Steve’s Comments (group member since Aug 15, 2013)

Steve’s comments from the Ask Steve Rasnic Tem - Saturday, August 24th! group.

Patrick,

Hmmm-that's really an interesting question, and something I've never thought about. I don't really know the answer, but if I had to guess, it may be that a number of those Canadian authors have read British ghost story collections, and British ghost story authors in general have been a major influence on me. So there would be certain aesthetic sympathies. As for Chizine, they have been champions of genre-bending work, and Celestial Inventories clearly represents the slipstream, harder to classify segment of my work, so they seemed to be a likely candidate as a publisher for this book from the very beginning. And they do beautiful books, with some of the finest design work in publishing.

Thanks Bethany,
To tell you the truth I'm not sure if any particular writer influenced The Man on the Ceiling--we were pretty much winging it and figuring it out along the way, using what we knew about creating both art and life, and attempting to write about both at the same time using ourselves as characters. I was familiar with self-conscious approaches to writing, particularly as used in the New Journalism in which reporters were writing themselves into the stories they were covering (I actually taught a Freshman writing course once using the New Journalism as a model), so I knew the advantages and the disadvantages, but what we tried to do was a little different than that (although maybe Tristram Shandy was an early model?)

I love many many writers right now. Caitlin Kiernan (The Drowning Girl, among others) is a favorite. Nathan Ballingrud's new collection is terrific, and I just wrote an introduction to Lynda E. Rucker's first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange--it's wonderful, especially if you like writers like Robert Aickman. But there are so many more writers I could name--I think it's a golden age for f&sf short fiction.
Bethany wrote: "Dear Steve,

I read the Man on the Ceiling a few months ago and was struck by the genre melding going on, as well as the raw nature and the personal horrors parents must have, and this inability to..."

Patrick, Rejection is part of the very fabric of the arts. The gatekeepers (whether they be directors, editors, gallery owners) are artists in their own way, and art is about choices, and part of saying yes to some elements is saying no to others as you assemble a magazine, anthology, or publishing program. And I'm still rejected from time to time--I try to see them as opportunities to get into something different than what I'd anticipated. Early in my career, I just tried to see it as part of the learning process, getting better, finding out the places my work fitted and where it didn't fit, and beyond all that remembering that I was the best person to bring my particular stories to life, and that if I didn't tell my stories no one else would.

Thanks David,

That's great to hear. Characters are key for me. I believe that unless they feel real the fantastic backgrounds of the stories tend to come across as arbitrary. I know when I read I'm looking for fantastic flights of the imagination, but I also want to be touched at an emotional level as well.

Thanks Patrick,

I guess it really depends on the piece. My tendency is to write “long” in the first draft in order to explore and find the emotional “heart” of the story, the rhythm and the poetry inherent in the content. Then I go back through and strip out the unnecessary, the additional verbiage that clouds the meaning or blunts the emotional impact. I find that it’s usually much more fruitful to strip away the excess from something that is overwritten than to add more to something which is underwritten or under-developed, in part because I find that when writers add on to a piece because they’re afraid it isn’t working well enough or communicating their meaning, they actually tend to add words they don’t really need.

On the other hand, if I know from the beginning that the story is going to be really short, I approach it a little differently. I build the story one sentence at a time, trying to find the fewest words possible in order to create emotion and build my meaning. It’s a bit like composing a poem. There’s one story, “Origami Bird,” in my Celestial Inventories collection, which at around 500 words is I think the finest short short I’ve ever written, and it took longer for me to write it than stories many times its length, because of that slowed-down, one sentence at a time writing process.

Patrickmalka wrote: "Hi Mr.Tem,

One of the things I love about your work is the sharp concision of the writing, something I know you've heard many times before. I especially love the stories that are broken down into..."

Shob,

Thanks so much for the kind words! I think the biggest hurdle in writing a piece in which you, personally, become one of the characters, is that sense of embarrassment, that fear of revealing too much and making yourself vulnerable to criticism. That book is not something we could have written when we were younger, because of that vulnerability, and also because it wouldn’t have seemed professional somehow. Writers, especially younger writers, want to maintain a certain objectivity, a certain distance. There is a desire to be “emotionally cool” to the material which makes you appear, and feel, to be in control.

But at least for us, once we got into our fifties, we discovered that we cared a great deal less about what other people might think, and “coolness” was a quality which no longer mattered. What mattered was “story” and giving everything required by the story, and in The Man On The Ceiling we felt we had a story concept which would allow us to do and say things in our writing we’d never done before. It was too good an opportunity to pass up.

So once we were past that hurdle, “toning down” and “tweaking” would have defeated the purpose-we needed to do whatever we felt the story required. And some parts of the story were difficult, even devastating to write. But you do what you feel you have to do. In terms of the writing, however, the most difficult part was figuring out what the “rules” of this particular fiction needed to be—how to determine what worked and what didn’t. That’s what consumed most of our time. And for the most part it came down to “telling the truth.” If we became too fanciful, or too complicated in the writing, or veered too far from the basic issues of love and children, we had to rein it back to maintain that sense of truthfulness.

But in that sense The Man On The Ceiling is no different than any other writing when you attempt to step somewhat outside the box of conventional genre expectations. You have to figure out how to know when the story works and when it doesn’t. You may have stepped outside a reader’s normal set of expectations, but in writing the piece you’re creating other reading expectations you have to address. In my new collection Celestial Inventories I tend to step between genres, allowing the characters’ desires and dreams to drive the stories rather than the usual expectations of genre. One character feels like he is invisible to other people, another feels a mysterious bond with strangers, another discovers a peculiar bond with children who have recently passed away. In all of these I was challenged to figure out what did and did not work and structure the stories accordingly.

Oh, and as far as the awards for The Man On The Ceiling are concerned, we were completely taken by surprise. We doubted we’d ever sell it, or that anyone would even read it—all we knew was that it was important for us to write.