Gareth L Powell interviewed
01/11/2008 . Source: Gareth D Jones 
Science fiction and fantasy author Gareth L Powell is interviewed by Gareth D Jones. He talks about his novel Silversands and writing works of short fiction for the likes of UK SFF magazine Interzone. Buy Silversands in the USA - or Buy Silversands in the UK  Gareth L Powell's first short story collection 'The Last Reef' was published recently by Elastic Press and is reviewed on SF Crowsnest this month. The title story is one of two to have appeared in Interzone and both polled well in the annual readers' polls. I spoke to Gareth about his writing career and what he's learned along the way.
Gareth D Jones: Your first stories and poems were published around fifteen years ago and then there was a bit of a lengthy hiatus. What brought you back to writing?
Gareth L Powell: I had some early successes with short stories and poems while at university, but quickly realised I needed a few years in the wilderness to gather the life experience required to produce convincing characters and situations. I never stopped trying to write, although I didn't produce much. I had a few lean years, but I kept battering away when I could, trying to teach myself how to do it - which involved trying to rid myself of everything I'd learned studying English at degree level.
Studying the classic texts is obviously a good thing to do if you want to be a writer - but the courses themselves don't teach you how to write like a writer, they teach you how to write like an academic, with long, discursive sentences designed to pad out your essays to their required length. You have to reject all that and find your own voice. You have to pick the writers that mean the most to you, and read them - not to find the "deeper meaning" behind what they're saying but to look closely at the way in which they're saying it. You have to jettison pretension and "literary ambition" and concentrate on communicating what you mean as simply and directly as possible.
When I turned thirty, I started to write seriously. It was the turn of the Millennium and I decided it was time to have a proper crack at it. I quit smoking and moved in with my fiancé (now my wife) and started work on the novel that would eventually become 'Silversands' (due from Pendragon Press in April 2009).
GDJ: Some of the stories in 'The Last Reef' are re-writes of earlier work. Do you feel your writing has progressed significantly over the last couple of years?
GLP: Actually, I re-wrote every story in the book to some degree before publication. I'm a perfectionist and I just can't stop tinkering. Every time I read through something I've written, I find myself making alterations to it, either incorporating new ideas and techniques I've learned or making changes in response to reader feedback, as with the re-written ending of the book's title story. Eventually, everything gets cannibalised.
Take 'A Necklace Of Ivy' for example. It's the oldest story in 'The Last Reef'. I wrote the first draft as a penniless student in the summer of 1992, after walking in some woods near Portishead in the rain. It was quite an amateur effort, full of clumsy sentences and over-written dialogue, but it nevertheless appeared in print in 1995 in the Welsh short story magazine 'Cambrensis', edited by the late Arthur Smith, who must have seen something worthwhile in it.
After that, the story languished in the bottom drawer of my desk for twelve years before I pulled it out and re-wrote it for publication in the September 2007 issue of 'Fiction Online'. And when I say I re-wrote it, I mean I did so from scratch. I completely revised it using everything I'd learned in the intervening twelve years and if you look at the two versions of the story side-by-side, you'll see that not a single sentence from the original made it into the new version unscathed.
GDJ: There is a pre-conception among some that web-based and particularly non-paying markets are inherently low quality. What's your view on that?
GLP: I've always been a little irritated by the attitude that on-line magazines are somehow inherently inferior to printed publications. Granted, there's a lot of crap out there, but there are also some web publications with high standards and rigorous editorial processes - and these publications are redefining what it means to be a "professional" Science Fiction writer. It's not all about cents-per-word anymore, it's about readership.
It's no longer possible to earn a decent wage writing short stories for traditional magazines, as it was for writers like Philip K Dick. Those days are gone and it's a sad fact that as our audience finds other things to spend their money and attention on, printed Science Fiction magazines are seeing a steady decline in subscriptions. Frankly, in the UK it's a lot easier for curious readers to Google an online SF magazine than it is for them to find a printed copy of one at their local newsagent.
Personally, I desperately hope the printed SF magazine market continues to survive in some form, but at the same time I also realise that if the next generation of prospective readers aren't coming to us, it's up to us to reach out to them. Without them, the genre will grow old and die. We have to set our stall where young and old alike can see and engage with it and if that means giving some of our work away on-line, then so be it. You only have to look at Google, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon and iTunes to realise the Internet's fundamentally changing the way we communicate, the way we shop and the way we share information and interact with one another. As Science Fiction writers, we should be at the forefront of that revolution and if the printed magazines want to survive, they're going to have to do something to attract that global audience.
