Terrible Minds 
Uncanny Magazine is an award-winning online science fiction and fantasy magazine, and every issue is packed with incredible stories, poems, essays, podcasts…and interviews. We need your help to fund another year! Check out our Uncanny Magazine Year 13: The Space Unicorn Believes in YOU! Kickstarter for subscriptions and cool backer rewards, and help us spread the word!
I started doing the print interviews for Uncanny in 2018: that’s seven and a half years, fifty issues with two interviews each, a hundred opportunities to chat with authors about their work. In that time, I’ve learned a lot—about the stories, the authors, what makes for a good interview, and more…
1. Process is whatever gets the story written.
I love talking to writers about their process! For Uncanny Magazine interviews, the first question I ask is usually how the story started—the spark or inspiration. Authors are constantly bombarded with inspirations, which can be anything—a reality tv show, a flooded village in Greece, a ballroom dance scene from a film—but for most writers, finding ideas is the easy part, the execution is what’s tricky.
And how a story comes together is all over the map:
- R.S.A. Garcia wrote her award-winning story “Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200” in eight hours after a comment from a friend sparked the idea and the story “dropped into [her] head fully formed.”
- For “The Memory Hounds of Bak-Ankham,” A. W. Prihandita did extensive planning before starting to write the actual draft—over twelve thousand words of notes!
- Sarah Pinsker’s award-winning “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather,” has a structure inspired by the lyrics site Genius, and she started by writing the lyrics and then developed characters to make comments on the ballad.
- In the interview with DaVaun Sanders about “All the World Is Fog,” I found out that his process for developing characters includes… an interview! Asking his characters questions helps him get to know their motivation and quirks.
Being able to talk to dozens of authors about their process has really driven home for me that there are so many ways to write a story, there is no one size fits all writing advice, and in the end authors just have to do the thing that works.
2. Go down the research rabbit holes!
It’s no secret that authors do a lot of research, but it’s fun to see how that research comes into play. Sometimes research informs the speculative element of a piece. Catherynne M. Valente drew from Romani, Greek, and Hebrew folklore in writing “When he Calls Your Name.” I’ll refrain from getting into details about what kind of folklore to avoid spoilers for anyone who hasn’t had a chance to read the story yet.
Other times the research helps authors recreate a general vibe or sense of place—Permanent Press features an unusual laundromat, and author Sunwoo Jeong “…sort of skulked around the neighborhood cleaners, trying to imbibe the atmosphere.” In “Red, Scuttle When the Ships Come Down,” Wen-yi Lee drew on historical events to create a context of “British colonialism and late nineteenth/early twentieth-century migrations” but shifted this into a more surreal story that isn’t explicitly set in any specific time or place.
One of my favorites is the research that goes into smaller details, like choosing the proper type of fruit:
“I also spent a lot of time thinking about fruits and looking up where they came from and all these tiny details about them. For example, I thought for a while that I was going to use pawpaws as the fruit at the end because I associate them with the woods near where I grew up, but I just couldn’t buy that they would survive the throw over the wall!”
AnaMaria Curtis, in the interview for “The Glass City.”
It’s a type of research I know all too well as an author—the random tidbits that you need to know for a small moment in a story, where you spend a lot of time doing research in order to write a line or two of text.
Research adds depth and realism to stories. It informs the choices authors make, and sometimes takes them in directions they didn’t originally plan to go. Authors choose which details to delve into, find connections between two vastly different topics, decide how realistic (or not) to make various elements of worldbuilding—these decisions shape the final story in ways that AI-generated texts cannot replicate. Going down the research rabbit hole is one of the things that makes human writing, well, human.
3. Authors are people, too.
Okay, so technically I already knew this (though admittedly when I was a kid I thought of authors as mythical god-like creatures b/c they made books). But! Since we’re currently being inundated with AI-generated texts, the humanity of authors is a point worth emphasizing. One of the great things about doing interviews at Uncanny Magazine is getting to introduce readers to the people behind the stories.
When I’m writing interview questions, I draw from elements in a story to ask about authors’ interests. A few that come up relatively frequently are gaming, music, and travel. Another thing I often ask about is food/cooking (which possibly says as much about my focus as it does about the authors!) and sometimes the resulting answers tend to make me hungry:
“One of my favorite food memories involves my aunt attempting to teach me how to make nyonya pineapple tarts. They’re little balls of dense pineapple jam on open flaky, buttery cookie-sized tarts, popular during Chinese New Year.”
Anya Ow, in the interview for Everything Under Heaven
And then, obviously, there are books! I ask writers about literary influences and about something more recent that they’ve read and loved. Answers to the former give a sense of context, authors’ texts in conversation with each other over time. Answers to the latter are a great place to discover new things to add to my reading list (and maybe yours, too).
4. Offbeat questions are fun to answer…
When I interview authors for Uncanny, I try to come up with a good mix of questions. I think about the pacing for the interview much as I would for a short story, so near the middle I throw in a question that is lighthearted, silly, or offbeat. Many times, these questions ask authors to put themselves in their characters’ shoes, and authors often single this out as their favorite question to answer. A few recent examples:
If you were offered godhood, would you take it?
If she dealt a tarot card for you, which one would it be…?
These sorts of questions are fun for readers to think about, too—if you were in the story, how might it be different? (I won’t answer all the questions—after all, I’m the interviewer, not the interviewee—but today my tarot card would be the Two of Wands.)
5. Uncanny Needs YOUR help to fund another year!
One last thing I’ve learned as an interviewer for Uncanny Magazine is that the business side of running a magazine is hard. Every issue of Uncanny is the combined effort of so many people—authors, artists, poets, essayists, editor-in-chief Michael Damian Thomas, and the entire Uncanny Magazine staff. So here is a chance to support real life human creators working together to make something amazing:
The Uncanny Magazine Year 13: The Space Unicorn Believes in YOU! Kickstarter is going on right now! We need your help to make Year 13 of Uncanny happen, and this is your chance to snag subscriptions, signed books, manuscript critiques, online hangouts, and other great rewards!
Caroline M. Yoachim is a prolific author of science fiction and fantasy short stories, including her Ignyte Award-winning short story “We Will Teach You How to Read | We Will Teach You How to Read”. Her stories have been translated into several languages, reprinted in best-of anthologies, and honored as finalists for multiple genre awards including the Hugo (four times) and Nebula Awards (seven times). Her short story collection Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World & Other Stories is available from Fairwood Press. For more, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
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