SQ (Shadow Quill): It is truly my honor to interview Jason Hough, a New York Times best-selling author of the Dire Earth Cycle science fiction trilogy. The following is a transcription of an audio file of my interview with Jason.
Jason, thank you so much for being here. I understand that before writing your debut novel, The Darwin Elevator, the first book of the Dire Earth Cycle, you were in the gaming business?
JH (Jason Hough): I used to design games, it was my job and my hobby; it took up all my time. When I got out of that I was working in a normal corporate culture big company and didn’t have a creative outlet. I wanted to do something creative. My original idea was to make short films; I always wanted to get into directing but the more I thought about it, I realized that I would have to have actors, cinematographer, editor; an entire team. After coming from the gaming world, however, I wanted to do something that would be completely my own. So, I started writing for this reason.
SQ: Was Darwin Elevator the book you started with?
JH: Not really, I started in 2003 with the same character, [Skyler Luiken], but it was a completely different story and in 4 years I wrote only 8 pages.
SQ: I would love to hear about the creative process that took place over those years. Let’s talk about the Skyler that you started out with years ago and how he developed into the Skyler that we now know from the Darwin Elevator.
JH: I sat down one day and I had an idea for this character, so I started writing it and I got a couple of pages in. I still didn’t know how to write, much less how to tell a story. My problem was that I would only sit down to work on it if the situation was perfect: it was the right time of day, no one was home, I had the right music on, whatever it was, it had to be exactly right. That was the main problem, that I would only sit down to work on it when it felt right and I didn’t get much writing done.
SQ: So, back then, it sounds like you kept avoiding writing your story. I would imagine it is something that a lot of beginning writers struggle with. For some beginning writers, they avoid writing because they do not think that they are good enough. What do you think got in the way for you?
JH: For me, the whole thing about me having to have the “perfect” conditions was because I honestly didn’t know how to approach it. It took me a long time to realize that this wasn’t working. And even when the conditions were right, the first thing I would do is reread what I wrote and start tinkering with the text and editing, and before I knew it, a couple of hours had gone by and the music was gone, it was a different time of day now, and while I refined the 8 pages extremely well, it didn’t get anywhere. What it was is that I didn’t have a plan.
SQ: It sounds like you were trying to free-write initially and then edit it; and it sounds like that wasn’t a strategy that was helpful. How did you then move from writing the 8 pages to then writing an entire novel?
JH: Exactly, that process was a mistake. There were a couple of things that helped me get away from that process. One was the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). So in 2007 I did that; completely different story, completely different characters. I didn’t go in with a full plan but it was enough to get me started. I also told so many people that I was doing NaNoWriMo that it was almost like I couldn’t fail. The brief plan that I came up with got me through half of the month and then the story completely fell apart. I still finished but it was total crap, it will never see the light of day. It was almost 300 pages.
SQ: Wow, congratulations on finishing your first NaNoWriMo. That’s impressive.
JH: Haha, thanks!
SQ: Would you say you learned anything from that experience?
JH: What I learned from that was to just turn off the editor in me and just get the words out. It was interesting because even though it fell apart at the half way mark, it was also at the half way mark that Neil Gaiman sent out an inspirational message to everyone participating, saying “I know where you are in this process” and it was exactly what I was going through, it was like he was reading my mind. He then went on to talk about how when he is working on a book, he might have a day where he writes 4,000 words and it’s flowing beautifully and he’ll have another day where he struggles to get 50 words and every single one, he’s like “this is terrible, what am I doing?” But then when he goes back to read it afterward, he can’t tell which words came on the good days and which ones came on the bad ones.
So what I really got out of that experience was that what I really needed to do was write and not worry about editing at that point. What I also got out of that was that I needed a better plan for the next NaNoWriMo.
SQ: How did you get ready for the next NaNoWriMo, how was it different?
JH: Next year I outlined like crazy, I did all this world building, I created all the characters, I had everything ready to go.
SQ: And that was before November then, before NaNoWriMo?
JH: Way before, yes, I started 3 months before.
SQ: And in this process of getting ready, what came first, the plot, the setting, or the characters?
