Fictionaut Five: Jonathan Evison

Jonathan Evison is the author of All About Lulu, West of Here, and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (forthcoming from Algonquin). He likes rabbits.

Q (Meg Pokrass): Have you had mentors? Do you mentor? Talk about the mentor relationship if you will, its importance for a writer…

My first editor Richard Nash was an amazing mentor, and continues to be one. He’s so wise and forthcoming and generous with his expertise, and I do my damndest to live up to this standard by helping every writer I can, however I can.

What do you do when you feel stuck or uninspired… suggestions for unblocking creativity?

I usually just write myself through it, or run for the hills with a case of beer and a notebook. If I’m having trouble moving forward, it’s usually because I’ve left myself behind the eight ball somehow. I go back and figure out where things went wrong. I find editing to be a great unblocker of creativity. Also beer and campfires.

Best advice you ever got? Words of wisdom… What helped you as a young writer?

When I was drowning in research for West of Here, I asked my friend David Liss (who writes excellent historical fiction) how I would know when it was time to stop researching, and he said: when the research starts getting in the way of the story you want to tell. That was amazing advice. The best advice I could give any writer is to sit their ass in a chair and write, because we’re all a bunch of procrastinators.

How well do you know your characters before you start writing them?

I don’t generally know them all that well to begin with. They are more or less characterizations, and sets of circumstances. It is the decisions they make once I set them free in the narrative which ultimately defines them. The discovery is my favorite part.

Regarding plot: How firm do your original plot intentions remain in the writing? Do they develop during the process of writing? Is it a tug of war?

Very much a tug-of-war, though I generally side with letting things develop. Again, it’s the discovery which floats my boat. I don’t want to be trapped inside my own conceptions. I want the characters and the story to lead me somewhere new and surprising. In short, I like the story to undermine my own expectations.

West of Here… can you talk a bit the nuts and bolts of birthing this complex novel? Such an enormous time-span, wildly big ideas and themes and still… you gift us with a feeling of intimacy in the character’s daily worlds, they are so real….

This book nearly drove me nuts as a critical exercise. Dozens of limited points-of-view populating two conversant timelines a hundred and twenty years apart is a narrative structure which creates all manner of potential continuity problems. I color-coded the manuscript spine, I wrote on my walls, I made graphs, thought maps, I filled over twenty spiral notebooks with notes (and I’m not talking about the research). My approach to the research was really what helped define the novel as much as anything. I didn’t want to use a wide-angle lens to historicize the material, so I read a lot of personal accounts and narratives of Washington frontier life. This helped me ground all my big ideas and themes in the vividly realized daily lives of my characters.

Are there favorite writing practices/exercises that you can share?

I like to smoke pot and write in my underwear. And I love Pilot #3 red pens.

The Fictionaut Five is our ongoing series of interviews with Fictionaut authors. Every Wednesday — and over the holidays, every Saturday — Meg Pokrass asks a writer five (or more) questions. Meg is the editor-at-large for BLIP Magazine, and her stories and poems have been published widely. Her first full collection of flash fiction, “Damn Sure Right” will be out in February from Press 53. She blogs at http://megpokrass.com.