Clay Stafford talks with Thomas Perry “On Crafting Unforgettable Characters”

Thomas Perry interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I was curious to talk with bestselling author Thomas Perry to explore the inner architecture of his characters—smart, flawed, fiercely independent—and how writers can create protagonists like his who feel as real as the people we know. I got the opportunity to speak with him from Southern California. “Thomas, let’s talk about characters. All is a strong word, as my wife always tells my children, but all your protagonists are strongly self-reliant and emotionally layered. How do you write those so honestly without them appearing forced or contrived?”

“There are certain things for each character. For example, Jane Whitefield is a character that I’ve written in nine novels, and she was probably most in danger of being a superhero.”

“She knows an awful lot.”

“She does. Part of the fun is that she knows things that we know how she knows, how she learned them, who told her or showed her, or what experience caused it. When I first started writing, I wrote one, and then at Random House, my editor was Joe Fox, and he called me up—as editors sometimes do—and they say, ‘Working on anything?’ and you say, ‘No, I don’t like to eat anymore. It’s okay.’ No, I said, ‘You know, I’m working on this Jane Whitefield character again. I finished with that first story, but I’m not finished with that character. I feel like I know more about her, having written her, thought about it, and read a lot of background information, anthropological books, and so on. I’m doing it, and it’s going well so far.’  And he said, ‘Okay, well, talk to you later.’ And then about fifteen minutes later, he called and said, ‘How’d you like to make it five?’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to do a series.’ And then he mentioned a number and I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’ High principle. After I’d written five of them, I wrote many other books that were standalone novels because I had been thinking of them over the five years I was writing those other books. At a certain point, I started getting letters from people and then emails. I finally got one that said, ‘You haven’t written a Jane Whitefield book in a couple of years. Are you dead, or have you retired?’”

“What did you reply?”

“No, the best reply is no reply. They think you’re dead.”

“How do you develop these character backstories and make your protagonists intriguing and deeply grounded without boring? How do you avoid that info dump we often want to put into our stories?”

“That’s where you must learn to cross out. Do I need this? Is this information that everybody must have to understand, or to move the story along? Get rid of it. It’s great to write it. You understand it, and it helps you with everything else about that character you’re writing, but you don’t have to lay it all out on the table and make everybody read it. As Elmore Leonard said famously, ‘Cross out the things that people are gonna skip over.’ I think that’s probably still true.”

“I love the way that you introduce characters. On the first pages of any book, your characters come fully formed. They’re not developing. How do you introduce them like that? Is there a trick that instantly signals they’re competent and deep, without over-explaining? It seems like we turned our private camera into their living room, and they are real people right there from the start.”

“I’m glad they seem that way. I don’t know. I like to start by acquiring the reader’s attention, trying to get the reader to pay attention to what I’m doing. There are a lot of ways of doing that. One of them is to slowly build up over a couple of pages to see what’s about to happen, and then you see them in action. That’s ideal. But the craziest beginning I think I ever wrote was—I can’t remember which book it was; it’s probably Pursuit, so you may remember—very first thing, ‘He looked down on the thirteenth body.’ He’s a cop. He’s the expert, and he’s going through this crime scene. At that point, you realize that the action has started, and you must sort of scramble to catch up and find out what’s happening as he finds out. He doesn’t know yet, either. He knows he has his skills and this experience, but we don’t. We’ll try to hitchhike with him to find out what this is.”

“Your characters—whether it’s Jane Whitefield, or in recent Pro Bono—have a kind of intelligence and resourcefulness, where I wish I were that intelligent and resourceful. Your books are full of moments where characters outthink or outmaneuver dangerous situations and have the believable skills to do that. How do you show that without creating a caricature of sorts?”

“It’s fine-tuning. It has to do with whether I have gone too far. Is this sublime or ridiculous? You must be your worst critic because harsher ones will be along shortly.”

“Does that tie into the character’s philosophy or code of ethics? You put it in there, but you don’t preach it. You know enough to make it work.”

“It’s all about characters. Who is this person? One of the ways we find out who this person is, is what the furniture of their mind is. What’s their feeling about life and human beings? You must know who he is to have a character you want to follow through a book. Not all at once, ever. It’s always as you go, you come to know them better. You see them in action, the things that they worry about or think about, how they treat others, and so on.”

“You reference the furniture of life. Your protagonists rarely wait for someone else to move the couch. They do not want to wait for someone else to solve their problems. How do you ensure that growth and change come from within the characters rather than external forces?”

