The Tenets of Fiction Writing, with Alan Heathcock

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 5. Today we're talking about the tenets of fiction writing according to Alan Heathcock, author of the multiple award-winning collection of short stories called Volt.

Okay, so welcome to the show again. A little warning up front for you today that our episode is going to go just a little bit longer than usual, but I think you'll be glad that it does once you meet my guest. Before we get into the interview, I do want to let you know just a couple of things. We're going to be talking about some things during the interview that I've made available for you on the website.

So I encourage you to go to the show's website. That's just the number 6. Don't spell it out. the show's website where you'll find a PDF copy of the 27 Tenets of Fiction Writing that we're going to be talking about today. You'll find information on today's guest and his book, Volt, as well as a few pictures that we're going to reference as well.

So again, that's the show's website. I hope you go there and check it out as you listen to today's podcast. It's a great resource that I'm sure you're going to find very valuable.

Introduction to Alan Heathcock

So with that in mind, let's get right into the interview. My guest today is a Chicago boy who eventually made his way to Idaho where he now teaches fiction writing at Boise State University. Alan Heathcock's first collection of short fiction, Volt, was published with Graywolf Press in 2011 to wide acclaim. It was selected as an editor's pick for the New York Times Book Review and The Oxford American was a finalist for the Barnes and Noble Discover Award. And many critics and magazines have called it one of the best books of 2011, including Publishers Weekly, The Chicago Tribune, Salon. com and GQ magazine.

And I'm going to stop with the accolades there or we won't have any time left to actually talk to him. So welcome to the show, Alan Heathcock. Hey, thanks for having me, Brad. Glad to be here. Excellent.

So before we get too far in, I've actually got a little bit of a bone to pick with you. I hope that's okay. Sure, absolutely.

Let's pick bones. All right, let's do that. Now, I come from a long and storied tradition of men who wear hats because we are bald. And I had assumed that you and I were probably brothers in this grand tradition. Yet recently you revealed that you actually have one of the literary world's great heads of hair.

So what gives? Yeah, I apologize about that. I come from a long line of men who wear hats who also have a great head of hair underneath the hat. We just, I love hats. It's maybe, it just goes back to, like when you're a kid and on Halloween you put on your costume and you felt like a super version of yourself or something like that. When I put on a hat, I just feel like a super version of myself.

And when I don't have my hat on, I feel a little more ordinary and that's not a society to me. I see. You know, as I think about it, maybe I should actually thank you for that. You know, more of you guys running around with great heads of hair under your hats. That's right. It might make fewer people assume I've got a bald head under mine.

Life Changes After Publication

So, all right, so enough of my insecurities. We'll talk a little bit about writing this morning. So when I was in your class, it's been a few years ago now, you were in the process of working with your editor on revisions for Volt prior to the publication. I think it's safe to say a lot has happened since then. Can you tell us a little bit about how your life has changed since Volt has come out? Well, a lot has changed and I've really fought to have as much of it remain the same as possible.

I mean, it's always this game of once the book comes out and if it's received well, then you become kind of a known commodity and people start asking stuff of you. And none of that's bad. That's all great stuff. It just puts demands on your time. That's different than when you just sat all day by yourself at your desk doing your work with no one talking in your ear.

And so, I mean, I've gotten amazing opportunities. I've gotten to travel the world in the past year. I've gone as far south as Sao Paulo, Brazil, down in South America and all the way up to the furthest point north in Point Barrow, Alaska, the farthest point north you can go in North America, all following my book around and talking to people about writing. And that still almost doesn't even make sense to me. It's a pretty extraordinary thing that these little stories that I made up could do that for my life and it's changed my family's life and let them be a part of the way I go and travel about the world.

And so it's been a really wonderful thing. There are lots more demands put on my time. I'm working harder than I ever have. I work every day. And that's not a bad thing either because I love what I do. And maybe the thing that I have to fight hard on is that I still remain and do my work every day.

I mean, there were certain things that I did for years and years when working on Volt that enabled the book to be of the quality that it was. Sure. And so I have to be very protective that I don't backslide on any of that stuff.

