#AuthorInterview with Ira Nayman - @ARNSProprietor

About the Author:

Ira Nayman is the author of six books in Multiverse series, the most recent of which is Good Intentions: The Multiverse Refugees Trilogy: First Pie in the Face (Elsewhen Press). He has also self-published 11 collections of Alternate Reality News Service articles, the most recent of which is Idiotocracy for Dummies. Ira has a PhD in Communications from McGill University and taught new media at Ryerson University. He is currently the editor of Amazing Stories magazine. Yes, that Amazing Stories magazine.

Interview with Ira Nayman

When did you first realize that you wanted to be a writer/ a storyteller?

When I was eight years old. I was in the parking lot of my grade school when I decided that I wanted to devote my life to writing humour/comedy. That was over 50 years ago – I have been doing it ever since.

The first things I wrote were parodies of the Sherlock Holmes stories I was then reading. I wrote them by hand on the backs of my father’s legal accounting papers (the fronts had multi-coloured criss-crossing lines). I wrote three stories; one per sheet. And I remember thinking: how do writers come up with the details that make stories so long?

To date, I have written eight novels (six of which have been published; one of the others is currently under consideration by my publisher, Elsewhen Press), 11 collections of Alternate Reality News Service short short stories and over 100 scripts. I guess I must have figured it out. 😀

ASIDE: In an interview I once saw, comedian Eddie Izzard talked about meeting his comedy idol Richard Pryor. He said that they found they had one thing in common: they both knew they wanted to be stand-up comedians when they were four years old. Now, I thought I was pretty precocious knowing I wanted to write comedy when I was eight, but, as it happens, I was already half a lifetime behind the curve!

What inspires you to write?

Making myself laugh. The satisfaction of writing something that I know is good. The idea that I can make other people laugh (although I haven’t had much feedback to my writing, so this is mostly a theoretical consideration at this point).

On that last point: I used to write script analysis articles for a magazine called Creative Screenwriting. After 9/11, the editor sent out an email asking all of his writers to submit articles for a special issue on the role of the artist in times of crisis. My response was an article called “Laughter is Always Appropriate.” (The article can be found in the non-fiction area of my Web site, Les Pages aux Folles)

I argued that laughter releases endorphins, a pain-numbing chemical, into the brain; it is a natural high. When people are under stress, laughter can help calm them down, help them to get through rough times. The idea that my writing could help people in this way is a constant inspiration to me.

How did you come up with the idea for your current story?

My writing interweaves a lot of smaller ideas into one large tapestry, so I don’t usually have a good answer for this question. With The Multiverse is a Nice Place to Visit, But I Wouldn’t Want to Live There, I wanted to revisit some characters I loved but hadn’t found the right story for.

One of my book series is The Alternate Reality News Service (ARNS), which sends reporters into other universes and has them report back on what they find there. (One reader described it as: “A science fiction version of The Onion.” I now like to think of it as: “The original fake news.”) Most of the 11 books in the series are collections of news, reviews, interviews, advice columns and anything else you could imagine reading in your daily newspaper, but the second and third books also contain behind the scenes stories of the people who work at ARNS. I wanted to give these characters a bigger story.

So. The first half of The Multiverse is a Nice Place to Visit, But I Wouldn’t Want to Live There details what happens when the consciousness of people in different universes gets exchanged. At around the mid-point of the book, with that problem sorted out, it becomes apparent that somebody at ARNS was responsible for the switches; the second half of the book is about an investigation of the news-gathering organization.

I like to think that the more fun I had writing a book, the more fun my audience will have reading it. I had a tremendous amount of fun writing this book.

Are there some stories tucked away in some drawer that was written before and never saw the light of the day?

Of course. Some of my earliest writing is, alas, lost to time (the Holmes stories, for example). Beyond that…

Before I was a prose geek, I was a film geek. Over a period of a decade, I took three years of screenwriting as an undergraduate and wrote over 100 scripts. I consider this an apprenticeship period, partly working with script form, partly working on the craft of storytelling. While I am currently pursuing getting a couple of the original TV series I created in this period produced, most of this material will not see the light of day.

And I’m okay with that.

Tell us about your writing process.

