The Writing Process: Thoughts from a Prolific Novelist
We like to sit down with our authors as often as we can to hear more about their process in the hopes that it’s helpful for other writers. No two processes are alike, and writers continually evolve their method. Here’s a peak into the way Richard Seltzer, a prolific writer, has managed to spin yarn after yarn.
The Spun Yarn: Richard, it's been a pleasure to work with you on two of your books, though I know you've written several more. How long have you been writing, and what are the kinds of stories you're particularly moved to tell?
Richard: I started writing stories in the second grade, 66 years ago, and reading them in show-and-tell. I've only been free to focus full-time on my fiction over the last two years, over which time I've finished six books. The books I write these days are largely fueled by a lifetime of experience. Events like the death of my wife and the last years of my mother and father come into play in unexpected and unintended ways. And the concept of "soul transfer" recurs in several of these novels -- the soul having the ability to move from one body to another and back again. This is related to the notion that ordinary life is magic – that we move from one body to another as we grow up and then age, that we take that for granted when it happens slowly, but would perceive it as fantastical if it happened quickly. In any case, adjustment to the new body is never easy. I'm also very interested in history and connections between past and present, like a palimpsest, where the present is written on the past and is influenced by it in ways we sometimes are unaware of.
The Spun Yarn: You used to work as a writer, marketing consultant, and "Internet Evangelist" for a minicomputer company for 19 years. What was it like to be an Internet Evangelist in the early 2000s? What did that job entail, and did it intersect with your writing at all?
That was great fun, in the early days of the Web between 1994-1998. For an entire year, DEC let me write a book about their AltaVista search engine (predecessor of Google). The result was the first consumer book about search engines -- The AltaVista Search Revolution. Then the company sent me around the world delivering speeches to convince people that there was business opportunity on the Internet. Many people still didn't have a clue back then. My typical speech was based on a dozen slides, one for each major industry that was going to be impacted. I laid out in simple terms the likely results 10-20 years later. That's very much the way things turned out. It was great fun opening the eyes of business people to what should have been obvious to everyone. I spoke in such places as Bogota, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Zimbabwe, and all over the U.S. and Canada.
I did my own fiction writing on my own time; but with four kids, there wasn't much time at all. I began books then that I have finally now been able to finish.
The Spun Yarn: I'd like to share a snippet of the opening of your new Historical Thriller, Parallel Lives.
"Here was a world apart, totally separate from the city-life he was used to. But he wasn't a young man, nor were the other residents. They hadn't come here to be cured. There was no cure for what they had, and they didn't delude themselves that they would ever move from here to another earthly dwelling. This was the end of the road. They were old and would only get older. They were here to enjoy what was left of life, ideally to figure out what life was about before it ended, and to do so in deliberate isolation from family and friends. That was the attraction of this remote location. They were on their own."
This opening contains no fantastic elements, but the uncanny mood leads us to wonder if something beyond the pale is in store for Abe and his compatriots. Why did you set your story in an assisted living facility, and where did the idea for this story come from?
In their final years, my mother and father both lived in an assisted-living facility a mile away from me. I visited every day and came to understand that environment, the rhythm of life there. While there, my father had a stroke that left him unable to walk and unable to talk, very much the character Dick in the book. And my mother wound up in the Alzheimer's wing, very much like Dick's wife in the book. I've also always had a strong interest in history and, more recently, in Mercy Otis Warren and General Johnny Burgoyne. Having uncovered Mercy's history of the American Revolution and knowing that it was never reissued after its initial publication in 1805, I typed the entire 1300 page book and her plays by hand (the old type made scanning fruitless) and posted it on my website, and made them available as ebooks for a pittance just to get it a much-deserved audience. While I knew that Burgoyne had been a popular playwright on the London stage after he lost the Battle of Saratoga, his plays hadn't been in print for more than 200 years. I put those into an ebook. Since Mercy Warren and Burgoyne were both playwrights; and he had written The Blockade of Boston and she had replied with a satire The Blockheads I wrote a play that involved the two of them meeting Mercy for the bicentennial back in 1976. And in the novel Parallel Lives people at the assisted living facility have, present day characters have mirror selves in the past, such as Warren and Burgoyne, with whom they interact in unexpected ways.
At The Spun Yarn, we're always interested in comparing notes on process. How many revisions did this story undergo before reaching its current state? How long in total did you spend on this book? What were your stumbling blocks, if any?
I had scattered notes gathered over forty years, but the pieces didn't fit together, until I was finally able to devote full time to my fiction, here in my one-bedroom apartment (with 3000 books in what others would use as the living room) here in Milford, CT. Once I got the basic concept and the characters came alive (so I heard them in my sleep and writing was like taking dictation), the first draft took less than three months. I did the final draft in less than a month. The main challenge was making it plausible that a nursing home in New Hampshire had a cellar with winding corridors leading to other places in other times.
The Spun Yarn: What kinds of resources did you use along the way, whether soliciting feedback or editorial help, writing schedule, etc?
As I was writing, I got some feedback, chapter by chapter, from friends, in particular from Rochelle Cohen, widow of a close friend of mine, the artist and author Rex Sexton. Then I got general comments as feedback from Jennifer Barclay, a developmental editor who is also an author and and agent, before I did the final draft, which I submitted to your readers at The Spun Yarn. .
The Spun Yarn: What are you working on next?
Yesterday I finished the first draft of another novel, All's Will That End's Will: The Shakespeare Twins, about the formative years of Shakespeare, the twin sister no one knew he had, and their passionate, tempestuous love for one another (with cameo appearances of characters from the plays). It's in the vein of the movie Shakespeare in Love, with a dash of Yentl (a woman struggling to get an education when it’s against the law.) That was lots of fun. I researched for a month (including rereading all of Shakespeare's plays). Then the book wrote itself in two months. Today I submitted it to Spun Yarn. I plan to do a final draft based on the feedback I get from the beta readers.
The Spun Yarn: We hope your prolific writing streak continues, and we’re excited to see what readers think about All’s Will That Ends Will. Thanks Richard!
