An Interview with Gregory Frost

Gregory Frost is a writer’s writer. His work employs a literary style, while still being accessible to a cross-section of speculative fiction readers. Since the early 1980s his work has appeared in The Twilight Zone Magazine, Asimov’s, Whispers, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, and many anthologies, notably the retold fairy-tale anthologies edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and numerous anthologies edited by Stephen Jones in the UK. His story, “Madonna of the Maquiladora,” was a finalist for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award, the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award, the Hugo, and the Nebula. Some of his stories are collected in Attack of the Jazz Giants & Other Stories, available from Golden Gryphon Press. The author of eight novels, his two most recent are Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet from Del Rey Books. He has been an instructor at Clarion, and he is one of two fiction workshop directors at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania. He lives outside of Philadelphia with his wife, Barbara, and a huge Maine coon cat named Captain Wow. I am pleased that Greg was able to answer a few of my questions for The Fix.

You were an illustrator first, but switched to fiction writing. What brought that about?

Happenstance. I took a creative writing class at night during my second year in art college, and very quickly found that I enjoyed writing stories and that there was an inverse relationship between them and the illustrating/painting. So the next year I got into a workshop run by poet Gary Gildner where I tried writing a science fiction novel…which turned out to be about 76 pages long. About that time my apartment burned down, and wiped out all three years of oil paintings and charcoal sketches, but weirdly did not destroy a short story that was lying on my kitchen table. It was a hell of a sign, but really I’d made my mind up by then. I’d had this epiphany one day in painting class where I looked up and counted the three people in the room who knew what they were doing with a canvas. I was not one of them. After that, I kind of limped to the end of the semester just to get out. I had great professors but I wasn’t going to go anyplace. I’ve finally, in the book I’m working on now, gotten to make references to a couple of them via an art class in the story.

You’ve been writing full time for the past couple of years. Could you describe your work day?

I get up, take my wife to the train, come home, and try to dive into writing. I’m probably successful half the time. There are days when I end up just crossing off all the chores and other things that need doing in the morning, and then spend the afternoon writing. Probably more of those than not. I read something somewhere about time management, and how you should start off the day with some small task you can accomplish easily. Then you’ve already done something right off to feel good about, and you can go off all pumped up to the next task—which in my case is usually a novel in progress.

Do you consider yourself a slow methodical writer or a quick facile one?

Slow and methodical is what I would have said before I wrote Fitcher’s Brides. That was at the invitation of Terri Windling, and by the time Tor gave it a green light I had ten months to write it from start to finish. Fortunately I had done all the historical research by then or I would still be working on it. There have been two occasions where I’ve written a short story very quickly—in one case overnight for Asimov’s (but I’ll never tell). The fact is, no book I’ve ever written has followed the same pattern for me as the one preceding it. Perhaps that’s because I don’t write the same thing twice: I’ve never done a series, never written anything multibook that was longer than a duology. So each time I start one it’s kind of “how do I approach this project?”

Who are a few authors who you’ve studied for craft and technique, and how do you apply them to your own writing?

For craft and technique, very much everybody I read. There’s this workshop persona that emerged during or right after Clarion and as a result is always analyzing, always going “How did she do that?” and trying to understand someone else’s techniques. I’m persuaded that they can be adopted. I once dissected a Dean Koontz novel just to figure out how it operated structurally. I wanted to see the mainspring. Consciously, though, Roger Zelazny was a big influence. There’s a fair bit of my deep affection for Roger’s work in the Shadowbridge books. But also Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and William Blake and Shakespeare. Very early on I thought that you didn’t dare borrow from other writers or it wouldn’t be you any longer; the truth is that you write like yourself even when you’re channeling somebody else into the mix. I remember Michael Swanwick critiqued a story of mine once and at one point there was a note in the margin that read “How would Nabokov do this?”

As a teenager, though, I read a lot of crap fiction—a load of movie and TV tie-in books, which are almost all trash. (The one true exception was Thomas M. Disch’s tie-in to The Prisoner.) I had an enormous fondness for Leslie Charteris’s books and stories of The Saint, Simon Templar. And when I first set out to write—in my late teens—I tried to emulate Charteris. And, forgive me Saint fans, but Charteris was one of the worst, most empurpled prose stylists who ever lived. He was the Lord Dunsany of crime fiction. And, God, it took me years to unlearn that style, to bury it under a lot of very large flagstones of clean, crisp, sharp prose. Believe me, you can imitate crap writers and you can shrivel and die as a result. Right now, somewhere, some poor schmuck is trying to write like Dan Brown, and God help him, he’s doomed.

