Interview: Jonathan Louis Duckworth
I met Jonathan through an online workshop run by Gabino Iglesias and followed him on Twitter immediately thereafter. An active member of the online #WritingCommunity, Jonathan writes poetry, fantasy, horror, and literary fiction; he is also a Teaching Fellow and PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas. He’s graciously taken some time away from teaching and writing to answer the following questions:
What is your personal writing process like?
I'm an afternoon-evening writer, which is a very hit or miss process because some days I'm too worn out to do anything creative. It used to be that I had to make everything right before I could put in a good shift, I had a number of little rituals that I had to observe before I could write—essentially I couldn't do anything but prepare to write on my writing days, or else the whole night would be shot. Nowadays I can usually write most nights if I'm engaged in a large project. I try to keep myself on target—1,000 words a night is always my goal when I'm writing a novel. I was very proud of myself this year for writing two whole novels in between February and August, and I credit that to keeping myself on task.
How big a part does reading play in your writing life?
How could anyone write if they didn't read? There was a time when I was starting out, in my late teens, where I wanted to be a writer but rarely read anything. I don't think I was writing anything worthwhile then, and if I didn't become a voracious reader starting in undergrad and continuing to this day, I'd never be half the writer I am now. It helps to read broadly and diversely, but it also helps to read within whatever genre you're trying to master. I also believe in reading a mix of classics and new, new (like, just printed last week) books, so that I can know how it started and how it's going (if you'll pardon the meme reference).
How do you cultivate your ideas?
My ideas cultivate me, I tend to think. I have no control over what my brain does or how it rearranges things I see, hear, experience, and read into completely new things. Russell Hoban advises to be "friends with your imagination," and I wholeheartedly cosign that advice. Sometimes I write things down when they occur to me in a notebook, and sometimes I don't. It's the ideas that I don't write down but stick with me nonetheless that I know are good, because they've burned themselves into my brain without any effort on my part.
How do you get "unstuck" creatively?
Generally I don't get stuck, which I know sounds like a glib answer. I learned years ago that "writer's block" or any similar concept is just another name for anxiety, and I handle my anxiety by managing expectations and practicing various forms of self-care. If a story isn't working, I let it go, set it aside, and work on something else for a while. Maybe I come back to it, maybe I don't, but I've learned not to stew over my failures, and that's been immensely helpful in getting stuck less.
What's your "go-to" piece of writing advice?
What I always tell students who are struggling to think of an idea for a story, after I've already explained to them that at the heart of story is character: think of something terrible that almost happened to you, or maybe did happen to you, and then make it happen to your character/make it worse than it was for you.
What story or book or poem inspired you to become a writer?
Well, I knew I wanted to write poetry after reading James Wright's "The Branch Will Not Break" in undergrad. As for my desire to be a fiction writer, I can't really trace that to any one moment or text, but I do recall wanting to write my own equivalent of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit for most of my childhood up till my teen years, so maybe that's the answer. I definitely wouldn't have ever pursued writing professionally though were it not for getting hooked on Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series of urban fantasy novels, which reignited my passion for reading around the time I graduated high school. So, a lot of books.
Where can people find you and your work online?
I have a terrible Wordpress that's woefully out of date and poorly organized, and you can find a lot of my older poetry and short stories there.
Otherwise, here are a few links for newer work that's more representative of who I am as a writer now:
“Lying in a Hammock in Warrensburg, New York”
And of course you can always Google me!
