I’ve been writing since I could write. School newspapers,
stories, lots of essays and so forth. It’s how I sort my thoughts. Over the
years, documenting my work has accounted for whatever success I’ve experienced
in every career I’ve pursued. Over the years, I never stopped writing stories
and poems as well as explanatory essays on science and technology. So there
wasn’t so much a transition as an altering of priorities.
How you do break down
the scientific jargon to laymen’s terms?
The transition from writing dry technical stuff to writing
suspense fiction was more of a refinement. The tools are the same, the
techniques differ. Adverbs, for example, are strangely useful in conveying
complex topics while being annoyingly useless, yet easy to abuse, in fiction. Over
the years, people who read my narrative work provided enough positive
reinforcement that I figured I could do it and being a novelist was third on my
list of life goals; behind being a scientist and playing linebacker for the
Oakland Raiders (I still haven’t given up on that).
Popular science writing is a wonderful challenge. There are
two primary guiding rules. The first, use as little jargon as possible. Trying
to understand complicated concepts is hard enough without being asked to learn
a new language; a lesson that I ODed on when I moved from physics research at
national labs and universities to tech development in the private sector. I had
no idea what the engineers were talking about until I realized that they just
used different jargon. The second rule is to milk metaphors like you work at a science-writing
dairy. But use better ones than that.
Are any of the
characters in your book based on people you know?
Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people I know
and my own alter-egos. So far, none of my characters are autobiographical. The closest
is Chopper, the villain in The Sensory Deception. My characters have quite
different religious and political opinions than mine. For example, Foster Reed,
the evangelical physicist in The God Patent is based on a combination of a childhood
friend who is Mormon and the only devoutly religious physicist I’ve ever known.
From that starting point, over several revisions, Foster evolved into that
character. He took a lot of work, probably because we had so little in common.
What inspired you to
come up with the concept of The God Patent? One night, while walking around
in a Florida
swamp with a beer buzz, I thought of the model of the soul that forms the
premise for The God Patent. I was a post doctoral research associate at the
time, which means that my understanding of quantum physics and relativity and
all that stuff was at a pinnacle. I explained the model to a few people and
decided that it would be more interesting if I could wrap it in a plot so that people
could discover it as Ryan and Katarina do in The God Patent. It took another
ten years to come up with that plot.
The thing I like about this model of the soul, and I won’t
tell you whether I believe it or not, has to do with faith. You see, I am very
curious about why people take leaps of faith. Horoscopes, for example. Why
would anyone think that the position of stars and planets could affect them?
It’s a leap of faith. Science involves faith, too, but at a different scale:
steps of faith, not leaps. You can’t perform every experiment, so believing
other people’s results requires an element of faith, but not a leap.
The cool thing about the model of the soul in The God Patent,
for me anyway, is that its believability is reduced to a single yes/no
question. A single, well-defined step of faith. No great leap, just a yes/no
question. A question which, evidently, requires about 400 pages of build-up. If
you answer the question “yes” then you believe that model of the soul. And lots
of people do answer “yes” which I find at once redeeming and kind of scary. I
have no desire to lead a cult.
How long did it take
you to write the first book? How many rewrites did you do on it? The first
draft took four months, the second six months, the 3rd and 4th took three
months each, the 5th and 6th each took a few weeks. A total of about 18 months
and, by that, I mean an average of 2-3 hours each day.
The God Patent got terrific buzz right from the start.
First, when I uploaded it to Scribd, it was in their top 5 most-read novels for
the better part of a year and then when Numina Press published the print
version, the San Francisco Chronicle did a big feature article. Plus, I
promoted it relentlessly through speeches, articles, YouTube videos and
literary events. I used four different speeches for promotion, two covering the
science, one for writers groups, and an unrelated career development speech.
The point being, that I got The God Patent in a lot of hands. I think I gave
almost 50 speeches to different groups in about 18 months.
At the end of the book, there’s a message “From the author”
where I ask people to send me an email of their thoughts. Lots of readers send
me notes and I ask them to write a review; about half of them do so. Asking for
favors runs contrary to my grain, I’m kinda shy with strangers, so it’s
personally painful to ask for those reviews, but I force myself and people are
pretty happy to do it. As far as I know, no one’s ever been offended.
You also wrote Your
Pursuit of Greatness - a workbook which you say evolved from a speech you’ve
been giving for years. How did you get started in doing inspirational speaking?
Here’s the story. Back in the mid-90s, when I was an
Assistant Professor of Physics, i.e., junior faculty, the dean came to my
office and said, “We need more science majors so I’m asking someone from each
department to give an hour speech to the incoming freshman class. If our
enrollment increases by 10% your chances for tenure will increase at least that
much.”
When I gave the first version of that speech, originally called
How I avoided Growing Up, the students gushed over it. The dean’s admin told me
that to this day, students still tell her the effect that speech had on their
career choices. The message is pretty simple: you might as well try to do what
you really want to do because the world is a big place and life is short. You
either succeed or you die trying, but you’re going to die anyway.
I kept giving that speech to incoming freshman every year. I
got tenure and left academia, but kept going back to give some version of that
speech. Then, when The God Patent came out, right during the great recession, I
figured with all those unemployed people that I had a captive audience so I
booked a bunch of speeches at employment development centers, networking events
and so forth and handed out bookmarks and sold books. It got the word out, but
marketing to people who are broke might have been a dubious concept.
