January 2005 - UKA's Writer of the Month:... Ian Hocking.
(3366 total words in this text)
(4952 reads) 
BIO
Ian Hocking was born and raised in the south-west of England. He read psychology at the University of Exeter and, after some wanderings in the north of the country, has now returned to Exeter to work as a teaching fellow. His first novel, Déjà Vu, will be published by the UKA Press in January 2005.
INTERVIEW
How long have you been writing?
I began to write when I was a young teenager and I sold my first story at the age of eighteen. That sounds impressive until I tell you that the magazine folded about three weeks later, long before said story was due to hit the shelves. Curse you, ‘Cornwall Today’! (Recently, I rewrote the story and published it in Thirteen.)
How did you come to writing? Has it always been a passion?
Writing is a passion for me in the sense that I do it habitually and get grumpy if I’m thwarted from producing at least a little bit of fiction per day (recently, that’s changed to ‘a little bit of marketing per day’; but at least it’s related to writing!). But I find writing difficult and always have. I write well only when I imagine a story, its physicality, its characters, the dramatic direction in which those characters are moving, and anything else of relevance. Maintaining this immense gestalt is like giving someone a piggyback and, after an hour or so, I’m exhausted.
How would you describe your writing?
In terms of quality, I’m not the person to ask. As long as the fiction I produce today is better than the fiction I produced six months ago, I’m reasonably happy. In terms of its content, I’d describe my stories as character studies and my prose style as dense (but in a good way!).
What is your own personal favourite?
A story usually means something different to its writer than it does to its reader. A story like ‘Mardi Gras’ (published in Citizen32, First Issue), for instance, in which a terrorist plants a bomb and watches it detonate – with time reversed, so he thinks he’s helping people – signified an earthquake in my writing style, but probably just an average story that won’t linger in the mind of a reader. ‘Ah, to Bring Light’ (published in The Quiet Feather, Issue Two), on the other hand, was written in about twenty minutes, but is the only story that has generated fan mail.
Er, what was the question? My favourite. Right. That has to be ‘Under the Limes’ (hear this story read by David Goodwin). It is set in 1964 on a Berlin U-bahn train that passes from the Allied Sector into the East. I like the story’s central dramatic situation and the use of language. More than any other, it feels closer to its ideal form – I was quite successful in capturing its essence.
Who is your favourite author?
I honestly don’t have a favourite author. There are some whose fiction I recognise as excellent – Delillo, Updike, Mailer, McEwan – but whose books don’t move me as much as, say, Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’, which is flawed but raised the stakes for what I wanted to do with my own fiction.
Well, if you tap your foot at me, I might offer David Mitchell’s work as the crest of today’s wave. I still dream about characters from ‘Cloud Atlas’. Mitchell underlines, for me, the necessity of invention and mastery of the forms of storytelling.
What is your opinion of writing on the net?
First, let me say that I think the Internet has been a boon for writers. It enables an immediacy of feedback that is essential in developing a good style. It is also valuable as a research tool. At the same time, however, I think that the Internet makes it rather too easy to have something published. My book, Déjà Vu, took the best part of a year to edit and wouldn’t have been any harder if I’d written it in my own blood, but the pressure of arriving at a once-chance, must-be-perfect proof significantly improved it. This pressure is missing (or is weaker) on Internet. Though there are great stories online, here at UKAuthors and elsewhere, they are often outnumbered by pieces that presented as finished but are still in draft form. I do think, however, that the Internet makes it easier for us, as a society, to support new writers.
Would you consider e-publishing?
I’ve had two experiences with e-publishing, the first good and second bad. My advice would be: read your contract, or be aware of any conditions that you agree to by submitting your work. The web is full of people who would like to exchange the dreams of writers for cash. Be professional and ask questions, be probing.
How about self-publishing?
As an idea, I have no problem with self-publishing. The halls of literature are decked with those who started out by publishing their own work. However, we no longer live in the nineteenth century. Self-publishing now carries an emotional baggage that might inhibit your future writing career. Again, I would suggest that writers who wish to consider self-publishing should go into it with their eyes open. For some, it will be the best option. But any writer should be aware of the dangers before going down the self-publishing route. Perhaps post a message to the UKAuthors forum – there are lots of willing and knowledgeable people around who can help decide whether it is right for them.
