Alana Joli Abbott Interview

Alana Joli Abbott is a writer and editor. Her work includes fiction, nonfiction, comics, role playing games, and contributions to shared worlds, among other things. She’ll say a bit more about all that. She answered my questions (I’m Dan Copulsky) in June 2010.

In terms of both profession and personal identity, what do you do?

How I self-identify is constantly changing, but mostly I think of myself as a writer and a mom. Professionally, I’m a freelance writer and editor who works a couple of days a week at the local library reference desk.

For your creative process, how does the writing fiction compare to writing nonfiction, or contributing to games or comics?

Each of those areas works differently, and even different styles of nonfiction require different types of thought! I work on a lot of reference series, writing short, concise articles that have to be synthesized from various other articles. The way I work on those is pretty straight forward: read the material, analyze the important parts, then put it back together in my own words.

Writing a history article is similar, but has a lot more fluidity, because the style isn’t as rigid. My article “Cruising the Thimble Islands” had a lot of the same analysis and synthesis, but I used a lot more of my own style, and invested myself more deeply in the research, doing interviews alongside reading books.

How does that compare to working on comics and games?

I write comics panel by panel. I took half of an online screenwriting class when one was offered through Barnes and Noble University, and even just the first few sessions helped me learn how to think about movement in writing. In prose, you write out what people are thinking and feeling—everything appears in your head and can be transferred directly to the reader. In screenwriting, according to what I learned, you can’t transmit any of the character’s thoughts; your audience sees everything through action. Comics are somewhere in between, since you reveal what’s going on with the characters through both short prose (if you reveal it at all) and images. Working with an artist also means, to me, leaving some gaps and details for my partner to fill in—describe too much and I’ve basically taken away all of the artist’s ability to move, but describe too little and we may end up creating different stories. So comics are a great balance in describing what I want a page to look like without taking control of the narrative.

Writing for games means leaving even more holes in the narrative, especially with adventure writing. The key there is to provide a framework inside of which the players and game master can tell the story and make it their own. Even writing about the world in descriptive text means leaving holes for the players to fill in—I try to hint at potential adventures or story ideas, but the settings only ever really come to life in the minds of the players, or in novels based in the same setting, which is what I’ve tried to do with my fiction writing set in shared worlds. (Both of my published novels, Into the Reach and Departure, are tie-ins to a game world.)

How do you approach writing fiction?

With my own fiction, I start without an outline, usually with just a scene or a feeling. I do research when I feel the story needs it, but it’s not the same kind of synthesis writing; instead, it’s taking the ideas presented in the research and running with them, working little details into the bigger story, and making sure that the details and the plot serve the characters. I’m very character driven as a writer, and I’m definitely a “pantser,” as they say in the blogosphere. I don’t like to work from an outline, because I feel like it spoils the surprise at where the story is going, and I have less motivation to write more of the story when I know how it all turns out.

You were a fan of Joss Whedon’s Firefly since you saw a preview trailer the winter before it came out. You then got a chance to contribute to the licensed role playing game based on the TV show, Serenity RPG. Is adding to a famous universe you’ve been a fan of as totally awesome as it sounds?

It was really incredible. Not only did I get to play in Joss’s ‘Verse, but I got to work with Margaret Weis as my editor for part of the project. (She’s just as amazing an editor as she is a writer.) Firefly really impacted the way I use language and the way I think about language, so having free reign to write in the linguistic style of the show was incredibly enjoyable. I’d do it again in a second if I had the opportunity.

How do you make the connections to work for different companies and on different projects? Is it something you have to consciously focus on it does it come naturally through doing the work you’re already doing?

Right now, I have enough clients to keep me busy, especially with my new “mom” role, so I’m not making a lot of effort to seek out new gigs. Much of my reference work comes through networking with people I used to work for, or who used to do work for me, when I was an in-house editor at Gale, now Gale Cengage, in the Detroit area. I did a lot of networking a few years running in the gaming industry by going to conventions and handing out my business card. The contacts I made there, and through ENWorld’s forums, made connections to other gigs, and I’ve been lucky to have my work show up in fiction anthologies and games based on hearing about opportunities from people I met. Most of that networking is still working for me, and more comes out of blogs I read and comment on. The self-perpetuating networking is nice, and as long as I’m busy, I don’t worry too much about stepping up and focusing more on that aspect.

How much do you think of projects as steps towards some greater success, and how much do you just relish the work you’re currently involved in?

As of now, I’ve stopped taking work that isn’t worth doing just for itself, whether that means for the payment at the end or for my own fulfillment. Earlier in my career, I did a lot of work for free, or for product credit, in order to establish myself. Volunteering like that is a great way to start making contacts and have writing samples to show around. These days, however, if it’s not work that I enjoy doing, it had either better pay very well or mean working with editors or project managers I really respect and enjoy working with. Of course, the best scenario would be doing work that I love for editors who are amazing and are paying me plenty of money! That’s a dream I’ve yet to realize.

Alana’s Website – virgilandbeatrice.com
Alana’s Livejournal – alanajoli.livejournal.com