“I sometimes feel it’s necessary to have a situation where, for one reason or another—sometimes complicated and sometimes simple—if this character doesn’t step up, nobody will. He’s the only one with experience and knowledge about something or another, or he’s a person who does things that don’t involve the law. Like Jane Whitefield, everything she does is illegal. Everything. Since I started writing about her, it became more illegal, and they hired hundreds of thousands of people to make sure it doesn’t happen. Jane must change and trim back what she does, which is an interesting thing to play with, and introduce a character who is on the run and figure out how that person will survive if someone’s after them wanting to kill him.”

“You’re talking about Jane, and she’s one of my favorites regarding dialogue. You write dialogue very well. How do you use dialogue to reflect the characters’ self-reliance and hint at their backstory without making it that info dump?”

“Small doses. They’re the doses relevant at that moment. It’s something she knows, and we know how she knows, which is a helper. That makes it less crazy. Also, she must invent things on the spot. It’s like providing evidence. You’re trying to present a character you know can do these things and that others will accept can do these things.”

“Your protagonists aren’t superheroes. They make mistakes, they carry burdens, and they have flaws. How do you include those flaws that enhance rather than undermine a character’s strength and credibility? Because the flaws certainly add reality to things, yet you don’t want to do something disparaging to the character.”

“The flaws in Jane Whitefield, for instance, have often to do with the difficulty of what she does and still being somebody’s wife in Amherst, New York. You can’t be going off and having these fantastic adventures and expect your husband to wait for you and say that’s fine. There’s the constant where she’s trying to handle that, trying not to lie to him, but she can’t tell him many things that are going on, because if you tell somebody something, there’s a chance they’ll let it slip. If you don’t tell somebody something, there’s no chance. She has left home several times and is returning a few weeks later.”

“In your extensive experience, what separates a character that readers admire from one they never forget, like Jane?”

“Dumb luck. You know, we try. We do our best. Sometimes it works.”

“Dumb luck? Do you really think so?”

“I think you learn more as you go along. It’s a tough thing to do. Part of it is sincerity. I admire her. Therefore, there are probably subtle clues in there somehow that she’s someone to admire, because I don’t say anything bad about her—just stuff that’s a problem because of what she does. It’s odd to be doing, but it has a background in the Northeastern Indians’ history. It was a situation where people were brought into the group and adopted, particularly by the Haudenosaunee. The Iroquois were big adopters, partly because they were fighting a lot. They lost a lot of people. In the 1630s, a Dutch explorer came into western New York and noticed in an Oneida village that people from thirty-two other groups lived there. It’s a lot of people.”

“In some part of our schizophrenic brain, do you view a strong, memorable character like Jane as real?”

“Real to me. Yeah. I miss her when I haven’t written about her for a while. I miss that attitude, that self-reliance, and at the same time, that great concern for other group members.”

“She would be pleased to hear you say that. Is there any advice we haven’t discussed on building characters that would help writers build their own memorable and self-reliant characters?”

“If you’ve ever read it before, don’t do it. That includes things like occasionally, there’ll be an homage to somebody or other, and I think it’s a waste of time because the other person did it better—the one who wrote it first.”

“In all things, be original.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference, The Balanced Writer, and Killer Nashville Magazine. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/.

Thomas Perry is the bestselling author of over twenty novels, including Pro Bono, Hero, Murder Book, the critically acclaimed Jane Whitefield series, The Old Man, and The Butcher’s Boy, which won the Edgar Award. He lives in Southern California.

https://www.thomasperryauthor.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Joyce Carol Oates “On Being Her Own Person”

Joyce Carol Oates interviewed by Clay Stafford

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I first met Joyce Carol Oates when she was the John Seigenthaler Legends Award winner at the Killer Nashville International Writer’s Conference. She is a prolific writer, a modern-day legend, and a professor at NYU and Princeton, where her fortunate students learn from one of the best living writers today. When her new collection of short stories came out, Flint Kill Creek, I reached out to her to see if we could chat about the new book, writing in general, and how to prepare oneself for a career as a writer. My goal, because she is both a prolific writer and a teacher, was to see if there was some Holy Grail that writers could discover to create a successful career. Fortunately, we may have stumbled upon it. “Joyce, someone such as you who's written over a hundred books, how do you consistently generate these fresh ideas and maintain this creative energy you've got going?”

“Well, it would not interest me to write the same book again, so I wouldn't be interested in that at all.”

