Jim Butcher Interviews Patrick Rothfuss (SDCC, 2011)Dictated by:
ZiggellyJB: Hi, I'm Jim Butcher, I'm here at San Diego Comic Con at the SUVUDU booth, and I'm going to be talking to author Patrick Rothfuss. Hello, Pat. Uh, I hate this man. He's extremely skilled, and he's very good at all kinds of things that I struggle to master, or haven't been able to. So we'll start there, Pat, for how much age we've got.PR: That's a good place to start.
JB: In your writing, one of the strengths that I really feel is something that you very very well is that you have this ability to shift into this lyrical, very poetic, style of writing, which is something that remains beyond me, and more than likely ever shall. And yet you have also the ability to shift gears and go to a very solid, very gritty, very pulpy style of action when need be. How do you decide when is the right time for the one or the other?PR: With me, the process is, I'm very heavy into revision, and I think that gives me the freedom to take bigger risks than people who are, say, very good at meeting their deadlines, which is one of the skills that you possess that I kind of envy...
JB: *looks down at his shirt, which says 'GO AWAY: I Have A Deadline”* I'll get you a shirt.PR: Yeah, I would need a whole outfit. But, one of the things that is dangerous when you get arty with the language is it's really potentially going to turn people off. But at the same time, if you can do it, then some people will love you for that just by itself. So I usually take all the risks in the draft, and I kind of free myself up to go ahead and overdue it a little bit, and then I go back through and I look at it really hard and I go, “Am I just wanking around here? Am I just, like, trying to play some sort of game and impress myself?”And then, more importantly, I get a bunch of feedback from Beta readers, and if I'm really anxious about a part because I think it's too self-indulgent, after they read it, I'll go through it with them, and I'm like “right here. Does this make me a complete tosser?” and sometimes they'll go, “yeah, that's a little... you know... you're dicking around there.”, and I go “okay, good,” and I kind of get that in my head, but sometimes people will go, “oh, no, that's one of my favorite parts!” , and then I feel a little bit better about maybe leaving it in.
I know you also have a lot of Beta readers that you use. Roughly how many Betas do you get reading?
JB: I've got about a dozen people. Thirteen? Oh, that's a good number, thirteen. Who are kind of reading along on a chapter-by-chapter basis, which is really valuable, because they'll be like “here, you missed this point,” and I'll go, “oh, let me fix that right now,” before we get any further into the story PR: Wow!
JB: What about you?PR: For me, I almost always have a draft, and then I give them the draft, usually on paper, with a red pen, and then they bounce it back to me with little notes, and some people are just really good at catching, like, grammatical stuff, and some people, they're historians, they go, “well, you know, rubber wasn't vulcanized until the early 1900's.” You know, they're just geeks from various flavors, and they point out stuff about, they go, “owls don't build nests.” Oh, well good, I don't screw that up now. But some people, my favourite Betas to come back, are full of, like, peanut-gallery comments that show the reader's mental process as they go through the book, and my favourite, like, I almost want to frame it, except my manuscript copies are too thick, it was, uh, a husband and wife who I've known since college, and they go through, and they read it together, and on every page, in the margins, there's comments, where it's almost like an MSD3K version of my book, and sometimes they're like, “oh, I hate him so much!” and then sometimes they'll disagree with each other in the margins, they'll comment on each other's comments, and, first off, it's really fun to read, and second off, it really lets me know exactly how they feel during the reading of a scene, as opposed to them just saying 'oh, you need a comment here,' while pointing out potential problems. And if they're feeling sad there, I didn't mean that, I need to fix that, or, if I'm not getting a response here, then maybe I should do something. So, yeah, and I do that like a hundred times, I've got like a hundred Beta readers, but I give them a whole manuscript at a time, and then I get it back and I fix it, and then I sent out the new Beta to new readers, so I get kind of a virtual read of it.
Do you end up, after you get a draft solid, you have Betas to read a draft, and then get back to you?
JB: Yeah, there usually are a couple of people who will do that.PR: Okay. And is that all before you send it to the editor, or is the editor kind of, in all the process, she's right at the end?
JB: It's all before it goes to the editor. My philosophy has always been that I want to create as little work for my editor as possible. It makes her happy with me, and she'll take me out to dinner and stuff.PR: Yeah. Save her for the heavy-hitting stuff.
