Q: Your background as a screenwriter has helped make your works accessible to a wide audience. How has your experience in this field influenced your writing and storytelling style?

 

A: I didn’t start screenwriting until I already had a career in novels. And the main thing screenwriting taught me was: Stick to novels. I have an unlimited special-effects budget; my novels don’t have an outside director whose main interest is in removing any trace of my novel from the movie, and as a novelist I can’t be fired.

My real background was as a playwright. I started by doctoring plays that I thought were missing opportunities, and from play doctor it is a short hop to writing plays from scratch. My early plays were mostly adaptations from other sources — history, scripture — because it is very helpful to have a source to draw on and give structure to the story.

When my plays were being produced, I would attend rehearsals. I would watch the audience very carefully, noticing when they shifted in their seats, coughed, turned and whispered to each other — all such spots were, I knew, lapses in my writing. It’s not that flawed writing makes people cough; it’s that good writing takes the audience out of themselves, and if there’s a dull or vague or repetitive spot, their attention shifts from the stage to their own body. Wow, I really need to cough. Or scratch an itch.

As I watched rehearsals, I also learned which lines actors found hard to say, and which they misinterpreted, changing stresses so that the speech no longer meant what it was supposed to mean. I learned that I should never speak to the director or the actor to give them the right line reading. Instead, I needed to revise the speech until it could not be misread. Of course, some actors can’t stand to give a straightforward reading, but by and large, I learned how to actor-proof my lines.

Moving into fiction writing, I realized that writing scenes now came naturally to me — I knew how to create tension and resolve it, how to make characters interact in surprising and interesting ways. I also did fine with dialogue; I know some writers struggle with that, but after years of actor-proofing my dialogue, it came easily and smoothly to me.

I still had plenty to learn. Fortunately, I was selling my fiction before I achieved any mastery of structure, so I could support my family. Unfortunately, I was selling my fiction before I achieved any mastery of structure, so the flaws in my early works are still out there. I’m not embarrassed by them — I always did the best I could with the story I was working on at the time. I’m simply frustrated at the missed opportunity.

Because my writing is geared toward the stage, I think my novels are best received as audiobooks. Stefan Rudnicki has assembled marvelous teams of narrators to record my books, and I think there is only one way to receive my stories better — and that is for the readers to read my books and stories out loud.

You’ll do just fine reading for your kids or your friends. After all, I actor-proofed my dialogue — and when you read a book aloud, you are putting on a play, taking all the roles, narrating the action, revealing the character’s private thoughts. I try to make it easy to read aloud, because the audience never receives a story more powerfully than when they join in the performance of it.

Still, if you read the story silently to yourself, you’ll still be giving inward expression to all the speeches and thoughts of the characters. Even though no one but you receives your performance, I think it’s the writer’s job to make that silent reading smooth and excellent. That’s what I try for.

 

Q: Can you discuss your experiences as a missionary for the LDS Church and how that has influenced your writing and worldview?

 

A: It’s a losing game for writers to try to identify their sources. The most powerful influences are unconscious, and it’s better to let literary scholars sort out sources and influences.

My missionary service mainly taught me that, contrary to what I thought, my profound introversion did not stop me from speaking to strangers, because I wasn’t being myself; I was being a teacher, and in that role I was fluent. It helped that I worked hard to master Portuguese (I served in the state of Sao Paulo, Brazil). I never learned how to talk about subjects like auto mechanics, sports and mathematics, mostly because I don’t know how to talk about them in English, either.

Mastering Portuguese grammar and syntax was a great help in learning to understand the workings of the English language as well. I had never noticed that not only did we have a subjunctive (“I wish I were stronger”); we had a future subjunctive (“Be that as it may”) and other grammatical forms that are largely untaught in America, but are an integral part of speaking a romance language.

Meeting people of a different culture and recognizing that their way was not better and not worse than my own culture’s way of doing things — they were simply different, and when in Sao Paulo, do as the Paulistas do. I think that has helped me in depicting cultures very different from my own.

Mostly, though, I simply loved Brazil, and by the time my mission ended, I thought of the towns and cities where I had lived and worked as something like home. I still miss Brazil.

 

Q: How do you approach representing diverse perspectives in your writing?

 

A: In a way, writing fiction is like doing improv. You don’t know what you’re going to say, but you say it anyway. If you’re writing from a character’s viewpoint, you notice what they notice; you have their attitude toward other people, you draw on their own past. Like improv, once you get into the flow, it becomes relatively easy. You have to concentrate intensely, as in improv, but you don’t think writer-thoughts onto the page; you think character-thoughts and put them into character-words.

So, we’re right back to my experiences in theatre. That’s why I think fiction writers should do what most playwrights do: Make copies of the manuscript (or section of the manuscript) and assemble some friends — reasonably bright ones, who will take it seriously — and have them read it out loud. You don’t read. You don’t talk. You just note on your copy where readers stumbled or got distracted or showed disbelief or disappointment in what happened.

