An Interview with Peter Owens

Interview questions from professional writer Cathy Houser:

CH: How is writing a novel different from writing short stories or news stories?

A novel is a sustained writing experience that happens over a couple of years and builds its own daily momentum. Characters evolve and grow, generating lives of their own. Short stories for me are a bit like feature articles. While you're working on them, they are very engrossing, and it is satisfying to work at things you can finish in a few weeks. I much prefer writing novels because they offer size and depth. But the time involved is a great professional risk. You can work at a novel for a couple of years and have nothing to show for it. News and feature stories have many elements that are similar to fiction. Scene, setting, action, dialogue, character, story line, description, and vivid writing are all important in today's more visual, action-oriented journalism. One seeming difference is that journalism must be true and fiction is made up, but fiction must have the ring of truth. It must be credible and authentic. A very important element of Rips is my attempt to create a sustained, vivid reality. I also paint, and I would consider myself a bit of a hyper-realist. I think my fiction fits in that mold.

CH: Did you outline the whole book or just let the characters take you on that journey?

PO: Both. I most enjoy the organic, spontaneous development of characters and situations. But historical fiction requires a lot of planning and research which constrain the shape of the book. As I researched Rips, I ran across all kinds of fascinating historical information, and when this happened, I told myself: okay this has to be a big scene. Or, I need to get this into the novel. This required me to plan and generate outlines and a timeline. On the other hand, these planned scenes served also to complicate the lives of characters, and how they managed and coped was not something I planned. In that sense, the characters took me on their own journey, and that was the fun part. I would put them into a situation initially inspired by my research, and then the characters had to scrape and claw to overcome the situations.

CH: This novel has lots of historical underpinnings? Did you have to do a lot of research before you started writing or was it more a process of discovering what you didn't know and having to go find out?

PO: I did a lot of research before I started writing, but as I wrote, I found myself having to do more research. The novel and the research evolved side-by-side, and at times I had to back-peddle and rewrite because I would discover something in my research that altered scenes, facts, details, the time-line, and so forth. But I'm comfortable with that process and have done it as a journalist many times. You reach a point in a feature story where you have unknowns or holes, so you do some more interviews or find needed documents, and then these can alter the story. I would say a rule of thumb for me is that I need to develop a good sense of the time line and major events during the era. I need a good solid landscape before I begin, so that when I'm writing, the new research mostly adds meat to the bones but doesn't turn the novel on its head. I actually enjoy this back and forth process. I write for a month or two, then conduct more intense research for a while; then I go back and write. It's a bit like one of those two-legged races.

CH: People are often curious about a writer's life--how they do what they do. Talk a bit about your process as a writer?

PO: I try to write during protected blocks of time, usually in the morning, though on a good day I can write from let's say 8 am to 5 pm. But often late in the day I get tired and a little sloppy, so I have to be careful, especially when weariness takes me in a bad direction in terms of story line. When I'm teaching and correcting papers and doing bureaucratic work, I need to protect my writing time. Sometimes that means writing for only two or three hours, but I have to get that writing time in. And you never know. Even an hour can sometimes produce a major new idea or scene or development that I can flesh out later. The key for me is consistency in the face of a thousand and one distractions. I need to carve out that "protected" time and go at it, and after a few weeks and months a lot of stuff gets done.

CH: Do you write every day, especially when you are also teaching?

PO: Usually I can't do much writing on the days I teach, so on those days I try to correct my papers and do all my school-related stuff. I try to write three days a week during the school year and five days a week during breaks and during the summer. When I teach classes three days a week, I try to carve some writing time on one of those mornings. It adds up. It helps that I'm a fast writer. I also have a tendency to get obsessed with big projects and that helps me get a lot done. But it can also exhaust me and make me cranky, so I have to guard myself from getting too obsessed.

CH: How has your journalism experience influenced your fiction writing?

