Chris Lawson is the author of Canterbury Hollow, a short story recently published on COSMOS online. Well known for his science fiction short stories and medical non-fiction essays, Lawson?s work has received several awards. His short story Written in Blood received an Aurealis Award for best science fiction short story and Hieronymous Boche blitzed the Aurealis horror category. On top of this, Lawson received a Ditmar Award for his novella Countless Screaming Argonauts.
Awards aside, writing stories is only a fraction of the man-come-machine that is Chris Lawson; indeed his unworldly brainpower could be from one of his science fiction novels. Lawson, whose father worked on a crocodile farm in Papua New Guinea, is a medical practitioner, a teacher, a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and a family man.
In a bid to see how the extraterrestrial magic of Canterbury Hollow was born, COSMOS intern Caitlin Bishop caught up with Lawson to discuss the apocalypses of science fiction, how building characters is like painting a wall and the basic technology of fur, leather, spears, canoes, nets, and water bladders.
Caitlin Bishop: From life balloting to a religious brethren saviour, this story discusses quality of life and the value of nature, what aspect of Canterbury Hollow is most important to you and why?
Chris Lawson: It?s the trade-off between them, I suppose. Canterbury Hollow is about people trying to live meaningful lives when one of the great traditional meanings, leaving a mark on the future, has become somewhat pointless.
Canterbury Hollow mentions the "engine of colonisation and exploitation", what real life concepts influenced this aspect?
The human expansion out of Africa. Extraordinary species, humans. We managed to colonise every continent except Antarctica with very basic technology. Fur, leather, spears, canoes, nets, and water bladders were sufficient for us to thrive in every ecosystem from tundra to tropical deserts despite not being all that well adapted to many of these.
Easter Island was settled by canoeing across 2,600 km of open ocean around 900-1200 years ago. After a long period of stability the population collapsed to the point of near-extinction by the 18th century. Some historians think the collapse was caused by over-exploitation of the environment, others blame slave-raiders or whalers or exposure to smallpox.
Whichever way it was, I think the force of human psychology that spurs us to explore and expand is intimately related to, and possibly even the same as, the force that urges us to squeeze every last drop out of our environment.
You?ve said you have known you were going to write stories since the age of eight; did the art of writing come naturally to you?
Words have always been very kind to me, so building the basic blocks of language came naturally but there are other layers to writing a story that took me a long time to evolve. Even now I find that I have to develop a new approach for every story I write. It?s a very time-hungry process for me and not one I can recommend in good faith to other writers.
You write in both fiction and non-fiction, which genre do you find most challenging and why?
Writing fiction is harder work for me, but there?s a hidden trap to non-fiction that makes it more painstaking. All writing except technical writing is about story telling, and there?s a wonderful feeling to drawing a strong story out of real historical or scientific events. The problem is that the story can be so compelling that you might fail to notice that it?s wrong. It?s devastating to go back to check a reference only to find that you?ve remembered it incorrectly and it completely ruins the tale you think you had.
What do you think about the contention that contemporary science fiction has lost its faith in the future?
Ah! You?re trying to lure me into an internet controversy! Without discussing specific criticisms of contemporary SF, I think it?s completely ahistorical to think that the genre has lost faith in the future. Any story about human characters in the far future is premised on an unfounded optimism about our ability to survive and prosper while remaining human - people like Stephen Baxter and Vernor Vinge are writing stories like this.
Conversely, the so-called Golden Age of SF (roughly 1938 to the mid-1950s, arguably the genre?s most starry-eyed era), was littered with stories set in bleak or disturbing futures such as James Blish?s A Case of Conscience, Theodore Sturgeon?s More Than Human, and the savage, almost Swiftian world of Pohl and Kornbluth?sThe Space Merchants.
Science fiction has had a surfeit of apocalypses from the very start and it has optimists writing today.
You?re a medical GP, a teacher, a writer and a family man; does the different aspects in your life provide inspiration for creative writing?
My stories are triggered by specific ideas or mental images, mostly from reading scientific research papers or history. When it comes to fleshing out the people in the story who have to confront the repercussions of that idea, though, you have to turn to personal experience to build plausible characters.
I?ve been lucky to have worked in a career that requires me to speak to many people from diverse backgrounds about matters that are of the utmost importance to them and that they would tell very few people (and sometimes nobody else). I never use specific events from a patient?s life?even de-identified, distorted, and placed in a new context, I would feel like I was breaking confidence. But once you?ve talked to thousands of people about their most intimate and confronting problems, it?s not hard to generate any number of characters.
Having said that, a really good character is more than just a collection of emotional needs. Understanding a character?s motivations is the undercoat; you need a couple of layers of paint over the top: the quirks, affectations, misjudgments, self-defeating behaviours, and so on. Sometimes it takes a long time for the character to develop even after I know what drives them; usually something snaps into focus when I?m thinking about something else entirely.
Do you have any advice for aspiring authors? How do you transform an idea into a story?
Read a lot. Read widely, not just in your favourite genre. Read history. Write the sort of stories you like to read. Write a lot; throw most of it in the bin. Be patient. Don?t expect to make a living out of writing; count yourself lucky if you do.
Transforming idea into story: the process is always idiosyncratic and varies from writer to writer. My process is fairly experimental. I try out lots of different scenarios, ?what if she did this?, ?what if he did that instead?, ?what if he was poor but from a wealthy family?, and see what works in my head. But when I?m stuck I try to think about the sort of person who would be challenged by the idea I?m thinking about, and what situations would push them into conflict.
What writing projects are you working on at the moment and what do you hope to write next?
I have a vast mental library of uncompleted stories. Well, it seems vast to me, anyway. I tend to chip away at all the stories at once until one of them clicks into place and is ready to be written. So you can expect a time-travel-existential-crisis noirish mystery, a dinosaurs-vs-creationists survival adventure, a biological-informatics disaster story, a post-World War One cubism-is-reality story, another story in the same universe as Canterbury Hollow, or any one of a dozen others.
It all depends on which stories distill themselves in my head first.
Caitlin Bishop is completing and internship at COSMOS Magazine.
Source: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/features/online/5986/in-conversation-with-chris-lawson
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