S1 Int6 - Interview with Christopher Thomas

a cryptid camped out in the deep dark woods of rural New England. I'm thrilled to have you join me for today's interview with Christopher Thomas. Last week's interview with Nissa Harlow,

author of the incredible story, "Find Me Again," was posted in written form,

and it's available totally free on Patreon. The link to that is in the show notes, and I encourage you to check it out. In today's interview, Christopher and I chat about the third story of season 1, The Winners. In this story, a couple who has been overheard having an argument is referred to The Winners, who have developed a procedure that removes troublesome elements of an individual's personality.

In this case, Henry is subject to The Winnowing and Marge, his wife must decide what parts of him remain. The story is chilling in the way the best speculative fiction can cause a shiver of dread to run down the spine.

“It gets us to sit back and ask ourselves, "Is this fair?”

What would I do in this situation, and just how far from reality is this scenario?" Anyway, if it's been a while, I encourage you to take a few minutes and give The Winners another listen. Christopher Thomas lives in Eastern Kentucky and has published short fiction in The Los Angeles Review, the Eccleberg Review, a collective magazine, "When Some End Elsewhere."

He has one published novel, "Never Sated, Never Sain, From Chromium Press 2005."

And now, on to our interview. Christopher, thank you so much. I'll jump right in with the questions, if that's all right by you. Of course, thank you. All right.

So the first question we have for you today, can you tell us a little bit about where the story began? Was it an image? Was it a character? What's the seed of this story?

Where did it germinate from? Absolutely.

The entry point for this story was the idea of personality.

So how they manifest in us? That was the thing that was really interesting. When I launched into wanting to write this story, I actually started it in a more literary realistic format. But because, oh, you start bumping up against the medical diagnosis of multiple personality disorder,

“it really expands what you need to do in order to make your claim.”

The idea of moving into a speculative space, kind of eliminated all of that as a concern. I could really kind of dig into, like, my thoughts on, how personality can come to be developed in each of us and how they sort of manifest from there.

Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And I can see that in the story as they go through the histories and the characters and the personalities, split them apart, put them back together. Do you have sort of, like, experience with seeing people going through and sort of sorting their personalities out and addressing different areas of their personality yourself?

I wouldn't say it so much to observe phenomenon as it is an experienced phenomenon. Like, we all know that we behave differently in different circumstances and most of us, I think, easily attribute that to us making conscious decisions to not curse in this one location, but to be fine, cursing in another location. And while I'm not making any proclonations, like, my view of it is that,

like, these are actually different personalities. You walk into your parents' houses according to your old for Christmas and you behave the same way you were 18. Like, that's, there's something triggering, like, that original personality in that location in that space. And I, I just like that idea as a, as a concept, because both, quite frankly, provides a lot of fodder for navigation in terms of the point to understand who we are.

“Yeah, and I think there's, there's a lot of different people,”

whether they have spouses or friends or whatnot. They think either about themselves or about the person near and dear to them to say, man, I really wish I could, you know, not have that part of you maybe. Like, I like all of you, except for, you know, maybe two or three things. Why do you worry that way when you're with your boyfriend or when you're with your girlfriend?

Because it's not, you're not like that at work or whatever. You know, if there's something to speak to that I think you've recognized. Yeah, but this story also points out that there's something lost when you take those pieces away, right? Yeah, there is a totality effect, right? You know, and so that's, that's part of the, I think the difficulty of us recognizing it in ourselves.

We attribute it as just a very minor variation to what we consider our singular personality. Yeah, yeah. I, I, I question whether that's really how it works. But it's also one of the things, you know, you can't, it's, it's hard to diagnose your own brain. Yeah.

Yeah, you get all up in your own thoughts and minds and feelings and you kind of can spin in and it really helps to have other people to talk to you to reflect off of, right?

Well, it, it, it requires you to use other people to reflect on otherwise you aren't dedicated.

Or you aren't living a life in a society you're, you're a burden. Absolutely, absolutely. So, um, on the subject of other people, uh, when you were writing this piece, did you have anyone particular in mind, anyone who you were trying to reach any kind of audience that you are envisioning, reading this kind of story?

No. And typically, that's because I have a few kind of personal rules for writing and one of them is, I'm just going to write what interests me, like what interests me deeply. My hope, of course, is that it will resonate with people or that somebody will, you know, enjoy what I'm saying or hopefully what I'm saying is well,

but mostly what I'm trying to do in stories like this is kind of examined, whatever thought,

seed that I have and kind of explore that through its natural conclusion. So, yeah, I'm not really trying to target an audience. I'm really trying to explore the idea. Yeah. So, the audience is kind of internal to yourself and then whoever wants to go along for the right, in a sense.

Yeah.

