Interview Week: The Writing Craft with Jamie Delano

What is the writer secret origin of Jamie Delano?  What caused you to become a writer?

I suspect the blame can be laid primarily at the feet of my mother. She infected me with the word virus, whispering sly poems and bedtime stories into my innocent hypnagogic ear almost before I could speak. My brain was thus catastrophically rewired with an innate fascination for the structure and music of language which I have been struggling to accommodate ever since. Even after sixty years I’m still not sure I’ve forgiven her for this cruel affliction.

What writers formed the larger part of your influences upon your writing?  Has that group of writers remained as your influences or have other writers, perhaps colleagues, new discoveries, or change in outlook led to more and or different ones?

I can spray a few off at random (say: Robert Louis Stevenson, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Alan Garner, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Captain W E Johns… through to… J G Ballard, G K Chesterton, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, William S Burroughs, William Shakespeare, Robert Stone, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thomson, James Ellroy, J P Donleavy, Flann O’Brien… among several thousand others) but, bottom line, just about any author I read in my formative years, as well as those I continue to read today, by necessity must be considered ‘influential’. We are all products of our combined experience and our interpretations of this. Experience is cumulative and ongoing; intelligence is adaptive, and understanding and perspective evolves according to this accretion of information. I haven’t given up considering the written thoughts of others yet (although maybe I am a tad more discerning than I once was), and so I continue to be influenced daily, while, in the nature of all us perpetrators of writing crimes, perhaps influencing (for good or ill) others in my turn.

How do you approach writing dialogue and do you think it is the more difficult task a writer does?  Why or why not?

Writing dialogue is tricky. Some find it trickier than others. 

Many claim the ultimate goal is ‘naturalism’; I’d say, listen to the average natural human vocal interaction, with all it’s stuttering, barely coherent sentence fragments, syntactical shorthands, non-verbal enhancements, etc, and tell me that is what you want to read on a page…

The writer’s craft is to suggest a style of natural speech while – especially in comics, where text-space is extremely limited – intensifying the delivery of information and emotion carried by the dialogue. It need not be entirely Shakespearean, but a degree of ‘poetry’ in phrasing is also to be desired. All writing should be easy on the ear, have its own appealing music, without appearing ostentatious. Often, the most seeming ‘natural’ writing is the most worked. I have spent entire days of my life trying to make brief dialogue exchanges hit the right notes and rhythms and sound pleasing. That’s what writers are supposed to do.

The ability to hear the voices of your characters in your head is also useful. 

Do you write as a result of inspiration or dedication and time at the keyboard?  If you read other writing, do you automatically begin to mentally edit that, or think, I would have gone a direction?

I write as a result of compulsion, driven by guilt that I am not fulfilling my self-assigned pointless life-function when I can’t face the bastard blank page terror again.

I am a ‘keyboard thinker’. My stories only reveal themselves when my tapping fingers summon them from void to screen before me.

It is one of the costs of being a ‘full-time’ writer, in my experience, that one’s wholehearted enjoyment of the work of others is diminished by a carping critical internal voice that constantly insists that this passage or another could be improved by some ultimately pointless and arrogant edit- the clauses of a sentence rearranged, a comma more, or less, here or there… I think this small-mindedness is fair, as long as you are prepared to be as ruthless and petty in criticism of your own work too.

If you were to give advice to a new writer what would you say?  Did you find most of your writer voice alone, or did it arise from education, time in the field, and influences from others also at work in the field?

Ignore the advice of others, especially when imparted through the agency of ‘Ten Things You Must …’ lists.

Write when you feel like it: writing for the sake of it is futile and ultimately counterproductive. You don’t have to write every day to be a writer. Any fool can blather out ‘a thousand words a day’ but the effort is worthless if you don’t get them in the right order.

That said- the only way to improve as a writer is through practice. It can always be better next time. That’s why you go back to the keyboard and start the next thing.

