Eric Flint

Interview by Alyce Wilson

Eric Flint is an American alternate history and fantasy author, editor, and e-publisher. Flint has a Master's Degree in history, specializing in West African history. He left his doctoral program over political issues and supported himself as a laborer, machinist and labor organizer. A long-time leftist political activist, Flint worked as a member of the Socialist Workers Party.

After winning the 1993 Writers of the Future contest, he published his first novel in 1997 and moved to full time writing in 1999. Shortly afterwards, he became the first librarian of the Baen Free Library and a prominent anti-copy protection activist. He has edited the works of several classic SF authors, repackaging their short stories into collections and fix-up novels.

In 2004, due to continuing interest by fan-fiction authors in his 1632 series, he suggested to Jim Baen of Baen Books the experimental serialized fan-fiction e-zine The Grantville Gazette, which found commercial success. Four of the Gazette magazine editions were collated into anthology formats to date.

Subsequently, Flint became editor of the new Jim Baen's Universe science-fiction e-zine while concurrently bringing out three to five of his own titles per year. After the death of Jim Baen, Flint founded grantvillegazette.com which continues to bring out The Grantville Gazettes, at better than standard magazine pay rates.

This interview was conducted when he was a keynote speaker at Philcon.

(biography adapted from Wikipedia)

As I told you, I interviewed David Weber years ago when he was [at Philcon] as a keynote speaker. He told me about your collaborative process [and] said you come up with ideas together and then you decide which portions of the book each of you will work on. Then from that point on you review each other's work and revise it together. That seems to coincide with what you wrote on your own site about that process. He talked about how this allowed you to bring your own strengths into the mix. Do you see it that way? And if so what are the strengths that you feel you're each bringing to it?

Oh yeah, that's a very accurate depiction of how we work together. It's hard to put this exactly into words because it's more instinctive. There's a few things we always agree on. [...] He's got a very, very elaborate, well-worked-out set of technical parameters for the science fictional aspects of the story. I don't get involved with that, because I know what they are, broadly speaking. He's actually written a very long, elaborate [reference guide]. We call it the tech bible, which is how everything works, and it's all very detailed. I'm not going to meddle with that.

So what I'll do if I'm writing a chapter — and this has happened — I'll say to David, "OK, at this point our heroes are here, they've got to get over here in, I figure, about two weeks. You figure out which wormholes they're going to use and whether they're using the heater [ph] pins or the theta [ph] pins or whatever. I don't care." [...] I tend to stay away from that completely. He will write any of the action scenes that involve large-scale naval forces.

That's what he told me, too.

That's really his bailiwick, and I'm just not going to get into it. It's not that I couldn't, but it's kind of silly. It's his specialty, so why would I meddle in it? I got into this series because I developed a set of characters and [...] one short novella, one long novella that I wrote for his anthologies that he had as part of his series. He liked the characters a lot, and he wanted to continue developing them. So I tend to follow those characters when we work together, but it gets more complicated because some of the characters like Catherine Montaigne, he sort of wound up with that. He's really working with her much more than I am. It's really quite complex how it works. We'll agree on which chapters we're each going to write. It's literally just like he describes it; then we'll review it and we'll discuss it. Occasionally, we don't see things exactly the same way, in which case Dave makes the decisions.

He said that when it's his universe then he kind of sets the agenda and when it's yours, like with the sequel to 1632, he said [...] that you were the one that was running the show.

There's a basic principle of collaboration which Mike Resnick laid out and talks on it, and it's very true. Whenever you're going to have a collaborative effort, one of the very first things you have to establish is who, if necessary, makes the final decision. In other words, somebody has to be accepted as the boss. In practice, it almost never really comes to that, but you have to have that established so that it just makes life a lot easier.

When I work with Dave Drake, it's based on a class that he's developed, so I just tell him, "Dave, it's your final decision," even though I do all the writing. But still, if there's any issue that comes up, Dave will be the one who makes the final, yes or no.

And you said he was a sort of writing mentor to you, as well?