And so I have an awareness of that, so I'm very protective of whatever qualitative things I had in my life that I don't mess them up or diminish the quality or get in a hurry for the next book or any of those things. And that's a battle, but at least I'm aware that it's a battle. I'm sure that it is. And that's actually a great point, I think, for a lot of our listeners today who, you know, they're not necessarily juggling time between book tours. And, you know, recently I've seen you scouting movie sites for filming. You know, but they are balancing other jobs or they're balancing family lives.

Organising Writing Time

And maybe you can just talk a little bit about how you are able to organize your writing time. I mean, do you set aside kind of a sacred time every day, regardless of where you're at in the world, to write? Or does it have to just be fluid and sneak it in wherever you can? I think you have to be fluid. You have to be disciplined, though, you have to be fluid. I found that, I mean, for a number of years, I would say, like, this is my writing time between these hours.

But, you know, life is too frenetic and crazy. And what would happen would be as if that writing time was disturbed, I would just get frustrated and say, well, my writing time is disturbed and I would find myself not writing. And so especially since the book's come out and I have such a crazy travel schedule, I've had to just learn how to, when I have time, especially, you know, several hours worth of time, to be able to wherever I'm at, to sit down and to focus and to get my imagination where it needs to be to be an effective writer. And that means writing, you know, I've now gotten to the point where I can write on airplanes and be pretty effective, not as effective as I'd like to. Hotel rooms, I've written in laundromats, in restaurants. And then when I am home, just to be, you know, really cherish the fact that I have my desk and my trailer to go out and get my work done.

But it's more about just being disciplined and being able to understand that when you have time to get it done, that to get focus and get the work done. Sure. Yeah.

So do you think some of those different locations that you write in kind of, I guess, leak into your writing? Here's an example. You posted a picture a while ago on Facebook when you were up in Alaska and it was just a stunning picture of this cemetery, this frozen cemetery that was just, I mean, it was an incredibly compelling picture. And I thought, how do you, how do you be in that kind of environment and not have that show up in your writing? Do you think that it does? Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I say over and over that I'm never not a writer. And so in part, being a writer is kind of being a curator of your own life and experiences and being very aware of when you're in the midst of something special, like I was up in Alaska. But it's also curating just feelings. And, you know, there are times when I've been on an airplane just feeling incredibly lonesome amongst people and taking an accounting of what that's about and the way it feels.

And so it's, I think the matter of being a writer is understanding that being a writer is a lifestyle. It is a job and it is a field of study. But more than that, and first of all, it's a lifestyle.

So I'm never not a writer. That, you know, I get to stand out on a tundra in negative 53 degrees in this stark and stunning cemetery with snow drifts snaking over things. Yeah, how can that not affect you deeply? That image will be a part of my imagination for the rest of my days and I'm sure it'll find its way into my fiction. Sure, sure.

So I want to talk a little bit today about a document that one of your other former listeners posted online a few months ago. It was called The 27 Tenets of Fiction Writing, according to Alan Heathcock. Tell me a little bit about how that document It made me, in a profound way, focus my entire intellect on figuring out how to answer those questions. And out of that process, which is, you know, editing a book isn't just like, I'll give it a week and a read over. This is months of communication with an editor and going over stuff you've already edited to get to the point where it's, you know, selected to be a book. Sure.

By that point, it's been edited, you know, a hundred times or more, every story. And so out of that kind of profoundly intense thing that is getting a book ready for the world, I found that I had a very clear-eyed understanding, at least on what I thought made quality quality and what I believed as a writer. And that's where I came up. I just wrote them all down. I thought, you know, I was teaching at the time. I thought, you know, what kind of teacher am I if I can't somehow share all of this stuff with my students, knowing that most of it would be lost on them.

But at least that they'd have this document that, you know, as they got deeper in as they followed their own passions, that maybe it would be helpful. And so I wrote it all down and I printed it off and I brought it in. Yeah, well, it's an excellent resource. I know, you know, a lot of people comment, I've got this posted next to my computer where I write because, you know, every one of these 27 tenets could be an entire episode on this show, really.

The 27 Tenets of Fiction Writing

But what I thought we'd do is just look at a handful of them and maybe have you just talk to us a little bit more deeply about them. Number four is an interesting one to me. It says, enable your character to change despite their flaw and through trial to understand a profound truth of the world. And then you add, figure out the profound truths of the world.

