I have another fellow author and contributor to the short story anthology, Midwinter Magic & Mayhem! Anna Tizard is a truly unique author that you will love getting to know. Be sure to check out Midwinter Magic & Mayhem for only 99¢ and enjoy some comfy reading for a chilly night. Be sure to also check out Anna’s books and podcast, which are linked throughout the interview.
Please welcome Anna Tizard, fellow fantasy author and contributor to our short story compilation, Midwinter Magic & Mayhem! Thanks for giving me the opportunity to interview you today. Can you introduce yourself and what you write to my readers?
Hi Tabitha, and thank you for having me!
I write weird, highly imaginative speculative fiction and dreampunk. For me, the whole point of stories is to take readers on a journey they’ve never been on before. Writing a story is magical – you’re literally creating and imparting to someone an experience they wouldn’t otherwise have. But to make these experiences resonate, they must explore situations which, even if they’re completely impossible, are in some way psychologically true.
A lot of my writing is inspired by the theories of the twentieth-century psychologist, Carl Jung, although I never set out intending to draw on these ideas; they tend to emerge of their own accord, taking on new, fantastical forms.
Stories are a way to tap into our unconscious minds, both when writing and reading. I think this is how we find and create experiences that really affect us and stay with us: they reach something deeper inside us.
You have a very unique method for writing new stories. Tell us about it!
Yes – “unique” is the word! I use the surrealist word game of Exquisite Corpse to come up with story ideas. The game randomizes word entries from different people to generate bizarre sentences that follow this structure: “The described noun did something with/to/ for the described noun”.
In fact, I play the game “live” on my podcast, Brainstoryum, brainstorming story ideas by scrambling words my listeners have sent to me through www.annatizard.com/play! It’s hilarious – I laugh quite a lot on the show – but once you start digging beyond your initial impression of these weird word combinations, you find how suggestive they are of situations and characters. Often they can be quite haunting.
Where did you come up with that idea, and how did it lead to your books?
I discovered the game when I was working in a call centre, bored but glad to be working with a great mix of people. At first we played Consequences (where you co-create a short story, with each player writing a different segment on a piece of paper and folding it so the next person can’t see what’s come before). Through a French-Spanish colleague (and an internet search) I learned that the French surrealists in the 1920s transformed Consequences into an even weirder game where you co-create a single sentence.
It was actually years after that initial discovery that I started experimenting with stories from the game results in earnest, and I got hooked!
“The empty danger” was a weird word combination that felt like a puzzle: what could be both dangerous and empty, or intangible? Along came the pandemic and I had my answer: fear itself. The novella explores the question of what happens when (pretty much) the whole world is feeling the same thing at once – but based on entirely fantastical interpretation of what fear might look like (evil goblin-like creatures beyond the clouds. Oh, and they also stink!).
My next book was inspired by an entire Exquisite Corpse result: “The lofty portrait of my grandmother rapidly salivated at the estranged stairwell” (and yes, you will probably have to read that sentence twice!). This sparked a story about an artist whose dying grandmother’s portrait comes alive after her death – so is she really dead? The plot has some really weird twists, again based on the idea that our minds are all connected. “I For Immortality” won the Imadjinn Award for Best Literary Fiction Novel in 2022.
So far I’ve written at least twenty short stories based on different Exquisite Corpses (Overcast in Midwinter Magic & Mayhem being one example). While many of these are yet to be published, one story, The Midnight Ship, became such a collaborative project since I invited my podcast listeners to give me feedback on the first draft, that I decided to publish this as a stand-alone, perma-free e-book. (Download here: https://BookHip.com/BLRGGCX.)
What is the silliest or funniest word combination you’ve had to work with?
Oh my goodness, there are so many… Two that spring to mind are: “The humungous vampire angrily washed the engorged cheese” and “The crispy pumpkin vaingloriously ached for the attentions of the narcotic slipper”. Another, more recent example is: “The loving horizon passed through the TSA Checkpoint with the galloping pickle.” I mean, come on! Talk about a writing challenge.
But it’s so fascinating to get feedback from my listeners because they can come up with whole new ways of looking at these things. For example, one author (Frasier Armitage) suggested that “The Loving Horizon” might be a valuable painting which someone is trying to smuggle through customs by hiding it under the less well-regarded piece, “The Galloping Pickle”! Incredible. Hats off to my listeners!
