Kelley Eskridge: living the writing life
The Seventh Week (Spring 2007)
interview by Leslie Howle
A shortened version of this interview appeared in the print edition of the Seventh Week, the newsletter of the Clarion West Writers Workshop. Many thanks to editor Eugene Myers for permission to post the full text of the interview here.
Kelley Eskridge’s short fiction has appeared in magazines and anthologies in the United States, Europe, Australia and Japan. Her novel, Solitaire, (HarperCollins Eos) was a New York Times Notable Book and was a finalist for the Nebula, Spectrum, and Endeavour awards. The novel is currently being adapted for film by Cherry Road Films.
In 1988 Kelley graduated from the Clarion workshop in East Lansing, Michigan. Now she’s about to teach for the first time at the Clarion West workshop.
SW: What inspired you to write speculative fiction?
KE: I grew up reading everything from comic books to Shakespeare, but it was fantasy and science fiction that got me through adolescence: Tolkien and Herbert and Alexei Panshin and Tanith Lee and James Blish took me to places where it was possible even for the most awkward, passionate, confused, scared, yearning kid to make something of herself.
SW: What led you to apply to Clarion; what kind of changes did it put you through to stop everything you were doing to attend the workshop?
KE: In early 1988, I was living in a suburb of Atlanta. I’d moved there to take a job and already knew I’d made a terrible mistake. I was making pitiful money, was only slowly finding friends, and felt trapped and lonely. One day I realized that I had to make some drastic changes — and I came across the annual Clarion announcement. I’d known about Clarion for years, but never seriously considered applying. And I didn’t expect to be accepted. I thought it would become a long-term goal for me, something that would keep me moving forward even in tough times. I’d make myself keep going through all that was hard in my daily life, keep writing until I was good enough, and keep trying until they took me. On some level, applying to Clarion was like saying “fuck you” to my current unhappiness.
And then I got the acceptance letter. I didn’t know whether to be giddy with joy or completely pissed off at being given what I asked for and now having to live up to it.
I took out a loan, quit my job and prepared to go. Three days before I was to leave, I had a brutal fall and wrenched my left ankle so badly that it turned black. I didn’t have insurance, so I bandaged it and borrowed crutches from a friend, and drove to Michigan with my foot propped on a box except for the interesting moments when I had to work the clutch.
Which is a long way of saying that I gave up a lot to go. I knew I’d come back to a loan payment, a lease, no income, no solid support system…. but I’d asked for a chance to change my life and it doesn’t do to refuse those gifts.
SW: And did it change your life?
KE: Clarion did change my life. People whose work I admired told me that I could write. I began to imagine life as a writer. I wrote the first draft of my first published story (“The Hum of Human Cities,” Pulphouse Volume Nine, 1990) the first week of the workshop. And I met Nicola Griffith: we’ve been together for 19 years, and now we’re living the writing life that we dreamed of over beer and pizza in the Michigan summer nights.
SW: Your short fiction has done very well — you’ve been short listed for the Tiptree and the Nebula for various work, and won the Astraea for “Alien Jane” as well as having it adapted for television. Did you write strictly short stories after Clarion? When did you start working on a novel?
KE: I worked on short fiction exclusively the first five or six years after Clarion. Nicola and I were living together; she was working on Ammonite and then Slow River, and I was in a series of corporate jobs to support us while we sorted out her immigration status. We had, from the beginning, the long-term goal of both being full-time writers — living the writing life together. So I worked on stories whenever I could, but never considered writing a novel until the mid-90’s, when it finally occurred to me that the chances of making a living from short fiction were pretty dismal.
Is that a good reason to write a novel? I don’t know. If it spurs someone to their best work, then great. Ask Nicola sometime about the immigration lawyer who told her to get famous and win awards if she wanted a green card, and how she went home and wrote Ammonite. But it’s a lot of pressure to put on one’s work, especially in the first years of get-serious writing when one has finally gained some tools and some perspective on the art and the business. I’m glad I took years, and saw my work improve steadily, before I tackled the novel.
Which is not to say that’s everyone’s path. Nicola and I often talk about writers having a preferred focal length, a prose form (or forms) in which they find their greatest access to good writing. Some people are novelists, some people are poets. This doesn’t mean the writer can’t create work at other length, just that there’s a groove we all have that’s ours. My focal length started at around 7,000 words back in the day, and has grown to be, right now, pretty squarely in the novella space — 15,000 to 50,000 words.
SW: So learning to write at novel length was a challenge for you?
KE: Absolutely. I didn’t have an instinctive feel for the shape or structure of a 100,000 word story. I didn’t know in my gut when it was time to drop deep into a moment or to glide right by. So I had to do it wrong, and scratch my head, and ask Nicola what she thought (she has an instinctive understanding of the novel form that I will have to learn the hard way); and then go back and work on it again. For eight years.
Writers who want to expand (or contract) their focal length need to suck it up and learn from those who do it better. A novel is not a really long short story, and a story is not a bare bones version of a “real” (i.e. novel-length) idea. Each form has its power and constraints. Each form requires skill. I think it’s good to have a lot of skills, and one of my goals as a writer is to one day have the integrated unconscious competence at 100,000 words that I do at 25,000. That’ll be cool.
