A Writing Conversation with Oliver Shiny
in where we chat about drinks and where stories come from
Welcome to first of the “Writing Conversations” series. As a writer, new to the profession, I’m often curious about other writers’ methods and their take on the Great Work. So, in each article, I reach out to one of these men and women of letters to chat about their work and get a bit behind-the-scenes in their process.
In this story, I talked to Oliver Shiny, also known as Oliver Blakemore. Oliver is the author of many fiction both novel and short story, as well as non-fiction articles on Medium. His prose is poetic and lyrical. He is also the editor of Spin This, Mosaic Playbill, and Operation: Spotlight. What struck me when I first met Oliver was also that he was a great networker of writers, a bit of a patron to many on their lonely journey of writing. He has certainly been one of the ones that made me feel welcomed in the Medium community. And so, naturally, I reached out to him to be my guinea pig in this new project.
R: Tell us a bit about yourself. Where did writing all start for you?
O: I don’t remember the first time I thought that I ought to write stories, because I think it’s something as much part of my makeup as the first time I wondered why a box of books is so heavy. One book is not, why should a box of them be? I grew up with a huge respect for books. So I can’t really remember the moment when writing and I started our inglorious, haphazard raggedness.
I can remember the first moment that I thought to myself, “You know, I want to do this. I want to wrestle with writer’s block for the rest of my life. Come at me, boredom!” I was thirteen, and I had a great idea for a movie. I looked around at my resources at thirteen — limited, I was homeschooled and paralytically shy — and pondered what I could do with them. “I know!” I said — well, thought, as I was disinclined to speak in those days — “I know what I’ll do! I shall write the story down, and perhaps make it as a movie someday. A book’s as good as a movie. Better, in many ways.” I don’t remember ever thinking that I ought to be a movie director again after that.
R: Where do you find your inspiration?
O: You can’t see my mild, ironical smile. Trust me, it’s crooked and wild-minded. See…inspiration and I have a funny relationship. I definitely believe in the existence of being lit by lightning and flying into frightful word-fraught finagling. I believe in the muse, I believe in the eternal story speaking through me. I believe in all that…
But — an’ this but causes huge arguments with the Muse when she catches up to me sometimes — I don’t have the patience to wait around for that lightning. Not usually. I imagine you didn’t mean it that ephemerally, but it so happens I ponder on this subject a lot, so there’s the ephemeral answer.
The practical answer is that I’m inspired by unexpected connections. Like, with my current novel, it started out when I wanted to write some Napoleonic Era navy fiction, sailing ships and things, but realized that I’d have trouble with it because I’ve never lived near the ocean. But I have lived on or near prairies my whole life. So then I imagined the sound of a sailing ship cruising through long grass. I couldn’t shake that image. I wanted to understand how it could work. I usually start with a contrast like that. A cloud you can stand on — what’s with that? An island that flies in the air — why? An eighty-year-old man eating a box of Rocket Pops by himself — how come? Being the one sad member of a laughing audience at a comedy show — explanation, please?
These sorts of images start me going. Although, usually, there’s no story in them. They’re just images. So I remember them, and wait, and then the real inspiration happens when the images collide with some other image and some conflict reveals itself. In my view, stories are essentially about conflict resolution. When an odd image collides with an unsettled scenario, then I find stories.
R: When you do find the stories in those conflicting images, are they already roughly fully formed? Or do the stories unfold themselves to you as you write?
O: Another odd question for me. I’m a bit of a story follower. For at least the first outline, but often all the way through the first draft, I experience the adventure with my characters as much as I can manage. I usually begin with an idea about the image surrounding the final resolution of the story, but only a vague idea of what happens between the beginning and that image of the end.
And although I don’t know the events of the story, but I have found that I do distinguish between story ideas with a whole story in them, or ideas that haven’t got all the elements yet. I hope to figure this out better some day, because right now it’s a bit fuzzy. What I mean is that, when I’ve got the idea, I kind of let the emotional landscape of it play out, without concentrating on the events, and I can kind of instinctively tell if there’s a whole story there or if it’s missing something. For instance, I recently wrote a story about a small game trapper who helped some vampires set a trap for a werewolf, and I knew that the idea had a whole story in it. And now I want to write a sequel in which that same small game trapper helps those same vampires track a ghost, and for some reason I have an instinct that the second idea about the ghost is missing something. Not sure what, but I’ll get there.
So I guess the answer is that I don’t know all the events of the story ahead of time, but I rarely set out on a story without feeling confident that it’s got enough events in it to get the story told.
