Interview with:Sam Smith [samsmith]
WRITING
 | What did you first read? How did you begin to write? Who were the first to read what you wrote? We didn't have many books at home. Plenty of comics, & comic annuals. The first fiction that drew me into its world was 'Coral Island'. The first book that had real impact on me was a 6 volume pictorial history of World War 2, especially the photographs of the pits in Belsen.
As a teenager I worked through the Harold Robbins and Mickey Spillanes. Once in the Merchant Navy I tried to smoke a cigarette every time that Mickey lit up.Cigarettes were cheap and being at sea is very boring. I gave up when the cabin was so full of smoke there was a danger of the sprinkler system being set off.
As a young man in London, flat-sharing in Chelsea, I had pressed on me everyone's favourite author. Steinbeck impressed. I had a Hemingway phase, followed by an E M Forster. I actually stood in the Queens Elm urinal next to Laurie Lee. But the author who inspired me beyond all others was Henry Miller. In particular his 'Smile at the Foot of the Ladder'. I read it in one sitting and decided to try and create something as honest as that, to give to someone else what he had just given to me. Even if it took the rest of my life so to do.
The first works I attempted were poems - shown to the girl who had leant me the 'Smile...'. She didn't seem that impressed. That said the poem was about another girlfriend's miscarriage.
Back in my bedsit I wrote 3 novels in a year, sent them off to publishers; and so began my long early career and collection of rejection slips. |
| What is your favorite genre? Can you provide a link to a site where we can read some of your work or learn something about it? |
| What is your creative process like? What happens before sitting down to write? Relentless and all-consuming. I make notes wherever I am, whatever I'm doing. If at work I used to sneak off to the lavatory to make quick notes. Out walking I always have notepad and pens with me. Same in bed. The exact form of words if not jotted down there and then can be so easily lost.
Not that every of these notes is worth keeping - many are a stating of the obvious, or profound nonsense. All of which will be sorted/edited when I do sit down to write. |
| What type of reading inspires you to write? Writers writing about writing often provokes trains of thought regarding my own writing which leads to further ideas. But, really, it can be any type of reading - depending on where my thoughts are focussed at the time of reading, what my preoccupations are regards my latest project. A single sentence in an otherwise turgid piece of prose can thus be epiphanic. A poem larded with errors can demonstrate to me exactly what is wrong with one of mine....
Simple answer is - reading inspires me to write. |
| What do you think are the basic ingredients of a story? Character and situation. Which applies to every genre. Add idea for SF. Then let character, situation and idea works itself through to a conclusion. Possibly. |
| What voice do you find most to your liking: first person or third person? Content dictates form. One novel, 'As Recorded', I began in the third person, but when I was about 50,000 words in the writing of it was becoming laboured. Ad if it was tedious to write it would most certainly be tedious in the reading. So I switched it to first person. But then the narrator became overbearingly conceited. Come the end I wrote the whole book in the form of an interview. Jacobyte Books of Australia published it. Unfortunately it's out of print now. |
| What well known writers do you admire most? There are simply so many - poets, novelists, biographers.... And not all of their works move me. Sometimes it can be just one poem, one novel. And sometimes I admire them more for their approach to writing rather than for the writing itself.
Poets I admore range from Cavafey to Ted Hughes, David Grubb to Bruce MacRae, Laura Riding to William Carlos Williams, Colin Simms to Michael Hamburger.... the list could go on and on...
Same for novelists. Henry Miller, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Djuna Barnes, Violette Leduc, Francois Sagan, Albert Camus, John Berger, Michael Holroyd, Margaret Drabble, Edna O'Brien.... the list is near endless. |
| What is required for a character to be believable? How do you create yours? Occasionally the characters grow out of the idea/plot. Sometimes I begin with the character, based sometimes on a person or an amalgam of people I have known. And for the characters to be credible - a warts'n all depiction, along with an implied back story. Too much detail can damage credibility. How much of people in real life do we know? As long as the author knows their life story all of it doesn't have to be told.
My creation of characters isn't always conscious. I like it when they surprise me by acting out of the character I have given them. |
| Are you equally good at telling stories orally? No. I stammer and I stutter and I rush through them. |
| Deep down inside, who do you write for? Someone like me. Someone sitting on a metaphorical beach, time to kill, with a book inside their head. For that moment of true communication - as happened to me with that copy of Henry Miller's 'Smile at the Foot of the Ladder'. And I've done it! Had people get in touch with me from around the world - saying how they have been moved by my work. Be that a poem or a novel. |
| Is writing a form of personal therapy? Are internal conflicts a creative force? In itself I don't think it is therapeutic. It certainly hasn't healed me. What drives me to write is anger at the falsity of the world out there. A conflict between me and it. And the world is still false and I am still angry.