PO: Journalism taught me to write fast and furiously. It taught me to always keep the story line front and center and to develop everything with facts, detail, dialogue, and action. Newspaper readers are brutal, and turn away from a story the moment their interest flags even a tiny bit. So I learned through journalism how to be efficient with language and to make every word count. That has helped me enormously because I tend toward being long-winded and tangled in minutia. Journalism also taught me how to take criticism and put it to constructive use. It's not as though I enjoy criticism, but I can usually handle it pretty professionally and make adjustments without getting in a defensive snit.

Journalism also taught me what it is like to have real readers and an acute sense of audience. Some fiction writers like to feel as though they don't have some distinct audience. They don't want to feel inhibited or constrained by that constant nagging presence. But that nagging presence is good for me. I need to try to put my readers first, and if I didn't do that, I would get hopelessly carried away and probably far too precious for my own good. Journalism also taught me about being paid for my work. We're not talking about big-time pay here, but the dignity of being paid for your time, your thoughts, your hard work, and your skills. I learned how to get the job done on time. I learned how to earn my paycheck. And finally journalism taught me about respecting the craft and skills of writing, the tools of the trade. In my enthusiasm I tended toward being a bit loose and undisciplined in my prose habits, and journalism forced me to take much greater care. That was essential for me.

CH: With all of your computer and software authoring experience one might expect you would write fiction that is set in that world, or at least intersects it? You know, "write what you know"? Did this project provide a kind of escape from that virtual world?

PO: Someday I'll probably write about my computer experience, but right now it's a not very interesting fictional world to me. I don't read much fiction about computers, nor am I an avid science fiction or thriller fan, two genres that lend themselves to a lot of computer razzle dazzle. Computers are interesting to me, still, but only in the real world sense, not in a fictional sense.

CH: On a related topic, how do you think computers and the Internet have changed, or will change, the world for writers?

PO: Tricky question. Computers have already changed how people write, quite drastically in my case. I compose on a computer and find word processing quite wonderful for revising. Computers will eventually change the entire book industry. Rips, in fact, is being published by a company that uses computers to print on demand, thus saving money, waste, and distribution costs while supplying books for those who want to read them. I expect that most book publishers will eventually adopt this model rather than generate big press runs and then having to eat remainders.

The Internet has become an enormously important resource for sales and distribution, but the Internet has also become so huge that it's easy to get lost in its enormous shuffle. There are now upwards of 500 million Web sites, so an author trying to get picked out of that unimaginably enormous mass faces daunting obstacles. I have my own quite extensive Web site at www.powens.com but getting people to visit is not easy.

I think it's too early to tell what will happen with computerized books, but most people don't want to read novels while sitting in front of a computer screen. The most important new technology for books will be electronic paper. This will allow a reader to handle a book between covers with pages to turn, yet the content of the pages will be downloaded through a computer or satellite. At first this technology will be expensive, but eventually most books will probably download to paper readers--electronic books, and at that point the industry will be revolutionized. From what I've read, the electronic paper technology is a good five years off, and then there will be another five years or so for the whole thing to shake out and become cheap enough for any kind of mass market use.

Still, writers will have to get known and be recognized through reviews, articles, interviews, and fairly conventional means, or they will just get lost in the giant Internet shuffle. I expect there will be indexes and finder tools that will help readers locate and sort all this stuff, but it won't be easy for writers to get recognized, and it may be even more difficult than it is today. I suspect that the Internet will offer for writers what Napster and similar sites have provided for music: cheap books but in greater abundance and variety than ever before. There will be much greater opportunity to get published but greater obstacles in getting recognized because anyone, really, will be able to publish his or her novel, just as anyone today can develop a Web site and publish on-line.

CH: Do you think it's important for creative writers to have something to fall back on?

For example, teaching or more steady writing like journalism?

PO: Well, unfortunately, I think for 99.9% of writers, yes. Most writers can't make their living writing fiction or poetry, so they need to find ways to pay the bills. The problem with journalism is that it's all-consuming if you want a living wage, so most people don't have the time or energy to write after putting in a day of journalism. Teaching at least offers some workable blocks of time, but many people who teach find it similarly exhausting and diverting. Some writers do manual labor, but getting well-paying part-time work is very difficult. Being a plumber or an electrician, for example, can give you decent money, but you have customers to satisfy or an out-straight employer needs you to fix someone's leaking pipe. In this country there are not many government grants or subsidies available to writers, and given all the controversies about government support of the fine arts, I can't see much change happening in the world of writing. It's very difficult to get academic jobs, at least right now, so I don't have any answers except to say, yes, you'd better have something to fall back on. Even then, you may be looking at a thirty-year detour like mine because even in academia, you need certain publications for tenure and promotions, and publishing novels is far from a certainty.

