Interview with Steve Sherwood, Director of TCU Writing Center

Lauren:  Who or what inspires you as an author?

Sherwood:  Inspires or inspired?

L: Either, I guess.

S:  Well, other writers do. I liked to read when I was a teenager, and my parents were readers, so we had books all through the house. At first I resisted and got talked into it. I got lost in other people’s worlds and so ended up wanting to create my own eventually too. I felt like several books I read were so real it was like I was right there, experiencing what they did, so it was sort of a source of adventure and a source of new knowledge and connecting with other people.

L:  Any particular books that really influenced you?

S: Well, believe it or not, it was Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which I first read when I was like 13. I felt like I was running down a jungle trail being chased by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, so that feeling, it is so powerful. I really felt breathless and that I was right there, so fear, I felt the fear. My urge after that was to see if I could do the same.

L:  Who or what motivates you as an author?

S:  Competition, probably somewhat with myself. Seeing if I can do something. In other words, people who are naysayers usually motivate me more than people who are praising me. So someone tells me, and this happened recently, “Sorry, this just doesn’t have what it takes. I know you spent all these years on it, but you might as well just quit and start over.” So that happened with a publisher and so I got kind of angry about 2 years ago at the rejection and the implication that I should just quit. I spent about a month tearing it apart and really working it over again. I cut about 80 pages out of it. I felt this sort of clicking sensation that the whole thing came together. Then the next time I sent it out it got taken by a publisher.

L:  About your writing process. Is there any particular time or place you like to write?

S:  Whenever I have the time really. I like summers here because we have to work anyway. We have to be in the office, and at least we have time. So I’d usually set my day up that I’d write from 8 to about noon, and then the afternoons were sort of to do other things. I don’t have that kind of control anymore. I pretty much write whenever I can. I prefer the morning when I’m still fresh and I feel creative. I used to think I could only write between 7 pm and midnight, but that’s not true. You can basically do it if you set yourself up so you can do it. So now I have an easy chair in a room in my house where, if I put an old movie on, I seem to be able to write well. I don’t pay any attention to the movie, it’s just background noise.

L:  How do you think technology is changing print culture, particularly in regards to you as an author?

S:  Unfortunately I think it’s killing the ability to make a living writing. Hemingway used to write a short story and get enough money to keep him going for another 6 months while he wrote another one. But that was in the days when a buck went a lot farther, and a buck in Europe went a lot farther than one in America. But even as recently as the 80s, people still made pretty good money from publishing. Some people still do, it’s just the few and far between. It’s the McMurtys or the Stephen Kings or the J.K. Rowlings. J.K. Rowling has made more money than any other writer. And I know a guy, T.A. Barron, who does pretty well, but he was rich to start with, so I don’t know if he’s rich because he’s an author now or if that helped. He makes a living. He writes sci-fi/fantasy stuff. So it depends on what you write. Computer culture has in some ways made more readers, but they read different things. It killed the newspaper business. There really are no newspapers anymore, it’s all online now. And no one pays for the circulation of a newspaper. So it’s killed journalism already, and I think it’s probably gonna kill fiction writing. The other thing is that everything is quick and on tap, so you don’t have to wait for anything, so there’s not patience, there’s no attention span anymore. Everyone has to have it ready now. If it isn’t right now, then it’s not interesting at all. It’s good in a lot of ways, but that’s one of the things it’s done to us.

L:  Has the current technological revolution changed your audience at all?

S:  If there is an audience. I think it’s changed the audience in the sense of how they read. So, like I said, I don’t think they have much of a patience or attention span. You can’t spend a lot of time on background material and expect them to stay with the book. So that’s one thing.

L:  Do you write differently or gear it toward different people?

S:  I don’t, but that’s probably why I don’t succeed on the same level that other people do. I usually write for me first, but I’m 60, so I’m writing for people basically my age. I’m not targeting a younger audience. And it’s not purposeful, it’s just that I’m speaking to people like me on some level. I think the people who are really successful right now are targeting a specific audience. They’re looking at age 14 females who are into the fantasy thing, and they’re doing really well. I’m not first a writer now, I’m first a teacher. Well, really I’m first an administrator, second a teacher, and third a writer. I don’t have the time to say I’m going to target a certain audience and see what I can do. I write something I feel compelled to write.

