William Shunn is the science fiction writer of the novella Inclination, plus several novelettes, short stories, articles and reviews. He has been nominated for a Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, and he maintains an active blog at Shunn.net.
Reflection’s Edge: I understand that you spend a lot of time at Writers WorkSpace in Chicago. What is it about working someplace other than home that appeals to you? Is it getting away from the normal distractions, or is it more inspiring to work with fellow writers who are aiming for similar goals, or something completely different?
William Shunn: I think you hit closer to the mark with B—it’s a way to start meeting other writers in Chicago and in a way to feel like writing is a real job. Not that it isn’t a real job, but it can be easy to forget some of your discipline and even some of your social skills when you’re just home by yourself all the time.
Going to the Writers WorkSpace gives me a chance to put some structure around the day to try to hold myself to what I think of as office hours and get a lot of writing done that way. And then to have other people who are doing the same thing that I can socialize with on breaks or whatever.
They also end up having some sort of informal writing group meetings. I’ve gotten into a little novel writing group there that meets every other week. We don’t really do much in the way of critiquing others’ work, but everyone reads five to eight pages of the novel they’re working on and you get a little feedback, but more, you get that instant feedback on what you’re doing and it kind of helps you to keep going to have a deadline and coming up in the next couple weeks when you’ve got to have more of a book to share with people.
I certainly don’t strictly need a place to work, but I’m definitely enjoying the fringe benefits that come along with it and the quiet over there.
RE: On a recent blog post about writing advice, you wrote that writing is not a process of simply transcribing ideas that have been worked out in full, but is the process of working through the ideas. How do you not work out your ideas ahead of time?
Shunn: I certainly do a lot of thinking about a project before I start trying to commit it to paper and even there’s a lot of thinking that goes on before I’ve written down any notes or anything of that sort. But… and this is probably not true for everybody… but I will tend to put off the beginning of writing until I’ve got a really really good idea of what I want to do, but then when I start to write those ideas grow. I find that it’s not until I’m actually writing the story or the novel that I have to grapple with all the details of the scenario that I’m working on.
This may be more true of science fiction and fantasy than of other types of writing, because until you’re right there trying to imagine and describe the environment or the society or whatever it is that your characters are inhabiting you won’t feel a need to imagine every last detail of that environment.
For me, I discover and work through a lot of different aspects of the background of my stories in the actual writing, and I’ve just never found any way that I can plan for all those things in advance.
RE: Do you think as the world gets more technology-oriented it gets harder to write science fiction? Do you think it limits the imagination in more ways, or do you think it forces science fiction writers to become more creative in finding ways around that?
Shunn: I think it does both. I think it does make writing science fiction harder because the technology is catching up with what you’re trying to write every day, but one of the big solutions to that is just set your science fiction so far in the future that it doesn’t necessarily matter.
For me and a lot of other science fiction writers who are interested in near-future speculation that’s a danger, but it does force you to be a lot more creative and to pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in science and technology now so that you can stay ahead of the danger of the present catching up with your future within the next year or two or even before your story gets published.
RE: Last time we talked, you were living in New York and now you’re living in Chicago. Did you take any special precautions with your work when you packed up?
Shunn: I’ve got a few bankers’ boxes full of old printouts and old manuscripts and so forth. I didn’t really take any special care of those. I did, however, protect—with my life—the computer disks and all those backups. I got a couple of gigantic hard drives and pretty much everything on my computers backed up to those.
I recently, in fact—because my background is in computer science and I used version-control software a lot when writing code—I adapted a version-control program called Subversion and installed it on one computer in my office and no matter where I am, when I save or maybe every hour or so I will commit the latest version of whatever I’m working on to my backup server.
So I’m kind of a nut about backup security like that. So the computer files and the hard drives all came right in the car with us and did not go in the moving truck.
RE: Can you tell us little bit about what you’re working on now?
Shunn: I’ve got a few projects going—in fact, what I’ve been working on this morning is what I hope will be the first in a series of short stories about a character named Pell Franziskaner. It’s a near-future science fiction series, one of those that I’m hoping won’t be overrun too quickly by current technological developments, but it’s a series of stories that takes place in Manhattan about 60 years from now when the city is flooded and a community of hipsters and technologists and so forth interacting with artificial intelligences, and I’m envisioning a whole series of stories about Pell Franziskaner and his sort of AI sidekick that will be kind of fun and kind of about serious social issues that will be facing humanity – globalization and so forth.
But those stories will be breaks between the heavy-duty novel work that I am doing. And I think the last time we spoke I was working on a novel-length version of my novella Inclinations, and I’m actually still working on that. I put that aside for about a year because when we moved to Chicago the goal was that my wife and I had would be to get to the point where she could work full-time and I could write full-time. That was our whole goal in moving to Chicago. And so for the first year, while we lived here, I did freelance work and freelance computer programming and saved up a lot of money, and I didn’t get a lot of writing done during that time. But starting in September I quit that, and now I’m back to the novel and trying to figure out how to actually write for eight hours a day.
It’s a whole different level of discipline from the days when I only had before and after work or sometime on weekends to do writing.
RE: If you could pick one science fiction book and make everyone in the country read it, which one would it be and why?
Shunn: A lot of answers are coming to mind, but I’m going to say Spin by Robert Charles Wilson. The reason I would want everyone to read this book is because I think it shows all of science fiction’s strengths, and none of what people would think of as its weaknesses. I think it would serve as a good introduction to a lot of people of why science fiction is interesting and relevant and why some of their preconceptions about the genre might not be justified—at least, not justified about everything in the genre.
Spin is a story that has all the strengths of any mainstream literary novel; it focuses on a small group of three characters and their very realistic relationships, but their personal story unfolds against a backdrop of a gigantic cosmological problem that the Earth is facing, in that Earth has been wrapped in a bubble of slow time and outside of this barrier the universe is aging at an amazingly fast pace. Society is trying to deal with the implications of that – strange religions are springing up, and all sorts of scientific probes are launched to try and figure out why this is happening, but at the same time, the effects of all this societal change and technological change are viewed through the lens of these three really sympathetic characters that we get to know very well.