Of course, you know, we laugh at that. It's kind of funny to, you know, to give us that direction. But yet something tells me maybe it's not just an attempt at humor. Are we as writers required to figure out the profound truths of the world? Yes, of course. I think that's the artist's job.

I think that's what we're always going to figure out. I mean, we can just tell a story, but, you know, even the deeper I get into working on a novel now out of stories, I'm understanding that everything we write is a unit of communication. And I think about that all the time, you know, which is to say, I'm not just making up a story. I am communicating something. It's a unit of communication. And if it is a unit of communication and I'm bound by that, what is it that I'm trying to say?

What is it I'm trying to get after? And just understanding that, you know, just asking yourself that question, what am I trying to say? What do I believe? Which is to say, what do I believe about whatever it is you're writing about? It really makes you buckle down and think about, you know, in my case, what do I think about the invasive nature of violence or what do I think about how justice sometimes does not follow the letter of the law? Or how do people grieve?

How do we forgive? You know, these are these are big, tough questions to answer. They're important. They're important questions. They're important questions to me, which is, I think, why I wrote stories that was enabling that particular unit of communication in the first place.

And so really, my takeaway as a human being, my takeaway as an artist is looking at that stuff. It's the greatest part of it. It's the toughest part of it, but it's the greatest part of it, because as I'm making up this story, as I'm thinking about what do I want to say, what am I trying to communicate, I just understand more about myself and my station in the world and my understanding of what I care about and believe. And that's that's the way everybody should live. We should approach every day that way.

And so, you know, out of that, if that creates great art on the other end, too, then that's kind of a double bonus. Absolutely. You know, that that reminds me of a question I got a lot. I spent a lot of years as a songwriter and I think the question I got most often is, which comes first for you, you know, the music or the lyrics, which which one do you write first? And I think maybe the literary equivalent of that question is, which comes first for you, the story or the theme? Well, I mean, that's kind of that is a chicken and the egg question because it is.

Yeah, I know. They often both hit me simultaneously in that I understand early on and case by case, depending on sometimes I'm thrown into a story because I'm already wrestling with some question, which is the theme, you know. And so I find my way into selecting a story that will enable me to have that conversation with myself.

Now, understanding what the theme is in some general ballpark way is very different than the process of writing a story, which is refining that question down and trying to find your way through into some insight. And so not only is it writing the story, enabling me to have that investigation with myself, but that over the course of many, many, many, many drafts, I find that interrogation really takes me to a far different place than I thought it would in the beginning. And so it's not only a chicken and the egg, but it's this circular thing that keeps going chicken egg, chicken egg, chicken egg, chicken egg. There's many a times where I've gotten where I thought I was done with a story and I have to kind of ask myself that question, what am I trying to say? What am I communicating here? And I'll say, I think it's this, I think it's X.

This is what I'm trying to communicate. And then I have to ask myself, well, is that true? Do I actually believe that's true? Let me think about this a minute before I throw it out in the world. And then I go, you know what? No, that's that's not exactly, that's not exactly what I think is true.

And I have to go back to the drawing board. Matter of fact, I could say that happened with every story in Vult. People ask me the question I get asked a lot because it took me a long time to write the book, you know, over a dozen years. Why? Why it took me so long. And I think as much as anything that that's what took me so long is I would think that I understood what what I was communicating only to find out that it wasn't exactly right.

And I'd have to kind of really look at things in a more intense way and refine my understanding of the story again and again and again and again until I finally come out to know that is exactly what I meant to say. Wow. OK.

Character Development and Themes

All right. So let's let's move on to a couple of more here. Sure. Number twelve says invent settings that are interesting and peculiar or find something interesting and peculiar in settings that are banal. All settings are metaphoric reflections of your character's interior. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that a little bit?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mean, the first part of it is is just kind of a statement about how to keep readers interested. And readers are much more interested in settings that are unique or in seeing details within a setting that they've seen a lot that bring the setting to life in a new way. It's defamiliarization. It just makes them engage with the work in a way that everything seems new to them.