“I wonder if some of it also has to do with all the reading you do. It's generating new ideas coming in all the time.”

“I suppose so. That's just the way our minds are different. I guess there are some writers who tend to write the same book. Some people have fixations about things. I don't know how to assess my own self, but I'm mostly interested in how to present the story in terms of structure. Like Flint Kill Creek, the story is really based very much on the physical reality of a creek: how, in a time of heavy rainfall, it rises and becomes this rushing stream. Other times, it's sort of peaceful and beautiful, and you walk along it, yet it's possible to underestimate the power of some natural phenomenon like a creek. It's an analog with human passion. You think that things are placid and in control, but something triggers it, and suddenly there is this violent upheaval of emotion. The story is really about a young man who is so frightened of falling in love or losing control, he has to have a kind of adversarial relationship with young women. He's really afraid to fall in love because it's like losing control. So, through a series of incidents, something happens so that he doesn't have to fall in love, that the person he might love disappears from the story. But to me, the story had to be written by that creek. I like to walk myself along the towpath here in the Princeton area, the Delaware and Raritan Canal. When I was a little girl, I played a lot in Tonawanda Creek, I mean literally played along with my friends. We would go down into the creek area and wade in the water, and then it was a little faster out in the middle, so it was kind of playful, but actually a little dangerous. Then, after rainfall, the creek would get very high and sometimes really high. So it's rushing along, and it's almost unrecognizable. I like to write about the real world, and describe it, and then put people into that world.”

“You've been writing for some time. How do you keep your writing so relevant and engaging to people at all times?”

“I don't know how I would answer that. I guess I'm just living in my own time. My most recent novel is called Butcher, and I wrote it a couple of years ago, and yet now it's so timely because women's reproductive rights have been really under attack and have been pushed back in many states, and it seems that women don't have the rights that we had only a decade ago, and things are kind of going backwards. So, my novel Butcher is set in the 19th century, and a lot of the ideas about women and women's bodies almost seem to be making like a nightmare comeback today. I was just in Milan. I was interviewed a lot about Butcher, and earlier in the year I was in Paris, and I was interviewed about Butcher, because the translations are coming out, and the interviewers were making that connection. They said, ‘Well, your novel is very timely. Was this deliberate?’ And I'm not sure if it was exactly deliberate, because I couldn't foretell the future, but it has this kind of painful timeliness now.”

“How do you balance your writing with all this marketing? Public appearances? Zoom meetings with me? How do you get all of it done? How does Joyce Carol Oates get all of it done?”

“Oh, I have a lot of quiet time. It's nice to talk to you, but as I said, I was reading like at 7 o'clock in the morning, I was completely immersed in a novel, then I was working on my own things, and then talking with you from three to four, that's a pleasure. It's like a little interlude. I don't travel that much. I just mentioned Milan and Paris because I was there. But most of the time I'm really home. I don't any longer have a husband. My husband passed away, so the house is very quiet. I have two kitties, and my life is kind of easy. Really, it's a lonely life, but in some ways it's easy.”

“Do you ever think at all—at the level you're at—about any kind of expanded readership or anything? Or do you just write and throw it out there?”

“I wouldn't really be thinking about that. That's a little late in my career. I mean, I try to write a bestseller.”

“And you have.”

“My next novel, which is coming out in June, is a whodunnit.”

“What's the title?”

“Fox, a person is named Fox. That's the first novel I've ever written that has that kind of plot. A body's found, there’s an investigation, we have back flash and backstory, people are interviewed. You follow about six or seven people, and one of them is actually the murderer, and you find out at the end who the murderer is. The last chapter reveals it. It's sort of like a classic structure of a whodunnit, and I've never done that before. I didn't do it for any particular reason. I think it was because I hadn't done it before, so I could experiment, and it was so much fun.”

“That's one of the things readers love about your work, is you experiment a lot.”

“That was a lot of fun, because I do read mysteries, and yet I never wrote an actual mystery before.”

“Authors sometimes get the advice—which you're totally the exception to—of pick one thing, stay with it, don’t veer from that because you can't build a brand if you don't stick with that one thing. Yet you write plays, nonfiction, poetry, short stories, novels, and you write in all sorts of genres. What advice or response do you give to that? Because I get that ‘stick with one thing’ all the time from media experts at Killer Nashville. You're the exception. You don't do that.”