Like most writers, I am a sponge. I read constantly; newspapers, magazines and other non-fiction (because a lot of what I write is satire, and I try to keep up with the sciences because science fiction), as well as fiction (because I can always learn from what other people do). I’m the kind of person who isn’t always keen on talking about himself, so I spend a lot of time listening to what other people say (and how they say it). I have also trained myself, over the years, to look for anomalies in the environment, for things that stick out or are otherwise unusual, and wonder how they came to be.

I write ideas down on scraps of paper. If they are for a specific project, I will type them into an ideas file at the earliest possible convenience. If not, well, I have a lot of scraps of paper. Given the poor quality of my handwriting, it’s a wonder I am able to remember anything at all! When I have enough ideas, I start major projects like novels.

I try to write something every day. Lately, a lot of my time has been devoted to my eighth series novel (which is unusual, because I only delivered the seventh novel in the series to my publisher last month; I seem to have foregone the downtime I usually have between major works). My method is to have several different projects on the go at once so that if I’m not inspired by one, I can work on another. In addition to the current novel I’m writing, there are three more in the series that I have planned, I have ideas for several short stories and there is the insatiable maw of my Website - LesPages aux Folles. There is always the Web site, which I have been updating weekly with topical humour since 2002.

Aww, what the hell. It keeps me off the streets...

What is your favorite scene in the book? Why?

The slap. It was such an important scene I asked for it to be depicted on the cover.

The Editrix-in-Chief of the Alternate Reality News Service is Brenda Brundtland-Govanni. She is a six foot six goth with anger management issues. Throughout the ARNS books, she threatens to put on her slapping gloves and get busy, but she never actually seems to go through with it. Brenda is my attempt to portray female anger, something that doesn’t appear that often in mainstream writing.

In the course of the investigation in The Multiverse is a Nice Place to Visit, But I Wouldn’t Want to Live There, Noomi Rapier (one of the main investigators, who was introduced in the first novel in the series, Welcome to the Multiverse*) pushes Brenda just a little too far while questioning her. The result? * SLAP *! The consequences surprised me – hopefully, they will surprise the reader, as well.

* Sorry for the Inconvenience

What is your most interesting writing quirk?

I warn potential readers that my writing is dense. One of the ways this manifests is that I often create complicated sentences.

What happens is this: I start with one comic idea, then I get a second comic idea related to the first. In writing the sentence, a third idea might occur to me as a result of the collision of the first two. Most writers would break the ideas out into separate sentences. I keep them in a single sentence (but written in a way that the meaning is always clear). I probably use more brackets and dashes in a single chapter than most writers do in entire novels!

There are other things. I set my novels in what I think of as an “alternative present.” This allows me to both have futuristic tech and make topical references. In addition, my novels are told by what I think of as an “unreliable omniscient narrator.” The UON will make a point about the story, but then change it later after thinking more about it, for example, or will ask the reader what they think should happen next.

It’s all part of the fun.

Do you read? Who are your favourite authors and how have they influenced your writing style?

My earliest influences were performers: the Marx brothers, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Woody Allen, Buster Keaton.

My favourite author is Thomas Pynchon (Rainbow’s Gravity, Against the Day. His use of language and breadth of vision often take my breath away. An author I have always enjoyed was Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues). In reviews, my writing is often compared to that of Douglas Adams (which is flattering, given that I am a fan, but I think our comic sensibilities are very different. On the other hand, when one review compared my writing to Robbins, it felt very right. From him, I learned to play with language and not to fear digressions (things I also learned from Kurt Vonnegut.

I am currently working my way through the works of Terry Pratchett (primarily his adult Discworld novels, but when I have finished those, I will read the young adult novels in the series, then his other novels). I am discovering, to my chagrin, that some of my comic moves were pioneered by him years before I started writing novels. (The good news is that my stories and the way I mix comic devices are different from his, so people reading my books will hopefully find them fresh and new.)

What is the best piece of advice you have received, as a writer?

It actually came from my fourth year screenwriting professor. At that point in my career, I tended to give funny lines out to characters indiscriminately. He pointed out that that made all of my characters sound the same, and, in any case, was a very restricted way of looking at humour. Much better to let the humour in my screenplays arise out of the quirks of the characters and their interactions. My writing after that was very different.

What is the best piece of advice you would give to someone that wants to get into writing?

I taught new media part-time for two years at Ryerson University. At the start of my introductory production courses, I would always tell my students that the life of an artist could be hard. The only reason to become an artist is because you love making art. If you don’t, if you can see yourself doing something else with your life, do that instead.

