Forrest Brazeal is a software engineer, writer, and cartoonist based in rural Virginia. His speculative fiction is published or forthcoming in Daily Science Fiction and Diabolical Plots.
How long have you been writing and what got you started?
I’ve always enjoyed words, and I do a fair amount of technical writing in the course of my daily work, but I’d never attempted to publish any fiction before this year. At the beginning of 2018 I decided to see if I could get something published in the next twelve months, and to my surprise I’ve sold half a dozen short stories now, mostly to professional SFWA-qualifying markets.
What is the best piece of advice you have for new writers?
Just because you wrote something good enough to get published somewhere, that doesn’t mean the next thing you write won’t be terrible. Progress is not linear, and the market is fickle. But don’t give up – the good news is that the general trend is upward. I’m a much better writer now than I was at the beginning of this year. Or at least, when I write something terrible I’m more likely to know why.
Are there any writing resources, such as books or websites, you’d like to recommend?
The Online Writing Workshop (sff.onlinewritingworkshop.com) is cheap, and great for genre writers. Once you get a professional sale under your belt, you can join Codex (codexwriters.com) and access a fantastic network of advice and support.
If you could go back and find yourself five years ago, what advice would you give yourself?
You have more control over your destiny than you think. Set impossible goals, then buckle down and achieve them. Nothing is stopping you except your own learned helplessness.
What is your favorite type of fiction and who are your favorite authors?
I don’t read much science fiction, even though most of my published stories fall into that category. I get plenty of speculative ideas from my day job in the tech world, or just from living in the twenty-first century. So I try to be careful that when I read fiction, I’m filling my ear with really good prose. For example, this summer I read quite a bit of classic southern realism: Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers. Getting the rhythms and strengths of those writers in my ear helped with a couple of stories that ended up selling to pro markets.
How do you measure success when it comes to your writing?
Readership. If I sell a piece that ends up behind a paywall and nobody reads it, I can’t consider it a success no matter what I got paid. For me, just the creative act of getting words down onto paper is not enough. It’s sharing those ideas with other people that gives the work meaning.
Are you an outliner or discovery writer? Or somewhere in between?
For short stories, I have to hold the whole thing in my head before I start putting words on paper. Once I know where I’m going, I can develop characters and thematic relationships that harmonize with each other and with the plot.
How do you deal with rejections?
Embrace them. It’s like the good burn you get while working out. If pain is weakness leaving the body, rejections are often the result of bad ideas leaving the mind. (Unless the editor is clearly a Philistine and doesn’t get the sublime beauty of your work, in which case you are entitled to stew for exactly ten minutes before picking up the pieces and moving right along.)
In your opinion, how important is a writing degree or MFA when it comes to achieving success in writing fiction?
I don’t have any formal creative writing education, so I’m not well qualified to say. I’m sure that some of the tips I’ve learned from online critique groups like OWW and Codex — which have massively helped me — I would have learned in a traditional degree program. On the other hand, here I am, learning those things pretty quickly and at minimal cost. The keys to improving as a writer are reading a lot, writing even more, and giving and receiving feedback. Many, many writers do those things successfully without forking over tens of thousands of dollars for a writing degree.
What book are you reading right now?
The Age of Innocence. And psyching myself up to dive into some David Foster Wallace. More importantly, I just finished re-reading the complete Calvin and Hobbes.
Is there anything you’d like to plug? Feel free to share a link.
Follow me on Twitter @forrestbrazeal!
