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Interview: Suzanne Palmer

Suzanne Palmer, AW’s own zanzjan, won 2018’s Hugo Award for Best Novelette for “The Secret Life of Bots.” Her short fiction has won readers’ awards for Asimov’s, Analog, and Interzone magazines, and been included in the Locus Recommended Reading List. Palmer has twice been a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and once for the Eugie M. Foster Memorial Award. Her debut novel Finder will be released by DAW on April 2, 2019.

What’s your elevator pitch for Finder?

Fergus Ferguson is an interstellar repo man who has gone off to a backwater, deep space settlement to find and take back a stolen spaceship, and gets caught up in the middle of an escalating feud between a crooked junk merchant and a family of lichen farmers. Plus: mysterious marauding aliens!

Did you have a playlist for Finder?

I need very different music when I’m working on a first draft versus while revising, and the first draft of Finder feels like ages ago now and I can’t remember what I was listening to back then, but certainly something high-energy like Florence & The Machine, Snow Patrol, etc. My go-to music in revision is usually Bonobo, along with Euphoria, Thievery Corporation, and other fairly mellow, largely instrumental music.

Were there any surprises for you as you wrote Finder? Character developments or plot twists that you didn’t expect?

Hahaha, the whole thing? But seriously, I am not much of a planner, and when I start a new project I usually only have a few tiny “seeds” of what I want — a character, or a setting, or a small scene — and I just throw it down on the page and see where it goes. I can usually tell within a few paragraphs from how the story language wants to pace itself, and from how quickly more idea bits are accumulating onto the growing mass how big it’s going to be, and with Finder I thought early on I was heading into novella territory, but I was nervous about letting it go longer. In the end, the story insisted, so I went along with it.

What’s your writing process like?

First drafts are an absolute chaotic mess, with a lot of back and forth and dead-end alleys I need to back out of and find a better path forward, and I often have only a vague idea where I’m going until I get there. The joy of discovery, of finding that you left yourself perfect breadcrumbs without even realizing it, is for me not only one of my favorite parts of the experience, but a necessary part of it. If I know too much about the story I get bored trying to write it.

Once I get to the actual end, and I have the big picture of what the story is and I start to revise, if it’s a longer piece I’ll usually build an outline retroactively as I work my way through, which then gives me a handy roadmap for a lot of the fiddly but critical work making the whole thing come together.

source:http://absolutewrite.com/