In Midwinter Magic & Mayhem, your story, “Overcast”, deals with some unnatural cold in the summertime. It also involves a clever word play with the title. Can you tell us about how your followers’ submissions inspired the story?
It’s funny you should ask about my followers’ submissions: When I first received the invitation to write for this anthology, I hunted around for an Exquisite Corpse that would fit the wintry theme. When I couldn’t find anything, I asked my listeners and readers to send me wintry words for the game, hoping that these would combine into the perfect Exquisite Corpse to inspire a story! But inspiration doesn’t work like that. As the original surrealists knew, the spark of an idea comes from the unconscious mind and one way to “get at” this is through randomness, and by not trying to control things.
So after going round in circles on this (and experimentally trying to break my own “rules” for finding inspiration!) I settled on a sentence that had some resonance for me, though not with an obvious winter theme:
“The long-tailed mystic learned the secrets of the overcast gargoyle.”
The word “overcast” was my way in to a weather-based kind of magic, and gradually the rest of the story took shape. The concept of winter actually being inside the protagonist came to me quite late in the drafting process. (I’m a discovery writer, and often I don’t know how everything’s going to fit together until quite far in to the first draft.)
The word play that occurs with the title (I don’t want to give this away to anyone who hasn’t read the story yet!) literally sprang into my mind at random while I was quite far into the second draft – there’s no way I could have worked that out consciously or in advance. This is what I love about being a discovery writer. Not only do my stories tap into the deeper parts of the mind, but the process itself is a way of delving into these unknown spaces inside me – and I get to turn them into entertainment!
Many readers come to my site to read my series on conlanging. Though you aren’t making up a new language, you are playing with words we know and use everyday. How has this opened up your creativity, if it has done so?
Trying to create stories from Exquisite Corpse game results is really challenging, but it’s become a vital regular exercise for my imagination (as well as extremely fun!). Since I began the podcast, I’m finding it quicker and easier to come up with new ideas. The imagination is like a muscle: you never know what you can achieve until you push yourself that bit further.
Brainstorming story ideas on the spot for the podcast also enables me to share this process with so many other authors (or aspiring authors) who, like me, have no clue where this is going to take their creativity.
Some people might find it a weird and scary prospect: allowing complete randomness to guide what I write next. It is scary, every time I sit down to play the game! But it’s given me confidence in what my imagination can do. It’s also given me the most unique, unexpected ideas I would never have otherwise dreamed of.
Do you have any upcoming releases or works-in-progress you’d like to tell us about?
I have several works in progress at the moment, either in early drafts or busy percolating. I like to switch between projects so some stories can “rest” while I work on others, and come back to them afresh. It’s a messy process but it works for me!
I’m looking forward to the spring or summer 2023 release of a new dreampunk anthology I’ve contributed to, entitled Somniscope (Fractured Mirror Publishing, edited by Cliff Jones Jr,). Broadly speaking, dreampunk is a fantasy and scifi subgenre which explores the mind and different states of consciousness – right up my street! My story is called The Secret Undoing and it’s about an auditor for the government who comes across some dodgy figures in the accounts. Having notified his manager, he is then forced to “forget” this incriminating piece of information. A dream clinician guides him through a meditation into the deeper layers of his unconscious mind so he can literally “bury” the unwanted memory. It’s as weird as it sounds!
Any parting thoughts you’d like to share?
I’ve always felt that stories are full of unlikely yet resonant connections. This is what the original surrealists were exploring by randomizing words and juxtaposing ill-fitting images: they wanted to go beyond the conscious order and the automatic assumptions we make, and to reach for something deeper than the obvious or surface reality. By placing situations and characters together that don’t fit perfectly, or are deliberately misaligned, we find the basis for a striking, original idea.
Everyone knows that stories are about conflict. But not everyone realises how much you can discover by digging into mismatched, conflicting ideas or themes, and using them to uproot new ways of exploring universal themes. This is really at the heart of what I do.
This is also why I’m always encouraging Brainstoryum listeners to join in, and to write in if they’ve been inspired to write a story. The possibilities are literally limitless.
Like Einstein said, “Creativity is intelligence having fun”.