Do you have any advice for other aspiring authors?
I don’t think I’ve ever read advice for aspiring authors that told me something I didn’t know, deep down. (1) The probability that you can make a living at writing is small. (2) Publishers are primarily interested in marketability, not quality (though quality is correlated with marketability); related to this, publishers will make the assumption that you can’t write for toffee until you manage to prove them otherwise (this requires an opportunity to do so). (3) Read fiction extensively and critically. (4) If you want to write full time – i.e. professionally – then be professional: make time for your writing, write to be published, know your markets, and keep submitting to them. (5) Believe that you can do it. This advice is unapologetically practical; as for the art of writing, you’ll get better as you do it.
Do you have any particular UKA favourites?
I’d prefer not to name names because I might leave someone out. Suffice it to say that there are some great talents on the site; some are recognised, some are not. Some work within the form, some push the envelope. This variety makes UKAuthors a great place to be.
How do you see your future writing career?
Precarious, same as anyone’s. The goal of my writing career is to be so successful that I can write full time. That ain’t easy and will require as much luck as talent and industry. Still, that’s my goal.
How do you go about writing? Do you have a special time, place, word count to aspire to?
When I’m writing a novel, I sit down at the same time and place, seven days a week, and write 500 words or so. That isn’t much, but over a period of months it builds up. One of the attractions of the short story form, I think, is that you can round one off in a single session and feel like you’ve done some work. With a novel, you might work for weeks and then realise you’ve written down a blind alley and you have to hit the delete key. Recently I’ve started to believe that I write short fiction as a novel avoidance strategy. The art of writing a novel is an order of magnitude harder than that of writing a short story, in my opinion. (Maybe that just means I need to put more effort into my short stories!)
Do you suffer from writer’s block? Any cures?
I don’t want to belittle writers who go through ‘writer’s block’, but I don’t think it truly exists as a ‘block’. I consider writing to be hard, period. It’s graft. I feel ‘writer’s block’ every time I sit down at a story, but you can’t expect to have any flow until you’re well into it. My advice would be to write through the block; write anything, perhaps poetry (because it’s so different), and then come back to your work. Even if you have to junk 90%, 10% of 1000 words is 100 words, whereas 10% of 0 is nothing.
Where do you go when the world gets scary?
When is the world not scary? I’d like to say that I write to get away from it; or I read. But good fiction is often a magnification of reality. I rely on my friends to improve my mood in these situations!
What would you recommend as your all-time top three books?
Blimey Charlie. If I could narrow that to ‘top three most influential on me’ and widen it to ‘nonfiction as well as fiction’, I’d have: (1) Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’, because it is a triumph of thought over ignorance, (2) Adams’s ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ (all of the series!), because he shaped my adolescence and (3) Kuhn’s ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, because this book helped found my academic education.
Here’s a space for your own plug. Tell us about anything you have published or anything that you are proud of and would like people to read. Self promotion is often frowned on but not here, so go for it.
Well, readers are very welcome to buy my debut novel, Déjà Vu. It’s available through all the usual channels, but why not buy it from the UKA Press website? If I may, I’d also like to plug Tom Saunders’s ‘Brother, What Strange Place is This?’, Aliya Whiteley’s ‘Mean Mode Median’, Mark Turley’s ‘The Rainbow Maker’, and David Gardiner’s ‘SIRAT’. Some established science fiction writers have been very kind in their support of my work, so please consider buying theirs: Ken MacCleod, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Stan Nicholls, Crawford Killian, and Mike Cobley.
Thank you, Ian
Thanks, Sooz. Best of luck with your own writing and best of luck to everyone on UKAuthors in achieving their writing goals.
Ian can be contacted at:
Email: ian_hocking@hotmail.com
Website: http://www.ianhocking.com
© Sue Simpson 2004
| 
