I want to quickly introduce you to Ellen Smith, author of a terrific and well-received book from earlier this year called Reluctant Cassandra — she describes it as Southern Fiction, which could interest a number of you — and the curator of a cool little blog at ellensmithwrites.com, where she does much of what I do here … talk about what motivates us to write, our challenges, share a little something from behind the scenes with those of you watching this whole crazy process from the outside.
I mention her because she’s been hugely supportive of my work after happening upon me on social media, and she reached out to me a couple of weeks ago about doing an interview with me for her blog. It’s pretty humbling to think anyone out there might be interested in hearing my rambling thoughts on whatever’s going on in my life, and I was happy to dive into the project. This morning, she posted the interview, and I think her questions did a good job of making me think about what I’m actually doing here, and why it’s important to me. I’ve included the first question and answer below, but there’s lots more beyond this, including what inspired me to become a writer, how I come up with new story ideas, details on my writing process, and some thoughts on my current novel-in-progress.
Absolutely go read the whole thing at Ellen’s blog. Then keep reading more of her posts after that, which are probably more interesting than reading about me.
Ellen Smith: I was so interested to learn that you were a reporter for over twenty years before you began fiction writing. One thing I loved about Killing the Immortals was your ability to show many different points of view on a complicated issue. Do you think that working in journalism had an influence on your fiction writing style?
Jeff Haws: No doubt, and in all sorts of ways. One of the differences I realized early was when it hit me that there were no excuses anymore. Sometimes, in journalism, you’re just dealt a bad hand. Maybe there’s not much to the topic. Maybe the subject doesn’t do much other than bite his lip and say “Uh-huh” a lot. But you do what you can with what you have, take lemons and make lemonades, all that stuff. What you, of course, can’t do is make up quotes, or facts.
In fiction, though, you have to do exactly that. It was pretty freeing. Character isn’t interesting? “Well, that’s your fault, dummy. Make him interesting.” I wrote mostly sports journalism, and the big thing that makes sports writing hard is you have the factual and structural expectations of news writing alongside the reader-entertainment expectations of music or feature writing. The reader wants to be transported back to the game they watched. They want to identify with the athletes they root for. So my writing is very story- and people-focused, because that’s what journalism taught me. And now with fiction, I can make those stories and people whatever I want. It’s freeing, but there’s also pressure. If it sucks, well, that’s completely on me. If I’m dealt a bad hand, I’m, ya know, the dealer. Hell, I can put the cards in whatever order I want. So, the groundwork is very different from journalism, but the goal is largely the same: write something that doesn’t suck.
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