Many artists that we now think of as masters of their field spent 30 or 40 years creating in obscurity (Vincent van Gogh, for instance, or Franz Kafka). You could go that long without making any money from your art, or getting critical attention, or developing an appreciable audience, with no guarantee that any of that will happen. But if you love making art, at least you will have devoted your life to something that brought you pleasure, and how many people can say that?

What would be the Dream Cast for you book if it was to be turned into a movie?

This is not an entirely empty exercise for me. I have written two pilots based on my novel series and would dearly love for one of them to be produced, so I do think about this.

There are a lot of young, black female actors who could play Noomi Rapier; Tessa Thompson, for instance, or Freema Agyeman. Rami Malek would be great as Noomi’s brother, Daveen Rasmaili Rapier (although he doesn’t appear in a substantial role until book six, Good Intentions: The Multiverse Refugee Trilogy: First Pie in the Face). Noomi’s partner at the Transdimensional Authority, Crash Chumley, would be played brilliantly by Nathan Fillion.

Most of the Transdimensional Authority investigators are described as “fire hydrants with limbs and dark glasses,” a reference to the fact that most police officers are big, bulky, broad-shouldered men. Actors who could fill these roles include: Patrick Wharburton, Jason Isaacs and either of the Amell brothers. One of them, Barack Bowens, has a voice that makes people want to obey everything he says (which is as much a curse as a blessing); he is patterned after opera star Eric Owens. It would be great if he would agree to the role.

But, uhh, I don’t really think of this that often...

How do you spend your free time? Do you have a favorite place to go and unwind?

Free time? I...I have heard that such a thing exists, but I have never experienced it myself.

I do spend time with friends. I go to opera five or six times a season, for example. I have a regular D&D game with a different set of friends. I am a Klingon (a member of the Klingon Assault Group fan club; I have most of a costume, but I still haven’t been fitted for forehead ridges).

But there isn’t a switch for humour that turns it on or off; seeing the world through a lens of comedy is part of who I am. In a similar vein, being a writer is a 24/7 kind of thing; I never know when ideas will hit me. So, I am always prepared to whip out my notebook and get to work.

Tell us three fun facts about yourself.

1. I never lie. I’m really bad at it, so I have just never cultivated the habit.

2. I never get bored. The world is such a fascinating place, there is always something for me to learn. And even when there isn’t, my mind is working on the next thing I am going to write. Honestly, there is just no excuse for boredom.

3. I have no problem doing repetitive physical actions (probably because of 2). The cats of one of my dear friends (hi, Gisela!) know that I can pet them for hours without tiring of it. Pretty Boy sometimes abuses this, but generally they’re good about it.

What do you have in store next for your readers?

Well!

Good Intentions, which is also available now, is, as the title suggests, the first book in a trilogy. The basic idea is that a universe is collapsing and the Transdimensional Authority hatches a refugee programme to get as many of the 19 to 24 billion sentient beings as possible to stable universes before it is destroyed. The first book is generally positive, following a single alien’s refugee experience. The second book, Bad Actors, will be mixed, portraying both positive and negative aspects of the refugee experience. The final book, The Ugly Truth, will deal with the darker aspects of xenophobic racism.

But surprise! The book currently under consideration at Elsewhen Press, which has published all of the previous novels in the series, is not Bad Actors. It is a Young Adult novel called Fraidy’s Amazeballs ARggles Adventure. Somebody has introduced augmented reality goggles into the Earth Prime in my multiverse; at first Freida “Fraidy” Katz uses her ARggles for all of the same things teenage girls do, but she eventually gets sucked into an anti-tech hacker network with possibly nefarious intentions. In the end, this novel nests nicely between the first and second books in the trilogy. There is also a follow-up YA novel (working title: Fraidy’s Amazeballs Alternaut Academy Adventure) which should nest nicely between the second and third books.

It’s a good thing my publisher loves surprises...

A man who is trying to have a contemplative Canadian literary moment by a frozen lake finds himself in a world where his every thought is tagged. Three actors who are performing Shakespeare on a stage in Stratford find themselves transported into the bodies of three people who live in Shakesperean England. The entire bridge crew of the Star Ship Star Blap find their consciousnesses have been transferred to...they're not sure, really. The Transdimensional Authority traces the consciousness transfer back to the Alternate Reality News Service. But what could the organization of cross-universal journalists possibly gain from such chaos?

About the Book: