One of the reasons I joined FanStory was to have fun writing and hopefully learn to be a better writer.

I learned a lot when I interviewed some of the writers who had been on-site for a while. Last spring, I interviewed Jay Squires. This past year (2022), Jay was selected FanStory's writer of the year.

Jay recently published three books that are available on Amazon. Just search his name on Amazon. His books are a treat.

I offer this repost for new members and others who may have missed it.

I think the interview is very fun and insightful. Jay has been writing a long time, and he retains his joy for the craft. 

 

Terry Broxson, Moderator

WHAT DO YOU LIKE BEST ABOUT WRITING?

Jay Squires:


 After 67 years of almost daily writing, I still face the frightful blank screen and a dull, stupid torpor at 7:30 every morning. Something inside me is compelled to communicate with my fingers. It can be scary. That, for me, is an unalterable reality. And it’s daily.

The only difference is what gets me to my computer every day in the first place. And that is what has morphed over time. In the beginning, it was those heady dreams of fame. At about mid-life, it was the flickering possibility of finding wealth and independence through the written word.

Then, some twenty years ago, I found myself (after failing in both the above), watching a slow and rather peculiar incubation going on in my creative process. If a woman’s entire nine-month pregnancy can be considered a preparation for birthing, I was definitely in my first trimester. While a woman has a pretty good idea of what her baby will look like … I had (and have) no clue of what, if anything, my incubation will produce. 

My incubation continues within my creative process, and if I’m not mistaken, that is what your question, is asking. What keeps me getting up every morning at 7:30?

Facing that screen … as my mind dully chums the surface with a new word combination—chooses the flamingo-like dance that a short sentence brings, or the sinewy waltz of a compound sentence—choice-making is the constant of the surface mind. But what my creative mind, below the surface, is scanning for is a wordless feeling. 

Today, my greatest joy is chasing that elusive feeling through my daily process of creating. Bear with me … but I can best describe this feeling as watching a beautiful young butterfly through the lens of a camera. You try to keep it at close range and in perfect focus, but as it dips and flits, as it soars and flutters, it keeps sliding in and out of focus.

That butterfly is the feeling my writing searches for each day. Once I find that feeling, once I become that fledgling butterfly, it can sustain me for hours, and those hours fly by like minutes.

Do I blend into—do I become that butterfly—often? Not as often as I’d like. For each encounter, there are days, preceding and following it, that are terribly, often painfully, unrewarding. But its next arrival is worth all the struggle that went before. It’s what makes my daily encounter with the blank screen worthwhile.


DO YOU HAVE A PROCESS OR FORMULA FOR WRITING?


Jay Squires:
 

I spent one summer as a broke, tanned and eager 21-year-old working in the garden of the Mildred Reid’s Writer Colony, earning my tuition. For three months she drilled into our heads the formula for writing a romance novel. I left there with the unshakable conviction that there is NO formula for writing an honest novel, be it a romance, kiddy fiction, or the next Great American Novel. [… or British, or Australian, or Spanish]

There is process, and we all have to discover our own for ourselves. I believe the first quarter of our writing life is spent making that discovery. 

I was always a seat-of-your-pants-er. That is at one end of the process spectrum. At the other end is the outliner. Obviously, one can fall anywhere in that great pasture in between. 

I am more-or-less at the extreme end. That is, I start with a character. I don’t even know him or her very well at the beginning. That character has to be somewhere. That’s the setting and also the beginning of the plot. Since I don’t want that character to be a deadly bore, I create barely believable problems to encounter and solutions that require super-human (and character-changing) courage and determination.

The problem is that a seat-of-your-pants writer is very wasteful. For every five of my completed pages, there are at least ten pages pasted into my ever-growing out-takes file. That material is never completely wasted. I’ll scavenge from it shamelessly for other stories. But it’s wasteful for the one I’m working on.

