AARON BEEPAT: What inspired you to write?
JONATHAN MABERRY: I think I was born with a gene for it. I can’t remember ever wanting to be anything else. Before I could write I told stories with toys. I remember in third grade when the teacher asked us what we wanted to be. Half the kids said ‘fireman’ or ‘astronaut’ or whatever. I said ‘storyteller.’
BEEPAT: Out of all your work, which are you most proud of?
MABERRY: At the moment? ROT & RUIN. I took a lot of chances with that book, and I fell in love with the world, the characters and the story. People often cry when they read it, and even though I’m a big manly man, I cried when I wrote it.
BEEPAT: How did you get your first writing job?
MABERRY: While I was in my second year of college I took a chance and sent query letters to major magazines to try and sell articles. They always say ‘write what you know’, and what I knew most at the time was martial arts. I’ve been studying jujutsu since I was a little kid. So I pitched articles on that. After a shaky start (by first writing the world’s worst query letter) I made my first sale, and it was to BLACK BELT MAGAZINE, the top-selling martial arts mag in the world. Wasn’t a lot of money, but it was a professional sale and I was off and running.
I’ve always sold some stuff as a sideline, but it wasn’t until about eight years ago that I jumped ship and took a risk by becoming a full-time writer. Turns out…it was the right choice.
BEEPAT: What advice would you give for anyone wanting to enter the writing industry?
MABERRY: First, learn the craft. Most writers are born with some kind of storytelling ability (maybe it’s a gene), but good writing is the result of storytelling plus learned skills. Take the time to learn about voice and point of voice, about figurative and descriptive language, about action and tension. Learn how to construct a sentence and a paragraph.
Next, write an outline. Know where your story is going to go so that you don’t waste time writing scenes which don’t contribute to that goal. That said, once you have an outline allow the story to grow organically so that you don’t force it to fit. A technique that works for me is that I write the first and last chapters of a book; then I write an exploratory synopsis –which is an essay written for myself in which I work out the story and the narrative logic; and then I write an outline.
One crucial thing is: NEVER revise until you are finished a first draft. Never. Ever. Revision of that kind is a momentum-killer. It’s a quicksand pit. Write it down fast and ugly and then fix it in the rewrite.
The second part of that piece of advice (and the reason most people step into the revision quicksand) is that you shouldn’t try to write a perfect piece. No one has ever done it, and no one can. Write a solid piece, pretty it up in the rewrite, and then send it out. Then work on something else. Perfection is by definition impossible for humans to attain. Stop wasting good writing time on it.
And last…and maybe most important of all…be relentless. If you love to write, then keep writing and keep sending it out.
BEEPAT: What are your upcoming works?
MABERRY: This has been my most productive year to date. Between novels, nonfiction books, short stories and comics, I’ve had something new coming out every month, and often multiple things coming out in a single week.
I also have three mini-series from Marvel in the pipeline. MARVEL UNIVERSE VS THE PUNISHER just finished and will be out as a hardback graphic novel in December (it’s a post-apocalyptic existentialist adventure. Very strange, even for me.) Next up is BLACK PANTHER: KLAWS OF THE PANTHER, kicking off in October; and then in January we launch CAPTAIN AMERICA: HAIL HYDRA, a five-issue Marvel Event that follows Cap from World War II to present day. And my graphic novel, DOOMWAR, debuts in hardcover in October.
In early 2011, I have my third Joe Ledger thriller, THE KING OF PLAGUES, hitting stores in March from St. Martins Griffin. It follows PATIENT ZERO (2009) and THE DRAGON FACTORY (2010). The whole series has been optioned by producer Michael DeLuca (Blade, Magnolia, Se7en) and is in development for TV.
***This article is a verbatim print of the exchange between Aaron Beepat and the author through social networking.