Today we are talking to Canadian speculative writer and editor Jordan Lapp. Jordan Lapp is a first prize winner of the well-known Writers of the Future contest. He is also an editor at Every Day Fiction.

IFP: When did you start writing? How did that come about?

JL: Like many budding writers, it was right around the time I read Lord of the Rings. You could say that it was the novel that launched a thousand careers. I fell into the trap of only writing pastiches, but hey, I was eight years old. What can you expect?

I began writing seriously about four years ago. The Vancouver Courier, a small regional newspaper, was holding a short fiction contest, and I decided to enter. The number of stories received would be capped at 125, so I wrote my piece and stood in line to submit it to their office at 8am on the only day they were reading. My story ended placing fourth (in the money) and I realized I could do this writing thing. From there, a google search for “writing contests” led me to the Writers of the Future, and I would enter nearly every quarter until I won.

IFP: Are there some recurring themes in your writing?

JL: Absolutely. Sudden death is a concept that fascinates me because it seems like people these days have much more to lose than they did in years past. More schooling is required to land a decent job; housing demands more of your income; and with the plight of Social Security, retirement looks more and more expensive. So, we spend much of our lives saving for a future date. What if that date never comes?

My stories often revolve around people who’ve spent all of their lives preparing for their future, only to realize that future may never materialize. My Writers of the Future winning story, “After the Final Sunset, Again”, addresses an extreme version of this question.

IFP: Plot or character. Which one is more important?

JL: It depends on the market.

These days, it seems like plot-driven writing is commonly known as “hack writing”. You see it a lot in media fiction. Character-driven fiction is much more powerful and long-lasting in the minds of your readers, but much more difficult to write. This is why you mainly see character-driven fiction in the pro magazines. Those markets are so competitive, they can pick and choose from among the best, and only the best are able to write sympathetic and engaging characters.

IFP: Do you have a favourite genre or subgenre?

JL: I’d have to say that Urban Fantasy is most intriguing to me. It’s generally more accessible to the average reader, and you have to spend much less time world-building. If you say “John drank a Coke,” your reader will know what that is. You don’t have to describe a “brown, fizzy beverage”. This leaves you more room to develop compelling characters and, in my opinion, this is why the genre is really exploding.

IFP: What do you do when you experience writer’s block?

JL: Write anyways.

It’s my firm belief that writer’s block is simply what you call it when you’re too hard on yourself and your writing. So, acknowledge that you’re writing terribly and write anyways. My writing group calls this “producing a SFD (Shitty First Draft)”, but I think it’s common to talk about turning off your internal editor. You put words on the page, no matter how terrible they are, and then go back and revise for your second draft.

IFP: You are a first place Writers of the Future winner and recently attended their writing workshop. What was that experience like?

JL: Amazing. Judge after judge told us it would never get that good again, and I believe them. I’ve posted a pretty thorough workshop description on my blog (http://www.jordanlapp.com/withoutreallytrying), but in short, you get flown in to wherever Author Services Inc. is holding the awards ceremony, put up in a five star hotel, and given a week-long writing workshop by some of the most amazing writers around. All on their dime. The prize money ($1000 in my case, with an additional $500 for publication in the anthology) is just the icing on the cake.

More important are the contacts you make. All of the judges were incredibly friendly to what was basically a group of unknowns, and went out of their way to make us feel welcome.

At the workshop, I had the opportunity to meet Luke Eidenschink, one of the illustrator winners. I was impressed with his artwork, which was very true to the style you might see in graphic novels. I asked him if he’d ever considered working on one, and he confessed that he had, but that he was an illustrator at heart and wasn’t enthusiastic about the stories he’d come up with. I mused that it would be nice if he could meet a few good writers, and the rest is history. We’re currently in the planning stages of producing a post-apocalyptic graphic novel.

IFP: Can you tell us a bit about “After the Final Sunset, Again”, your winning story? What’s it about?

JL: “After the Final Sunset, Again” is the story of a woman with the qualities of a Phoenix, the mythical bird who is reborn in flame. Unlike the myth, this Phoenix lives for only a day, and during that time is guided to accomplish certain tasks by a faceless deity. At the moment of her birth, she has a brush with Death and it is so terrifying that she resolves to find some way to live past sunset, thus sparking the rest of the story.

IFP: So what’s the secret to winning Writers of the Future? Any tips for writers submitting to it?

JL: Write an amazing story. Of course, this is also the secret to achieving literary immortality, so I’ll try and expand on it to deal with Writers of the Future specifically.

First, buy and read the anthology. There’s only one a year, and it’s about the price of a Starbuck’s coffee. K.D. Wentworth, the coordinating judge, picks all the finalist stories on her own (the winners are picked by a panel of judges), and though her tastes are varied, they are specific to her, and you can figure them out in a general sense by reading the anthology.