Your second novel,
The Sensory Deception, is coming out in August. Are there any similarities
between that book and your first novel? They are similar in the sense that
their premises are built around cutting edge science. I think the science is
better integrated in The Sensory Deception.
The idea for The Sensory Deception came from a newspaper
article about a polar bear that swam from ice floes off of Greenland to Iceland.
Two weeks of swimming, looking for ice and not finding any. Finally the bear
washes up on shore and the police shoot it. Here’s a link to the story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/jun/05/animalwelfare.animalbehaviour
It occurred to me that if people could experience that first
hand, it might alter their politics, might turn them into environmentalists. So
I started thinking about nature-based immersive virtual reality and came up
with the idea for “sensory saturation,” did a little research and discovered
that the effect had been verified by neuro-scientists.
The idea is that if you’re inundated with sensory
information, your brain doesn’t have time to reflect, to think, and your time
horizon reduces from what you experience now, hours, weeks, years, decades, to
a window of about ten seconds—the reality of most animals. Developing
characters and a plot for that premise led me to Gloria, the brilliant,
beautiful Iranian Jew venture capitalist, Farley Rutherford, the naive natural
born leader, Chopper Vittori, the migraine-tortured badass neurologist, and
Ringo Hayes, the uber-geek engineer.
From a writer’s standpoint, the idea of writing from an
animal’s point of view is a wonderful challenge. Animals process information
differently, whales, for example, visualize through sonar and bears are more
attuned to scent and taste than sight. So those POV passages are detail heavy.
I usually hate excessive details, but they’re necessary here so I had to
balance my loathing of irrelevant details with conveying the sense of an
animal’s reality. From the twenty or so people who’ve read the manuscript and
the response at readings, the polar bear and sperm whale POV pieces come off
pretty well.
How do you write? Did you do an outline first? Did you do
individual character development before doing the full plot?
I develop an outline as far as my own impatience allows,
usually, 3-4 pages of initial ideas for how the story unfolds. For The God
Patent, The Sensory Deception, and the novel I’m working on now, The Time
Prisoner, the plots come to me in the middle of the night. I get up and run
into another room and lay down the essential story. It takes a few weeks to eek
out the other details and, during that time, I start building characters.
I need to know my characters pretty well before I can start
drafting. To nail down their attributes and get an idea of their quirks, I use specially
modified dungeons and dragons character sheets. Yes, I played DnD in high
school, thoroughly baked most of the time. If you want a copy of my character
sheet, send me a note: ransom@ransomstephens.com
.
Tell me how you got involved with 47North for your
publishing?
The Sensory Deception was ready to go in January of 2012 and
I was shopping it around to agents and publishers. I got about 40
rejections—every writer knows how it works—as well as two offers from small
publishers including Numina Press, who published The God Patent. Since The
Sensory Deception is more blockbuster-y and less “literary,” I wanted a bigger
house to get behind it so, with all voices of self-doubt in my head telling me
I was crazy, I turned down both of the publishers.
A few months later, in July of 2012, with that growing stack
of rejections, I started looking for a developmental editor to help me fix it
up. I’d gotten great feedback and encouragement from the San Francisco Writers
Workshop and the handful of writers, including some authors of bestsellers, so
I believed it was a good project, a full-speed techno-eco-science thriller, if
you will.
One morning in the middle of July, I was at hotel in Silicon
Valley getting dressed before heading to a high-tech development conference,
“The PCIe SIG-DevCon” (see what I mean about engineering jargon?), and checked
my email. There was a note from someone who had read The God Patent—as I
already told you, I get these notes now and them. The note went on about how he
loved the story and characters, premise and so forth. So I’m patting myself on
the back, “Yes isn’t this nice, another love letter from my adoring—“ and the
letter concluded with “…by the way, I’m an acquisition editor with 47North and
I’d like to talk to you about your writing career. Do you have any other
manuscripts we could consider?”
What happened next?
I talked to him the next day and sent him The Sensory
Deception manuscript. Then I sweated for a month, waiting. During that time, I
wrote a note to myself promising that no matter what their response, I would
not alter my pursuit of this goal.
The lesson for other writers, as well as myself, is that
this sort of good fortune (who are we kidding, it’s luck) that he read my
book—results from years of effort. Writing fiction had been my top priority
every day for seven years when this opportunity found me. That it found me was
a result of uploading The God Patent and doing everything I could to get word
out.
In scientific terms, I made a big cross section, a big
target that made it possible for good fortune to find. In the current state of
the publishing industry writers have to expose themselves. For many of us,
putting our work, our metaphorical necks, on the line runs counter to our every
instinct, but it’s the only way to reach that point where someday, maybe, if we
keep pushing long enough, we’ll be allowed to sit in a favorite chair, in the
dark corner of a favorite room, with a couple of dogs at our feet and be left
alone to write fiction for living.
I can’t think of a single piece of advice. I’m a craft
junkie and so the best advice I’ve been given is a long list of lessons about
how to write compelling stories with interesting characters. I put most of them
on my website for anyone to check out: ransomstephens.com/the-craft.htm
If you would like to learn more about this author and his books, here's a link to his website and Amazon
The Sensory Deception won't be out until August but can be pre-ordered as ebook, audio, or print with guaranteed best price.
The Sensory Deception won't be out until August but can be pre-ordered as ebook, audio, or print with guaranteed best price.
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