“No, but I'm just my own person. I think if you want to have a serious career, like as a mystery detective writer, you probably should establish one character and develop that character. One detective, let's say, set in a certain region of America so that there's a good deal of local color. I think that's a good pattern to choose one person as a detective, investigator, or coroner and sort of stay with that person. I think most people, as it turns out, just don't have that much energy. They're not going to write in fifteen different modes. They're going to write in one. So that's sort of tried and true. I mean, you know Ellery Queen and Earl Stanley Gardner and Michael Connolly. Michael Connolly, with Hieronymus Bosch novels, is very successful, and they're excellent novels. He's a very good writer. He's made a wonderful career out of staying pretty close to home.”

“Is there any parting advice you would give to writers who are reading here?”

“I think the most practical advice, maybe, is to take a writing course with somebody whom you respect. That way you get some instant feedback on your writing, and I see it all the time. The students are so grateful for ideas. I have a young woman at Rutgers, she got criticism from the class, and she came back with a revision that was stunning to me. I just read it yesterday. Her revision is so good, I think my jaw dropped. She got ideas from five or six different people, including me. I gave her a lot of ideas. She just completely revised something and added pages and pages, and I was really amazed. I mean, what can I say? That wouldn't have happened without that workshop. She knows that. You have to be able to revise. You have to be able to sit there and listen to what people are saying, and take some notes, and then go home and actually work. She is a journalism major as well as something else. So I think she's got a real career sense. She’s gonna work. Other people may be waiting for inspiration or something special, but she's got the work ethic. And that's important.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference and the online streaming creative learning platform The Balanced Writer. Subscribe to his weekly writing tips at https://claystafford.com/

Joyce Carol Oates has published nearly 100 books, including 58 novels, many plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; she won the National Book Award for her novel them. https://celestialtimepiece.com/

Clay Stafford talks with Callan Wink “On Succeeding as a Part-Time Writer”

Callan Wink interviewed by Clay Stafford

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In spring, summer, and fall, Callan Wink can be found guiding flyfish anglers in Montana. In the winter, he surfs in Costa Rica. Callan’s new book, Beartooth, is out, and I wanted to talk to him about his success as a part-time writer. I caught up with Callan in Costa Rica (he’s already made the migration) after a morning of surfing and before a walk on the beach. “Callan, let’s talk about the writing and editing process, specifically about Beartooth. I heard it’s had a circuitous route. Can you tell us about your process and the trajectory of this particular book?”

“I've probably had the premise in my head for a long time, over ten years, and I wrote it as a short story when I was writing more short stories. It was an okay short story, but it was thin. I felt like there was more, so I never tried publishing it. Then I wrote this long, 400-page, boring novel. It had a great first fifty-sixty pages, I thought. It was one of my first attempts at writing a novel. It didn't go well, so I put it away for a long time and wrote my other two books in the meantime—another novel and that collection of short stories. Then, I came back to it a couple of years ago. I wanted to write a collection of novellas. I still thought the first fifty-sixty pages were really good, so I just went back to this one and brutally cut out everything boring, which was a lot of it.”

“Which is a good move.”

“It was pretty good. It was eighty-ninety pages, and I had a couple of other novellas. My agent and I tried to sell that as a collection of three novellas, and we had interest, but the publishers, in the end, said a collection of novellas is a hard sell, but they were all like, ‘We like this one, Beartooth. Can you make it longer?’ I'm like, shit. It was longer at one point. But anyway, then I went back. I also rewrote and developed other things. I do think it made it better. It's still a short novel, but I feel like the stage it's at now is the best of all those iterations. If I learned anything from this one, it was if you have a good premise, don't give up on it, which I'm prone to do. I like to keep moving on to other things, and if something doesn't work out quickly and easily, I'm like, it's not meant to be. But good premises are a little harder to come by, I'm realizing as I get older. If you have a good one, it behooves you to keep working on it.”

“I find your writing life fascinating. For those struggling with family and work, how do you balance writing with your other responsibilities as a part-time writer?”

“I have a lot of respect for people who are producing when they have families and full-time jobs and things like that. I’m a single person. My summer, spring, and fall job is very physically and emotionally taxing at times. It's long days, and I'm tired and don't write. But I do feel like when you have constraints on time, it does make you a little more likely to buckle down when you do have time. I don't work at it all year, but when I do, I try to be disciplined and get my 1,000 words in every day in the winter and at least feel like I'm generating some stuff. I don't know if it's the best way, quite honestly. I feel like working on it all year is probably better for writing novels. But I do feel like it's probably going to mean that I'm going to be producing shorter novels because it's a little easier to get one in the bag in a few months or a rough, rough draft, as opposed to some epic, sprawling thing where you’ve got to be in it for years every day.”