And so that's just a great strategy. Now, the second part of it is a truth that comes with me being what I've come to call being an empathetic writer, which is to say that I try as much as I think the most powerful place from which to write is from this true empathetic connection with the character to write through the character as much as possible so that every line, every detail is, is the character, what they're seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, is there a motion, their psychology, et cetera, et cetera. So when I write that way, I understand that everything is a statement about that character. Everything is a reflection back on that character.

So, for example, you know, depending on the type of day you're having, if you just found out that, you know, your wife is pregnant and that's a great thing, and you're celebrating and you go for a walk, the world, you would you would see things differently. You would see the world differently. You would notice things that are kind of connected to your temperament in your state of mind. If you were writing the experience of that character, you would not only select the details within the setting that are reflective of that temperament, but you would probably select prose that would be suggestive of the mood as well.

So it's never just set design, never just there is a tree, there is a car, there is a street. It is connected to the temperament of the individual. What what they're seeing because of the mood they're in, what they're noticing because of who they are and how it should be written because of the mood they're in. You're trying to collect all of this stuff.

Now, that same street is going to be very different from someone who just say got a letter finding out that their son, who's a soldier, has been killed in Afghanistan. They're going to notice completely different things, even if they look at the same tree as the other person, it's going to have a different temperament. The details of the tree are going to feel differently.

And so, you know, once I got my head around this idea of being an empathetic writer, then I understood that everything, every sound, every And if it all falls back on the character and their temperament and what they're noticing and how they're noticing things, then at least you have that to go by and gauge that that's always the truth you're looking to connect with. Sure. Excellent.

The Importance of Setting

Okay, so I will move on to number 20 here. This one says no shortcuts. Think of the most demanding ways to accomplish what you want and do those things. It will save you time in the end. Can you give us an example of the kind of thing you're talking about? Yeah, well, this one is definitely one, a hard-learned lesson that, you know, I think, and this is not just me, this is most humans, we will try to find the quickest way to be effective, the quickest and the most painless way to be effective.

And we're hoping that somehow across our fingers we get lucky and stumble into something of quality. But what I found was, you know, in my learning process, in my learning curve that, by and large, when I took shortcuts, I did not learn as well and I did not get my work to where it needed to be. And in the same way with my process of writing, when I tried to skip steps, the quality of the work was not there and inevitably I would have to go back and repeat all of the steps again to get it right.

So I'll give one example from each. And so I remember I really admired this filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, Swedish filmmaker, made beautiful, powerful movies and I'd watch his films and I kind of had some notion that I would like to write scenes with the same sort of depth and intensity with which he wrote. And so in a general sense, I would say, Oh, okay, well I should write or I try to write scenes like him. And I think we do this all the time. We read books or see movies or see plays and be like, well, I kind of like that kind of stuff. I would like to write like that.

And so the obvious way for me to learn that would be for me to actually sit down and write out entire scenes from his films as if they were fiction. And so that thought came to me and I thought, well, that's completely ridiculous. Like who would, who would take up an entire day just writing scenes from a film, you know, literally taking his dialogue, taking his scenes, trying to capture his character's mannerisms, et cetera, et cetera.

And so I didn't do that. I just tried to, you know, carry this thought with me and I wasn't getting to where I wanted to go. And so finally one day I sat down and said, you know what, I'm going to try this. You know, I was kind of in between stories anyway and stuck and just as an exercise to kill time, I decided to actually do it. And I found it profoundly helpful, you know, just because it then I understood it wasn't just the dialogue or some general sense of what he was doing, but like everything contributed to being able to convey what he did. The lighting, the choreography, the character's mannerisms, their tone of voice, you know, the setting around it.

And so it was very, very instructive. You know, the pauses between dialogue, not just the dialogue, but being able to capture the amount of time between what one person says and another. And so it created a new understanding. It created not just one general challenge, like I want to write like Ingmar Bergman, but it created, you know, dozens of these smaller challenges, which I had to recognize and overcome.

And so out of that, you know, doing it again and again. And after I did it once, I did it again and again and again. I actually, there's a film of his, Winter Light, and I wrote out the entire movie. And it took me, you know, I did over the course of probably a month and it took me some time. And, but it was incredibly instructive. Those, those settings were incredibly instructive to me on how to execute a scene and how to capture certain, certain temperaments, certain emotions, certain psychologies within a scene.