JH: The core of the idea came first. It changed a lot over time but that’s what came first. So, in July of that year, I met my friend for dinner. The point of that dinner was that we were going to pitch each other all of the ideas we were thinking of writing and then convince each other which one we should work on. So I had to have something ready. One of the things I learned over those 4 years is that having a deadline really helps me.
SQ: So having people to be accountable to made it easier for you to finish NaNoWriMo the first time and then come up with ideas for the second one?
JH: Exactly, plus NaNoWriMo’s deadline and then my publisher’s, and agent’s deadlines helped me finish it on time. So I had to have something ready for that dinner with my friend, and I actually went in with 2 ideas. I got about ¾ of the way through the pitch and he said “you can just stop, that’s the one should work on, I don’t even want to hear the other one.” The funny thing is that at the time I was more excited about the other idea.
I started out with the super basic idea about a space elevator, which is in a city that no one can leave for mysterious reasons. After that I borrowed Skyler from an earlier story I worked on and then I just started filling out the roles around him.
The main thing I did for characters was that… I knew I wanted to write from different view points. In order to get myself into each character’s head, I wrote a little diary for each one on what they were doing the day before this book starts; what they do from they time they wake up to sleep. Not only did that really help me with each character but it also helped me build the world because I had to start thinking about all these things that I hadn’t considered before.
SQ: Would you mind sharing some of those details about the characters? We only get a brief glimpse into them from the books and I would love to learn more about them. I know that Skyler has a military background but I don’t really know very much about him otherwise.
JH: So, that diary took place the day before, so he is still well into his routine of what he’s doing in Darwin. So when I was writing it, I was thinking, this is a crew of scavengers that leaves the city to go on these missions. They get requests from various sources. The day before these events took place was a lot of him contacting the various sources that he received those missions from. Around the airport there’s a lot of gossip and a lot of trading. This helped me.
I realized that his “fence” wouldn’t be at the airport, so he has to travel to meet him, and that actually ended up becoming a chapter.
Each character had an entry like that and the great thing about that is that it really helped me get into each character’s head, helped me build their world, and helped me realize what I was pulling them out of when the story starts. This is something I learned in a story writing class that I went to – that generally the heroes of the story can have whatever goals they want but ultimately, the goal is to return to back to their normal lives, so knowing what their normal lives were helped me figure out what they were trying to get back to.
SQ: It sounds like such a helpful exercise, I’m sure it could benefit many writers out there, especially those looking to write a novel for NaNoWriMo.
JH: It was fun! And I kept it pretty light, it was just an outline, I didn’t write reams of paper or anything, but it really helped me get to know the characters, and it really worked well.
SQ: Wow, sounds like it, that’s wonderful. So, you started out with the basic idea for the story and a diary for each main character, how did you move from that to NaNoWriMo and how much did you have to prepare during those 3 months before NaNoWriMo started?
JH: I actually over-prepared. In between doing the two NaNoWriMos, I actually wrote 2 screenplays, just for fun and I used an outlining technique, called Save the Cat (http://www.blakesnyder.com/ ). I think that professional writers love to hate Save the Cat because it basically teaches you how to write the most formulaic crap possible. The guy that wrote this system wrote the most cliché Hollywood movies because he basically figured out that formula. His book very bluntly explains how to make a successful Hollywood screenplay. A lot of beginning screenwriters get hooked on that and they go on to write Hollywood movies that most people love to hate because they are so predictable.
What I got out of it was something different – the basics of these techniques are basically the basics of classic story structure. Once I learned that system I was able to learn from that and develop my own system, so I’ve since kind of come up with my own thing.
SQ: And what did you learn from that system?
JH: Well, it starts out by having these 15 “beats,” he [Blake Snyder] calls them, plot points, that you have to hit, and in his version they have to be at very specific points in the screenplay. He talks about the screenplay in terms of 110 pages, which is the standard length for a first draft, and so his “beats” will say, ‘this one needs to be on page 12, this one needs to be on page 42,’ or whatever.
So when I looked at that, I thought, going from that to writing a novel, I just shortened that to 100 pages, and looked at it as a percentage, out of 100%. And so once I had my goal for how many words I wanted the novel to be, I kind of knew right in this range, this kind of thing needs to be happening in order for the pace to be good.
