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.