R: Your answers are as poetic as your writing itself. How did you develop into this writing style? How has your writing style evolved over time?
O: I developed it through impatience mainly, I think. I’m always learning by emulating writers I like; when a passage or story particularly affects me I try to capture whatever happened in that passage myself. You know the feeling, I’m sure. I mean the feeling that the words you’re reading are more full than words usually are — they open up your mind and allow you more sight than you had. I love those moments, when it’s like looking through a window made of poetical scratchings — like you’re not even reading but watching.
I wish I could say that my style developed mainly from the careful study and emulation of that kind of writing. And it has to an extent. My style is a bit of a mix of tricks from everyone I’ve read whose work I’ve admired, retooled to suit my voice and my ideas and my feelings of course.
But mainly, my style is the product of impatience. You see, my thoughts go much faster than my fingers, typing or writing with a pen, and my entire writing career has consisted of a sort of fight between what my imagination is saying and what the writing part can manage to write of it. My style has developed out of necessity to be as expressive as possible as swiftly as possible. Not because my thoughts are particularly brilliant, but because they’re always threatening to veer off onto tangents, and I need to write quickly in order to finish what I’m thinking right now.
Thank you for complimenting the poetical style. I’ve been mortally afeared for these past years that my style’s been going bland. My discipline has been to get nearer to a purer expression of what I think and how I feel, and I’ve been afraid I’ve been sacrificing eloquence for clarity. I suppose that sort of answers the second part of your question as well. Since I started writing, I’ve always sought the clearest and prettiest way of saying anything. I’d like to think that my style has mainly evolved into a more elegant version of itself.
R: What are the writing tools of your choice? What are things you cannot do without in your writing process?
O: Technique. That may sound a little precious, but I mean it seriously. I have rather a zooming-about lifestyle and an even more zipping-around mind, and it’s difficult for me to either sit still or to settle into routines. I don’t usually rely on consistent locations or beverages or equipment. I like exploring new coffee shops and things, and I’m always misplacing notebooks. I’ve taken to saving my documents on the internet so that I can work on them from any computer with internet access.
I do occasionally require some quiet nook and some comforting drink to write certain kinds of things, it is true. For the most part, I can only rely on having one tool with me when I am writing: my mind. Because of this, I fill my brain with as much helpful stuff as I can manage. Some of it sticks, fortunately. Also, as much as I can manage, I only write with a black pen, and I only edit with a blue pen. And I like to listen to music. I am easily distracted by random sounds, and music helps me to avoid hearing them.
R: What’s your favourite drink to accompany your writing so far of all the ones you’ve tried?
O: Earl Grey tea with sugar and lemon, probably. I often change drinks, though. I find that variation stimulates my imagination. I can tell you one drink that I probably shan’t ever write with again, though: Maker’s Mark Rye. I tried to write while tipsy once. It turns out that I’m quite ignorant about alcohol and I did it wrong. I got drunk before I got that mild tipsy that I was aiming for, and I spent the rest of the night wishing that I hadn’t. Beverages are essential for my writing, though. I burn up a lot of energy when I write, and I’m liable to get dehydrated. I need water, at the very least.
R: Where can readers find some of your work?
O: My work is scattered about a bit. One place they can find my work is on my Medium profile. I keep the fiction at the top, because it’s the work that most pleases me. You can also find some of my work in a collective called daCunha.global, which is the home of a creative collaboration I’m involved in — a sort of next generation publishing engine that’s worth checking out.
Also, since I’ve got a moment to indulge in some self-promotion — -generally abhorrent to me, but we must sometimes indulge in self-promotion as writers — I’m also making myself public through Patreon.com (where I’m called Oliver Blakemore, penname); there I shall soon be sharing chapters of my novel, with them showin’ the right coin to procure the goods. I’m basically just a pusher, but a pusher of literature, so I figure I’m still taking the moral high ground.
Oh! And I’m excited to be involved with a publication on Medium called Mosaic Playbill, which encourages writers — sort of a support group and critique group sort of deal. You can find some of my writing and the writing of a handful of other writers there, most of them with a talent to utterly eclipse mine. I like promoting things.
R: One last question for those of us aspiring writers. What’s one piece of advice you would share?
O: Do the work. People will tell you to stop wasting your time. Don’t stop. You matter. Burn it.
You can also follow Oliver on Twitter (@olivershiny) or on Facebook.
Got some thoughts on writing you’d like to share? I’d love to interview you! Give me a shout at renee@wiredcrow.com.