As an example, I like the approach the publishers of 'Interzone' are using. They're still publishing the print magazine but they're also offering it for sale as an electronic download on 'Fictionwise', and releasing free podcast readings of the best stories on their website in order to get their content out to the widest possible audience in a convenient choice of formats.
GDJ: You've been putting out free flash fiction on your website for over a year now. Have you found that its brought you any benefits, even if just the fun of it?
GLP: The whole "Friday Flash Fiction" thing started as a bit of fun. It was just a way for me to motivate myself to produce a short piece of weekly fiction for my blog. It was too easy to collapse in front of the TV with a beer on a Friday night and I needed a self-imposed deadline to concentrate my mind. I didn't expect anyone else to join in - but much to my surprise, the idea seemed to strike a chord and soon there were seven other writers doing the same thing, all of them posting short pieces on their websites and taking the time to critique each other's work, offering each other encouragement and advice.
And within nine months, we'd produced our first printed anthology, which was published by Odd Two Out Press in April 2008, edited by Paul Graham Raven of 'Futurismic' fame.
Looking back, I think the friendship of those other writers is the most worthwhile thing to have come out of the whole experience. And I think it taught us all a lot about the discipline needed to produce creative work to a deadline and to keep doing it week after week. And personally, I know I learned a lot about brevity and the art of setting a scene using only the most concise descriptions. I learned a lot about paring my prose down to the bare essentials and about describing characters and settings using one or two telling details instead of full physical descriptions.
GDJ: Some of your stories are set in Bristol or the West Country - territory presumably quite familiar to you, while others take place in more exotic locations such as Mars - presumably not so familiar. What are the advantages or disadvantages of both kinds of settings when writing?
GLP: It's always fun to set stories in your hometown, because you can use locations you know intimately and that familiarity can add an extra authenticity to your writing. You don't have to imagine a setting because you can visit it and walk around in it. You can see the stage on which your characters will play out their scenes. Unfortunately, doing so can also cause problems. You can fall into the trap of assuming too much knowledge on behalf of your readers. If you set a story against a local landmark and they've never visited it, they might not get the significance you assume it's bringing to your story.
They might miss the detail you take for granted. In your mind's eye, you might be constructing the most dramatic scene you've ever imagined - but if the reader doesn't know enough about the locale to picture the scene in their own mind - if you're not describing it properly - all your hard work is wasted. You have to take a step back and ensure you're being fair to them, that you're avoiding in-jokes and describing the scene the same way you would if you were describing one on Mars or Jupiter, not letting your familiarity with the scene blind you to the reader's needs.
On the other hand, I also enjoy setting stories in exotic locales I haven't visited - whether it's Buenos Aires, Tokyo or the Moon - because that's what I've always enjoyed about the SF genre, the way it can transport you to some other time or place and fire your imagination so that you feel you've been there and experienced something above and beyond your everyday routine. What you have to do as a writer is make sure you treat your local environment the same way - because it may well be exotic and mysterious to some of your readers.
For instance, I recently co-wrote a short story with Aliette de Bodard, set in Paris.
It's a city I've visited only twice in my life, but one in which Aliette has lived for many years. While she felt at home writing about the streets and boulevards, I had to use Google Earth to obtain detailed aerial photographs of the locations and routes we were using in the story, to give me the insight I needed to produce credible descriptions of the scenery the characters found themselves passing through.
GDJ: Finally, what plans do you have over the coming year that we can look forward to?
GLP: Since 'The Last Reef' came out, I've written another twenty thousand words of short stories, including an all-action space opera for 'Interzone', the aforementioned story with Aliette de Bodard, and an apocalyptic romance for the forthcoming 'Future Bristol' anthology from Swimming Kangaroo Press. April should see the release of my first novel, 'Silversands' from Pendragon Press and there are more novels and short stories in the pipeline. Beyond that, I have all the usual hopes and ambitions, such as earning a living, being happy and raising my family to the best of my ability.
GDJ: Thanks for your thoughts.
(c) Interview Gareth L. Powell, Gareth D. Jones and SFCrowsnest 2008
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