Remembering Andrew Pyper
My interview with Andrew from January 2020
One of my favourite podcast interviews was with novelist Andrew Pyper back in January 2020, when I did a bunch of recordings in Toronto on my way from Kingston to Whitehorse. He was recommended to me by fellow Toronto author, Guy Gavriel Kay, whom I interviewed just a few months before.
A week ago, Andrew passed away due to complications from cancer.
You can listen to the What on Earth is Going on? episode, but in honour of Andrew—who had some fascinating things to say about his writing process and much more—I figured I’d save you some time. I’ve edited down the podcast transcript, mostly to cut all of my interjections and ponderings. What’s left behind is a wonderful and very helpful chat for any writer, maybe even any creative person.
I love conducting interviews, and I especially love asking writers about writing. I’ve been wondering if I should do this once again for this Substack. Maybe once a month I’ll interview a writer and ask them a similar set of questions about their craft. What do you think? Would you be interested in that? Let me know!
Our Conversation
This is an edited and shortened transcript of my conversation with Andrew Pyper, recorded at his home in Toronto on January 29, 2020. It was released on May 1 of that year as Episode 91 of my podcast, What on Earth is Going on?
BEN
You work in your home, right?
ANDREW
Yup. As a writer? I do.
BEN
How do you find that? Is it ever distracting?
ANDREW
You know, that ought to happen and I've been waiting for it to happen for the last 25 years, but it really hasn't. I don't know, I don't want to credit myself with some kind of exemplary self-discipline or something, maybe that's it. I'm not sure, but I think I would feel too guilty if I just sort of took myself out to the movies or just lay down and had a two hour nap or took myself out for lunch. I never do those things.
BEN
Tell me about your writing process. Do you use pen or pencil or computer?
ANDREW
I'll answer that question by kind of taking a step prior to the writing. I'm a big advocate for pre-writing, outlining. And so that takes ultimately a very loosey-goosey form. Various kind of scraps of paper, notes, notebooks, emails to myself, random sort of communications from my own brain, back to my own brain. And then from all of that will come the story, however broadly understood. And then I will take eight and a half by 11 sheets of blank paper and staple them together so it forms this kind of long tail and lay it out on the floor and draw a line down the length of this thing, which would be essentially like a human body length, and break it up into acts and then individual chapters within those chapters, individual scenes. And then from there, I put it up on the wall of the office. And then from there, I'm typing on the computer. The first draft is written entirely on a word processor. And then it kind of goes back to the editing with a pen.
BEN
And you edit from there?
ANDREW
Yeah, and read aloud. That's another big thing. When I teach creative writing, people will say, should I get an editor? I say yes, if you can afford one or hire a freelance editor, get a loved one that you can trust to read your manuscript, everyone you can get to read it. But if you can't get that, or if you're nervous about that, or you don't have the resources for that, the cheapest and most cheerful way of editing is reading your own work aloud. I did it very recently on a manuscript that was in the very late stages. It was after editing, we're at the copy editing stage. You'd sort of think the glaring errors have been captured. Now I read it aloud and say, "Oh, that makes no sense. That's clunky. Why would she do that?"
You can capture things that, I'll give an example from just this week, repetitions that on the page were invisible to me. But in reading aloud, I realized, oh my God, Andrew, you're way overusing the word malice. And it's not even a favorite word of mine, but in this particular text, it was like, malice, malice, malice. So I had to replace malice with malevolence or whatever. My eyes weren't seeing the echo of malice, but my ears heard it.
BEN
When you were mentioning that first stage of sending emails to yourself and taking notes, is that a disciplined process?
ANDREW
Very much the latter for me anyway. There's a certain kind of practical driving forward impulse to sort of, okay, must write book, have general idea of what the world of the book is going to be. Let's get to it. But it kind of bumps up against, well, what is the story or what is it about? It's a little bit like the cab driver story of like, "Hey, what do you do?" "I'm a writer." "Oh, I've got an idea for a story." "Oh, really? What is it?" And then they'll say something like, "Wow, it's about a guy who robs a bank." And then, I don't know. Right? So you don't actually have an idea for a story. The moment you try to articulate it, it kind of runs away like a mouse out of the kitchen.
It's the subconscious, the in the shower, letting things kind of rattle around and you collect them. I ended up kind of collecting them quite literally in notes, and I keep them in plastic bags and it looks like at tax time when you kind of spill all the receipts onto the dining room table. And what's remarkable is that 80% of that stuff weirdly relates to the story at hand. It's almost as though some other crew, some kind of elves of the subconscious have been kind of, "No, we're building the novel right now, you idiot. While you think you're in charge, we are actually constructing it and leave us alone."