Usually, the solution is to make that part longer, so it can be clearer and deeper. It’s not length you’re pursuing, it’s depth. Believability, emotional involvement and clarity.

You don’t know what you’ve written until you hear it read aloud.

 

Q: How do you approach the process of adapting your stories for different mediums?

 

A: I have learned that with rare exceptions I am not well-suited to adapting my own work to other media. It’s like translating to another language — the translator should be a native speaker of the target language. The adapter of fiction should be a master of the target medium.

Since I have written hundreds of scripts for audioplays, I am the right guy to adapt my stories for full-cast audio. I have learned how to write for radio and audio without relying heavily on a narrator — as much as possible, I make it drama or comedy rather than “literature.” In essence, I’m writing my story as a play.

But while I have ideas about adaptation and can certainly tell when an adapter has gone off the rails (whose story are you writing, actually?), I generally leave them alone. There is no way that other media can contain the whole of a novel — that would be a five- to six-hour movie, and half the audience would have to be carried out in body bags or on stretchers. So I understand completely when adapters have to delete scenes and change things around so the script will work. When the adapter really knows what they’re doing and has a good grasp of my story, I rarely have to make corrections at all. I trust the adapter.

 

Q: What draws you to explore different genres, and do you have a particular genre that you enjoy writing in the most?

 

A: Science fiction is where my career began, and I’ve become used to the tools of the genre. Fantasy is very close to sci-fi, and like most sci-fi writers who have also turned to fantasy, I provide guidance for the reader to find their way through the world as surely as if I were taking them to another planet.

Speculative fiction is therefore my home, and I’m not moving out. But now and then I get to take a vacation in another genre. Historical fiction is wonderful to work with, because I’m tied to reality and yet am free to delve into characters in a way that real historians can’t.

Oddly enough, however, the genre that I love most is romantic comedy. There is no built-in audience for my romantic comedies, but Jane Austen lives in the back of my mind, constantly tilting me toward stories of families and of men and women trying to find each other out. You can see that, I suppose, in my YA novels, and in the Pathfinder series and in Wakers. Wakers is, above all, a romantic comedy. That’s what I think is best and most important about it.

Fortunately, romantic comedy is a literary genre that can nestle into almost any other, and I find that mysteries and historical novels I like the best are romantic comedies in which people die. Humor is always one character’s wisecrack away, and having two characters discover that they love each other is as satisfying as solving the sci-fi problems raised in the story.

 

Q: What advice do you have for aspiring writers looking to improve their craft and break into the industry?

 

A: Breaking into the industry is a matter of finding an editor who responds strongly to your fiction, or of developing an audience for your self-published fiction online. It’s as much a matter of luck as of skill.

But it’s important for writers to develop skill and wisdom. For instance, a writer who hasn’t mastered third-person limited point-of-view with deep penetration is going to be severely hampered. If you’ve got third-person limited down so it flows easily for you and for your readers, you are almost certainly going to get either acceptances or rejection letters that say, “But I really like the way you write, so I hope you’ll keep sending me your stuff.”

Mastery of third-person limited is how you mark yourself as a professional.

As for advice to new writers, I think Heinlein’s rules are still applicable: Write. Finish what you write. Submit what you have finished. Never revise except in response to editorial suggestions.

I have watched countless new writers sabotage their own careers by ignoring these rules. You can’t sell a story you haven’t finished. And it’s easy to fall into the trap of making endless “improvements” in the manuscript. Here’s the unwelcome fact: Fiddling with the manuscript does not improve it. Usually, it makes it less and less readable.

The only living draft of fiction is the first draft. The one that flows out of your head onto the page, using your natural style because you aren’t thinking about style; you’re thinking about characters and events. If you realize you made a crucial mistake, you don’t write a second draft in which you “fix” the problem part but then resume the manuscript from there. There is no second draft in living fiction. If it isn’t working, decide what you need to do and then write a new draft, a new first draft, salvaging nothing from the previous draft, so that this first draft also flows straight out of your head onto the page.

If you have a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, glue all the pages together and never open it again. Don’t give it to another writer for it to poison them, too. Almost everything in that book is toxic. It tries to distill prose down to a “style” that is as far from the natural human voice as possible. You already have a voice, a style. Just talk to the page or to the readers — that’s where your voice will show up.

But if you can’t let go of the things your English teachers and professors taught you, go ahead and simply write. If the story is good enough, readers will forgive all kinds of idiotic mistakes — like using first-person present tense, a crippling irrational mode that is hard to overcome. The Hunger Games made that mistake, yet had a story so strong it completely overcame that ridiculous decision.

I’d love to launch into my diatribe about why writer’s block is a good thing — it’s your unconscious mind telling you that you did or are about to do something that’s wrong for your story. When you find out what your mistake was, write a new first draft of everything after that point.

When they give you an award, be sure to thank Writer’s Block for tapping into the Unconscious Writer, who is much wiser than the writers who think they are in control of their story.

• Weldon Ngetich