L:  How do you think reading and authorship is going to change in the next 50 years?

S:  I think as we get to more the multimedia thing we might as well be filmmakers in a lot of ways. We all hope to write a book that gets made into a film because that’s where a lot of money is, and that’s where an audience is. But I’m afraid we’re gonna get to the point where we’re gonna go straight to pictures. It’s gonna be so easy to make a film. And now even in eBooks they’re putting in pictures, videos, links. It’s more and more a visual culture and a sound culture, so that makes me a little bit afraid for our mental state and our intelligence. I don’t think that you can do the same things with film and video and sound that you can do with words. You have to exercise the word facility, otherwise you just don’t refine it. The fewer people who read now, the fewer readers there’ll be in the future because they don’t get in the habit. So we’re already losing a readership. That’s why I don’t feel that bad about targeting people my age, because they’re the ones that read. I’m part of a book club. It’s a group of couples, and we read about a book a month. I read a lot anyway, but we also have that book club. And I believe that there are still a lot of people who want to do that, and some of them are in their 40s and 50s. Other book clubs that I’ve been involved with, I just go read a book with them.  They’re all fairly old people, they really are, but they’re still reading. I don’t see too many book clubs by college age kids. So where does that leave us? It leaves us with the people who are going to be leading the way in the next generation aren’t readers, they’re consumers of YouTube. Even now I sometimes read books on a screen. I have a Kindle, and I have a Nook that my father gave me. It’s color, and he has all these books, so I don’t have to pay any money on them, so sometimes I’ll just upload what he’s already bought, so I’ve got like 200 books on there. They’re not all books I would choose, but when you read them, you can flip really quickly through the screens. You read about 2 or 3 times as fast as you do when you turn a page. There’s not a lot of savoring going on, so there’s a lot of quick, “get through the book” kind of approaches. If I’m reading a book on paper (we do one a month), then I take a lot more time with it. I actually do think about it. It sometimes affects how I get through the day. So I’m afraid it’s going toward the YouTube videos. I’m afraid if we have a story to tell we’re gonna have to be producers of video in the future. Maybe there’ll be a resurgence. It’s funny how things go. You get to feeling pessimistic and feeling like there’s no future for things, and there’s a sort of classical resurgence of what’s happened before. Someone springs up that’s so good everyone has to pay attention. That may happen and it may grab the whole next generation and make readers out of them. J.K. Rowling sort of did that for your age. People started reading. Why? Very vivid writing, she came along at just the right time, and it was supported by movies too. So you have a whole generation of kids who’ve read these books and couldn’t wait for the next one. That may continue to happen with certain people. They may be the leading people; they may be people who are intelligent enough to run the government and do professional work. We’ll have to see what happens. It would be really great to be one of those cutting-edge people who just happens onto the idea or the series of stories that just grabs everybody’s imagination like J.K. Rowling did. And T.A. Barron, he did the Merlin series. But his stories are sort of retellings of a tale that’s already been told. That’s not what I write. I try to write something that comes out of starch and reality. I hope it’s original. I don’t want to just hang my whole story on someone’s pre-chewed story. He makes it fresh and he’s really good, but still he takes these myths and attaches a new story to them. That generates readership. So he’s smart. I just haven’t figured out a way to do that, or I don’t have the interest in it. I guess that’s probably the truth.

L:  How did you find a publisher for your works initially?