SW: You had a number of jobs after leaving Clarion, ending with your last job at Wizards of the Coast. At what point did you decide you could quit your day job and write full time?
KE: I spent many years assuming that I had to write my way into the dream, that it was writing that would free me financially to finally be a writer. I would write a kick-ass novel that would win a million awards and get me a multi-book contract big enough to pay off the mortgage. But that’s not how it works for most of us, and here’s the thing — it doesn’t necessarily need to. There are other paths to that freedom.
Once I figured out that writing wasn’t going to finance my life as a writer, Nicola and I began a concerted, focused effort to make it happen another way. In 1995, we rolled the numbers, figured out how much we thought we would need in the bank if I quit working, and set a five-year goal of getting to that number. Her part came through writing, mine came through Wizards of the Coast. I loved my time there, worked bloody hard, built skills, and eventually became a vice president. Vice presidents got stock options. In 1999, Hasbro bought Wizards and cashed everyone out. In 2000, I left the company and started living the writing life.
Nicola and I knew in 1988 that we wanted a writing life. It took us 12 years of eye-on-the-prize decision-making to get it, and we still have to figure out how to keep it. The new goal is to actually make all the money we need, ongoing, through writing. In spite of Nicola’s multiple novels and her writing success, we’re not there yet.
If that gives newer writers pause, well, good. Because successful writing has less to do with brilliant work than it does with competent publishing and sensible business decisions by both writer and publisher. Writers who want to earn a living through writing fiction need to understand publishing with a clear-eyed dispassion. I know too many writers who don’t understand their own business and are therefore at the mercy of it. Unless your focal length, your stamina, your working rhythms, your family situation and your own notions of having a life all integrate to make it possible for you to write well, quickly, and consistently at novel length, you are either going to have to work harder and pay the price, or you are going to have to find other ways (other kinds of writing, or work that is not writing) to pay for the life.
SW: What new work can we look forward to next?
KE: My newest publication is a collection of short fiction called Dangerous Space from Aqueduct Press. It’s available for order now through the Aqueduct Press website ( www.aqueductpress.com) and will be available soon through Amazon and other distribution channels. The collection includes my previously published short fiction and a new novella. Dangerous Space represents nearly 20 years of work: the first draft of the oldest story was written at Clarion in 1988, and I finished the new novella in early 2007.
I’m also hard at work on screenplays. It turns out that, for me, screenplays operate at about the same focal length as novellas. So, perhaps because of that, I’m learning quickly and pouring myself into it with a great deal of passion. If I can be a working screenwriter as well as a working prose writer, I will — I’m having way too much fun to stop. And screenwriting is part of the “maintain the writing life” strategy; it remains to be seen whether it’s a viable notion. I’m paying my dues as a screenwriter right now, but I bring to the party my 20 years of understanding of character, relationship, dialogue, and the demands of structure. It’s helping.
Working on screenplays has given me new understandings of prose. I have new ideas for novels, for stories… we’ll see. The important thing is to be working. Writers grow by doing, but writers who do and do and do without growing have a shorter life cycle these days. The real answer to the question isn’t “I’m working on a screenplay or a novel or…” The real answer is that I’m working on growing as a writer. Teaching Clarion West in 2007 will help me with that, as did attending Clarion East in 1988.
SW: Why write, Kelley, what drives you?
KE: I write because I’m selfish. Because it makes me feel good. Writing takes me faster and farther into my own deep places than almost anything — it’s right up there with music and the most intimate conversation and heart-stopping sex. Writing at its best is for me ecstatic and contemplative, satisfying and scary, expansive and intimate, all at the same time.
It hasn’t always been like that. Like anything else worth doing over the long haul, I believe writing benefits from practice, from experience, from facing challenge (regardless of whether any particular result is success or failure). But I’ve learned that the work has to be its own payoff. There is no higher reward for sticking with it — there is only the work I’ve done, and how I’ve felt doing it, and how it’s made other people feel. That’s what compels me now: it feels good to reach other people with my work, and it feels good to reach myself.
SW: Do you have any advice for this summer’s Clarion West students?
KE: Most of us can do more than we think we can. We can all find moments in which we write beyond ourselves, in which we suck it up and go back and try it again and again until the work is better. This isn’t a race — faster isn’t better. This is the life. Going back, doing it again, making it better. Doing more. So come to Clarion and give yourself up to it for six weeks. Get more tired than you think you can. Get braver. Get more scared. Get hungrier. Get more wild. Get more passionate. Get less sleep so you can get more life along with all that writing. And please, please, please get less concerned about the person next to you — who cares if they’re better than you? Help them improve even more, and let them help you. Everything else is bullshit.
There is room at the writing table for all of us. Clarion is not a competition. No winners. No guarantees of success or fame or fortune. Clarion guarantees only the chance for change. It’s a crucible. It’s a well of dreams. It’s an open door. But don’t pretend for a moment that it’s always a happy time: there is great joy possible in this experience, and there’s also pain and the fear and the reshaping of your world in ways that you may or may not expect or enjoy. And that’s the life, too.