Author Interview

Q: Why did you decide to actually sit down and start writing this book?

A: Well the main reason was really to explore some questions that I had about myself and my relationship to fantasy and gaming, which is something that I was very interested in as a teenager and then kind of put it behind me, went off to college, tried to be a “cool person”, mostly unsuccessfully. And when I rediscovered some of my dungeons and dragons paraphernalia that I hadn’t seen in 20 or 25 years, and that sort of event in my personal life intersecting with what I saw to be the rise of some more popular manifestations of fantasy like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings, all of these things are becoming very popular books, movies, and video games.  I thought to myself, well something’s changed here since I was a teenager; something has really made a shift in our culture. So that confluence of my personal interest in the topic and of what I saw happening in the larger culture was the reason why I thought this would be worth investigating.

Q: What made you decide to write it in a first person narrative?

A: I had begun to write some chapters before it was a book. Because I work as a journalist, I was able to do some cool assignments and I was able to get a couple of editors interested in hiring me to write a couple of stories about me immersing myself into these subcultures. In the book there’s a chapter about a Live Action Role Playing group, or a LARP group, down in Georgia and this editor from a newspaper sent me down there. Parts of the whole book started to come together as individual articles, and I realized that I had hit on this interesting mix of me being a character in the narrative saying, “I’m this guy who used to do this, but it’s been many years since I’ve been into it; I’m going to get back into it.” My story, how did I feel, what was I thinking, my hesitations or my own mix of emotions about experiencing this, I thought would be an interesting element to weave into as well as an eye in which the reader could see what I was experiencing. That’s also interweaved with interviews with people who I had met during some of these activities, and as the book goes on I go deeper and deeper into different things. I hope it’s a technique that works, but one could you don’t necessarily need to have Ethan as a character in these chapters. For sure I could’ve written them differently without me being in it and just described what happens at these events or these activities without me being a part of it. But I feel like my strengths as a writer are more… or maybe I’m just an egoist. “I want to be the center of attention!”

Q: Can you recall any other articles like that that you decided not to put in as chapters in this book?

A: Well there were some. I had done quite a bit of stories like that that had nothing to do with this topic. I’ve done some travel writing and that sort of thing, but in those pieces there was no real way to work them into the story. There were some other chapters that were going to be in this book that didn’t end up making it. There were some experiences that I might’ve started to write about. I’m trying to think of a good example of something. There were a lot of activities or ideas for things I was going to do that ended up on the cutting room floor and that was largely because of space or for budget reasons, honestly. I gave myself a certain amount of money to use for travel expenses to go places. For me, the big question was “Was I going to spend all of the money I needed to buy a plane ticket to go to New Zealand to visit all of the filming locations of Lord of The Rings? Was that something I wanted to spend a couple thousand dollars to do? Or should I take that money and explore some other part of the subculture?” There were some difficult decisions. I hope I made the right ones, but it’s such a big topic, it was difficult. There were a lot of things I could’ve written about, but for space reasons I had to not include.

Q: Is there any writing or other projects that you’re working on right now?

A: I work as a freelance journalist so on an average week I might be working on a story or two. Sometimes they’re for newspapers and magazines; sometimes it’s a personal essay or some op-ed thing. I do a lot of short form journalism and essay writing, and I do a lot of book reviews and movie reviews for places like the Boston Globe, so that’s always part of my week to week work life. I do have another book project that has changed form a little bit over the years. I’m in the process of working on what’s called the book proposal for that, which my agent is trying to shop around to get published and get a book deal, so that’s finally coming into view. It’s hard to know what’s worthy of investigating in a few thousand words in an essay or an article, and what really is interesting enough and warrants going into depth as a whole book, and I’m still a relative beginner.

Q: What was most difficult step while writing this book?

A: I had never written a book before. I had a lot of experience writing short form journalism, as I mentioned. How do you make a reader want to get past chapter one and read chapter two, and once they finished chapter two, how do you get them excited about reading chapter three? Having never come up for a structure for a book before, I never thought about how I do that on a craft level or on a structural level. How do I make sure that the reader is interested to go further? That was difficult, thinking of ways to sustain their interest. That’s why I felt like the personal story of my own relationship to fantasy and gaming and so on and so forth was an important theme or thread to follow. The other practical problem I had with writing was the deadline. The book was accepted as a proposal, which means that I had written maybe twenty percent of it as well as a marketing plan for the book that you normally submit your book proposals with, and the editor said, “Great. I love your idea. My publishing house will publish it.” This was in April, and he said, “You have until December to write it.” So, less than a year; I was under the gun, and there were times when I thought there was no way I was going to be able to do this. I was travelling a lot, I was researching, I was writing, I was coming home and writing a chapter, and going to Pennsylvania and going to France and going to New Zealand. I had all of this stuff I had to fit in and write the thing, and I had about nine months to do it. That, on a practical level, was incredibly challenging, and I nearly threw myself out the window, but I didn’t.

