Vin Suprynowicz and Scott Bieser
[Continued from page 1]
SUNNI: Sounds like it ... Did you and Neil work closely on your graphic novel interpretation of The Probability Broach? Or did you simply get the okay from him for the idea, and run with it by yourself?
SCOTT: Neil and I worked closely on the graphic novel. We spent a couple of weeks working up the "look" of the main characters, and Neil wrote a complete comic-book script for the graphic novel, based on his original book. In the beginning, as I was drawing the book I would see something I wanted to change to make it look better or read better, and I'd e-mail him and wait for a response before continuing. By the time we were halfway through the book, Neil said, "Scott, I trust you and know that you understand this story as well as anyone. Go ahead and make whatever changes you deem appropriate." I always sent him notices when I made changes, but we never had any real disagreements on how to do this book.
SUNNI: I'm not usually a big fan of graphic novels or comics in general, but I really enjoyed your vision of The Probability Broach. Why did you decide to do it, and what do you hope to accomplish with it -- other than making some money, of course?
SCOTT: It was our mutual friend, the late, great Lux Lucre (AKA Kerry Pearson), who suggested doing a comic-book mini-series. Neil wasn't too keen on trying to break his story into six or eight episodes, and I'm not keen on the 32-page comic-book format anymore -- I think it's a doomed format. So Neil and I worked up some sample pages for a graphic novel -- they're the future -- and I shopped the book around for publishers. Finding none, I convinced my brother to start a new company, BigHead Press, to publish the work. What we hope to accomplish, besides making money, is to expand the audience for Neil's work. No one besides Heinlein has been better at presenting libertarian ideas in an entertaining way.
SUNNI: Many writers who dabble in both areas say that writing fiction well is much more difficult than nonfiction. That seems to dovetail with my perception as a reader: few nonfiction writers transition successfully to fiction. Vin, you're a notable exception to that pattern, and I'm wondering if you have any ideas on why you not only succeeded, but have done so well in creating a story, characters, and an environment that many readers find so engaging.
VIN: Journalism is good training for other kinds of writing, but only up to a point. It teaches you craft. You learn to organize your thoughts on the fly and write short and get to the point. Picking out the one cogent detail instead of describing someone right down to the color of their socks, which usually reveals nothing. You're not there to take an inventory, you're looking for that one detail that tells the story. She hasn't fixed her own sweater but the dog's sweater is neatly mended, whatever. You work fast and you write a lot so you get better. I'd still tell any young writer to go write professionally for a newspaper or magazine for awhile. It bakes out that temptation to write purple prose. You need to see a good editor lop all that stuff off and throw it on the floor. You're learning a craft, and one of your tools is a great big pair of scissors. But then there comes a day when you've done it too long. Fiction demands that we get inside the character and hear her thoughts and suffer with her and exult with her, but journalism trains you to stay on the surface, only to write what you can see and prove.
So if you're meant to write fiction, you go home at midnight frustrated and you pour all that love and hate and frustration into pages and pages of stuff that you have no idea how you're ever going to use. It's either that or eventually they beat it out of you; you stop putting in those off-the-wall details and those rambling ungrammatical verbatim quotes that actually sound like the way real people talk, and you're dead. You're embalmed as a writer; you just don't know it yet. I see it all the time. It's a little scary, 'cause newspaper writing is a steady paycheck. But in the end, your daily paper wants nice, safe, inoffensive stuff to wedge in between the brassiere ads on page 4 and that special on motor oil down at Checker Auto Parts in the Sports section. Newspaper readers write in to complain if you run a photo of a stripper to illustrate a story on a topless clubs, even if she's partially hidden and you can't see a thing. It's the idea of showing the stripper that offends them. "This is a family newspaper!" Well, where do they think goddamned families come from, underneath the cabbage leaves?
You can tell them 12 guys got blown up in Baghdad every day of the week, but don't show them a single photo of a real dead body or they'll cancel their subscription. It just got to be time for me to write the gory photos and show the stripper's tits, that's all. I like tits, and I think we have to look at death to understand life, and I've passed all my exams and got gold stars on all my papers; I've got nothing left to prove and I don't give a damn if people look at me funny, any more, because I'm right. I'm quite often shockingly right. The sleeper is awake. When journalism gets afraid to cover reality, we go back to writing reality and we call it fiction.
SUNNI: Would you consider online writing as professional writing? I don't mean a personal blog -- but maybe a politically-oriented one, or an online 'zine like The Libertarian Enterprise or Lew Rockwell.com?
It's hard to answer because that's so broad. I just don't know how they all work. But the basic criterion is you have to do it for money. Not forever -- there's a risk of getting comfortable and sticking at it for 20 years till your stuff has about as much individuality as a Keebler cookie. But for a couple years, at least, you have to depend on it to pay the rent, you have to work for an editor who can give you a raise or get you fired, or transferred to taking classified ads over the phone. It's a hidden benefit of capitalism that hardly anybody ever talks about. Because as long as everybody is a volunteer they can say "Oh, that's very nice dear, thank you so much (bless her heart)"; no one ever calls you on your rambling attempts to channel the Bronte sisters. So the learning curve never really gets started. But if you need that paycheck to pay the rent you grit your teeth and mutter what an insensitive bastard he is and you learn to do it his way; you get hammered out in the forge, you get purified in that fire. You learn to write crisp and short without a wasted word.
So, later, when you've been through that bloodbath, you've earned your stripes, then you can start to fool around with the formulas, break them down the way Coltrane and Parker broke down the tunes and played them from the inside out. But you've internalized that editor, his voice is always there for you in your ear, going, "Oh great, Heathcliff on the moor! How many pages of this crap do you think they're going to put up with? You do know what they invented wastebaskets for, don't you?"
SUNNI: While we're still somewhat on the subject of fiction and nonfiction, I'm sure you've heard about Hunter S Thompson's suicide yesterday. What are your thoughts on the gonzo journalist's approach to writing?
VIN: I just filed a column on Dr. Thompson. My subscribers will see it. I admired his writing, his style. I was a huge fan. But in the end I think he got trapped in his own myth, always having to top himself. Once Johnny Depp plays you in the movie and you're a running character in Doonesbury, how do you turn that off? Easy for us proles to sit here in the dirt saying, "You shouldn't have fallen for your own myth, you had to find the humility to go back to getting your hands dirty doing the hard research; you only know you've got something to write when you stumble on something that surprises you, so you feel that old urge to shout, 'Holy shit, wait till I tell them about this ...'" I loved the guy; it's hard to be harsh, but he was like the archaeologist who keeps re-telling his great discovery from 1972, like the musician who just keeps playing the old hits. A lot of the old fans will keep asking to hear Hello, Mary Lou. Well, just tell 'em you don't do that any more. Life's too short. Either that or eat your gun, I guess. Everybody's got the right.