S:  I searched for years. I have had 3 agents, and not one of those agents has sold anything for me. My very first novel still hasn’t been published, and I spent 13 years working on it. It was almost a Paramount Pictures movie back in 1981, and that didn’t happen. Random House was looking at it, but that fell through. Outside Magazine hired me to do an essay based on the book, so I did it and they paid me a quarter price to kill it. They didn’t approve of it. I published that piece later elsewhere. But all these hopes kind of came to a peak and then all came crashing down. I went back to school and I spent the next 5 or 6 years refining it, and I got another agent for that book after the first one fell through. She got very close on a couple of occasions, but it just didn’t sell. Meanwhile I wrote another one, and she didn’t like it well enough to represent it. I spent 10 years trying to get it published with a different agent, and that one died after agreeing to represent it, so that was a little discouraging. Then I won the George Garrett Fiction Prize from the Texas Review Press, and they published it. I had already entered it in couple other contests, and it was a finalist in one of those. Hardwater is the name of my second novel, the first one I published. I ended up publishing my next one, my third novel, called No Asylum, through the same publisher years later. I got an agent for that one too for a short time, but she ended up going out of business after taking it around to quite a few publishers. I entered it in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest in 2010, and it was top 50 out of all the manuscripts. So it was close, but you have to be real savvy and you have to have a bunch of friends who are pulling for you and voting for you. I actually sent them my best chapter, which is the final chapter. It’s the action climax. All these people were saying ooh, if this is how the book starts, imagine the rest. And I’m sitting there thinking, “That’ s not how the book starts.” They only said submit 10 pages, so I sent in my most active 10 pages. That’s why it made it to the top 50. The back of the book has a blurb from Publisher’s Weekly that I got because I was one of the finalists. That’s no good to you unless you publish it. Again, this is a book that I worked on for a number of years. I started in the class of 1996, and then I went back and got a PhD, and I was divorced and remarried and raised a bunch of kids. Finally I finished the book and published it last year. There were 17 years between the start and the finish. And I published it through the same publisher that I used for the first one. I haven’t heard much feedback. It’s sort of like throwing a rock into a lake; it just sort of disappears. Nobody reads anymore. That’s part of the game. I’m not making my living at writing, fortunately. That would be really hard. If you’re gonna do that, you can’t just write what you feel like writing. You have to target a market that actually has a bunch of readers in it. I’d have to be writing for vampire-obsessed teenage girls or something. I’ve got a niece who’s a real reader, and she’s got a blog where she reviews books. I guess she’s 15. She’s been doing it since she was 13, and she’s got this huge readership on her blog. She reads a book almost every day it seems, and they’re big thick sci-fi/fantasy kinds of books. But she buys a ton of them, so there’s somebody out there buying books.

L:  Have your manuscripts changed a lot in the editorial process?

S:  Oh yeah, very much so. It’s my own editorial process, not because I have an editor, but because I have some guy who rejects my novel and says something nasty about it, so I go back and I say is he right? I think he may be right. Back to the revision process. I’m real optimistic, so I’ll churn out a draft of something and think this is really good, and I’ll send it out and it’ll get rejected a bunch of times, so then I’ll start doubting it. For me, revising is about getting it done first and then going back and enriching it with better detail, combining characters if need be to get rid of extra characters, getting rid of scenes that just aren’t carrying the story forward. So if I was able to chop out 80 pages of that manuscript, I should have done it before I sent it out. It shouldn’t have taken someone being mean to get me to do that. I tend to be overly optimistic about it at first, and then later on I start to get fatalistic and really do the hard stuff. Same thing happened with Hardwater. I got angry again about a rejection back in 2002, so I spent a month in the summer really just savaging the book myself, getting mad at myself, and going through and making sure everything was in good order. Again, I had that sort of clicking sensation and I thought, “Everything’s right in place.” So the next time I sent it out, it won that contest, and I was really happy about that. Mine’s a really long process. It’s probably a year to write a manuscript if I’m really working hard, maybe two depending. Then maybe 10 years before it’s ready for the presses. And that’s if someone wants to publish it. So I may get it to the point where I think it’s publishable, but it may not find a home. Once it does, there’s a lot of revision you still have to do to make sure the eyes are the same color throughout the book, that the brass cannon should actually be a bronze cannon according to history. You need to do research to check your facts and make sure they make sense. Once they accepted it, I spent about 2 months practically every night going home and reading it closely.

L:  When you start writing a novel, do you have a sort of outline in your head, or do you just start writing?