“What strategies do you use to stay motivated and maintain that momentum during writing on your schedule?”

“That's a good question. I don't love the process of writing that much, quite honestly. Sometimes it's fun. You feel like you're getting somewhere, and things are flowing. I still really enjoy that feeling, but those times are overshadowed by vast periods of What am I doing? None of this is going well. But it's just always what I've done. It's like a compulsion. It's not something I will probably stop doing anytime soon. I was doing it without thinking that this was what I would do for my job. It was always like, I'm a fishing guide and write stuff. I used to write poetry. It wasn't very good, but I did that at a young age, and I guess I've always been writing, so I feel weird not to be at least thinking about it. Even if I'm not writing every day, I usually think about it most days. So yeah, for whatever reason, it's this compulsion I have. I don't necessarily feel like I need to be motivated too much other than to start feeling guilty if I haven't been working on something. It’s ingrained at this point. I don't see it changing anytime soon. Setting a small goal in terms of productivity is a good thing. I've always tried to do one thousand words daily, and I don't hit it every day, but I can most days. Sometimes it takes me a couple of hours, and sometimes it's like most of the day. But if I can get that, I can go about the rest of my day. I can go to the bar, surfing, or whatever.”

“Do you outline? Or do you sit down and start writing?”

“I do feel like maybe the outline for novels is a good way to do it. When I've tried to do it in the past, it feels like when you're doing the outline, you're like, Okay, this is great. I'm setting up this framework, and this is all gonna go a lot easier. But then it always seems to lack some organic characteristics that when I write happens. I don't outline much, but honestly, it might be easier if I did. It hasn't worked for me at this point. I usually try to write and have a point I want to get to in the next maybe ten pages. And I get to that point. And then, I think about what I want to do in the next ten pages. So, there is not a lot of outlining going on.”

“When you were writing Beartooth, were there any unusual challenges or anything you found challenging in developing the characters? And how did you overcome those?”

“I guess the challenge is the relationship between the two brothers, which evolved over time in the rewriting. It was all challenging, to tell you the truth. Several early readers said we want this mother character to be more developed. From the beginning, I had a pretty good idea about the two brothers and how I wanted them to be and act in the story. I knew she would be this absent figure, but when she returned, trying to create her more as a fully fleshed-out character was one of the more challenging things in the book for me. I can write a thirty-something-year-old man pretty well. Writing a sixty-year-old woman is a little bit more of a stretch. It's something I had to lean into a little bit more.”

“What part of the novel writing process is the most enjoyable?”

“There are fun moments, and finishing that first draft is sort of fun. You feel like you've done something. This is only my second novel, but weirdly, it’s like every one gets more challenging because you know how much work you have ahead. My first one, I had no idea. I thought I was pretty much there when I finished that first draft. No, not even close. There's so much work. Knowing how much work is coming up and going into it can be a little oppressive. Now, I think a lot of my challenge is to not think about that and try to recapture the going forward with it that I did in my first novel, where I didn't have any expectations. Weirdly, trying to write more like I did when I was first starting is something I have to try to do more now.”

“Do you think education sometimes messes with your mind? You know, you love writing, and then you go to school, and sometimes there are rules and things that start coming in your head.”

“For sure. The writing education I've had was significant in that I had rooms full of readers who had to read my stuff and give me feedback, so getting feedback as a writer is, I think, super crucial and challenging to do, often when you're outside of a writing program, for a lot of writers, unless you have this group of readers that you feel like are invested in your work and things like that. That can be a rare thing. When you have that, you feel like you are getting the feedback you need. But when you're on your own, you're just kind of on your own. I've taught writing a couple of times, and I enjoyed it for the most part. But I noticed that when I was trying to write, sometimes things I said in class to my students would come into my head. It was weird. I didn't like it, quite honestly, because there were things I was telling my students, and I was trying to apply them to my writing, which was weirdly counterproductive.”

“Putting yourself in a box.”

“A little bit. I was judging what I was writing based on something I was trying to tell my students in class that day, which wasn't helpful. I'm always impressed by people who are good writing teachers and also produce a lot of stuff. I don't have that ability.”

“Sometimes two different hats.”

“A little bit. I’ve got a lot of respect for writing teachers who are also good writers and working a lot because it's taxing.”