Edit. Edit the fuck out of everything. Edit each sentence as you write it. When you eventually hit ‘The End’ start editing again from the beginning.

Learn from the work of others. Don’t imitate it. If you are a writer, your individual voice will make itself apparent. Learn to recognise it. Listen to it and let it speak when you do.

Expect to be miserable for a great deal of your life as you wrestle to master your recalcitrant craft, aware in the deepest recesses of your soul that, ultimately, in the universal scheme of things, it’s all just pointless drivel and no one really cares.

You will be known to many readers for your run on Hellblazer, but, you've written in many other fields, and formats.  Do you care how people think about your body of work, do you say "well yes I did Hellblazer, but I've also done all sorts of other work" what do you want people to think when they hear your name with regard to writing?

If I’m honest, yes, I do care how people regard my body of work. Of course I’m grateful that many people have enjoyed – and massively expanded on – work I did on, say, Hellblazer thirty years ago. But I have written far better stuff since. It would be nice if more people appreciated that too, but I’m grateful for those that do; and, in the end, I’m not writing for other people but to satisfy myself and pass the endless dreary hours of my life in an entertaining and absorbing fashion.

I want people to think when they consider my oeuvre that at least I took the job seriously, applied myself to developing my craft, and never, however tempted, just resorted to phoning shit in.

Do you have practises and habits of writing?  Do you write daily?

Frankly, these days, I consider I’m doing well if I write seriously on a yearly cycle… There is not an endless supply of words; sometimes you need to conserve them. Especially when billions of them are being blurted into the global earhole every second. Why add to the raucous cacophony merely for the sake of it? Well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

When I do have a work in progress, my practice is to circle the stairs to my study for hours before warily mounting them to turn on the evil machine, cajole the cooperation of my characters in revealing what it is they want to say and do, and write down as much of it as I am able. When the ‘flow’ is exhausted – after one hour, or eight – I stop to eat and pay attention to humans inhabiting the real world around me for a few hours, before spending the quiet after-midnight hours reviewing the day’s earlier output, refining it as much as I am able, before retiring to sleep and let my unconscious mind process the following day’s direction of literary travel/travail…

You write mostly prose now, I think, does that use a different writer muscle, or, is writing writing regardless of the style, format, time taking to write it?

Any manipulation of words for the purpose of education, entertainment or polemic can be considered ‘writing’. It’s basically the ordering and communication of thought through the medium of language.

Writing for comics requires different techniques, maybe, to writing novels, because of the intrinsic differences between the respective media; but it’s all an exercise in wordplay. A comic script requires narrative and dialogue, and art direction which will inspire an artist to bring aspects the storytelling to the page in a graphic format. That same descriptive function is still necessary in  a novel, but communicated to the reader’s imagination directly, rather than mitigated by the vision of an artist.

The major practical difference, as I see it, is that comics are collaborative, and more structurally restrictive, while novels are solitary enterprises and potentially endless.

Is there any area, format, field of writing that remains mostly unplowed territory?

You mean in general, or personally?

Personally...

I regret not developing an early love for poetry. I was tempted by journalism at one point. But, on the whole and being kind of lazy, I don’t really feel I have much unrequited capacity weighing on me.

Writers, artists, makers of film all have a fire in them called creativity.  Would you have found an outlet eventually, if you had not become first a comic writer?  Is there a better path regarding a writer's creative and financial journey?

I have a few different way in which I express my ‘creativity’. Writing has not left me much space to exercise them. Take away the writing and I’d do more photography, probably some painting, gardening, even education…

I consider myself very fortunate to have found a slot in an industry that allowed me to earn a moderate living for a few decades writing comics. If I had not, my life would have been more miserable, and fewer people would have read stuff I’ve written, but I think I would still have considered myself a writer and been forced to fulfil that calling on some level. As I say, words are a disease and, once he has contracted it, a writer has no option but to spread the infection as far and wide as possible, so that others may suffer with him.  Jamie Delano 2018