These days I don’t even look at it anymore. But if I’m ever feeling stuck, I can usually just think about, ‘well, what would he have done around here? Oh yeah, I totally forgot about this.’ So it was a great system to just get the guts of a story down, and what I did for Darwin first was outline those 15 plot points.
SQ: And you had all that set up before NaNoWriMo even started?
JH: Yes, and they were really detailed, too. I was kind of laughing, because when I went back and looked at it, the outline for this book was 9000 words [chuckles], and the book’s only 140,000, so…a good percentage of it was already outlined. In hindsight it was way too much, because by the time I was about half way through writing this I was hardly even looking at the outline anymore because writing it out got it in my head, but secondly, it was too detailed, and the problem was it was taking all the fun out of the actual writing.
SQ: Did you change anything as you were writing?
JH: Oh yeah, which was good and bad because the whole point of outlining is so you can stay on script and not write yourself into a corner, which was to combat what had happened to me the year before: just free-writing the whole thing. There were definitely times when I would not reference the outline and write a chapter and think, ‘this is great,’ and then I would start working on the next chapter and I would read the one paragraph outline that I had and realize that what I had just written completely messed up where I had intended to go.
SQ: How did you resolve that?
JH: Well, in the case of this, I had to just revise the heck out of it. Nowadays, I’ve done a couple of things. One is, when I outline, I keep myself to a maximum of five words per chapter, if I can get it down to three, that’s my goal. The example I give to people is, if I was outlining Star Wars, the last entry in the outline would be, ‘Luke destroys Death Star.’ So it’s always noun-verb-noun and I try to outline it as what happens at the end of that chapter, or at least what the major moment is that’s going to move the story forward, because there may be other things that happen that aren’t as important.
SQ: It sounds like you use a kind of means-ends strategy for your writing, as in, ‘this is where I want to end up.’
JH: Exactly. And the reason I keep it so short now is that I still have the freedom to get to that point in whatever way I can think of, and so the actual task of writing is still fun and spontaneous and all that, as long as I know I have to end there.
SQ: I wanted to ask about some of the specifics from the book, too.
JH: Sure.
SQ: How did you feel when you had to hurt a character, for example when you killed off one of your major characters? That was heart-breaking to read, how was it for you to write?
JH: It was hard to write, but at the same time, one of the things I think a lot of writers learned from George R. R. Martin is that if you baby all of your characters (or your good guys, at least), then the reader never really believes that they’re in danger. The funny thing is, I didn’t even set out to do that, it wasn’t in my outline that [character name omitted to prevent spoilers] would die.
SQ: How did you decide to kill this character?
JH: It just seemed right during that scene, that something needed to happen there.
SQ: So that was one of those spur of the moment events?
JH: Totally spur of the moment. Later in the book, more characters die. I won’t get into the details, but again, it was spontaneous, originally in the outline they just got captured. As I was writing it, again, I just felt, I want readers to not know who’s going to make it to the end of this book, and even beyond that, because I have three books to write, and I want to keep that anxiety high from the reader’s standpoint. I have two editors at Del Rey, my editor and his assistant, and they’ve both emailed me at various times, saying, ‘Dude, you just made me cry,’ and I’m like, ‘yes!’
SQ: Is that the kind of psychological reaction you’re going for when you’re writing, that kind of attachment to the characters?
JH: The first time one of them told me that really surprised me because I couldn’t believe that anyone would be that invested that tears would happen. The funny thing is that they even know where it’s going now because they’re approving the outline, and even with that knowledge, they’re still telling me, ‘ohh, Dude, you just made me cry!’ and I love it. It’s weird to hear it as a writer, but at the same time it makes me realize I’m kind of doing my job, because that’s, again, sort of what I was going for.
SQ: Your novel has a bit of a Firefly feel to it.
JH: It does. I actually went to Vegas to see the movie [Serenity] early, I got to see it like four months early, Joss Whedon did this special thing where he auctioned off tickets. So I left Vegas, I was flying home, and I was just bummed because there was nothing else like that, at the time at least, maybe still not, and I just wanted there to be more stuff like that, and then doubly so in the world of literary fiction. I’m a big sci-fi reader, I’m not a scientist, and so I just kind of made a conscious decision at that point to try to capture the same kind of thing that Firefly had going.