Q: Was there a specific chapter that was the hardest to write or to go through the process to get your information before writing?

A: There were a couple dead ends. Look at the chapter where I write about a woman who’s very much into playing video games, in this particular case a video game called World of Warcraft. I wanted to find one person who would be a good spokesperson or poster child for that experience. I went down a lot of different dead ends trying to find the right person who would agree to be interviewed and for me to spend time with this person and felt like they had enough of an interesting story of their own to tell. I came upon that hurdle many times; I thought I was onto someone who seemed like they were interesting or had an interesting story to tell, but the more I hung out with them and spent time with them I thought, this person isn’t as interesting as I thought, so I needed to start over with somebody else. That happened a couple of times. On a personal level, the first couple of chapters were hard because it was revealing a lot of stuff about my childhood and my relationship with my mom and the situation with her illness, and I had some worries about how my family would react to that and whether they were ok with that and how they felt about that being the beginning of the book. Initially that was not the beginning of the book; initially that chapter was later in the book, and then we revised the structure of it and decided to lead with that. *Ethan picks up a book next to him* Most people pick up a book and they go, “Oh this looks interesting.” They look at the back cover, and they may look at the front, and then they start reading the first couple of pages. And if it doesn’t interest them, then they’re probably going to go, “Oh well.” *Tosses the book aside* So we tried to think hard about what would be the most interesting place to start the book, and the eventual decision was to lead it with that childhood stuff.

Q: On the other end of that spectrum, was there a chapter that was specifically the most fun to write?

A: The experiences where I was really immersing myself in something new. For example, the time that I went to this medieval reenactment society, this organization called the Society for Creative Anachronism, where I spent a week camping with them dressed in my tunic, was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to have the experience and to also try to write it up. Inevitably in the writing process, I came back with ten times more material than I could use. I had these notebooks full of notes and videos I shot and photos I had taken; I tried to document every experience as much as I could. In the end I knew that I had about a 5000-word chapter that I could condense this into. I knew each chapter was going to be a different investigation, so I came back from that really excited that I had all this great material. The same thing happened when I went to New Zealand and had that experience, but then the hard part was, oh crap, I have to figure out a way to take the best material and only put it into this small space. There’s fun in making those decisions, but as a writer I find that a little bit anxiety provoking as well because I know a lot of good stuff is not going to ever see the light of day. 

Q: If you had the opportunity to rewrite your book, what would you do differently?

A: I think somethings in my life have changed somewhat since I wrote the book; it’s been a few years now since the book came out. Partly the book ends a bit ambiguously about my own “quest” to find my place with fantasy and gaming today. The real story is, since the book came out, I’ve more fully immersed myself in the stuff than I had when I was writing it. In a perfect world, if I had had more time to write the book, and if there was more of a processing period at the end of it, I could’ve thought more about how I could end this book in a way that felt more satisfying, so I might say at the end of the book “As it turns out, I started to play Dungeons and Dragons again”, which is true; I do play with a group of guys here in Boston. That experience hadn’t actually happened yet, so I couldn’t make that up and say I was doing it when I really wasn’t. As a journalist, I felt like I had to be truthful. So, there’s that aspect of it, and certainly, in my observation of what has happened with the culture in the five years or so since I’ve done this, we’ve only gone further into this as a culture, in terms of the popularity and the money making opportunities that a lot of this has had, whether it’s The Hobbit or Game of Thrones or more video games or social media and our technological devices being a greater part of our lives; these are all developments that have happened since I wrote the book that I think probably could warrant an additional chapter. I’m fortunate that the book is coming out in Brazil, of all places, so hopefully soon, in the next year or so, and I think there’s going to be an opportunity to write a new forward to the book saying “In the five years since I’ve written this book, this is what’s happened since then, in my life and what’s happened in the culture.

Q: Do you have any favorite books or authors in particular?

A: Tons, there are certainly some that relate to the topic. It’s obvious from reading the book that I’m really into Tolkien; he’s one of my favorites. I read pretty broadly. My professional training originally as a writer was in poetry, so there are a number of writers, both contemporary and dead, who I enjoy. Contemporary American poets, people like, not even especially well-known ones but people like James Riden, Richard Hugo, and Elizabeth Bishop, and more classic poets like Walt Whitman. I read quite a bit of poetry, or used to more so in the past. I read a fair amount of nonfiction as well, and there are some writers who do things similar to what I do, and in a way, I feel like as a journalist and as a writer I need to be more aware of what other people are doing in my field. There’s a writer, for example, by the name of A. J. Jacobs who does a number of these stunt journalism books. One is a book about him trying to live by the code of conduct that is described in The Old Testament of The Bible. He does that for a year, so he dresses in a tunic and grows a long beard and does all these things. It’s called The Year of Living Biblically. Examples of writers like that who you have a kind of similar way of interacting with their subject matter, I’m interested to see what they’re doing, what they’re up to. This is always a hard question to answer because I think “What are the books beside my bed right now?” so I’m trying to think what they are. I do review books for the Boston Globe so I’m always getting new books. I just read the new Stephen King novel for example, and that was fun. There’s always something there.

Q: Did any other particular author inspire your writing?

A: I would probably answer that somewhat the same way. I think that if I’m stuck as a writer and I feel like I don’t know how to get myself out of a writing situation I will go to a writer who I admire. So, I can be thinking, you know, god, I can’t figure out how to start this chapter, or this essay, or I feel like I’m just stuck in my own “Ethan voice” that I always use. Can I try something different? I’ll pull a book off my shelf and I’ll sort of see, you know a book from a writer whose prose style I admire and see, okay what are they doing here? That’s always helpful. I think this is really good strategy for anyone who is stuck. Its not like you’re ripping them off or plagiarizing, but you’re just borrowing their ideas, how they wrote something.

                                                                   

Q: What was your favorite fictional series growing up, or today?

A: Yeah, there was a bunch of stuff that I read as kid. I remember spending hours and hours reading these young adult writers, a lot were about kids living in the wilderness. There was a book, for example, called My Side of the Mountain about a kid who runs away from home in New York City and lives in a tree in the woods. There was another book series, A Wrinkle in Time and sequels by Madeleine L’Engle that I loved. There was a book series that was kind of like the boy equivalent of The Little House on the Prairie series and it was called The Great Brain. It was about boys living in this frontier town in the west. It was about a smart kid and his younger brother, and the book is narrated from the perspective of the younger brother, which was sort of my experience as a kid, because I had an older brother and my older brother was always the smart one who had all the smart ideas.  These were worlds that I could sort of immerse myself into, like the pioneer days. There were some other ones by Scott O’Donnell, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and kids were living on islands. Maybe knowing about my own family situation, we were sort of raised by wolves, you know, in a way…maybe there’s some logic as to why that was an appealing narrative, because there were some crazy things happening at home as well for me.

Q: Have you ever written fan fiction?

A: I have not actually. I feel like I’ve written, and I do dabble in fiction although I don’t think its my best mode. But I have written fiction where I incorporate references to the things that I love. I can remember thinking of a story that I started to write about a boy who starts having conversations with Gandalf, the wizard, from The Lord of the Rings. So Gandalf just appears in the room and he starts having these conversations with him. Not technically fan fiction but for me, a way for me to incorporate my love for these things, and if I can find a way to make a The Lord of the Rings reference in some article I’m doing for The Boston Globe, I’ll do it just because that’s the way my brain works, you know.

Q: If you could have lunch with anyone, fictional or real, who would it be?

A: Oh my goodness. Wow. It would be fascinating to be there with Tolkien. I mean I don’t know what the guy was like personally; it would just be fascinating to be in his presence. In my book I have an obsessive quest to track down Peter Jackson, the film maker, and ever since I was a kid I was crazy in love with the people who made these fantasy science fiction movies. I immersed myself in the world of Star Wars and then all the Steven Spielberg movies. These were filmmakers I really admired.  I would love to gather them all around a table. Wouldn’t that be awesome, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and lets say Peter Jackson. We could all sit around and talk about stuff. That would be great. I’m lucky in that my life as a journalist sometimes allows me to meet up with some of my childhood heroes, which is kind of cool, so I sometimes get to meet film directors and that’s great. There’s a list of people that I’ve never gotten the chance to talk to that it would be nice if it happened.

Q: How has your love of fantasy influenced your life outside of this book?