If I should reincarnate once again into a writer instead of a sloth, a rabbit, or a tree, I would force myself to sketch out a rough outline of each story ahead of time and consider it the foundation that gives my edifice strength at its core.

But alas! it won’t happen in this life, I’m afraid.


YOU ARE A GOOD REVIEWER OF OTHER PEOPLE'S WORK. WHAT DO YOU LOOK FOR WHEN YOU REVIEW THEM?


Jay Squires:
 

When I choose a story to read I have only one expectation. I expect to be—I choose to be—a willing captive of that writer as long as she/he keeps my eyes moving across that page and down. The movement is entirely unconscious and mechanical, of course. What really is going on is a kind of alchemical, magical transformation that takes me from word to image.

And image is what I want to focus on with this question.

At some point, anyone who has received multiple reviews from me has suffered through my metaphor of “the movie theater of one’s mind.” That is EXACTLY what goes on during that period of captivity when I am reading yours or another’s writing. It occurs whether I’m reading Hemmingway’s, The Sun Also Rises or Faulkner’s As I lay Dying, or whether it’s from the intelligent and prolific pen of Lyenochca, or from the equally prolific, but zany, slightly-out-of-focus brain of Bill Schott.

It comes from my expectation as I sit, tub of popcorn in my lap, and watch the movie unfold on the screen of my mind. Any distraction that reminds me I’m watching a movie is, of course, unwelcomed. 

Imagine Brad Pitt in a torrid love scene with Penelope Cruz when she pulls abruptly away from their embrace and says, “Geez, Brad, I can only hold my breath so long. Did you have tacos last night?”

Similar distractions can occur when I’m reading your FanStory posts. I may be watching myself on the back of a medieval dragon who was floating along in the author’s past tense voice when suddenly I am on the same scaly back but in the present tense. It’s like a cellphone ringing in the theater. I’m back munching popcorn and wondering what’s for dinner tonight. 

Tense-slipping is but one of the many triggers that, when pulled, shoot me out of my movie screen illusion. The purpose of this question, though, is not to point to all these triggers.

But it does point to one all-important constant. As writers, we must always keep our readers’ interests in mind. Our readers are like customers in the marketplace: the reader is always right. That’s why I’m such a stickler in my own posts and in the posts I’m reviewing for adhering to the small things.

Take the EM-dash (—), for example. It’s like a giant magnet for HTML garbage. FanStory’s editor, I call the editnazi, is a finicky little bitch and it’s not gonna change. So it’s up to each of us to scrape that garbage away from either side of that EM-dash. Why bother? Because it’s ugly, that’s why. And it’s the fart in the movie theater.

The next biggest offender is spacing between paragraphs. FanStory’s advanced editor (and that’s the only one the writer who wants to control the nuances of his/her writing should use), removes all the spaces between paragraphs after you paste your text in. It’s our responsibility to put them back in, while thumbing our nose at the editnazi.

Improper spacing between paragraphs, and not putting an extra space between scenes, is actually the first thing I look for. After being briefly teased by the title and the lead picture, but before I let that first paragraph set its sharp hook in my jaw … you’ll find my eyes scanning down that page looking for white space between chunks of writing. Each white space will be a fresh gulp of air as I read. All our minds crave that white space. Our minds need air.

Knowing that, I am amazed at how many posts I scan that are solid, unscaleable (to me), walls of words. When this happens, I will often use my review to let the writer know that folks ain’t gonna read it the way it stands. Then, after explaining what they need to do, I ask them to let me know when they’ve made the corrections so I can truly review their post for content.

An equal, if not bigger, offender than lack of breathing space is font size. I believe that FS’s pre-set font is 10. I do not use less than a 16. (For my plays I use an 18 font size.) While it’s true that the reader can increase font size by simply pushing the Ctrl button and tapping the + key, as a writer we can’t assume our reader knows that. Two months ago I didn’t know it. So … in this and in all things …

Make your first impression on the reader a lasting one.