Monthly Archives: April 2012

Interviews

New Book Release: The Infinite Knowledge of J.T. Badgley by Tiana Warner

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Tiana Warner has just released her first novel, The Infinite Knowledge of J.T. Badgley. The 23-year-old author hails from Abbotsford, BC, and works as a software developer. Earlier this year, I had the pleasure of working with the gracious Tiana on her book, a young adult science fiction novel. But The Infinite Knowledge is really so much more than this genre label suggests. I thoroughly enjoyed chatting with Tiana about her book, and hope you will enjoy our interview.

CK: What was it that prompted you to start writing The Infinite Knowledge of J.T. Badgley in the first place, and how long did it take you to write the book?

TW: I’ve wanted to be a writer for as long as I can remember. When I was 5 I would write stories and staple the pages together and sell them to relatives. I started writing The Infinite Knowledge near the end of high school, when we studied classics like Gulliver’s Travels and 1984. I knew then that I wanted to write a book with a purpose—so I started with the topics I feel passionate about, and everything else followed. It took me six years because of university, but in the end I’m glad I was patient.

CK: In the book, the unsuspecting protagonist Jake (J.T.) plummets via a portal through space and lands on the planet Zielaarde, a planet very like our own in some ways. Through your portrayal of Zielaarde, what kinds of things were you trying to say about Earth and its inhabitants?

TW: I want the reader to interpret much of it for themselves, but I will say that I had a fun time exploring certain contemporary issues. Some of these issues are more light-hearted, while others I take more seriously and feel strongly about. The inhabitants of Zielaarde often reflect the way we humans regard the environment, technology, and each other.

CK: The book is an excellent read—it’s dramatic and suspenseful, and I wasn’t sure how it would end until it actually did end. As well, it’s often funny—the reactions the Ziels (inhabitants of Zielaarde) and Jake have to each other were quite amusing. But the book is also very thought-provoking and serious. Ultimately, what thoughts or impressions did you hope to leave readers with?

TW: I hope readers come away thinking about said contemporary issues, but I also hope they think about their own roles and abilities in this world. The book is primarily written for teens, so when I was writing it I wanted make sure I avoided telling the reader what to think, and focused on simply provoking them into thinking. Jake faces the same identity-crisis problems that so many teens face around the time of their high school graduations, and he’s at an age where he starts to gain awareness and scepticism of philosophy and religion. He is forced to gain a stronger sense of self in the book, and I hope Jake’s self-exploration also encourages such thinking in the reader.

CK: One thing I enjoyed about the book was your ability to really get inside Jake’s  experience. He suffers immensely, and the reader is keenly aware of his every thought, sensation, and emotion. Was it difficult to write in this intense sort of way?

TW: It certainly took more than one draft before I was able to fully portray Jake’s thoughts and emotions. It takes a lot of focus and imagination to pretend you’re an entirely different person in an entirely different place, and then to describe exactly how you feel and what you’re thinking at that moment. I find that it helps to imagine a situation using all of the senses.

It’s interesting when you’ve been pouring out the deep thoughts and emotions of a character for years, and then it comes time to actually let other people read it. It feels too personal, like they’re about to read into part of your soul. I guess that’s how you know you’ve really put everything into a character.

CK: Tell me about your fascination with astronomy and how you’ve brought this into the book.

TW: It’s funny, because when I was a kid I hated learning about space. I was afraid of it and tried to avoid thinking about it, because I couldn’t understand how space and time were even possible. I still can’t understand it. I guess writing this book was a way to overcome that. I pushed my own fear and uncertainty onto Jake. When you pick a topic that you feel very strongly about—whether that feeling is of love or hate or obsession or fear—you write about it more passionately. What strengthened the passion was when I decided to take an introductory astronomy class in my last year of university. It was without a doubt one of the most interesting classes I’ve taken, and also a very sobering one because it makes you realize how small we are in such a vast universe. By the time that class was done I had already written most of The Infinite Knowledge, but I was still able to apply some of the science I learned to the story. It’s fun inventing concepts when you write science fiction, but what’s more fun is when you can relate your made-up concepts to real science.

CK: Your love of animals was really obvious to me in the way you portrayed certain creatures in the book. Can you tell me a bit about this love, and how it informs the book?

TW: There’s never been a time in my life where I’ve been without a pet, and I think a dog will always be my perfect companion. It takes owning a dog or a horse to really understand the bond you can have with one. As Betty White once said, “Animals don’t lie. Animals don’t criticize. If animals have moody days, they handle them better than humans do.” I tried to portray such human-animal friendships in a couple of ways in the book. An important, loyal character doesn’t always need to be a person.

CK: Which writers do you like to read, and which have been most influential on your work?

TW: My favourite author of all time has to be J. K. Rowling. I’m a Harry Potter superfan. In general, I tend to enjoy a wide variety of books and authors, although I mostly find myself reading YA. I wouldn’t say any one writer has influenced my work, though. Everyone has a writing style and I tried to distinguish my own, as well.

CK: Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?

TW: I think a person has to have a certain level of obsessive passion in order to write a full novel, so my advice is “Don’t hold back.” The best part of writing—and especially sci-fi—is that you get the freedom to create whatever you want to create. It’s your book and you control everything inside of it, so do what you want with it! Immerse yourself in your book’s world. Tape outlines and photos and maps to your walls, write down ideas in your cell phone as they come to you, make a playlist that inspires your characters, get those Crayola window crayons and write inspiration on your mirror—whatever it takes for your book to materialize. Then, when you write your first draft, don’t even pause to think about the format or spelling errors. Just let those creative juices fly, and do your editing later.