JB: Alright, so. For folks who are not necessarily into the writing industry, tell me what is a fairly typical “I got a few things done today” writing day like?PR: Oh, boy. A good writing day, I sleep myself out, that means I don't wake up by, like, alarm, or noise or something like that, so I actually wake up and I'm full of sleep. And that could be literally any time of the day, depending on what my schedule is like. I'm not diurnal or nocturnal at this point, I have a rolling, bizarre sleep schedule. So I wake up, hang out with my girlfriend and my baby, and after they're sick of me, I probably do some e-mail, at home, because I have to stay on top of that or it's going to bury me, and then I go over to the workhouse. I was not getting enough done on the book for years, and I realized that part of it was the fact that the internet was always there. You know, when you're writing, typing along, and you stop sometimes, and you go “what's that word?” or go, “what would his response be?” or, “how can I describe that facial expression?”, and mentally you have to kind of really think about that, even if it's just for three seconds, but with the internet always there, and facebook always there, sometimes, when I would pause, I'd be like, “I wonder if somebody sent me a new e-mail,” or “maybe somebody's posted on my wall on facebook.”
JB: “Somebody's mentioned me on Twitter.”PR: I haven't done Twitter yet, thank god. And what happened once was, my cable modem broke, and so I said, “okay, great, I'm going to write today anyway”, and so I was writing, and I would get to those places, and then I'd start to think... and then I'd go, “Oh, I can't. Oh, I can't.” And it's like when the power goes off in your house, and you spend, like, the next three hours flipping switches uselessly, and you don't realize how instinctual it's become, I caught myself about fifty times about to hop away from the book to do something else, and that's when I realized that that was a real problem, because when I was being my most productive was back before I had internet in my house. So I actually went out and bought a workspace that has no internet on it, I have no phone in that house, people don't stop by, no one is allowed to go in my writing room, because you stay the fuck out of my space.
JB: Okay, so I'm not the only territorial writer in the world. Grr! Get out of my room!PR: Sarah came over to the workhouse once, and, you know, the reason we got a whole house is because property is really cheap in central Wisconsin, and we use a lot of the part for charity, so it's just the upstairs office that's mine. Sarah came over for a visit, and this was right when I bought it, she had the baby, and she goes, “oh, I need to change him, can I go upstairs and use...” and I go, “No!” and then she just sort of swelled up, and I'm like, “honey, no, you can't go in there,” because I love Sarah, but she is like the internet, except instead of me going to the internet...
JB: This is being taped, right?PR: I know. She knows. She is, like, around the house, doing whatever, and she thinks, “oh, there's something I want to tell Pat,” or, you know, “oh, I want to give him a kiss.” For some reason she loves me, it doesn't make any sense. And she'll repress maybe nineteen out of twenty of those impulses, but even that one out of twenty, that means she comes in maybe two or three times an hour...
JB: I know what you mean, yeah.PR: And it was a real stress on our relationship, 'cause sometimes it's fine, and sometimes, “yeah, I was just playing a game”, or “yeah, I was on my e-mail,” but if she interrupts me while I'm writing, then I start to almost resent her presence, and it was not healthy.
JB: Yeah, it's “Dad, I love you,” this, and “Honey, you should eat,” that. You can't work in that environment!PR: Exactly. I need to be in my cave.
JB: I feel so much better now. Thank you.PR: I got distracted on your actual question. And then I write for... eight hours. I have a cup of tea, and I don't even necessarily eat at that time. If I'm under a deadline, or going really well, or trying to push, then I'll do it for twelve hours. And that might be, like, you're blazing a trail, and actually writing draft and new material, or it might be going through Betas, or it might be going through, like, an extensive rolling checklist of potential problems that I need to resolve. That would be a good day's writing. Then I go home in time to still see my baby before he goes to sleep. That would be a perfect writing day, right there.
JB: Okay.