Dave Drake?

You used the term apprenticeship.

Yes, I did. It was very much like that.

What did you learn from him that you took into your other projects?

A couple things. One thing: I got some good advice on the tricky aspects of making a career out of being a writer. So some of it was just practical advice. But as far as writing goes, it was mostly the craft of writing. There's an awful lot of craftsmanship involved with writing that is not visible to the reader; it shouldn't be visible to the reader, that...

Like in the revision process?

No, just writing. I'll give you a concrete example. I had a tendency, as do many authors, especially new authors, but you'll find well-established authors do it, I would have a tendency to slide into what's called "indirect discourse" where a scene, I would just describe and tell a reader what happened in a certain episode and move on. Partly, that happens because you're not quite skilled enough and partly, actually, you get tired, and it seems like it's a fast way to get through it. Whenever I would do that, David would say, "Eric, you lapsed into indirect discourse. I want you to rewrite this in direct discourse."

Meaning?

Which means putting it in dialogue, action, etc. Telling the reader "so and so did this and said this and so forth," you actually thicken. He didn't have to tell me to do that too often; because after a while I began to understand what he was talking about, and I could see it myself. It takes, usually, longer to write; it takes more pages to write; it typically works much better; and it's much faster to read it. There are things like that. Things like how to structure. David's extraordinarily good at structure and plot. I hadn't, to be honest, given a whole lot of thought to plot. [...]

Well, before you worked with him you primarily worked, as I understand, with a friend from college?

Yes, Richard Roach. But even then [...] a lot of it [was] my own. My collaboration with Richard is kind of unusual, because Richard's not really a writer.

He's [more of] an idea man, right?

Yes, it's hard to describe. He does write, but his prose, as it is written, is perfectly un-publishable. But he and I, and two other friends initially, they dropped out early on, developed the Joe's World series from the beginning, starting in 1969. We always worked together on it, and we would kick the ideas back and forth. He's the one other person besides me who would understand the whole framework and what we're doing with it. He would write; it's just that his prose is terrible, so typically, he would write a chapter and what I would usually do is look at it. There would almost always be a really good idea in it, and I would just typically rewrite it completely. Not rewrite what he wrote; I would just scrap what he wrote, and I'd write it. There are some exceptions. There are some chapters and passages he wrote that were quite good. I'd keep them and expand it or polish it or whatever, but I wouldn't mess with it. But typically, if you're looking at the page which lists me and Richard as the collaborators, in terms of actually writing I probably wrote...

More than ninety percent of it.

Ninety-six to ninety-seven percent. Richard actually wrote more of a later episode, of a book that'll come later, but what happened when it came time… He and I were never worried how we were going to work on it together but eventually, many, many years later, we got to the point of actually signing contracts, and at that point you can't be vague in a contract, so we had to decide how we were going to split the money, how we were going to divide the credits. And we had basically five books under contract, and we decided the fairest way to do it was that I would get eighty percent of the money and eighty percent of the credit. The way we did that was that it meant I was going to be sole author in three of the books, starting with The Philosophical Strangler, and Richard and I would be the collaborators on two of the books. But in a way, it's just a formality; you could just as easily list him as a collaborator on all five of them.

Right.

Or on none of them in some cases. [...] We've [known] each other since we were young men and have known each other all our lives. We worked together on this project going on four years now. It's just not something that either he or I worry about. It's just that at a certain point you've got to put formalities, so names get put on there and bylines and money gets divided up.

Well, when you've known someone that long, they almost become like part of your family.

Right, yes.

"Well of course I'm going to include you."

Sure, exactly. But the point is Richard was a less-developed writer than I was. I was basically, like most writers, I was an autodidact. I taught myself how to write. And it shows. I read recently, about a year and a half ago, I reread Mother of Demons, and I'm very proud of that novel; it's an excellent novel. But looking back on it from — I wrote that in 1993 — 15 years later, I can see all the crude, rough craftsmanship and things I would do differently today. I'm not going to, but I could see; back then I just didn't.