BEN
How long does that take?
ANDREW
More and more, as a matter of percentage, people will ask, "How long does it take to write a book?" The writing for me, the writing of a first draft from book to book to book has gotten as a percentage, much less. Part of it is learning how not to waste time or avoiding the ways that I used to waste time. And one of them has been sort of thinking that the first draft is where you luxuriate and that's really writing. I've come to realize that that's really a smaller part of it and that a larger part of it ought to be the thought that goes into it prior to the typing.
This is where I get kind of nerdily excited about outlining because I think people hear the word outline or the process or imagine the process of outlining and think it's some kind of predetermined, unfun labor, when in fact it's the most explosively creative part of the whole process. What happens is these questions are being asked of what really is the story. I sort of think of it as finding the "about" of your story. You go in thinking, I know what this story is about. But what you're really searching for and what you discover in the process of outlining is that thing beneath the surface that the book is truly about. And I think that's why a lot of books or manuscripts that quote fail is not that they're written by unskilled writers, nor is it a concept. It's just the about of the story was never discovered.
[Discussion about genre and marketing]
It's been a career-long question for me, and it's been asked not by me, but typically by the people publishing the books or the people buying the books. Sometimes the readers were disappointed by the books because they felt that they were looking for one kind of product and got something else. And then having said that, it can also split the other way that people are quite delighted by, oh, I got my scares and I got my disembodied corpse in the first act, but I also got something that one would typically associate with, quote, literary fiction.
Expectations is a very powerful thing. I would be curious to know whether readers from a hundred years ago would have had that same set of expectations going into a book that contemporary readers do. I don't think so. I think there would be more like, oh, I don't know, here's a new book, someone said it's good, or I went to the bookshop and this was recommended, then you just plunge in and you don't know where you're going. Now it's so pre-chewed from the marketing point of view that readers are often disappointed because their expectations haven't been met, but the expectations may be unfair or misattributed. And all of this comes down to a publishing industry that is very anxious and category is a huge driving force in it. Where do we put it? How do we market it?
[Discussion about writing community]
I have some colleagues who find it very important to feel that they're part of a community. Obviously community is a very amorphous term. It can mean all sorts of things. But in relation to the writing world, some writers will feel like, well, this is my writing community. That could be the national Canadian writing community. It could be a province, a town. It could be something much smaller. It could be connected to their personal identity or politics in some way. However it's fractured, they feel a priority of finding affiliation. It could be institutional. There weren't really MFA programs to speak of back in my day. Now, of course, they are. We have programs like UBC, which are giant faculties pumping out lots of professionally trained writers and faculty, and people feel affiliations with an institution.
I've always been very wary of that. I've never had a mentor. I've never studied creative writing in any formal setting. And I don't mention these things by way of sort of like, because that's how awesome I am. I'm just saying, I think it's just always been a reflex. I enjoy community too. I have a lot of my best friends are writers. I enjoy the company of writers. I love talking about writing and complaining and griping and drinking with my friends who are writers. So it's not that I'm kind of a lone wolf in any respect, but I'm hesitant when it starts to be understood as a community because then that feels like going back to what we were saying earlier, it's sort of like, who are you? Well, this is my affiliation.
Hey! Enjoying this? Share it with someone you think would dig it too, and nudge them to subscribe. Like and comment—I’d love to hear what you think!
BEN
What on earth is going on?
Well, I'll tell you what's been on my mind about the world recently, which is the deployment of stupidity, or the stupid among us. There's no other way to put it. And I call those people placists, because they're kind of people who really kind of think about, and I think it's a genuine thing. The stupid as a constituency, as a political force, as a block that can be deployed and used to further the goals of those who are just not quite as stupid, or at least are smart enough to recognize how to use the stupid.