CH: How hard is it to get an historically-based novel published? Fiction writing is one of a few things that people can do every day for the rest of their lives and still not get published.

PO: Absolutely. Or they might get lucky and publish one novel that doesn't sell very well, and that's it. No one will publish another. Historical fiction is no different and is actually a fairly small genre. I hope I have some good luck, but I know the odds are against me selling a whole lot of books or getting a lot of recognition. I happen to think Rips is a very good book, a very engrossing read. But I'm going to need some important people to express that view, and I just don't know if that will happen. There are a lot of good books out there, a lot of good writers. I think there are a lot of aspiring writers who think they're better than all the writers getting published and comfort themselves by thinking the world of fiction is a wasteland. Baloney. This a very tough business, and there are many fine writers being published today. I would say this: I've paid my dues, but so what?

CH: In some ways, telling stories is an act of faith. What advice do you have for struggling writers trying to get published?

PO: Start by acknowledging how good, how skilled, and how persistent you need to be to compete. Most of my students simply will not hear how difficult it is, nor will they try to understand how good they have to be. They don't work hard enough. They don't study other writers carefully enough. They aren't diverse enough. Look, I got this far because I did all kinds of writing. I was tenacious and was always improving, learning, practicing, getting published, and putting myself in a position to succeed. I don't want to portray myself as some sort of martyr, but thirty years ago I was a good writer, and I've been busting my butt ever since to get better. It just takes a huge commitment. Unlike many professions with entry-level jobs and a great stratification along the career ladder, new writers most often start off competing with the very best and most seasoned professionals. The bottom line is that you have to be good, and while talent plays a big role, this is also an acquired skill. Some can never do it, but those who make it have to work like hell to build skills around their talent so they can at least position themselves to succeed.

CH: You mentioned that Gorham Munson was one of your professors at Wesleyan. What other writers have influenced your writing?

PO: When I was a kid I loved William Faulkner, Mark Twain, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, some of Hemingway, some of Vonnegut. Today I really like Cormac McCarthy, Charles Frasier, Stephen Harrigan, Mary Karr, Bailey White, Annie Proulx, Pam Houston, some of Larry McMurtry, some of E. L. Doctorow especially Welcome to Hard Times, and I'm an old fan of Ernest Hebert who recently published a book set during the French and Indian War that I look forward to reading. Maybe we'll have a revival of the era! Hebert is a fine writer.

CH: What writers do you most admire? Why?

PO: I like all of these folks because they are very robust writers who write with great energy. When I read their stuff, I just want to write myself. They make me feel energized, and I like their gritty, down-to-earth prose. Of all of them, I have to say Cormac McCarthy is to me the most fascinating, but I have to say that Harrigan's The Gates of the Alamo was a masterfully written book that is both gritty and elegant and about as clean a novel as I've read in a long time. These are the kind of writers I read with near obsessive energy and yet hate it when I'm done.

CH: I see you paddling your way down the St. Lawrence River. Have you spent a lot of time on the river? Would you say you know it intimately?

PO: I would say I know my part of the river intimately, but the St. Lawrence is huge and so changeable, it's scary. But I've developed a great love of the river and its rhythms, and it's very much a part of me. When I taught in England for six months, my thoughts were often located at the river, and in many respects it feels to me like home in a very primitive, basic sense of the word, even though my real home is on Cape Cod. I remember the lessons I learned from the old river guide Joe Hart, and while there are certainly people who know even my part of the river better than I do, I feel I'm pretty competent and very respectful of its power and mysteries. It's been a big part of my life from age six until now, and I'm delighted to have finally started writing about it. The river is a big part of Rips and probably its biggest character.