SQ: So for you specifically, what does science fiction mean to you compared to some of the other genres, like fantasy, for example?
JH: That’s a good question and I don’t think it gets asked often enough. I would almost prefer it be called “future fiction” and take the word science out of it, because I feel like, if you want to set a story 500 years from now, immediately that is called science fiction, and therefore there’s an expectation that there will be lots of science going on. That always bugs me, because in our everyday lives when we are talking what kind of phone you might have, like an iPhone, what apps it has, but we don’t really talk about the dual processing system or whatever, most of us take that kind of stuff for granted. In science fiction, it happens a lot where the characters dive into these deep scientific conversations and it’s not very natural.
Similarly, I don’t see why you can’t have a story set in the 1900s that has science elements, but it would be called historical fiction, not science fiction. That always bothered me. I wanted to break away from the expectation that science fiction is science heavy. Take Firefly, for example, it was not science heavy, they don’t go into the physics behind the show, but it is science fiction and people still love it. I did try to keep the science realistic but not get carried away in it.
SQ: I did want to also ask you about the psychology of SUBS [the disease described in the books], it seems that different people have it affect different emotions. For some people, SUBS affects fear, for others it’s anger. It almost sounds like the people affected are stripped of their prefrontal functioning and only have the primal, kind of animalistic functioning that drives their behavior
JH: My idea was that the disease affects the higher level brain functioning that allows us to suppress the inappropriate behaviors, so the disease gradually deteriorate those brain functions until only the primal functions remain.
SQ: What inspired the idea behind the Darwin Elevator and this kind of a post-apocalyptic setting?
JH: My initial idea was actually a combination of 4 different ideas, one of them was about Earth 100 years in the future and an alien race builds an elevator there without an explanation, and I wanted to write about what that would do, people would want to start charging for it, everyone would try to benefit… I was going to have it take place all around the world but as I started outlining, I decided to constrain in to one location, where the elevator is, and then everything outside of it is a danger zone.
SQ: Through the drafts that you were writing, what was the most helpful in helping you shape your story?
JH: My agent really helped me a lot. I also gave the manuscript to some friends of mine, which if they bothered to read it at all, I was getting “oh yeah, it was great” months down the line but nothing specific. I realized that I needed impartial feedback. So, I actually ended up hiring a freelance editor, I found a guy who was willing to do the first 2,000 words for free, and I ended up hiring him for the rest of it, his name is Mike Calmbach from Writanon, he was extremely helpful.
SQ: Your story, especially the fight scenes do a wonderful job of describing the action so that the reader knows exactly what is happening but at the same time, without providing so much detail that the reader is bored or lost. Can you talk a little bit about your process of writing the scenery and action scenes?
JH: A friend of mine is actually a screenwriter, who writes the most amazing scenery. Every time I would read his scenes, they would just blow my mind: in such a short amount of words, he would paint this amazing picture in your head. One day I actually asked him and he told me that he writes on the floor, he lies on the floor to type and whenever he can’t see it in his head, he just rolls over on his head, closes his eyes and watches the movie, and then he tries to write what he saw. I don’t do exactly that but I picture the scenes in my head. I noticed that the action scenes I write 3 times faster than any other scenes, I just picture it one action after another.
SQ: At any point, were you nervous about copyright or someone stealing your ideas?
JH: It’s funny, the first novel I wrote, I got copyrighted and the 2 screen plays are registered but I realized it was not necessary. As a new writer, it’s kind of fun to do, but what I noticed is that the more people you tell about your idea, the less people are likely to steal it because they know you are the one writing it. It might happen once in a while but it hardly happens, you certainly hear stories about it but if I’m sitting with another author, I don’t mind sharing it because you get great feedback. So, I don’t worry about it anymore. I also believe that if 3 authors were sitting together and were presented with the same idea, they would write 3 different novels, and I hope that this will be helpful to the beginning writers out there.
SQ: Jason, your first book is doing great, book 2 is coming out on August 27, and book 3 shortly after that, on September 25. Congratulations and I wish you the very best! Thank you so much for meeting with me and doing this interview.
JH: Thank you so much, it was a lot of fun!
If you would like to contact Jason Hough, he can be found on Twitter: Facebook, or his website: http://www.jasonhough.com/