CK: Are you currently working on another novel? If so, can you tell us anything about it?

TW: I’ve been harbouring an idea for about a year, but haven’t had the chance to give it a good go. I’m very excited about it. It’s different from The Infinite Knowledge, however, and has a more mature theme. That’s all I’m going to say, since I’m still outlining the plot at this point! I’m also trying to convince a friend of a friend to let me write a story based on his very interesting life.

For more information about Tiana Warner and The Infinite Knowledge of J.T. Badgley, please see the author’s website: http://www.tianawarner.com.

 

 

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Writing and Editing

Nothing Exceeds Like Excess: The Irritating Art of Exaggeration

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Over the virtual water cooler of Facebook, my editor friends and I sometimes discuss irksome little things we frequently come across in manuscripts, and I’ve noticed one thing that comes up a lot. Writers take note: if you happen to feel like irritating editors, one of the best ways to go about it is to be overly dramatic and exaggerate in some fashion. Unsubtlety in your writing can take many forms, many of which are dead easy to pull off and have nothing to do with actual word choice.

Take punctuation, for example, which is probably the simplest tool for exaggeration at your disposal. Many writers make a habit of using more than one exclamation mark. They think that to do so automatically makes what they have to say that much more exciting!!! Why use one exclamation mark when you can use two (or even three)? Two exclamation marks will surely make what you’ve written twice as thrilling, won’t they? Well, you probably already know what my response to that is. Use just one. I really must insist. And for heaven’s sake, if you have dialogue, don’t punctuate it with an exclamation mark and then add the dialogue tag, “he exclaimed.” To do so is redundant, because we know he’s exclaiming from the exclamation mark.

But multiple exclamation marks aren’t the only type of punctuational (if I may say that) excess. To convey extreme, possibly life-threatening astonishment from which we are unlikely to recover, many writers use something popularly known as the interrobang, which looks like this: ?! You might use it in a sentence such as the following: “Seriously, can you really believe that Caroline is dissing the interrobang?!” Yes, I am dissing it, for it is not something that serious writers ought to use. It is not even a standard punctuation mark. Use it in your social networking if you feel you really must (but please don’t tell me that you did).

Another form of excess that must be avoided is too much capitalization. Have you ever noticed how some Writers attempt to give their Precious Words a sort of Earth-Shattering Significance by capitalizing them? Need I say more? The effect is generally pompous at best. Unless you’re a pompous individual and would like to advertise that fact, don’t capitalize to excess. Capitalize only those words that really need it by virtue of their being accepted proper nouns.

Similarly, don’t shout in your writing, as shouting quickly becomes wearisome to those on the receiving end (your readers). Think of an obnoxious drunk person yelling at you repeatedly and you’ll get the idea. Shouting in writing takes a couple of different forms–namely using all CAPITAL LETTERS or bold type. AND THESE SHOULD NEVER, EVER BE USED IN COMBINATION, ESPECIALLY WITH TOO MANY EXCLAMATION MARKS–OR INTERROBANGS!! DID YOU HEAR ME?

If you wish to emphasize something, you can do so in an understated, tasteful way by using italics. But always use them with a light hand, saving them for when you really need them. For one thing, they are more difficult to read than regular Roman text. And when you give added emphasis to too many things in your writing, not much of anything seems important after a while. As well, the reader tends to either get tired or develop a migraine, and you don’t really want to be responsible for that.

Do your readers–and editor, for that matter–an enormous favour by sparing them the above excesses. Trust me, they will thank you for your consideration.

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Writing and Editing

In Praise of Young Authors

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When you reach a certain age, it’s all too easy to become a little bit crotchety on the subject of the younger generation. The transition to curmudgeonliness happens not long after a moment of awakening, such as when a store clerk at a cosmetic counter suggests you purchase an anti-aging serum, or when a young person mentions a bit of slang you’ve never even heard of–even though you’re an editor and thought you were conversant with all the latest usage. Your relative oldness stands out in dramatic relief at such moments. You can no longer pass yourself off as young, nor can you pretend to truly understand the young. The gulf between you and the younger generation seems vast and insurmountable, which paves the way for becoming a critical such-and-such.

To the most curmudgeonly among us, young people are inevitably rude, lazy, undisciplined, distracted, and illiterate. But come now, are they really? I confess to being at a certain disadvantage when it comes to the subject of the young, as I don’t have children of my own, and I spend much of my time around other middle-aged people, many of whom are also childless. But what I can tell you is that none of those adjectives even remotely apply to some of the young authors who have crossed my path recently.

One author I worked with earlier this year is still in high school, while another recently graduated from university. Both have written sizeable and ambitious novels in the fantasy and science fiction genres. Both are respectful, gracious, and generally delightful to deal with. And as far as literacy is concerned, both have very successfully absorbed the fundamentals of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, which speaks well for both them and the educational system. But more than that, it’s as if they’ve already read all those books I’ve been reading about how to write good fiction and have even memorized the rules–they really know how to structure a novel. And doing so seems to come very naturally to them. Perhaps it’s not so much that they’ve read about the rules as that they’ve already read a lot of fiction in their young lives and have absorbed it at such a deep level that they instinctively know how to write it.

That anyone so young manages to write a novel, let alone a good one, astonishes me. Beyond their obvious literary ability, these young authors have ambition, patience, and discipline in spades–not to mention a buoyant optimism to carry them through the long process of writing and publishing their work. Looking back at my much younger self, I know I wasn’t half as impressive as they are. I certainly wish them well, and I can’t wait to see where their writing will take them.

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