Lee Denning is the pen name of not one author but two--Denning Powell and his daughter Lee, who apparently make an awesome science fiction writing team. In this interview Powell talks about how they went about writing the first novel in the series, Monkey Trap, as well as other aspects of writing and publishing. The sequel to Monkey Trap, Hiding Hand, is scheduled to be released by Twilight Times Books this August.
When did you decide you wanted to become an author? Do you have another job besides writing?
After 30 years of science and engineering and starting/running a consulting business, I decided to go back to my inner child. I Decided I needed a retirement job I could go to naked, so I picked writing. Not being totally wacky, I still do engineering work part-time to pay the bills. My daughter Leanne, poor dear, got sucked into the creative process and we write together, but she works full-time in the psych/marketing area.
Were you an avid reader as a child? What type of books did you enjoy reading?
Read everything from comic books to the Bible (well, a little). The earliest was Edgar Rice Burroughs, his Tarzan and Mars books, and Heinlein/Clark/Asimov was the next phase, I think.
Tell us a bit about your latest book, and what inspired you to write such a story.
I conceived Monkey Trap in 1971 while I was in the Air Force, in a boring staff job at Tan Son Nhut airbase in Saigon, and actually wrote about 100 pages longhand. Then I got an opportunity to go upcountry with an Army Special Forces unit and life got interesting and I later got busy building a career after the Air Force so I put the thing down for 30 years. In 2001 I dug those 100 pages out of the attic and read them. The writing was crap, and I threw it all out, but the ideas were good: humanity is on the cusp of an evolutionary development that could bring great good or great evil, and a test has to be run to decide whether to let the development progress or pull the plug (i.e., are the human monkeys smart enough to avoid their internal traps?).
How did you and your daughter go about writing the book? Did you take each a subsequent chapter?
Our approach wasn't particularly organized or specified to begin with, but has evolved as we progress...
For Monkey Trap, I'd already structured the story, gotten organized, and was up to about chapter 8 on the actual writing when I happened to mention to Lee what I was doing. She was in college at the time and got very excited about it. She asked to see what I'd done, and started feeding me ideas, and then really got sucked in and started contributing some writing, and by the end of the story, she'd told about a quarter of the story (I think her grades suffered a bit in her senior year, but I didn't say anything).
What about for your sequel, Hiding Hand?
For Hiding Hand (publication date August 2008), we started that book jointly from scratch, and were much better organized. The sequence was... an email concept/brainstorming effort that we called Table A, followed by an email plotting/character development effort that we called Table B, followed by an email story outline/structure that we called Table C. (Our collaboration is mostly email because she's on the west coast of the US and I'm on the east coast.) Table C was what we actually wrote from — it laid out for each chapter what we needed to accomplish, and described the scenes that had to take place (typically averaging 5 scenes per chapter). Lee wrote a lot of the female character scenes, and I wrote a lot of the male character scenes, although there wasn't any hard dividing line. I mostly did the bad guy mullah Muhammad Zurvan, because --- hahahaha -- I just really like working with the bad guys; and I mostly did the boy hero Joshua... probably so I could redeem my own misspent youth. Lee mostly did the female good child Eva, because she's a lot closer to the female inner child than I can ever hope to be; and she also did the old Crone Hessa because of the psychological and metaphysical conflictedness of the poor dear. But, we traded scenes back and forth and marked them up, so we both had an almost inseparable involvement in developing each of the characters — I don't think either of us can claim any one character as solely our own. This sort of collaboration probably explains why the characters in Monkey Trap rang true through the story, and hopefully readers will feel the same about the characters in Hiding Hand.
For Splintered Light (now in progress) we followed the same basic Table A/B/C organization, but the Hiding Hand experience taught us that there's no point in getting too directive or overly organized about Table C — once you start the actual writing the story starts to tell itself and you'd best go with the flow. At the scene level (to get back to one of your earlier questions about structured versus stream-of-consciousness) the writing becomes almost all stream-of-consciousness. The structure we'd set up to guide it (i.e., Table C) sometimes works pretty well (maybe 40% of the time), and sometimes not at all (maybe 30%) and sometimes sort of works (the other 30%). We're realistic about this -- when the muse beast has the bit in its teeth, you gotta give it free rein. But we never abandon the structure, because it's a good context for the story — it reminds us exactly what to accomplish in each chapter and scene. So if what we wrote doesn't accomplish what we intended — and if we think what we intended is still valid — then we try to reconcile the left-brain and the right-brain differences across the corpus callosum of two people who are quite different in many ways. Somehow that always works, because Lee and I are also quite similar in many ways besides genetic, and because — as they say — love conquers all. To tell the truth, I really don't know quite what to make of the process... but it's a lot of fun...
How would you describe your creative process while writing this book? Was it stream-of-consciousness writing, or did you first write an outline?
Mayra Calvani is a multi-genre author and reviewer. She's the co-author of
The Slippery Art of Book Reviewing. To see the full line-up of reviewer interviews here at Blogcritics this month of June, visit her blog,
The Slippery Book Review.
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Where is the article on Lisa Jackson? The links are connected and only come to this article.
Christopher Hoare
This is not a personal attack