That said.... if I hadn't had writing as an outlet for my anger I daresay that anger would probably have turned upon my self, upon my failure to change this injust world, and that anger would probably have destroyed me. |
| Does reader feed-back help you? Not with the book/poem read. Possibly for future books/poems.
Whatever I'm writing goes through so many drafts before it ever gets seen by another....
I'm not sure what this question means by 'reader'. By the time my work gets into the public domain, after all my drafts, it's usually been gone over by at least one editor, and we will have many a debate over aspects of the novel/collection.
But, yes, all feedback is valuable. Even the scathing reviews. Though not welcome, they do remind one that one can't please everyone all of the time. |
| Do you participate in competitions? Have you received any awards? I only go in for those competitions where the prize includes publication. All too many competitions exist solely to raise money, and no-one but the judges get to read the work. The competitions are often for some very worthwhile cause, but have little literary significance.
Yes, I have received awards. In particular Skrev Press's for a Science Fiction novella - my novel 'We Need Madmen' - http://www.skrevpress.com/first.html
As gratifying have been those triumphs - I hesitate to call them competitions - but where poems of mine have been voted the best by readers. "Word" in Iota magazine, for instance, and "Rip" by the People's Poet. |
| Do you share rough drafts of your writings with someone whose opinion you trust? No.
Although I might read a first draft of a poem to my wife or daughters. But even that's not a good idea.
Novels never get seen by anyone until the pre-submission draft. |
| Do you believe you have already found "your voice" or is that something one is always searching for? If I keep saying that content dictates form it's because it does. If one tries to impose one's 'voice' on content the dissonance will be offputting.
Consequently I have never looked for my 'voice'. |
| What discipline do you impose on yourself regarding schedules, goals, etc.? I write every day for at least 2 hours. I always have at least 2 books on the go at once - in order that I don't try to cram everything into the one book. I will also have a series of poems on the go. And these I will fit in around the editing I do for The Journal and Original Plus, as well as any editing for other publishers or any commissions.
With so much on the go at once I have to keep to schedules or all becomes chaos. |
| What do you surround yourself with in your work area in order to help your concentrate? Music. Classical mostly - Radio 3. If there's too much talking put on a CD. Jazz with no vocals. |
| Do you write on a computer? Do you print frequently? Do you correct on paper? What is your process? If a novel I do at the very least 3 longhand drafts before typing. Then I do a rough print, take a red pen to it. Possibly do another print, another red pen edit...
Poems can take anything up to 20 longhand drafts. More. Then, having printed, even published, still I will make changes. |
| What sites do you frequent on-line to share experiences or information? |
| What has been your experience with publishers? Various.
For the first 23 years what I mostly got from publishers was rejection slips. And some encouragement. My second year of submitting work MacMillan passed a reader's report to me which began, 'This man can really write....' Unfortunately, as with other publishers, MacMillan's sales people didn't rate the commercial chances of my MS and it wasn't taken on.
During those 23 years several publishers accepted one or other of my novels, only for the project to go belly-up - for a variety of reasons - the favouring editor leaving, publisher going bust, getting taken over... - before reaching print. The final straw was when a new publisher took on a novel - 'Constant Change' - got me to change it, meetings at my house, at theirs - and the finance they'd arranged never came through.
It was then, 1990, I decided to try and get some of my poetry published. Within a year I was averaging a poem a month accepted by one magazine or another. Within three years I had my first collection, 'To Be Like John Clare', published by University of Salzburg Press. A poem was selected for the Forward Prize, I read on Radio 3... And shortly after I became a publisher myself, although not to self-publish. The internet happened.
Online Originals - one of the very first online publishers - took my novel, 'Sister Blister' - http://www.onlineoriginals.com. David Gettman even put it in for the Booker. And after that there was no stopping me. Jacobyte published 4 more of my novels, then BeWrite Books took some more. Then boho/Bluechrome, and Skrev..... So it goes. Of course nothing is fixed. Some publishers still promise the earth and don't deliver, some - despite their best efforts - go bust. And some seem to exist, perversely, solely to make money out of their authors. Thankfully I've managed to avoid them, have been published on a royalty basis only.
Yes, it's been my experience that publishers are as mixed a breed as writers. |
| What are you working on now? A novel called 'Something's Wrong', which I'll probably have ready to submit somewhere next year. And I'm about to start another SF novel.
I'm also still working on a set of poems called 'Scenes from a Country Life'. |
| What do you recommend I do with all those things I wrote years ago but have never been able to bring myself to show anyone? Read them again with a red pen in your hand. If you find yourself scribbling over the pages then you have probably got something worth salvaging, or that might take you in a new direction. If, however, you find yourself uneasily holding the page further and further away - best look to the recycling bin. For the paper not the literary endeavour. |
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[samsmith]
Sam Smith
Cumbria UK
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