10 Questions - Stephen Hunt
Stephen Hunt is an entertainment reporter at the Calgary Herald and adjunct professor of playwriting in the UBC's Creative Writing Program. He's the author of The White Guy: A Field Guide. His one-man show The White Guy was produced at The Public Theatre in New York and elsewhere, and has been published by Applause Books in Best American Short Plays 1997-98. His writing has appeared in the LA Times, New York Post, Italian Rolling Stone, The Globe & Mail, FQ, Shift, Toro, Saturday Night, Moving Pictures, and elsewhere. He lives in Calgary with his wife Melanee Murray-Hunt and son Gus.
1) Where do you write?
Upstairs in my office, at the dining room table, at work, in airport departure lounges, in coffee shops-anywhere!
2) What do you write with or on?
I write first drafts on a writing pad with a pen, then type them onto my laptop. I also have a mini-laptop that write on. It's a tiny, perfect writing instrument.
3) What font?
12 point.
4) Do you have a writing schedule?
I'm a morning person. The best case scenario is I’m up at 6am and write until lunch. I rarely achieve the best-case scenario. I have a 5 year old son and I'm the cook of the house.
5) Best tip for rewriting?
I think it was Hemingway who said, "Challenge every word's right to exist." Also, if something seems a bit boring, take that emotion seriously.
6) Best piece of grammar or style advice?
I think writing is all about searching for your voice as a writer. That's where your secret powers lie. Keep looking until you find it.
7) Writing rituals?
When I lived in Santa Monica I was a freelancer, and I played this psychological trick on myself: I used to leave my apartment for breakfast, then come back to my office. After the writing is done, it went back to being my apartment. (This worked less well when my son was born.)
8) Cure for writer's block?
I always try to write something every day, even if it's not related to whatever big, long project I'm working on. Sometimes the reason you get blocked is because of the sheer size of what you're trying to write. A journal, a letter, a little essay, a list of the Top 10 movies you've seen that year, a blog entry--anything that gets you typing, and into the writing groove. Think of writing as an imagination workout: no one really likes exercising but if you can get into the habit of doing it, you do it automatically and get through those first unhappy 15 minutes. If you develop a habit of writing every day, even if you feel somewhat less than inspired, you will be less blocked than if you sit around waiting for Inspiration to tap you on the shoulder and whisper in your ear. I have a lot more uninspired days than inspired ones.
9) How do your capture ideas?
Reading . Listening to the radio. Walking. But nothing beats reading. Reading rocks.
10) What do you wish you were better at?
Sticking to it. At UBC, when I was in the grad school program, there was a writer named Leo McKay, from Nova Scotia, who got more short stories published than any of us. Leo was a good writer, but not Alice Munro, if you get my drift. One day, I finally asked him his secret. He showed me a board he kept in his apartment. It was a chart, of all the stories he sent out, and all the magazines he submitted them to. As soon as one rejection came back, he checked off that mag and immediately sent the story out to another magazine. "I've never had a story accepted with less than three rejections," he said--which astonished me, because I took every single rejection to heart, swore I'd completely rewrite the failed story, stuck it in a drawer and mostly abandoned it forever. Nowadays, whenever I'm feeling a little bit bleak or hopeless about the writing life, I just chant a little to myself. I chant, "Leo McKay, Leo McKay, Leo McKay" and after a while, I feel better. If you want to chant Leo McKay too, that's fine. He recently published a big novel at Random House or some other big time publisher like that, so I think all of us writers need to locate our inner Leo McKay a little more regularly. There's a lot of 'no thanks' in the writing life, and often it really is business, not personal. So suck it up, buttercup, and keep on keeping on!
To place a hold on Stephen Hunt’s or Leo Mckay’s books click on the links below:
The white guy : a field guide / by Hunt, Stephen, 1961-
Twenty-six : [a novel] / by McKay, Leo Francis, 1964-
Like this : stories / by McKay, Leo Francis, 1964-