Five Questions: Kevin J. Anderson
Kevin J. Anderson is one of the nicest guys you will ever meet—and one of the most unusual authors. While other writers spend their time pounding away at worn out keyboard keys and staring at a screen that becomes all too blurry all too quickly, Kevin writes outdoors as he hikes through the mountains of Colorado. How does he do this, you may ask? A hand-held tape recorder and a lot of batteries!
I’ve always been kind of curious how many tape recorders he has gone through over the years… Hmm…
At any rate, Kevin is best known for his co-authorship with Brian Herbert on the Dune novels and his epic sci-fi opus Saga of the Seven Suns. He is always working on several books and/or comic books in various stages of editorial work—from “writing” the manuscript to editing five or six times that manuscript to doing publicity for those published manuscripts.
Below is Five Questions with Kevin J. Anderson. Enjoy!
Suvudu: When did you start writing? Why do you write?
Kevin J. Anderson: I started imagining stories and telling them to people when I was five years old; I wrote my first “novel” when I was eight, typing it on scrap paper on my dad’s old manual typewriter. I kept writing stories, started sending them out when I was 12. And I kept going.
I write because the stories keep forming in my head, the characters, the plotlines, the worlds. If I don’t write them down, my brain would get overloaded.
S: Describe your writing day? How many words/pages do you write a day on average? Breaks? How much time do you spend editing and how do you go about it?
KJA: Because I’ve always got so many things going, so many projects, so many deadlines, so many travel commitments, there’s no such thing as a “typical” day (although I long for one!). In general, though, I get up and have coffee and breakfast, I work out for about an hour (keep yourself healthy and you can keep going full-speed all the time), check the e-mail, then I go out in the morning for a walk or a hike—I write my new chapters by dictating into a hand-held recorder, so I take a few hours on the trail and dictate a minimum of two chapters (15 pages or so). I come back to the office by late morning and spend the rest of the day editing, polishing, proofreading, answering phone calls, and all the other parts of the job. I cook dinner for me and my wife, then we spend the evening watching genre TV shows and films (while I often type answers to interview… such as now.)
S: How many books did you write before you signed your first book contract? How did you get that contract? Via agent? Industry friend? Writer’s retreat? Slushpile? Other?
KJA: I had written and published many short stories in various magazines, then I wrote a fantasy novel (that didn’t sell), then a science fiction mystery—Resurrection, Inc.—which did sell to Signet Books, via an agent, whom I had gotten based on my short story credits. After that I signed a three-book contract.
S: What advice would you give beginning writers? What is the best way to break into the industry?
KJA: Most important advice is to believe in persistence. Keep trying and keep trying—it’s like trying to make the Olympic team, so don’t expect it to happen right away. Work on your craft, keep trying to improve yourself, meet people, submit manuscripts and keep submitting. If there was a shortcut, I wouldn’t have spent so many years trying to do it!
S: What are you currently working on? When can we expect it?
KJA: I’ve got a very powerful and ambitious new fantasy trilogy, Terra Incognita, about sailing ships and sea monsters and the crusades. The first book, The Edge of the World, comes out in June and I’m working on the final proofing before production, and I’m just beginning work on the second book—the story keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the characters are doing wonderful things. [cover art on this post]
I’ve also got the novel Enemies & Allies from Morrow in May, about the first meeting between Batman and Superman during the Cold War in the 1950s. And Brian Herbert and I are editing our next Dune novel, Jessica of Dune (due in August from Tor Books).
Tomorrow and Wednesday will see Five Questions—answered, of course—from two other authors! So stay tuned!
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