Second, don’t disqualify yourself right out the gate. The anthologies sell to high schools, so no gratuitous swearing or sex scenes. Note the word “gratuitous”. “After the Final Sunset, Again” begins with a naked woman rising from a bathtub, so nudity doesn’t automatically disqualify you. “Tasteful” is the word of the day.

Third, do have speculative content in the first page or two. Seems unfair, but KD gets so many submissions that don’t match the contest specs that she doesn’t have time to read a story that may not be speculative. She told us she gets cookie recipes and high school history essays, so make sure that she knows that your entry fits the guidelines in the first couple of paragraphs.

Fourth, if you read the anthology, you’ll notice that the primary characteristic among the winners are original ideas. I don’t care how original your vampire fiction is, once you insert the word “vampire”, believe me, it’s been done. Write the most original piece you can.

I did a ton of research on the contest while I was entering it and centralized what I could on a page on my website. Your readers are welcome to consult it, and contact me if they have further questions: http://www.jordanlapp.com/withoutreallytrying/writers-of-the-future-resources/.

IFP: You attended Clarion West recently and blogged about it. For our readers who may not understand what the big deal is, why is this workshop so important?

JL: The workshop is important because it is taught by the most decorated speculative fiction authors in the field, and tends to turn out at least a couple of professional authors every year.

First, the workshop is six weeks long and costs a couple of thousand dollars, so the participants are generally pretty serious about their craft. You live in a sorority house for six weeks with 17 other writers at about your skill level. This is the real benefit. Every writer has strengths and weakness. When I was in the workshop, my strengths were concept, setting and plot. My weaknesses were character and voice. By studying writers with opposite strengths, I was able to strengthen my craft dramatically. The stories I’ve written since the workshop have been much stronger as a result.

Finally, Clarion West, in particular, is at the center of the speculative fiction community in Seattle. They hold readings and throw parties, so you get to make contacts, not just with your instructors, but also with amazing local writers like Nancy Kress and Elizabeth Gunn.

IFP: What were the best and the worst parts of the Clarion experience?

JL: The best part was meeting 17 other students who are as dedicated to improving their craft as I was and learning to improve my own writing from studying theirs. We still communicate via a google group, and we’re determined to be the “next generation” of speculative writers.

The worst part was getting a bad reception to the story I wrote on my second week. At the time, I thought I’d written the best piece I’d produced so far, one that had pushed my boundaries as a writer, and when it got torn apart by the class I was devastated. However, like everything else at Clarion West, this was a learning experience, and I’m glad it happened.

IFP: What was the most important thing you learned at Clarion West?

JL: I was the first student at Clarion West ever to win Writers of the Future, and then attend. Usually, it works the other way around. I knew I’d written a good story in “After the Final Sunset, Again”, but I didn’t know how I’d done it. What was different about that story that allowed it to succeed where others had fallen flat?

In the end, it was Character. My WotF piece had been written from 1st person POV, and then rewritten into 3rd person, which had artificially forced me to write deep in the Phoenix’s head. Clarion West helped me to realize this and allowed me to focus on strengthening weak areas of my craft.

IFP: Clarion West requires a constant output of stories during a very short period of time. How did you find inspiration to keep churning out stories?

JL: I know some of the other writers struggled with this, and it’s true that you don’t have to produce six stories while you’re at the workshop, but I wanted to stretch my limits. Once I vowed to write the required stories, ideas came to me right on time like they were arriving by conveyor belt. There’s something about being in that kind of creative environment that really gets the neurons firing. However, if we’d gone longer than six weeks, this might have become counterproductive. A lot of the final stories turned in for critique contained tons of in-jokes and nods to Clarion West.

IFP: You are also an editor at Every Day Fiction. Why did you decide to go the editing route?

JL: We are in a time of dramatic change in the short fiction industry. Magazines are increasingly going online, but they are simply taking their old business model and digitizing it.

The most popular websites these days in terms of hits are blogs, and all the top blogs have content that is updated several times a day. Subscribe to Boing Boing, Engadget, or io9 to see what I mean. Even John Scalzi, sci-fi’s poster boy for blogging, usually updates his blog three or four times a day. And yet magazines have always been published quarterly, and so magazine publishers are still only publishing new fiction to their sites every three months. For the rest of the year, those sites are static.

People don’t like static websites. They want new content every time they visit a site. With that insight in mind, Camille Gooderham Campbell, Steven Smethurst, and I set out to create Every Day Fiction. This site would feature a new flash fiction story (the perfect length for the average surfer to consume) every day.

Has the experiment worked? Kind of.