S:  Unfortunately no. What I’ll do is I’ll sit down and brainstorm for about a month if I’m really getting started. So for Hardwater, this is as close to an outline as I came. It’s based on 3 years of being an editor for a newspaper in Wyoming. That’s the root experience that all the fiction came out of. So I sat and thought of people, places, and events. So I thought, who could be characters in this novel. I have real people and characters that I built out of some of them. Then I thought of where the events should take place. What are some unusual places in this area? I listed the places where these things might happen, and what real events can I fictionalize. It takes off from there. None of it’s true, all of it’s fiction. There’s some similarities to what may have happened in a couple of places, but nothing really true. It’s all true to the story. So I start from there, come up with an opening chapter, and I just kind of go from there. I have an idea of where I might be going, but I literally got to chapter 5 and had to stop and wonder where this was going. When I was in the shower I got a picture in my head of the radiation symbol, and I thought well of course. This takes place in a uranium mining town, so there has to be something related to radiation. So that was the key to my finishing the book. I really had to rethink the whole book and think how it all fit together. I broke through that point and it all just kind of went from there. Same thing happened with No Asylum. I was stuck on chapter 10 because it took place in a little town called Garden City. I’d been through there as a kid. It’s in the middle of Kansas; it sounds like a beautiful little place. And it was when I was 7 years old. But when I went back, I realized it’s a horrible place now. At least, I think it’s kind of a horrible place. It’s full of meatpacking plants, it’s got seedy looking houses in the downtown area, it’s got crime, it’s like the meth capitol of Kansas. My cousin lives there, and she hates what I say about her town. But I went back and visited it. That little bit of research that I did there gave me all kinds of details that I didn’t know for the novel. Just a short 2-day trip to the town, and I was able to break through the barrier and finish the novel. So it’s just moments like that that stop you, and I don’t know why they stop you, it’s like your imagination gets stuck and you can’t move any further. I needed an infusion of fact to move further. I’ve found it really fascinating. I help people write here [Writing Center], and if I’m stuck, how can I help other people write? I’m supposed to say, “Yeah, you’ll get through it,” but you may not.

L:  Have you had any other jobs in the writing field besides teaching and writing novels?

S:  I was a newspaper reporter and a magazine writer. It was for Outside Magazine, which is an outdoor publication out of Chicago and now New York. It’s pretty popular. All I did was freelance for them. I also worked for a business magazine called Business Insurance for 2 years fulltime and 3 or 4 years freelance while I was writing my first novel. So it was a way of earning money on the side. So I was a journalist/freelancer, and then I took 3 years off to write my first novel.

L:  Working in the Writing Center here, has this affected your work as an author at all?

S:  I think it’s made me a better writer. It slowed me down. My boss told me I’m such a wonderful writer, and I said I’m not really a writer, I’m a person who helps other people with their writing. That’s what I spend most of my time doing. That’s how I think of it now. For a long time, I wrote for a living, and now I don’t really write for a living, I teach or help for a living. So it makes my own writing secondary or tertiary. It’s not my first priority, and I don’t have much time to devote to it. After a while you do run out of optimism enough to write a new novel after being rejected and not making money at it. I hate to say that, because I’m about to start another one. It’s the prequel to Hardwater.  It’s sort of based on some background information in there, about what the guy went through before he came to Wyoming. The dilemma I have is the whole story is already told in my head. I’m not that interested yet, and that’s been holding me up. It won’t be as much of a discovery as the other novels have been for me. The story’s already laid out for me, so I don’t have much opportunity to take it in different directions. It’s really hard for me to start because I find it boring. It sounds like you’d be able to just go ahead and write it since it’s already planned, but no. For me I really do need to not know where it’s going to go so I can find my way there. It’s a kind of journey. If you know the end, it’s kind of boring. And if it’s boring to you, it’s probably going to be boring to your readers too.

I’ve only ever had jobs in the writing field; it’s my thing. If writing dies, I have no purpose. I have a feeling there’s enough of us, like there are still Civil War buffs and reenactors or specialized artists like quilters or poets, that reading will never die out. There’ll still be an audience, but it may just be us in the future. Writers may write simply for other writers. And I still believe in writing just for the sake of writing and for the sake of expressing something you feel you need to express. Is literature still relevant? Yes, it seems to be. Social issue kind of literature still seems to have some cache out there. I bet there’ll be some audience for us in the future. Not everyone will be a reader in the future, but I think there’ll still be people out there who appreciate what we do. I hope.