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

“Dean Koontz: The Secret of Selling 500 Million Books”

Dean Koontz interviewed by Clay Stafford

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Dean Koontz is and always has been an incredibly prolific writer. He’s also an excellent writer, which explains why he’s had such phenomenal success. When I heard he and I were going to get to chat exclusively for Killer Nashville Magazine, I wanted to talk to him about how one man can author over one hundred and forty books, a gazillion short stories, have sixteen movies made from his books, and sell over five hundred million copies of his books in at least thirty-eight languages. It's no small feat, but surprisingly, one that Dean thinks we are all capable of. “So, Dean, how long should a wannabe writer give their career before they expect decent results?”

“Well, it varies for everybody. But six months is ridiculous. Yeah, it’s not going to be that fast unless you’re one of the very lucky ones who comes out, delivers a manuscript, and publishers want it. But you also have to keep in mind some key things. Publishers don’t always know what the public wants. In fact, you could argue that half the time, they have no idea. A perfect example of this is Harry Potter, which every publisher in New York turned down, and it went to this little Canadian Scholastic thing and became the biggest thing of its generation. So, you just don’t know. But you could struggle for a long time trying to break through, especially for doing anything a little bit different. And everybody says, ‘Well, this is different. Nobody wants something like this.’ And there are all those kinds of stories, so I can’t put a time frame on it. But I would say a minimum of a few years.”

“I usually tell everyone—people who come to Killer Nashville, groups I speak to—four years. Give it four years. Is that reasonable?”

“I think that's reasonable. If it isn’t working in four years, I wouldn’t rule it out altogether, but you’d better find a day job.”

“I was looking at your Facebook page, and it said on some of your books you would work fifty hours a week for x-amount of time, seventy hours a week for x-amount of time. How many hours a week do you actually work?”

“These days, I put in about sixty hours a week. And I’m seventy-eight.”

“Holy cow, you don’t look anywhere near seventy-eight.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no retiring in this. I love what I do, so I’ll keep doing it until I fall dead on the keyboard. There were years when I put in eighty-hour weeks. Now, that sounds grueling. Sixty hours these days probably sounds grueling to most people or to many people. But the fact is, I love what I do, and it’s fun. And if it’s fun, that doesn't mean it’s not hard work and it doesn’t take time, because it’s both fun and hard work, but because it is, the sixty hours fly by. I never feel like I’m in drudgery. So, it varies for everybody. But that’s the time that I put in. When people say, ‘Wow! You’ve written all these books; you must dash them off quickly.’ No, it’s exactly the opposite. But I just put a lot of hours in every week, and it’s that consistency week after week after week. I don’t take off a month for Bermuda. I don't like to travel, so that wouldn't come up anyway. When you do that, it’s kind of astonishing how much work piles up.”

“How is your work schedule divided? I assume you write every single day?”

“Pretty much. I will certainly write six days a week. I get up at 5:00. I used to be a night guy, but after I got married, I became a day guy because my wife is a day person. I’m up at 5:00, take the dog for a walk, feed the dog, shower, and am at my desk by 6:30, and I write straight through to dinner. I never eat lunch because eating lunch makes me foggy, and so I’m looking at ten hours a day, six days a week, and when it’s toward the last third of a book, it goes to seven days a week because the momentum is such that I don’t want to lose it. It usually takes me five months to six months to produce a novel that’s one hundred thousand words.”

“Does this include your editing, any kind of research you do, and all that? Is it in that time period?”

“Yeah, I have a weird way of writing; though, I’ve learned that certain other writers have it. I don’t write a first draft and go back. I polish a page twenty to thirty times, sometimes ten, but I don’t move on from that page until I feel it’s as perfect as I can make it. Then I go to the next page. And I sort of say, I build a book like coral reefs are built, all these little dead skeletons piling on top of each other, and at the end of a chapter, I go print it out because you see things printed out you don’t see on the screen. I do a couple of passes of each chapter that way and then move on. In the end, it’s had so many drafts before anyone else sees it that I generally never have to do much of anything else. I’ll always get editorial suggestions. I think since I started working this way, which was in the early days, my editorial suggestions take me never a lot more than a week, sometimes a couple of days. But when editors make good suggestions, you want to do it because the book does not say ‘By Dean Koontz with wonderful suggestions by…’ You get all the credit, so you might as well take any wonderful suggestion.”