Prior to this insight, I sort of thought that politics was still fundamentally ideological. That we have debates about, you know, one might feel as a conservative, I don't want things to change, and as a progressive, I do. And those were their clashes, and they would sort of, one side would win at a particular moment, another. And that still feels like, on the surface, the theater that is being enacted in this political sphere. But I'm starting to wonder whether, with the advent of social media and its abuses, with the current president of the United States, with the sort of regressive, grinding, frustrating beliefs that seem to be kind of popping up in quarters where you think, surely we've stomped that out. These idiotic points of view. And again, I don't mean just I don't agree with, I mean objective idiocy. Like the flat earth movement, for example, or anti-vaxxers, things that are making these robust comebacks that are based on, not just misinformation, but again, blatant stupidity. Maybe I underestimated all my life how big a factor that was, just kind of waiting to be exploited. Or flipped, looked at it another way, I overestimated the power of the smart. Looking at recent events in the United States, when Trump was kind of rising as a candidate, I sort of thought that smart people, people who have gone to college, who are able to have an intelligent conversation, I don't mean intellectuals per se, I just mean people who have read a book in their life would sort of say, okay, enough's enough. This joke has gone on far too long.
And it shapes too. If it were simply a matter of feeling a pressure issue by issue to adhere to a particular sort of take on it, that'd be one thing. It's also the priority that's been assigned to those issues. So today, in this hour that we are enjoying together that we're not looking at our phones, we don't know. But right now, I can guarantee you that there has been an agenda set for this day within my social, according to the decisions that I've made on social media, it has been decided that these are the three things that Andrew, you should feel very strongly about. And if I don't, if I actually don't really care about this Star Wars debate, or it could be pop cultural, where people again feel, it feels like I just can't match. I can match it on the politics, or I can match it on things that I regard anyways of substance. When, for example, when I see the rise of authoritarianism in former, formerly great democracies, that upsets me because it harms people. And that makes me very angry. And I don't like it when vulnerable people are subjected to cruelties. And so that happens to, I regard that as that high priority. And yet, it doesn't seem to be the case that that would necessarily raise issues of that kind to high priority.
I think it's where that kind of branding, self-branding is now kind of nudging out of the sphere that used to be occupied by politics. Where we used to have maybe a conversation about, what do you think with this issue? What should we do about this? Has been replaced by, for God's sakes, you have to watch Hunting of the Hill House or whatever.
And you see it in a pop cultural way in books, books of the moment, which we've always had and ought to have. My wife, for example, is part of a book club. And the books that they choose are almost always books that I could have predicted that they're going to choose this month. Not just because it's an Oprah pick or something like that. It's just sort of this is the book you will read. And how they receive that message is I don't know if they know it. They all get the memo without actually getting the memo. It's fascinating and frightening to me that that kind of unanimity of presumed taste has already occurred.
BEN
If there was one thing that we haven't talked about that you wish we had, what would that be?
ANDREW
You know, there's so many things. But I think that will increasingly become important to the survival of self. And by that, I mean resistance, resistance, not necessarily just in the sort of Democrats versus Republican sense, although that's a big part of it. And it's not just resistance in the sense of individual against the corporate or it's resistance in kind of in all arenas. I think we must to preserve the idea of a self that the action that defines the self, however, we land on a particular decision or choice, it's almost immaterial. It's the resistance to unanimity, to affiliation, to obligation. It's in the act of resistance that the self might be preserved. If we give up on that, if it just becomes a matter of taste choices, then the self dies. I think my prevailing anxiety going forward for my kids would be, in addition to the practical matters of climate change and those very worrying things, would be finding a space that isn't programmed.
And that's where for me kind of all the roads are leading back to in a way now. And you know, the horror movie aspect of this, I've already mentioned invasion of the body snatchers, but thinking about that, we assume that the invasion will be some kind of alien force that takes us over very involuntarily. I don't think any of those horror scenarios really anticipated how voluntary it will actually end up being. And those people who stand outside of it, the resistors, the survivors, the heroes will be just kind of lonely people kind of looking around sort of wondering like, is anyone else like me? Is there anyone else who's kind of chosen not to go into the mouth of the monster, because everyone else is just kind of delightedly submitting to this thing. And we know it, right? There's headlines every day saying like, "Hey, by the way, your phone is watching you, by the way, it's actually making you depressed." Yes. Well, that's because of the decisions you're making. I'm going to continue to make those choices. Like we're just, all of us are knowingly, willingly doing stuff that makes us miserable.
Did you enjoy this piece? Would you value future interviews like this? If so, would you prefer more or less detail? What kind of questions would you like to be asked? Let me know!
Reading and Listening
More of the What Went Wrong podcast. Specifically: Jurassic Park, Die Hard, Twister and Galaxy Quest.
News
On January 18 I’m joining a roundtable discussion in Dawson for the Arctic Circle Retreat to share my experiences with a few others. That day or the next I’ll be doing a community creative writing workshop—details TBD!
Quote of the Week
“Sometimes people close a door because they’re trying to figure out a way to get you to knock.”
— From The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper