Among other awards, Bud Sparhawk's stories have been a finalist for a Nebula Award three times (Primrose and Thorn, 1996; Magic's Price, 2001; Clay's Pride, 2004) and have been selected for several "Years Best SF" anthologies. His first short story appeared in 1976 and he has published about 90 short stories and novellas since then.
He writes about writing on his blog, Musings.
This second part discusses Bud's ideas on writing. The first part of the interview is here.
Q9: What inspired your early stories?
A: I took the kids to see Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at a cinema. While watching that, I got an idea that became the story "Alba Krystal" (Ben Bova's title). I also wrote "The Tompkins Battery Case" around then. Those were my first two published stories, but then there was a gap of 13 years before I started writing again!
When I finished the Okinawa assignment, I went back to Oklahoma City and got into the Masters program. The classes were at night. A buddy and I did this together. We went to school three nights a week, studies three other nights, and we had one day for our wives and children. We worked together during the day, so we did this at lunch too. That was the pattern.
At Oklahoma City University, they used a text "The Theory of Money" that I could not grasp what the book was talking about. It was so opaque. We took the final, which I staggered through with mediocre success, along with my Air Force buddy, Will. We had many more courses and we agreed that when we had to prepare for the comprehensive exams we would devote one day each to study for the other topics. However, we would set aside four days for this Theory of Money, leaving that until last, so we could have the preparation fresh in our minds. The morning of the first of our four study days for this exam, I sat down and opened the book and started reading it. I thought to myself, "The hard part must be further back than what I remember." I kept reading and reading and I finished it by the afternoon! I called Will up and said, "Will, I just finished the book and what was it that we had such a hard time understanding with this?" He said, "I did the same thing! How could we be so stupid?" I don't know if our subconscious finally got enough time to process the information or what. We spend the three remaining study days drinking beer and talking in general about our plans.
Q10: There was an education article recently in the news about some people are better at laterally transferring information from one area to another than others are. Do you think that was involved?
A: I've always been able to make do with the tools at hand. Whether that is mechanical or what.
Anyway, I passed the exams, got my Masters degree in Finance and, shortly after that, got out of the service. Came back east and got a finance job at a commercial communications company called ARINC. I quit that job and went to work at MCI, which was a small company at the time with only 1000 employees nationwide, and only 50 in Washington DC. After that, a friend from ARINC called me up. He wanted to start his own company and wanted me to run his finances. So I quit MCI and did that for a number of years. Then I worked independently for awhile as a IT consultant. Then I worked as a project manager on an FAA contract, some other companies, and the FDA before joining McFadden, a government contractor for several agencies. One day the CEO walked into my office and said "I just fired everyone on the staff. You and I are going to run the company now." Okay! We added a contracts officer and our troika managed the organization. A few years later, after the owner of the company sold it to us, we managed the company from about an 11 million dollar company to a 35 million dollar company. At the point I retired.
When I retired, Barbara Clough had been beating on my head for years to run for the president of SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) and when one of the board members quit I become a board member for the Eastern region. Later, when the treasurer of SFWA retired, I agreed to step into that
position since that is my skill set. I've been doing that for about a year now.
Q11: Do you apply that problem-solving ability in your writing also?
A: I have been trying for the last two years to figure out how it is that I do what I do when I write. I've got it down to a more-or-less mechanical process. On my blog I wrote a post on the 10 stages of writing then I proceeded to document all 10 steps and I actually developed a story. It turned out there were twelve steps! (Laughter.)
Basically, what I did for years was to just sit down and write down the story, as it came to me without thought as to style or structure or any of that stuff.
Here's an example. Around 1992 or 1993, Mike Resnick asked me to contribute to a Marty Greenberg anthology. He sent me an email saying "I need a dinosaur story from you of about 5000 words in 3 weeks." I replied "What are the guidelines?" He emailed back, "Dinosaurs. 5000 words. 3 weeks." (Laughter.) I picked up a copy of National Geographic and saw an article about a dig out in Argentina, where they were extracting footprints from a shale formation. I thought, there's the McGuffin. What if they saw tracks? I'll start with a pair of scientists - a graduate student and her
professor and their somewhat stormy relationship. One story would span from the start of their relationship to its untimely end. Then another subplot started from close to the end of the story building up to when she was killed. Then there was the story of the dinosaurs. One story line was fairly brief, another was longer, and the story of the dinosaurs spanned millions of years. I wrote each of these stories separately then put each scene from each story on an index card and shuffled them up (Laughter) and put them on the floor and arranged them in a workable order. This scene is a flashback, that scene is a flash-forward, and so on. I wrote the story up that way and sent it in and he bought it and it got published that way as "Fierce Embrace".
I wrote another story pretty much the same way called "Iridium Dreams", which appeared in the magazine Analog Science Fiction, Science Fact. In that story a dig in the Gobi Desert played the same sort of role as a McGuffin that the Argentina dig did in the dinosaur story.
I started thinking about this thing called structure in a story. Structure is composed of a bunch of scenes. What makes a scene? It has a protagonist, a point of view, an antagonist, the action takes place in a physical location, the weather, time, and so on, has to be incorporated into the story. A story is a sequence of scenes strung along into a plot-line. If you think of a story this way, you can start trying to rearrange these scenes. The process I use to create a story is not necessarily linear. I might come up with the main idea and then think of something else to add here and there. Wouldn't it be neat to go back to the beginning and add this scene? Her background should be inserted there. All these scenes can then be rearranged later into a story. You might know exactly what the time-line of events is, but you might not want to tell the story in that order. Once you have the scenes in the order you like, you write it up.
Q12: Do you worry about background of your character, what they wear, their personalities?
A: I've never really gone into that detail. Nancy Kress told me that she has a good mental image of her protagonist and what the basic story idea is about before she sits down to write. She wants to know her protagonist fairly well. Other people work with outlines. It's one of those things where every writer is going to have their own
unique process that they are comfortable with. Mine is writing scenes and rearranging. What I do in the beginning is to just start typing the story as it comes
to me. Eventually, it gets to the point where I think I have enough to work with. I could have about 2000 words of a 5000 word story at that point. Then I break up each scene-block into an "index card" in the software program Scrivener that I use. These "cards" can be rearranged on the Scrivener "cork-board" in any way you like. At that point, I look for what scenes are missing and start adding new scenes on new "cards".
I might need to add detail to this scene, add exposition to that scene, add description here, add a quirk to a character's personality characteristic there.
After filling all these things in, you get the first rough draft. It will be about five or six thousand words. Then you begin the agonizing process of line-by-line editing. You might do some rearranging and other edits until you get the story in the final form you like.
Q13: In many of your stories, it seems as though you imagine a situation and places characters in that situation, then ask how would these people react in this situation. Do you agree with that?
A: Well, my stories have a very limited scope. No grand conquests. They are usually about some specific thing happening to some individual. That is one reason why I don't do novels. Novels take a lot of effort over a long period of time. I have far too many ideas to stick to one thing. I'm a jack rabbit.
This s continued in part three here.
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