A: Well I think in a couple ways… I do have a tendency to kind of imagine things that aren’t really there. I think I have a pretty good grasp on reality, but I don’t have a problem imagining, lets say, I’m walking across the Tufts campus and I see the wind combine the leaves, spin up or I’m in the woods and I wonder what’s behind that tree, could it be an Elf, could it be an Orc. I will have these weird moments, I call them my “medieval moments.” Let me give you sort of a weird insight into the way my brain works. I will actually imagine, I’ll have these moments where I think what if, what if this wasn’t reality. I do find myself imagining these kinds of fantasy situations a lot. But on a more inspirational level I do feel like the opportunity to read or experience through, lets say, a movie or video game or TV show, these narratives of a heroic character who goes on a quest, has a way of making me feel better about myself. You could argue oh, when you go watch this movie, the cool handsome guy who has these incredible muscles and does these incredible things makes me feel a lesser person. But for me it makes me feel like well, if this person can do it, maybe I can do it. There’s a way in which these experiences, particularly in a fantasy novel can make me feel, well if Frodo can go do this thing, look at Frodo, he was this tall and he had no real strengths, he managed to do this incredible thing so maybe I have the ability to do that as well in my own life. Like, I’m going to have this difficult conversation with someone in my family that I’m really dreading, or I’m going to do this thing that’s a little out of my comfort zone. Those stories can make me feel like oh, that’s something I can do.

Q: What’s your favorite genre besides fantasy, or subgenre within fantasy?

A: That’s always the most interesting. I feel like a bit of a broken record here, but the scenario that you see in The Lord of the Rings, or The Hobbit, where its kind of pre technological society that has magic in it. I get a little bit cranky when I see authors mixing things up. Like it takes place in a place like Middle Earth, but they have guns. No, keep your guns out of Middle Earth, I want swords and magic, I want monsters, but not steam punk. To my mind, that’s the sweet spot for me is imagining that. For other people it’s much different. It might be the future or a mash up of other genres together like horror, that kind of thing. For me, that’s what speaks to me, because I like to imagine this world before technology. My large complaint about America and about the world is that I was born in the wrong era. I don’t like cars and I don’t like cell phones…If I could walk everywhere with just my backpack and my sword, that would be it. Its totally unrealistic, it’s a romantic idea, but I feel like if I could just get by with just my wits and what I could make and build that would be an interesting life to lead. I would probably be dead in 20 minutes, but in my mind that’s what seems appealing to me.

Q: What was your best/ favorite subject in school?

A: I would have to say it was History and English. I had a great history teacher who let me do creative projects. I would incorporate my interest in Dungeons and Dragons into history projects. We would do a unit on ancient Rome and I would find someway to do a term paper about catapults. Or I would make little movies; I would shoot these cartoons about things that related to history. And then in Literature, in English, I was playing a lot of D and D at the time, I was telling stories and I found ways to do creative projects that related to my interest in telling a fantasy story. I had really tolerant high school teachers which was nice.

Q: When did you know that you wanted to become a writer and what were your motivations?

A: I never thought I would be a writer… but I definitely knew I was interested in being a writer as a kid. We had an old typewriter, and I would write up little news reports about what was happening in the family. I was like a little journalist even though I had no idea what I was doing. I was doing a lot of writing of these, I recently unearthed a bunch of letters, my dad saved every letter I ever sent him which is really a wonderful thing. I looked back at those letters and they’re crazy creative letters about me imagining that I’m in James Bond movie, or typed up in this weird way with bloodstains and like the edges are burned. So I was already a writer, I didn’t know that I could make a career out of it. It wasn’t until later when I eventually found my way into journalism that I actually found a way to make a living out of it. No one getting rich doing this, but it’s a way to make a living. Looking backwards now I see kind of inklings of it when I was ten or fifteen.

Q: What advice do you have for younger writers?

A: Try to find writers that you really love and that inspire you, and then start writing your own stuff, whatever it is. When you’re a really young writer you don’t know or care whatever your stuff is any good or not, and you don’t care, you just write it and I think that’s a really good place to be in. As we get older we start to get more self conscious of it. You show it to a teacher or send it out to a magazine and there’s going to be some sort of critical feedback. I think the danger is to assume that you don’t have immediate success on a commercial level therefore you should stop doing it. I’m a creative writing teacher and one of the things I noticed is that a lot of people your age, in college, you’re English majors with dreams of being a writer somehow from graduating from college and moving into your first or second or third job that dream just completely disappears. There’s no way to integrate it into your life. But you can still do it, you can keep it going on the side. I think its really important to remember that it’s a craft that requires practice, and you can do it every so often and keep yourself engaged in it.