“You get all the blame, too.”

“Yes, you do, although I refuse to accept it.”

“Do you work from an outline, then? Or do you just stream of consciousness?”

“I worked from outline for many years, but things were not succeeding, and so I finally said, you know, one of the problems is that I do an outline, the publisher sees it, says ‘Good. We’ll give you a contract,’ then I go and write the book and deliver it, and it’s not the same book. It’s very similar, but there are all kinds of things, I think, that became better in the writing, and publishers say, ‘Well, this isn’t quite the book we bought,’ and I became very frustrated with that. I also began to think, ‘This is not organic. I am deciding the entire novel before I start it.’ Writing from an outline might work and does for many writers, but I realized it didn’t work for me because I wasn’t getting an organic story. The characters weren’t as rich as I wanted because they were sort of set at the beginning. So, I started writing the first book I did without an outline called Strangers, which was over two hundred fifty thousand words. It was a long novel and had about twelve main characters. It was a big storyline, and I found that it all fell together perfectly well. It took me eleven months of sixty- to seventy-hour weeks, but the book came together, and that was my first hardcover bestseller. I’ve never used an outline since. I just begin with a premise, a character or two, and follow it all. It’s all about character, anyway. If the book is good, character is what drives it.”

“Is that the secret of it all? Putting in the time? Free-flowing thought? Characters?”

“I think there are several. It’s just willing to put in the time and think about what you’re doing, recognizing that characters are more important than anything else. If the characters work, the book will work. If the characters don’t, you may still be able to sell the book, but you’re not looking at long-term reader involvement. Readers like to fall in love with the characters. That doesn’t mean the characters all have to be wonderful angelic figures. They also like to fall in love with the villains, which means getting all those characters to be rich and different. I get asked often, ‘You have so many eccentric characters. The Odd Thomas books are filled with almost nothing else. How do you make them relatable?’ And I say, ‘Well, first, you need to realize every single human being on the planet is eccentric. You are as well.”

“Me?” I laugh. “You’re the first to point that out.”

He joins in. “It’s just a matter of recognizing that. And then, when you start looking for the characters’ eccentricities—which the character will start to express to you—you have to write them with respect and compassion. You don’t make fun of them, even if they are amusing, and you treat them as you would people: by the Golden Rule. And if you do, audiences fall in love with them, and they stay with you to see who you will write about next. And that’s about the best thing I can say. Don’t write a novel where the guy’s a CIA agent, and that’s it. Who is he? What is he other than that? And I never write about CIA agents, but I see there’s a tendency in that kind of fiction to just put the character out there. That’s who he is. Well, that isn’t who he is. He’s something, all of us are, something much more than our job.”

“What advice do you give to new writers who want to become the next Dean Koontz?”

“First of all, you can’t be me because I’m learning to clone myself, so I plan to be around for a long time. But, you know, everybody works a different way, so I’m always hesitant to give ironclad advice. But what I do say to many young writers who write to me, and they’ve got writer's block, is that I’ve never had it, but I know what it is. It’s always the same thing. It’s self-doubt. You get into a story. You start doubting that you can do this, that this works, that that works. It’s all self-doubt. I have more self-doubt than any writer I’ve ever known, and that’s why I came up with this thing of perfecting every page until I move to the next. Then, the self-doubt goes away because the page flows, and when I get to the next page, self-doubt returns. So, I will do it all again. When I’m done, the book works. Now, if that won’t work for everybody, I think it could work for most writers if they get used to it, and there are certain benefits to it. You do not have to write multiple drafts after you’ve written one. What happens with a lot of writers is they write that first draft—especially when they’re young or new—and now they have something, and they’re very reluctant to think, ‘Oh, this needs a lot of work’ because they’re looking at it as, ‘Oh, I have a novel-length manuscript.’ Well, that’s only the first part of the journey. And I just don’t want to get to that point and feel tempted to say, ‘This is good enough,’ because it almost never will be that way.”

“No,” I say, “it never will.”

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

Dean Koontz is the author of many #1 bestsellers. His books have sold over five hundred million copies in thirty-eight languages, and The Times (of London) has called him a “literary juggler.” He lives in Southern California with his wife Gerda, their golden retriever, Elsa, and the enduring spirits of their goldens Trixie and Anna. https://www.deankoontz.com/