CH: How do you feel about Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s project to preserve and protect the river?

PO: The St. Lawrence has suffered a lot of abuse and pollution from both sides of the border, and while Kennedy's efforts apply more to American waters upriver, I hope he and others succeed. I have a fair amount of admiration for the Canadian government and a very high regard for the Canadian people. It's a wonderful country and so much more humane than America. But the Canadians have not been great stewards of the St. Lawrence, and the heavy metals, PCB's and other dangerous pollutants will pose a problem for many years. I also find the huge preponderance of jet skiis and over-sized powerboats to be depressing. Even these days I hear loons off my island, but their calls are often of distress, and I know someday I will not hear them anymore. I do a lot of kayaking, sailing, and puttering about in a 3HP outboard, and it makes the river so huge, so vast. All of the speed, noise and turbulence are destructive, and these people engaged in this frantic activity are oblivious to the nuances of the river and are brutal to its wildlife. But I don't know how much this can be changed. We're talking about levels of sensitivity, and I see the same clashes on Cape Cod. It just strikes me as so self-defeating. I don't begrudge anyone enjoying the river or the ocean, but speed blunts that enjoyment so thoroughly and shrinks these spaces horribly.

CH: Where did you grow up? There are a lot of different ideas about how writers develop their own individual style. For example, some believe that landscape has a major influence on how a writer writes, not to mention on what they choose to write.

PO: I grew up in the little Village of Prospect in the foothills of the Adirondacks in Upstate New York. Many of the voices in Rips come from that background and, of course, from the St, Lawrence where I visited every spring and summer throughout my life. I don't like cities and consider myself a country boy, at heart. Despite my education in elite universities, I very much admire the common sense and grit of the people populating my childhood in the country and on the river. They seem much closer to elemental truths than urban folks and academics.

CH: The style of this novel is often very muscular and, at the same time, very fluid. Would you say that the landscape that you've spent so much time in, or the river itself, has had an influence on the style of this book or on your writing style in general?

Yes, I think these landscapes are crucial to my writing and what interests me in people who populate them. To me nature is a huge part of my writing, and the list of writers I most admire are mostly country writers whose writing is gritty, energetic, and muscular. And I love the water and the mysteries of wind and waves. And I'm awed by the power of water which contains and conveys such overwhelming and dangerous energy. So when I write about this stuff, I'm completely there, and I suppose it must show; I hope it shows.

CH: You say you're working on a sequel to Rips. What's the focus of that new novel?

PO: The new novel is set again on the St. Lawrence and the region during the War of 1812. It includes some of same the characters and their kin, and once again the chaos of war serves as a backdrop for the struggles of the characters as they try to make a go of it against daunting obstacles.

CH: Do you see this as an ongoing series of novels set on the river?

PO: I'd like to write at least one more river novel after the sequel, maybe more. It depends, but I've got ideas floating around involving World War II as a backdrop. It might involve a character like my uncle and namesake who was shot down in a bomber over Papua New Guinea. He loved the Adirondacks and was apparently a wonderful person. I've written some of his story in the "Tailgunner" section of my Web site. When I say it depends, I mean I hope people want to read this stuff, so I have an opportunity to keep on going!

CH: What's your biggest challenge now as you go forward as a novelist? Can you see these stories as the foundation for a movie?

PO: I think Rips would make a terrific movie, but historical movies are largely shunned by big producers, so who knows? First, Rips needs to get recognized.

CH: Do you have any plans to adapt this material for a screenplay?

PO: I'd rather keep writing the books, and if someone wanted to do a screenplay and I could just help some, that would be fine. But I've only got one life and a finite amount of energy or time. So my preference would be to move forward with new books and hope I'll get some readers. As I said, this is just a small start in a direction I'd love to pursue. But the people who publish books and make movies want to make money, and that requires some sort of following. So I hope I get a few readers. Getting Rips published seems to me to be a baby step. The rest is largely speculation at this point requiring a lot of luck.

Contact: Peter Owens, pvowens@mediaone.net

Last revised: 11-20-2000