“For a novel with no deadline, no due date, how do you know when you're in that phase where it's like, ‘Okay, the draft is great. I need to start editing to get it ready to submit.’ At what point do you know you're at that point? Other than ‘I'm sick of it, and I'm ready.’”

“Yeah, well, there's that.”

“No, don't! Don't go to that one.”

“Generally, if I'm at the point where I'm just dinking around with commas and stuff, I'm like, ‘All right, it's time to get some other eyes on it.’ Once I'm either at the very sentence-level stuff or where I can't seem to access it anymore in a way that makes any substantial changes, then I at least need to put it away for a long time or send it to somebody.”

“If you're sending it to somebody, how do you handle the feedback from your beta readers or critique partners?”

“At least for me, I'm lucky, and I don't have a large pool of people I send stuff to. My agent, luckily, is great at reading stuff. I don't just send him whatever first draft junk I wrote. I try to respect his time because he's a busy guy. But, if I've been working on something and I think there's some merit, he'll give me good notes–just like a letter, and usually, it's pretty insightful. And then I try to go back into it with that. I think one thing that I've realized in doing this now is that there's a lot of benefit for me in putting something away for a significant amount of time because then you go back to it with fresh eyes. There are things that you can't see when you're so immersed in it. Putting something away is big for me.”

“But that disheartening feeling, too, when you come back two years later and go, ‘This was so good. I can't wait to read it,’ and then you're like, ‘This is so bad. I can’t believe I wrote it.’”

“I'm like eroded. I have probably three fully different novel drafts that I will never publish. They may have been things I needed to write to get out of my system for other things to come in, but if I were to look at the number of pages I've written on a scale compared to the ones I've published, that would be sad. I don't like to think about that.”

“How do you determine which parts of your novel need the most significant revision? You were talking about how the mom needed to be expanded. What clues do you have about that without third-party influence?”

“One thing I've noticed in my stuff is sometimes I get caught up in how to get from point A to Point B. I know I want to get to Point B at some point, and then there are all these steps. I get hung up in there. It gets boring while I'm just trying to get the characters from here to there, and that's something that can be hard to see if you haven't put it away for a while. But for whatever reason, coming back after a significant amount of time away from it, I'm more able to see the gaps or areas where you can cut and get to the more interesting stuff. Knowing when to end a scene and move on to something interesting is something that comes in editing. I've become more aware of it now; it is just moving along.”

“So, how do you solve that? Is it pretty much good, boring, and good stuff, and then we just put some transition or something in there and remove the boring? How does that work?”

“I think what I've noticed in my first drafts is maybe I don't give the reader enough credit or something because I'm still trying to figure it out in my own head where I need it to be very clear and sort of step by step to from point A to point B. Going back in, I'm like, ‘Oh, a reader is going to infer. We don't need all of that. We can get right into the next thing.’ I realized it early in short story writing, which is very scene-dependent. The gaps in between add to the effect of the story. Knowing when to transition is a big part of writing a short story, at least how I've done it, which translates into a novel. I try not to look at the sort of blank spots as much as a negative thing. I mean, you still need to have continuity and for readers to be able to follow along, but having blank spots in various areas when you're advancing is not the end of the world, and often is better, quite honestly.”

“You referenced inference. That's sometimes good because it invites the reader to think and contemplate where you're going, what just happened, or what did happen.”

“Definitely. A reader's imagination can do much better writing than I can. So, allowing the reader to use their imagination is crucial.”

“What advice would you give aspiring novelists about building a sustainable career while working at it part-time?”

“That's a good one, you know.”

“You're doing what you want to do, right?”

“Totally. I love it.”

“Your summertime gig, and you do not want to give that up?”

“I'm very fortunate. I'm not making a ton of money, but my lifestyle is a ten on a scale of one to ten. I have a good program, and I guess everyone's different. I think some people like going the academic route. For me, just having another job that is not writing is crucial. Many writers I've admired have taught as their job, but many also had other careers. Many writers have had just some job that was completely different than writing. And for me, that's important, and I would recommend that. And maybe not even go to school to write, to tell you the truth. Read a lot, and then study biology or something. It's kind of what I probably should have done.”

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Clay Stafford is a bestselling writer, filmmaker, and founder of Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference. Subscribe to his newsletter at https://claystafford.com/

Callan Wink has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University, where he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow. His stories and essays have been published in the New Yorker, Granta, Playboy, Men’s Journal, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of a novel, August, and a collection of short stories, Dog Run Moon. He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a fly-fishing guide on the Yellowstone River. https://www.spiegelandgrau.com/beartooth