*Brief, somewhat awkward silence*
I should probably come up with another question. Alright. When it comes to research. Research is a lot of things that writers will have to do, depending on what genre you're writing and the story you're telling, there's a lot of things to focus, or when you're writing a kind of an epic fantasy, in an alternate fantasy world, what kind of research do you find yourself engaging in, in a place where you can just make stuff up? PR: I don't think I do a lot of research like most other people do, because I think the majority of people, like, intelligent, together, people, they do, “I'm going to write a book where somebody goes on a ship”, and so they get books about seafaring, and the Renaissance, and they figure out, like, the rigging, and all of this stuff, and how whatever works. And I don't do that, I don't pre-research stuff. Like, you know, music is a big part of the books, but I didn't, like, go out and try to figure out what it was like to be a musician, and read books about musicians, or Baroque luting, or whatever. As a result, I think, in some ways it works to my advantage, because if you go out and research for three months about Renaissance seafaring, and you get all this information, you feel kind of like you have to use it, or you've wasted your time, and that means that you suddenly have the danger of trying to put all this information in a book, because you're proud that you know it, as opposed to it being in service to the story. I'm not saying that everyone who does this type of research does this, I just think that it's a danger. And sometimes, I'll run into it, and I'm like 'oh! Either this person is an enthusiast in this area, or they'd done a bunch of research and it's coming out of them a little too heavy for the needs of the story. As opposed to me, if you don't know much about something, first off you can't put too much in, second off, when you explain it to somebody else who doesn't know anything about it, you can't talk down to them. So, you know, right now, if I was to talk to you about seafaring in the Renaissance, I don't really know all that much about it, other than what I've gleamed from history classes and a general smattering of eclectic knowledge. So we talk about it, and I'm able to express it in a way that makes sense to another ignorant person, and I don't use terms like, “mizzon-mast” or “(?)”, whatever the hell, which is good because you haven't done three-months of research either, and you don't know what a mizzon-mast is, and I think that works to my advantage. Now the downside, of course, is that sometimes I make, like, real big assumptions that are, like, egregious mistakes, and sometimes, if a Beta reader doesn't catch me on those, they'll go really late in the process. Like, at one point, I'd been working on the book, honest to god, for, like, twelve years, and somebody, a friend, read the book and he came back and he went, “you know, lutes traditionally have fourteen strings. And they're strung in courses, so it's two strings tuned to the same note, and so, if you broke a string, it actually doesn't matter, because you would still have that same note.” And I just went cold, because at that point, the book was about six, seven months away from being published, and I would have looked like a total ass to anyone who knows anything about Renaissance music. And so I had to go in and do that course correction, because I had not done the initial research. So, I approach it a little bit differently, and then after I've written stuff, then I research to fill in holes in my knowledge, for specific information. That's how I handle it, for the most part.
JB: Okay. Character creation. When you're getting a character together, where do you start from, in terms of creating this person?PR: A lot of people ask me “do you base your characters on people you know in real life?” and for me, I always perceive the underlying question is I have written a story in which I have based all of the characters on cool people I know in real life, and it's okay for me to do that, right? That's the subtext that I perceive in that question, it may or may not be true. And so I always say, “no.” In my experience it doesn't work well because it's sort of like... what was that celebrity reality show where they took all these people and they put 'em in a house?
JB: Yeah, okay, right.PR: It didn't work well. It was a train-wreck. Because these people have nothing to do with each other. That's not a story, it's like a mess of personality. More importantly, if you go, 'oh! Brad Pitt is really cool!”, and so you try to put Brad Pitt in your story, with a different name and a mustache so he looks different, it doesn't work because you don't know how Brad Pitt thinks, so that you can't do what Brad Pitt would do, that really makes him cool. And so, you want to steal that coolness for your book, but it doesn't work. And so I say “no, people aren't based off this,” but, sometimes I do, but instead of trying to take the whole person, I take like a tiny, tiny, tiny speck of a person. Like, a particular aspect of their personality. Not even anything as big as... like, they're gregarious, or anything like that. It's just a little vocal tick, maybe it's a love of a particular thing, and it's almost like a seed crystal, and the character, like, coalesces around that as I build the rest of it. And at the end of it, if you knew who I stole that piece from, they would look nothing like this final character, but I think that it does help to have something real that you use kind of as the seed, that the character grows out of.
JB: A small part of their soul.PR: Exactly. I steal just a piece, and then it gives some sort of mythic weight to the character until they get that kind of spark of life on their own, and then they kind of take off. That I've said succeed, but not with trying to steal a whole character.
JB: You heard it here. Patrick Rothfuss, stealing tiny pieces of your soul. PR: Yeah, so be careful when you come see me at a Con. I will rip it right out of you. *Both laugh.* That sounds awful.