And so that's one I, and now I start there. If I, if I see a scene from a movie that I think is done really well, I sit down and write it. And I still, I still to this day do that. I just start there because there's no way I'm going to learn how to do that in, except for actually doing it.

And so I just, I marked that stuff out as a part of my writing day sometimes. I'm just, just doing that. And so as part of my process too, I've moved over to a process where, and this is just for me, everybody's different.

So you have to work out your own process. But for me, I, I have to front load a great deal of this stuff just to get my imagination to where it needs to go. And so like when I first started a long time ago, I would sit down at the computer and I would just kind of write and see what happened and follow it in. And most of it wasn't any good. And I'd revise or throw out and accordingly. And I'm not saying that that's the wrong way.

If that's the way you write, that's the way you write. But for me, I, I eventually found that after writing a scene, I would have to later go back and like really figure out what the room looked like, you know, figure out, you know, do, do any little bit of research I might have to do in any particular scene. Um, I'd have to think about, uh, the temperament of the characters and, you know, getting the verbs right. And, um, there's just all this post-production work that I had to do, which is now work that I do upfront.

And so the hard way I think of doing it now is, um, uh, like I know I have to write a scene today. I have to write a scene. I'll give a really specific example. Today I'm writing a scene. I'm working on a novel and I know that there are, there's a young woman and her little sister and then a woman and her son. And they're in a storm shelter and a great storm is raging outside and they've just had some tragedy happen.

And it's the middle of the night and they can't sleep. And I have this, this young woman who's my main character and this other woman have a conversation about, uh, what, what they're going to do tomorrow morning when and, um, so in order to write this scene, um, I know after I get done talking with you today, I'm going to sit down and get to work and I'm going to imagine that shelter. I'm going to get it in my imagination as clear as I possibly can. I'm going to take notes on this being the middle of the night, what they can see and what they can't see, what the smells might be, what the sounds might be coming from the storm above, uh, how the wind turbine might be turning. Um, I'm going to think about the, the character and what they've just been through and try to get my head around. I don't know what it's going to be on, but I'm going to look through my bookshelves of finding any other book I might have read that has that same emotional or psychological or intellectual content of someone who's just been through tragedy and is now in a shelter trying to like, what would the world is continuing to go on?

What am I going to do now? Um, and I'm going to see if there's any scenes from movies and if so, watch and I'm going to do everything and anything. I'm going to look at photographs of shelters. Uh, I have this photograph I look at again and again and again that I've kind of select as a storm shelter. I'm getting my imagination there.

So I do all this work to get my imagination all the way down to where, you know, it is vivid and clear and absolutely real to me. And once my imagination is in that place, which is a very difficult place to get your imagination, then I sit down and write and I know that I've done all the hard work ahead of time. Then what comes out, though it will need revision, at least will be in the place it needs to be. I won't have to wholesale revise at the, at that point.

So that's a couple examples of doing things the hard way to save myself time. Those are great examples. A little intimidating, uh, examples. That's a lot of work to put into a scene. I don't think it should be intimidating. I think there's, uh, it's again, I think you will save yourself.

It sounds intimidating. I think this isn't the main point I want to make with this. It sounds intimidating. I guess, of course I say this to people and they're like, no, that's crazy. Why would I do that much work? And what I'm saying is to get your work up to quality, you will have to do that work or more if you put it off.

And so by not starting with that process, by not understanding that you need your imagination to be in that place, you're going to first write something not as good as you need it to be and you'll have to, you'll have to eventually do this process. You'll have to eventually circle back and do all of these things in one way or another over the course of all of your revisions. And so, um, and plus, you know, I'll also say that this process, it is so much fun. I get a tremendous amount of joy from, from doing this, this kind of exploration of getting my imagination in this place. Um, it's riveting to me. It's completely fascinating to me.

The Solitary Nature of Writing

And so the dragon that I'm chasing day after day is not just sit down and say, you know, tell my wife when she get things like writing groups or even taking writing classes or having first readers of your fiction. Define what you mean by be alone. Well, I think, you know, I think I mean a couple of things there. One of it is, I think, a general piece of advice, and one of it's very specific to me and my temperament.

