Conversations with the Bookless: Sandra Seamans

A couple of years ago Jeff Vandermeer ran a series of blog posts called Conversations With the Bookless. The Conversations with the Bookless series was designed to showcase those writers who are up and coming, who don’t yet have a collection or a novel out, who are making their names known writing short stories. With Jeff’s blessing I will be continuing the series here at BSC over the next couple of weeks, but with a focus mostly on mystery/crime fiction.

From the first generation successes of Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler and Sean Doolittle that came out of Plots With Guns to the later success of zine author/founders Sandra Ruttan and Russel McLean to a lot of others the online zines have, over the years, proved to be a fairly successful and fertile ground for emerging talents to launch a career, highlight their own work and showcase the work of others.

These writers are the next generation and it will be interesting in the next couple of years to see which of them will make it and which will stand out.

Nothing else to say really except to end with a quote from the original series.

The fact is, if you don’t have a book out, it’s harder to get attention and it’s harder for reader attention to crystallize around you. I hope these interviews introduce readers to some of the great talent that, in the coming years, will be amazingly and bountifully bookful. — Jeff Vandermeer

To kick off the series there can be only one choice and that is Sandra Seamans. After partially breaking away from The Short Mystery Fiction Society to fill a gap in their coverage Sandra Seamans has gone on to become, in many ways, the queen of the scene. In creating her own little corner she has created a salon for discussion and a crossroads with links to markets, zines, contests; links to her own stories and other’s. She has become the biggest cheerleader of the short form and those who practice it, freely giving out Snoopy Dances at the success of others. Her work has the quality of professionalism about it; you know that you are going to get a consistent level of polished quality whether it is a flash fiction piece or something longer.

    
Where are you, right now, as you’re writing these answers?

I’m in the office my husband built for me. The shelves that hold my books and pictures and the desk where the computer sits are made from pine and maple boards harvested from the trees on our farm. It’s a small space filled with pieces of my past and present. A good place to build stories.

    
What’s your favorite story written by someone else?

Ha! That’s like asking me to pick my favorite grandchild. This past winter I’ve been spending my time reading the classic short story writers of the mystery genre’s past. Chandler’s “Red Wind”, and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” just blew me away with the writing, the mood they set, how everything felt so real. And Stanley Ellin’s “The Payoff”, my God, can that man turn a story on its ear. Of the newer writers, Andrew Vachss’ “Cain” showed me how you can take a worn out theme and make it new and Harlan Ellison’s “Soft Monkey” taught me how to break all those short story “rules”. Of the new generation of writers I’ve read on the internet, I’d have to say that Kyle Minor’s story “They Take You” is one that will stick with me for a long time. When I got to the end of that story, I felt myself saying, no, no, no, you can’t do that. But he did and it was the perfect ending to a glorious story.

    
Who are your influences and what is your most unlikeliest influence?

My biggest influence is O Henry, short story writer extraordinaire. When I was in eighth grade I was given an award for reading more than twenty-five books during the school year. My English teacher, Mrs. Gow, told me I should expand my reading beyond the horse related stories that I loved and presented me with a copy of “O Henry Stories”. What an amazing writer to discover. He wrote crime, western, romance, drama, horror, all of them set in the Depression era time that he lived in. And it wasn’t just the times he explored with his writing but every aspect of the life he lived. Every writer should receive such a gift.

My most unlikely influence would be Georgette Heyer. I love her books and own a paperback copy of nearly every one. While she is known as a regency romance writer, a great many of her books center around a crime of some type, usually blackmail or theft. She makes you realize that not every crime story has to have a murder in it. I especially love how she brings her characters alive with dialogue, the words they use and the things they say draw a complete picture of their character. And her books are filled with humor instead of the angst of most romance novels showing that you can step outside the boundaries of your genre to create something fresh and different.

    
What do you most value in the fiction you love?

The voice of a storyteller. When a writer can weave a story that sucks you in to the point that you can’t stop reading you know you’re in the hands of a true storyteller. A good storyteller can make the whole world fall away and sweep you into the lives of their characters until you feel every emotion, smell every smell, and taste every sensation with them. Their breath is your breath as you travel through the story with them.

    
Why do you write?

Why does anybody write? It’s certainly not for the money or the glory because very few writers actually achieve that sort of fame and even fewer can claim they make a living with their writing.

I suppose like every other writer, I hear the voices in my head begging me to tell their story. Worse, they haunt me be until I actually get them written down. But deep down it goes back to a line I heard in a movie once. A writer gives a voice to those who can’t speak for themselves. And that’s what I try to do, get inside the people who are afraid to speak out for themselves, to tell the truth of what their lives are like. I guess for me, writing boils down to a search for the truth by scratching at the wounded lives of the people around me.

    
What is the value and purpose of short fiction in mystery/crime fiction for you personally and overall for the form and genre?

For a newbie crime fiction writer, like me, the value of the short form is in helping me find my voice and finding the niche within the genre that suits that voice. I’ve also used the form to create characters and explore every aspect of who and what they are or can be. With the short form I can tackle subject matter that would never sell in novel form. Readers don’t mind catching a glimpse into the darkness of being human if it doesn’t swallow them whole.

