VP Profile #10: Steve Buchheit

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This week I am blessed with two Viable Paradise interviews in my mail box. The first of these is with Steve Buchheit, a writer with a social conscious as well as an excellent sense of noir. Welcome, Steve!

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Tamago: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

Steve: My standard answer is that I got serious about writing a decade ago, but that's not the whole story. Progressing forward I also am looking back over my life to see the influences and strains of story that I'm putting into my work. My earliest memory of writing is buying a Kodak Brownie at the Gibbsboro School white elephant sale for a dollar. My parents were still together so we had money to buy rolls of film and I started telling stories through the camera. I wrote poetry through high school, but mostly to impress girls. In college I had the option of skipping English classes. Instead I minored in Creative Writing with my writing focus in poetry, but the literature side had a distinct genre bent (my senior paper was on the concepts of God through the writings of Arthur C. Clarke). While I was traveling for Ernst & Young, I tried writing a pastiche of Steven Brust which utterly failed because I didn't have the fire in me. Then about a decade ago I started writing an homage to Glenn Cook and that book kicked my tuchus. That was my come to Jesus moment. I still want to go back and finish that book, but I don't know that I'm completely ready for it.

I took some continuing ed classes at that point and was blessed to have two highly influential instructors. I realized at that time that I had no clue how to tell a story. So I downshifted into short stories to strengthen my skills (note to new writers, short stories and novels have very little in common, but knowing how to tell a story transcends both).

So, while I now realize I've been writing and telling stories all my life, it's really only been a decade since I've been serious about it.

Tamago: Do you feel you have a genre as a writer?

Steve: I don't think I have one standard genre. When I started writing short fiction, I wrote SF, because that's what I read a lot of in the short form. When I started experimenting with fantasy I found my writer's voice became stronger. And when I hit into dark fantasy I could feel the energy flowing into the keyboard. I keep trying experiments into other genres, but it all seems to flow back into fantasy of some sort. The first story I had accepted by a paying market (signed the contract, still haven't been printed, it's a long story) started out as an attempt at literary fiction, but somehow in the middle turned into the Cthulhu horror. I jettisoned the majority of the literary work and focused in on the horror. And that's what sold. I'm sure there's a positive feedback lesson in there somewhere.

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Mirrored from Writer Tamago.