But the general piece of advice is that we have to be very, very careful. And I say this in my classes. Even in workshops that I teach, we have to be very careful in misunderstanding that writing is a group project. Writing is not a group project. For anything, I think, of value, you know, something great. It's going to be a singular thing.

It's going to originate from you, singularly from you. And you just have to hold that as precious. That's not to say that you can't interact with other writers and that you can't have other people read your work. Obviously, that's a part of the show, but that you kind of have to be alone. You can't have other people do the work for you. You have to be alone with understanding what is it that I'm trying to communicate?

What am I trying to connect with? I mean, like this whole process that I just described, it's you that has to get, you have to get your imagination in that place. You have to inhabit the character.

And so the risk of thinking that it's anything but a project just for you to do alone is that, well, I will just kind of tow around the edges. I will get in the ballpark and then I'll bring it to my writing group and I'll see if anybody can, with their own experience, pull me in a little bit deeper. And I think that's always, that's always the greatest risk because that's the easiest way of having it done. It's less invasive. It's less painful. Please help me.

Please pull me in. But I just don't think that you're going to be able to get a story done the right way unless it's you slogging in there by yourself with your own preoccupations, with your own temperament, with your own understandings and misunderstandings to get it done well. Also in the learning process, I'll say that, you know, we just learn a whole lot faster when we say, this is all on my shoulders. I have to figure it out.

And so that's one part of it. And the other part of it is just, you know, as I call myself an empathetic writer and as I have to do this very bizarre thing, which is to inhabit the lives of someone who is not me and often in places that are tragic, you know, grief, different instances of violence and deep and ugly stuff. That's the stuff that I'm wading into. If I'm in a coffee shop and people are all around me, I'm not going to be able to engage with what I need to engage with. You know?

So, I mean, there's sometimes I'm out in my trailer. I'll give a very specific example. I was writing a story called The Stain Freight, which is the first story in my collection. And it's about a tragic death of a father accidentally kills his own son in a farming accident, which is based on a story that actually happened in my family.

And so engaging with the tragedy and grief, and I knew I had to get that right because I wanted to tell the story correctly. It's too important, this story, to just kind of wade in the edges of. I had to get it right.

But, you know, there were some days I knew that I was writing it correctly because I was just, I was just sitting there crying and writing and trying to get it down. So if I was in a coffee shop, for example, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to take myself to that place. I'm not so sure that I could be able to take myself to that place, even if I was writing about love, you know, which is a very self-conscious thing, too.

And so to allow ourselves to engage with the work, I mean, by and large, writers are introverts anyway. And so to allow ourselves to get rid of our self-consciousness and to go in to completely inhabit this other life. I think it helps to not think that anybody else is actually watching us.

So I say, I say that now I work on airplanes, for example, but I found that basically I can revise on airplanes or I can read. I can take notes on stuff, but the actual hard lifting of writing a scene, I can't do that on an airplane. It's just a, you know, I do, one, I do weird stuff. My wife says that I talk to myself, talk to myself out loud while I'm writing. She says I look possessed and that I scare the children and things like that.

So, which is why I go out to my trailer and be by myself and do my weird stuff. Sure. Yeah.

But that's part of it. And I think that's a part of the job and being effective in your job is you have to take yourself to that place where you can't be self-conscious and you can engage in full. And I don't think you can do that around other people. Yeah, excellent.

Advice for Aspiring Writers

Okay, so I've got one more question here for you today. Sure. I'm going to give you a time machine and I'm going to send you back to the pre-published Alan Heathcock. This is before Volt, before Peacekeeper was published, before anybody bought or published anything with your name on it. What advice would you give that Alan Heathcock? I would tell him that you're going to have to be patient and to stop losing sleep about all of this publishing stuff and keep having faith that what you're doing and the way you're going about things is exactly right.

But you're too hard on yourself and you're losing sleep over wanting the publishing thing to come faster. And it will come and it will come in a beautiful way and you'll be proud of the book that you write if you just keep doing what you're doing and doing your work every day and doing it as well as you can. And so that's a piece of advice I know that I wouldn't take back then.

But that's the advice I would need to hear. Sure. Okay. Just don't be in a rush. Keep doing what you're doing.

All right. So you mentioned a novel that you're working on and what are the next projects to have the Alan Heathcock name that we can be looking forward to? Well, the big one in the world of New York is the novel I'm working on and I'm having a blast writing it. I'm having a lot of fun. And I'm completely engaged in it now. And I'm, as you mentioned before, making a film version of my story Smoke.

And I've come on as a producer of that, which is a whole new adventure of trying to figure out the lingo and how films are made. And it's completely invigorating and exhausting process. And it's very strange because it's completely collaborative, which is the opposite of what a process is for being a writer.

But I'm having a blast doing that, too. And so we're going to be shooting that in the next couple of months. And so I'll be busy on that. I've talked about and I've been thinking a lot about writing a play. And I think I'm going to begin taking notes on taking a crack at writing a stage play and see how that goes. And, oh, if only the days were made up of more hours.

But I just completed a short story, another short story, the first one since Volt, and that'll be coming out in a magazine in the fall. And so just just trying to stay interested and invigorated every day. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Al, I just so appreciate your time with us this morning. I just want to wish you best of luck in what you're working on now. And we'll all look forward to reading it and seeing it on the big screen, it sounds like.

So thank you so much for your time this morning. Thank you, Brad. I love what you're doing with this blog and that people are engaging. And I hope everybody out there has a great day with their own writing.

All right. Thanks. So if you haven't already, I encourage you to click on over to the show's website, where you'll find all 27 of Alan's tenets of fiction writing. You'll also find links to follow him on Twitter and connect with him on Facebook. You'll find that image from the Arctic cemetery that we talked about, as well as a link where you can pick up his book Volt. I really think that in future and actually probably even now in some places that this book is going to be used to teach elements of craft in writing classes.

You'll find his writing is compelling. It's authentic and it's powerful. If you look over Al's 27 tenets and want to see them in action, then picking up a copy of Volt is the perfect way to do that. I encourage you to pick up a copy and experience one of the really unique voices in American literature today. You'll be glad that you did.

So for today's wise words segment, I'm excited to announce our first listener submitted wise words. So we'll take a listen to that now. Hey, Brad, my name is Sergio and I'm calling from Los Angeles. I wanted to maybe drop a little note on the wise words of the day. Mine are from Neil Gaiman. When he was on the Nerdist podcast, he spoke for a couple of minutes about what he thought writers should know.

And he touched on something that was really powerful for me. I get intimidated with the thought of other writers who have done fantastic pieces of work. Right now, everybody's talking about George R. Martin or maybe he himself, Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore, people that I love and respect. And I wonder as I'm writing, are the things that I write, will they be able to match up to what these guys are doing? And on Neil Gaiman's episode you find particularly helpful, I hope you'll share it with us like Sergio did and give us a call on our message line.

That number is. If you want to save the dime and not have to pay for the call, then you can go to our website, click on that Talk to Us link, and you'll find a way there that you can actually have our message line call you and save you the money of a long distance call there if that's something you're concerned about. Just to remind you of our weekly challenge, we mentioned it in the interview, but the weekly challenge is go to a place where there is water. Go to a lakeside, a pond, a river, some kind of natural area. And first sit down and describe the scene as you experience it at that moment using compelling details, using description. Then go back and put yourself in the place of someone who has just received news that someone you are close to has drowned.

Now describe the scene again through that perspective. How would it appear different? What things do you notice now that you may not have noticed before? How does your description of these things change from that perspective? How does your prose change to reflect your mood and perspective?

So for next week, we are going to do a first of what I assume will be several of these. I'm going to call it a loose ends episode. I'm starting to get some listener questions piling up that I'd like to address as well as touch on a few topics we've covered in previous shows that I feel like we left some gaps in and maybe go into them in a little more detail using some more concrete examples. That means it's a perfect time to get your voice on the show by calling our message line and leaving a question or a comment for the show. Again, you can find that number on the website at the talk to us link too if you didn't get that jotted down.

So thanks so much for sticking around for a little longer episode this week and I hope you'll check in again next week. So remember, the best way to improve your craft is by writing. That's what I'm off to go do. I hope you're off to do the same.

Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of the show's website. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week, but until then, join the conversation at the show's website.