Q & A with Richard Wagames
Q. When did
you first start writing?
I was a kid, maybe six, maybe seven. I remember
sitting in the
woods behind the house I lived in and writing stories and poems about
the way I wished my life was. I was a foster kid and I felt lost, like
I didn’t belong, didn’t fit, wasn’t
wanted. So I wrote stories, happy stories about family and adventures
and coming home and parties and all the good stuff. Then, I recall
drawing a cover page and threading colored yarn between the three holes
and writing MY STORIES by Richard on the cover. In a way, I guess,
I’m still writing about family and adventures and all the
good stuff.
Q. Who were
your inspirations to become a novelist?
I read everything I could get my hands on from the moment I learned to
read. So my list of inspirations starts a long ways back. Thornton W.
Burgess, J.M. Barrie, Franklin W. Dixon, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Louis
Lamour. That’s who I remember from my boyhood. Later I
wandered into a lot of libraries and discovered Cormac McCarthy,
Richard Russo, Richard Ford, T.C. Boyle, Annie Dillard, Louise Erdrich
and V.S. Naipaul along with the greats like Hemingway, Steinbeck,
Shakespeare, Wharton, Austen and Mark Twain. They all contributed to my
appreciation of the novel form and what was possible.
Q. When did
you first believe you could be a published novelist?
I still don’t believe it. I feel that
being
published is a privilege and I’m graced with that role,
really truly blessed to be able to make my stories available to a broad
range of people. It’s an honor that few of us ever get. But I
suppose, when I got a letter from Doubleday Canada after sending them
the first 150 pages of what would become Keeper’n Me, my
first novel, asking me to finish it and let them be the first to see it
when it was done – that’s when I first really
believed
it was possible. An editor from a major publishing house asking me to
see the finished manuscript. Unbelievable. A definite turning point in
my life.
Q. When do you
write?
I’m a morning writer. There’s
something
about that time of day that’s magical to me and I love to be
up and awake in it and creating. It’s like I can feel the
universe shrugging itself into wakefulness, coming alive again and it
galvanizes my writing energies even without caffeine. I’ve
tried other times of day but there’s nothing like the morning
when you’re fresh and rested to write and create.
Q. What advice
would you give an aspiring novelist or writer in general?
Read. Read everything. Read billboards,
magazines, soup can
labels, anything because there are stories everywhere. If you read as
much as possible it will give you vision and teach you what is good and
what is possible. It will teach you how good stories are put together.
Read. Always. Never stop because reading is the last station on the
railroad of creative writing because a book or a story is never truly
finished until it’s read by someone. Reading will open your
mind and open your spirit to the lavish, magical world of words and
image, of language and structure, and the infinite possibility that
exists to frame your stories in. Then go home and sit down and write.
Q. Is it hard to write a
novel?
It’s hard to write a sentence. A novel
is just a
long line of sentences back to back. You learn to write a good, clean
simple sentence, one that reads well, one that says what you mean to
say, one that invites the reader in, one that opens the door to the
sentence to follow and you can learn to write a novel. It starts with
learning to write a good sentence though. Learn that trick first and
the rest will follow.
Q. Are there other things
we could do to prepare to be a good writer besides reading?
Stories are everywhere. Seek them out. Stories
exist in plays,
in symphonies, in opera, ballet, songs, poems, movies, television
shows, advertisements, magazines and newspapers. The more you watch,
listen, and experience the broader your frame of reference becomes and
the better storyteller you will be. Don’t be content to only
listen to one form of music, see one kind of movie or watch one type of
TV show. I Listen to jazz, folk, gospel, blues, R&B, reggae,
country, classical and rock and roll, for instance. I read history,
science, philosophy, literary fiction, mystery fiction and poetry. It
all adds up and gives you more to work with when it comes time to write.
Q. What do you see
yourself doing in ten years?
I’ll be sitting at a keyboard somewhere
writing
another story. I’ll be older, in my 60s, but young and
resilient enough to create another landscape for people to enter and be
entertained. Writing is my life. It is my soul in its highest
expression of itself and there is nothing in this world that I would
rather do. In ten years, I’ll be doing what I do now, only
better, with more experience and an older, wiser eye and ear.