Our audience is huge. We have more visitors on the average month than any of the pro magazines have subscribers, with some stories attracting reads in the hundreds of thousands. On the other hand, we haven’t received much critical acclaim. As far as I can see, there are several reasons for that: 1. We’re not a genre magazine because we also publish contemporary fiction, and we’re not a lit magazine because we publish genre stories; no one knows what to do with us. 2. Our pay rates are low. Even though we pay, in aggregate, about what a semi-pro mag pays writers for its quarterly issues (often far more), per story we pay under 1c/word. A lot of top talent won’t write for that rate, despite the size of our readership.

IFP: What do you prefer: writing or editing?

JL: Editing is rewarding in its own way, but if the choice comes down to editing or writing, I’ll take writing every time.

IFP: Who is your favourite author and why?
JL: I enjoy stories rather than authors. I suppose, if my back is against a wall, I enjoy Stephen King because of his incredible characterization and his uncanny use of atmosphere, I respect China Miéville for writing painfully original fantasy, and I love Orson Scott Card for entertaining the heck out of me.

IFP: Is there something you see too little of in speculative fiction right now? Or too much?

JL: Too much Tolkienesque settings. Too little Tolkienesque settings.

Confused? Let me elaborate: authors of the speculative fiction field refer to a particular kind of story as having the “default European setting”. Stories with this setting often indicate a failure of imagination on the part of an author who has read Tolkien and his legion of imitators.

Many writers don’t realize that in Fantasy, you can do anything. Anything at all. Cities in the sky? Of course! Fish that breathe air and ride to war on donkeys? Absolutely (but good Lord, you’d better be an amazing writer to pull that off). Why should we be confined to knights and dragons?

On the other hand, the response to the charge of using “the default European setting” is simply to translate that failure of imagination to a different setting. We now have “default Asian setting”. Often, these are poorly-researched pieces that mix Korean, Japanese, and Chinese mythology indiscriminantly. This is worse than the European setting because of that underlying ignorance.

IFP: Do you think that speculative writing from Canada and the U.S. are different? How?

JL: Not that I’ve noticed. Something like 90% of Canada’s population lives within 20 miles of the U.S. Border. There’s so much U.S. programming on the radio that we have legislated that a mandatory 35% of radio content must be Canadian.

In terms of sci-fi and fantasy, well, we have award-winning writers like Robert J. Sawyer, Nalo Hopkinson, and Dave Duncan. Do they have any unifying traits? I’m not sure they do.

IFP: If you could look into a crystal ball, where would you say the future of speculative writing lies?

JL: There is a real division in the field right now. Tim Powers and Rob Sawyer both advised me at the WotF workshop to avoid writing media tie-ins. Ted Chiang gave a talk at Clarion West arguing the same thing. He claimed that it cheapened fiction in general and that we should create our own universes, not live in the creative content of others.

On the other hand, I also met Kevin J. Anderson, Sean Williams, and Steve Savile, who all write media-ties and make a handsome living at it. I see no shame in what they’re doing at all. All of them write tie-ins and original work.

In the old days, writers were funded by “patrons”, usually local Lords and Ladies. In exchange for producing propaganda and the occasional flattering poem, writers were paid to turn out their own great works. This is where I see the field heading. Writers will produce fiction for “patrons”, which will be large franchises like Star Wars and Warhammer in order to fund their own Great Works.

Two authors who might be good examples of this are Tobias Buckell and Greg Bear, both of whom are writing Halo novels.

IFP: What are you working on right now?

JL: I’m currently adapting “After the Final Sunset, Again” into a novel and rewriting my Clarion West short stories. I wasn’t particularly proud of the work I produced during the workshop, but knowing what I know now about creating strong characters, I’m pretty sure I can rewrite them so that they sell.

IFP: Do you have a favourite Lovecraft/Mythos story? If so, which one is it?

JL: I’ve read a few Lovecraft pieces (”Call of Cthulhu”, “Rats in the Walls”), but believe it or not, my favourite Lovecraft/Mythos story is written by Stephen King. I found “Crouch End” in Dark Descent, an anthology edited by David G. Hartwell, and I was spellbound by its atmosphere.

IFP: If you could be a Lovecraft/Mythos monster or character, which one would you be? Why?

JL: Wow. One of the things I admire most about Lovecraft is that his monsters and gods are so alien they are, by definition, beyond human comprehension. His characters, on the other hand, almost uniformly suffer gruesome deaths or are driven mad by their experiences. I don’t think I’d want to be any of them.

IFP: Thank you for your time.

Bio: Jordan is a recent first place winner of the prestigious Writers of the Future contest. Jordan is also a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and is a member of both Codex and the Spec24 Writing group. In 2007, Jordan decided to give back to the short fiction community and founded Every Day Fiction, a flash fiction magazine specializing in complete stories you can read in 5 to 10 minutes.

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