In using the mystery/crime genre to create stories you meet characters on the worst day of their life and how they react to that moment in their life is the basis of the story. You tap into emotions that don’t exist in the day to day act of living. You can explore cowardice, heroism, fear, self-preservation, anger, the list of emotions that can be brought into the story are endless. It’s not just a scattering of clues to solve a mystery, it can go much deeper into the human condition and that’s what the very best writers in this genre achieve. And isn’t that what readers really want, that glimpse into themselves?

    
What issues or ideas about fiction have been foremost in your mind of late?

Reality – getting every detail exactly right in your story. For people who live in front of a television watching news that skirts the truth, and TV shows and movies that step way beyond the possible, I’m surprised when people get upset that you don’t get every detail exactly right in fiction. And for me, fiction is the key word. Let’s face it, people don’t complain when their action hero walks into a scene carrying knives, guns, and a missile launcher but let your book character shoot one bullet too many or put a silencer on a gun that shouldn’t have one and they go ballistic. Why? It’s pure fantasy, the same as the picture on your TV screen. Yes, fiction has to be truthful and believable but why do readers focus more on these minor points than on the story as a whole? And if a reader becomes so obsessed with the minor details how does he ever let himself escape into the story? For me, a story is pure escapism, a place to step outside of my life and into another world whether I’m reading or writing.

    
Who is the best short story writer that people haven’t gotten hip to yet?

Kyle Minor, hands down, is the best writer out there on so many levels. The writing is full of emotion and he taps into your soul while you’re reading, leaving you completely breathless when you finish one of his stories. He makes me want to toss everything I’ve ever written into the circular file.

    
What do you like most about short fiction?

As a reader, I love that I can steal a few minutes here or there and read a complete story in a book or on the internet. Instant escapism. I love that a short story deals with just one scene or one moment in someone’s life with no other story lines or themes to take you out of the main thrust of the story.

As a writer, I love that I can sit down in the morning and know that by the end of the day I’ve got a complete first draft of a story, especially if it’s a flash piece. With that first draft down, I can look for the point of the story and which character can best tell it, then expand from there. I find the tells and turn them into shows with actions and dialogue and in doing that I find where the truth in a story lies, what I really want to say with this bit of fiction.

My problem writing longer fiction is that I tend to write more and more convoluted plots until nothing in the story makes sense, with the shorts there is more focus without the temptation to throw in more and more problems for the character to deal with.

    
When did you start writing short fiction and what prompted you to do so?

When I first started writing, almost twenty years ago, I wrote because I was sure it was the path to getting rich. Ha! I learned soon enough that I didn’t have a clue what I was doing. That just because I could make up as good a story as the one I was reading didn’t mean I could actually get published.

So, I started learning by reading books about writing, getting a subscription to Writer’s Digest, and writing, writing, writing. I’d submit a piece here or there, get rejected, give up, then go back and try again. I also discovered in myself a knack for writing short slice of life pieces and started submitting them to local newspapers and regional magazines with some success. But writing had to be fit into the bits and pieces of time that came my way when the kids didn’t need something or the farm didn’t need tending. Probably why short stories were the way I went with my writing.

Then about six years ago I got a computer, discovered an online flash writing workshop, found a mentor and started getting serious about writing. I put aside thoughts of getting rich and famous and concentrated on just writing, grabbing every opportunity that was offered. It didn’t matter that I didn’t get paid, I was doing what I loved and that was writing short stories. I embraced the theme write/submit, write/submit, write/submit and I actually began to get published, not just online but in small print journals and one small press anthology.

There are still markets I haven’t cracked but I’m working on it and that’s all any writer can do. Just keep writing, keep striving to be a better writer, and keep submitting. I try to remember to embrace the joy of writing and keep the doubts tucked under the blankets, though they do creep out from time to time and try to steal away the joy.

    
Of your stories, which is your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?

Of my flash pieces, I’d say that the one I wrote for Patti Abbott’s Shifting Gears flash challenge is my best. It’s called “Rabbit in a Trap” and I think I captured all the emotions of the woman in the story and came up with a perfect flash ending to the story. Of my shorts there are two. You do know that this question is similar to choosing favorite grandchildren again? The first was “The Guilty” published in Crime and Suspense because I’d crafted two characters, Ginger Blue and Bones, who should have been totally unbelievable within the boundaries of the genre and managed to make them real. The second story is “Cold Rifts” published in Crooked, because I wanted to break some “rules”, first by starting off a story with the weather and second by creating a character that nobody should have liked but still felt sorry for, and I killed the dog, the biggest no-no of them all.

    
Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?

Hopefully. I’ve got several out on submission and several more in various stages that will go when they’re ready.

    
How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?

First by actually sitting down and writing a novel. I’ve been putting this off because I didn’t feel I had the skills to take on such a project, but as the stories grow longer and my writing ability improves, that next step is fast approaching doable. One thing that has always stuck with me, though, is something another short story writer once said. “Not everybody has a novel in them.” And I do believe that there is some truth to that. Right now, I’m happy writing shorts and anything else that comes my way is just frosting on the writing cake.

    
_{Sandra Seamans blogs at My Little Corner where links to her fiction can be found.}