University of Tampa Press Interviews: A Conversation with Daryl Gregory

Our editorial board member and regular contributor Christina Connor sat down (virtually!) with Daryl Gregory (author of Spoonbenders, Raising Stony MayHall, Pandemonium, We Are All Completely Fine) for an interview on his writing practice and tips for new writers. The full interview will be published in our forthcoming special issue devoted to fiction, “Tales of the Fantastic.” Here is an excerpt from that interview:  


Christina Connor: So, what is your process for writing a new work: prep, drafting, editing? How do you develop your plot and characters? What guides your editing process from beginning to end? 

Daryl Gregory: There’s a highly technical term I use for the beginning of my process: “floundering.” I’m not one of those people who has their next five novels sitting in a notebook ready to go. I usually finish a novel, and think, “well, that’s it for ideas. I’m done with writing; I guess that was my career.” But then the work begins again. 

Unfortunately, one of the side effects of being a writer is that your reading becomes predatory. You’re hunting for another idea, for something to spark, until you’re like, “wow, I wonder if I could use this and make something new out of it.” For example, the book I’m working on now is a cross-country road trip, so I’m reading Canterbury Tales and a lot of translations of Gilgamesh. So, to prepare, I do a lot of flailing around, a lot of reading, including nonfiction. 

But eventually I find something that kicks off the writing, an image or an idea. And then I start trying to figure out what can attach itself to that idea. There’s almost always a character who goes with the idea or with the place; they come hand in hand. I usually don’t have much choice about the main character. They just appear along with the story. There’s no story without the character, or no world without that character moving through it. 

What do the characters want? How are they trying to get it from each other?” That’s what plot is.

That’s always the start of it. And then it’s just the painful process of trying to figure out, especially in the beginning, all of the different choices you can make, all the different kinds of novels you can make out of that initial idea. You have to ask yourself, “where do I want it to end?” John Crowley teaches a one-day workshop called “Writing to the End,” and in it, he says that if you aim for the end, everything else feeds into that. Once you know the end, you can come up with a structure and a story to get you there.  

In every scene you have to ask yourself: “What do the characters want? How are they trying to get it from each other?” That’s what plot is.  

[…] 

CC: Do you have any recommendations for writers trying to get their first contract? What was that process like for you? 

DG: The most stressful part of the novel publishing process is finding an agent. An agent is a gateway to traditional publishing. Almost all the publishers—all the paying publishers—want to receive submissions from agents and not from the writers themselves. There are exceptions to this, windows when you can submit when you don’t have an agent, but most of the time you need an agent. And that process of getting one to take you on can be brutal. I made a spreadsheet of all the agents that I was trying to reach, then sent out submissions in blocks of ten. A few asked for sample chapters, and a few more asked for the full manuscript. But all the responses took a long time…. 

Writing a query is very difficult; writing a synopsis is even harder. But the people in your critique group and your fellow writers can help. This is why going to conferences can be good. You can meet writers who can help you, and you can help them. There are people I’ve met at conferences who’ve been very helpful to me and whom I love to death to this day. 

But your first job is to finish the book! You’ve just got to be able to power through it.