Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Welcome one, welcome all, to the fourth stop on the Writing Process Blog Tour, one of those writerly process-ish bloggy tour-like things that we use as an excuse to talk about our passion: writing.

My name is Kurt, and I’ll be your host for as long as you keep reading.

Thanks to my predecessor, J.Z. Murdock, author of darkness, for the invitation to join the tour.

The premise is simple. At each stop along the tour, the author talks about his/her writing processes, and then hands you off to the next writer in line. (Todd…you ready?)

It’s just four simple questions:

• What am I working on?
• How does my work differ from others in its genre?
• Why do I write what I do?
• How does my writing process work?

Still here? Good.

Here we go…

What am I working on?

I’m working on being a better person.

Ah, yes, about writing.

My current work-in-progress is The Wolf Tree, a novel, though I expect there to be a few short stories completed before it’s done. This book is a departure for me in that it’s not a strict “genre” book. It’s what I call “mainstream,” which is my catch-all phrase for everything not specifically “genre.”

However, this “departure” shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Look at my bibliography and you’ll see a steady progression from the stricter genre tropes to stories that are less…comfortable…within genre label limits.

The Wolf Tree is about four people separated by 150 years. Two of them (a couple), live in the modern-day Seattle, and the other two live in Seattle as it was being founded, back around 1850. Their lives–their histories–interact, and so do their stories.

We meet them when their relationship is already in trouble, but things get complicated when, in digging a new bed for her roses, he finds something in the dirt, something that someone left behind a long time ago.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

My work hasn’t ever fit comfortably within genre labels. Not ever. I didn’t plan it this way, but I’m a genre-bender, putting a bit of supernatural in my thrillers, a bit of fantasy in my science fiction. The predominant substrate of my books, however, has always been history. Every book I’ve written has strong historical and/or anthropological components.

The Fallen Cloud Saga is set in 19th c. America, where the Cheyenne play a major role. The Ploughman Chronicles are set in 9th century Bretagne, just at the culture there began to change from Celtic to Christian. Unraveling Time ping-pongs its timey-wimey way through the centuries, visiting Ancient Greece, Roman Alexandria, France during the Hundred Years War, Federalist Philadelphia (say that five times fast), and a handful of other places and times. Even my one strictly modern book, Dreams of the Desert Wind, has a sense of history, when our archaeolinguist hero, David, discovers a dead language being spoken on the streets of Jerusalem by Bedouin tribesmen.

Yes, history is definitely a major player in my books, and not just as a setting for the story, but in the way it drives the plots. It’s just the same with my new book: the two Seattle timelines interact, each affecting the other. History is the driver: personal history, family history, history of people, places, and times.

Why do I write what I do?

I’m a slow writer. Even when I was writing fast, I wrote slowly, taking nine or ten months to complete a novel. And because I’m a slow writer, what I write simply must interest me. I don’t want to spend a year (or more…or a lot more) doing something that bores me. It’s hard enough writing a novel without writing something I can’t be excited about.

So, obviously, history is of interest to me, as are different societies and cultures. How does the medieval mind differ from ours? Why didn’t Elizabethan artists paint landscapes? What was it really like in the scrum-line of Hoplite warfare?

To a great extent, writing what I write is an excuse to learn about a people or a period of history. I get to indulge my research-geek nature and haunt library stacks, pore over old books (not everything is digitized, you know), as well as spending hours and hours on the ‘net searching through old maps, diaries, and obscure articles.

My research activities allowed me to be one of the first people to take a virtual tour of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, the Spanish royal palace built in the shape of the grille upon which its namesake was martyred (The Cry of the Wind). I started my FBI file off with a bang when I studied early blueprints of the White House while simultaneously searching for information on explosives, fuses, and gunpowder (The Spirit of Thunder). I learned about coffin-building techniques and experimental medical treatments for yellow fever used in Colonial America (Unraveling Time).

I write what I write because it is what I want to write. Lord knows, it ain’t for the money.

How does my writing process work?

Not well, at times.

There are great fallow swathes in my writing processes. Okay, to be accurate, there are what appear to be great fallow swathes, but actually they are periods of percolation. I will let an idea percolate for a long time, sometimes, allowing for both conscious and sub-conscious reflection and refinement. I’ve been doing this a lot on The Wolf Tree; each day I’ll touch upon the plot or a problem, inspecting its ragged edges like I would a chipped tooth, looking for the piece that fills the breach and makes it whole.

Before this is, though, there must be the idea. The germ of the story can appear anywhere, anytime, and almost always when I am not looking for it. I write a lot of these “idea seeds” down and most of them go nowhere. Dreams are notorious that way; they always seem like really cool story ideas, at 3AM, but almost always look like ugly trolls over coffee. For every hundred ideas, probably two prove fertile.

But, if that germ of an idea sprouts and begins to grow, I take a closer look at it and see what it wants to be. At this point, I start sketching out ideas and asking questions: who, what, why? Who’s story is it? What is the conflict? Why do I care? That last one is a crucial question because if I don’t care about the story, you sure as hell won’t. And as I said, it must interest me if I’m going to hit the next stage.

The next stage is always research. This is critical for my process, and dangerous. I like detail. I like to have a clear, realistic picture of the place and the time and the people I’m going to use in my books (not that I don’t change things, but I want to know that I’ve changed them). Since I can’t always go to the places I want to use–my TARDIS has been on the fritz for a while, else you might have found me on the shores of Potidaea, watching Socrates battle it out with the Corinthians–I must settle for a lot of research. Often this takes me months; I probably spent a year, all told, researching the Cheyenne language and culture for the books of The Fallen Cloud Saga.

Research is risky, though, because it’s a great way to procrastinate. I can research something to the nth degree, becoming a master of the subject, and thus avoid writing down a single word of fiction. Why? Because writing frightens me.

Yep. Writing a novel is a big scary thing to me, and I always avoid it for as long as I can. We can talk more about that later; right now, the important thing is that eventually I master my fears and start writing.

However, I may not be starting the novel, yet. I will write some vignettes of setting, some character studies. I usually write a short story or two, using the setting, to get a feel for the place. I need to walk around in it a while before I really get going.

And then I really get going, but as I said, this is not a quick process. I dislike NaNoWriMo primarily because everyone’s so gaga about it and I know that (a) I wouldn’t finish a novel in a month, and (b) I wouldn’t enjoy the process. Trust me; I know how fast I can write, and pushing myself like that only makes a hard job harder. I’m very goal-oriented, and I don’t like being set up for failure.

So, then I write. Longhand. Pen on paper. About 3-4 days/evenings per week, for months.

I may write only 200 words in a day. I may write 2000. I think my absolute high-water mark was around 5000 words in a single day. I write in a spiral bound Gregg-ruled steno notepad, down one side, and then down the other. The pages are filled with scrawls and loops and large crossed-out sections. Arrows bring one paragraph down behind another. Sentences are started and restarted and re-restarted. Dialogue becomes description and vice versa.

Write write write, then rest.

Then edit edit edit. then rest.

Then edit some more. Then send it out to my beta readers. Then more editing. Then a bit more editing, just to polish it up.

Then juuuust a bit more.

With luck, at some point during the editing process, I’ve tangled with the seed of a new idea, the germ of a new story.

Wrap-up

Thanks for reading to the end! Next week, head on over to my friend and fellow writer Todd Baker. Since he’s a memoirist, I’m interested to read his answers to these questions.

k