You’re an active participant of the Sycamore Hills Writer’s Workshop. Is there a story that came out of that you’d care to discuss?

Less active now than I used to be. Syc Hill has always been a place where I bring a story I don’t know how to write. In some years it has served as an excuse to write something that intimidates me; in others it’s served as a place to road test something. “Madonna of the Maquiladora” went through that critical abattoir, with the result that Bruce Sterling sent me back to studying more world politics, which made the story stronger; and I workshopped the opening four chapters of Fitcher’s Brides there, and Jonathan Lethem spotted a critical point of view element that was out of whack; and another story, “That Blissful Height,” which is in the Sycamore Hill anthology, Intersections, would likely never have been written except for the workshop. It was one of those daunting stories for which the workshop served as a catalyst.

In “Madonna of the Maquiladora,” you employed a somewhat slipstream style and the use of second person. Tell us about the technique behind that.

This is what I was talking about earlier with borrowing elements from other writers. The second person voice of that story comes from my having read Carlos Fuentes’s novella, “Aura,” which is also in second person. Fuentes used that weird POV to suggest a kind of funhouse mirror grotesqueness to everything, and that was exactly the tone I wanted for Juarez. I had tried writing a first person narrative and it just simply sucked. The moment I approached it from second person, the story flowed out. I wasn’t focused on anything beyond that being the right voice for the story. I really do think that every story has one right voice. You find that, and you find the way into the story. Writing teachers say “Every story has been written.” And that may be so, but no story has ever been written from the voice you are going to give it once you find it.

One of my favorite stories of yours is “The Girlfriends of Dorian Gray.” What was the inspiration behind this piece?

The story came about over dinner at Michael Swanwick’s house. I was telling a story about a book editor I knew who had a series of relationships with women, and in each case, the women put on a huge amount of weight and he remained trim. Jokingly, I said “It’s the girlfriends of Dorian Gray.” And Marianne Porter, Michael’s wife, looked at me dead serious and said, “You know you have to write that now.” It’s another work where the voice of the story was all important. It’s a knowing voice, a judgmental voice (contrary to what we’re all told in writing classes), and it has already judged the main character and found him wanting. Thus the story celebrates his downfall.

Your two latest novels, Shadowbridge and Lord Tophet, are primarily novels consisting of short stories along the 1001 Arabian Nights tradition. Are they episodic in nature, and what led you to this narrative choice?

First, no, the stories aren’t episodic, although a few of the characters in them recur: for instance the fisherman Chilingana is the main character in both a creation myth story and a tale of how Death came into the world. The structure of the books is admittedly peculiar. The first is very nautiloid. It curls around upon itself so that just when you think it’s going forward, it flips back and comes to the same point from a different perspective. The second book, Lord Tophet, is entirely different, more of a domino-effect structure as the things set up in the first book now trigger one thing after another. But both structurally reference labyrinths, which became important to the books (and there you can see one Zelazny element that slipped in).

The idea of a large framing story supporting a tales within tales approach is very Arabian Nights in nature, where the story of the sultan and Shahrazad is the bigger story. There the smaller stories don’t particularly reflect upon the larger one, but I wanted mine to kind of pluck at the tale and plight of Leodora. The other huge influence upon the books is Somadeva’s Tales from the Kathāsaritsāgara, to which I’m obliged to Michael Swanwick, who pointed me in its direction long ago.

Do you have any advice for younger writers trying to learn their craft and sell their fiction?

Write what you’re passionate about, because your passion will more directly translate on the page to the sort of magnetism that holds readers to the story. If you try to chase after what’s hot at the moment, by the time you write it, that thing won’t be hot anymore anyway. As to learning your craft, that’s a lifelong endeavor. Don’t be frustrated if you write stories and they don’t immediately sell. Almost everyone has to write a lot of what I think of as “learning stories.” They may not sell, but they are what you have to write in order to reach the point where your stories do sell. Writing fiction is an apprenticeship to a craft and you have to treat it as such.

What are you working on now?

Currently I’m working on a supernatural mystery novel—once again, trying something I haven’t done before. After that, I’ve a science fiction thriller that’s in the planning stages, and another Shadowbridge novel to write at some point, which has nothing to do with the story in the two that are out now, but will still be a book full of stories. Otherwise, I’m writing some short fiction—one piece will be out in Realms of Fantasy before year’s end—and teaching a little bit, and still trying to become a quick and facile writer. It could happen.