“And I think you need to be point though, because although I don't have an audience in mind when I write this story,”

once it's done, I have to acknowledge that like maybe this is for a different audience that I might submit, another one of my stories. And so, I think there's some self selection in terms of the outcome,

but not in terms of what I'm trying to achieve.

That makes sense. And when you're going through the process of writing this story, this one in particular, was there anything that you were maybe nervous about putting on the page or a concept that you weren't as comfortable with, that you weren't sure that you were maybe equipped or the right person to be approaching it and how did you approach that? I think we talked about that a little bit.

So, I did not feel equipped to address multiple personalities or individuals in a literary realistic format. You know, there's about medical implications because it's psychology. Because people do have actual disorders, and so I didn't want to step on that or make light of it in any way. And so my mood for the speculation, the speculative form, was the reason I like to chose to do that. No, that makes sense.

And I mean, it seems like a really vivid way that you chose to depict it.

“I think that many times people think about emotions as sort of these esoteric things that kind of”

zoom around. I think Disney did an example of where they personified it or was it Pixar. You kind of take a different approach where you actually visualize it sort of on a screen. And I thought that was a really cool way that you kind of went about it. Yeah, you mentioned that in your summation of the story that it very much like a MRI scan or something like that.

You could imagine 20 years from now with AI, maybe it's 16 months. Like, you know, that was that we're going to have technology very, that we could have technology something like this. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, there was actually the other piece of it that you also mentioned in your summation that I did actually question was the was the gender.

Mm-hmm. It was the kind of true victim of the story being male and without voice and that sort of thing. But I wanted to, so that made me nervous initially because I didn't want to put two things in the same story. Yeah, but at the same time, I like doing that because it's in speculative fiction. If you can have two or three things, I think that are just off-center.

It untethered to the reader a little bit and allows them to kind of take in what they're what they're reading at base value. Yeah, it's a purposeful disorientation, right? Putting them at a normal. Exactly. That's that's really wonderful.

And I think that's one of the things that makes this story unique. One of the other, you know, things that you're kind of alluding to is that as you are writing this story, there were some pieces that might have been easier, some pieces that were more difficult. Was there a scene that you went back to that you revisited, struggled with? The opening scene, the opening section, I wrote very quickly, relatively speaking, meaning it.

They kind of felt together pretty quickly. Then it became, how do I move through the bureaucratic process of accomplishing it?

“You know, you have to make decisions about do I show every exam, every procedure, or do I kind of skip ahead?”

I didn't want to write a 6,000 word story, so you have to make sort of decisions there. So it's settling on just that final procedure and going into the clinic and seeing that kind of contained this scene. And then, and then the final scene as short as it is also came somewhat quickly, conceptually, but it's a fair number of rewriting to get it to kind of get it to have the tone that I wanted. I see, yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, totally speaking, there's definitely, you know, a cool detachment through most of the story, which I think gives it an extra sense of sort of haunting sort of imposing bureaucratic inevitability, right?

He didn't really have any say, it all just happened, right?

Yeah, it's a river that's flowing, I think it's definitely right. Right. Is there anything in the piece that you kind of tucked in as a detail that maybe isn't so obvious that you think that readers could have missed or might have not considered?

“The only thing that comes to mind is just the slight ambiguity of the end.”

I've had people respond to me in that, the tragedy of it all that you know disconnecting this and that, but I've had others respond to me that, the march has been liberated to some extent, and that she's now happy to use this mangled night to open her hair in this sort of thing. So I do like the idea of the ambiguity of it, partly because maybe what we were talking about earlier with personality is depending on the moment in the setting, like our own opinions about what situation we are in change.

And so I think that there's some truth that probably both sides of that perspective. Yeah, absolutely. And I think I've also heard some of that feedback where people are a little bit unsure how they should feel. And I think it reflects a little bit about where a given listener or reader anchors themselves, do they anchor themselves with Henry or do they anchor themselves with March, right? Do they feel like they are ending the story on a loss or on a liberation?

“Yeah, and I think for the horror of it, of the experience, the other thing I like about it, is the subject suggests that there really is no end to the ambiguity.”

So it's not only this particular couple, but many others are probably looking very similarly disconnected, living disconnected experiences for the same reason. Absolutely, that makes absolutely sense. I would like to move on to kind of a little bit of a flash round where I sort of shoot questions that you, your process, your style, moving away from the story specifically and just more about sort of your overall process. That's I'm good.

All right, so first one, typical writer question, are you a plotter or a pancer?

It depends on the story, a little bit of both. If I'm writing a longer piece, I need to have some structure in mind because I need to know where I need to get to it. In a shorter piece, in a shorter story, like this one, for example, I would consider this more of a cancer story. So this one was I had an idea, and I'd just need to start with a not character and enough setting to start the idea of moving and then kind of see where it goes. So for short pieces, for flash fiction, anything on your mind say, your 4,000 words, I'm happy you just kind of jumped in.

“I think longer than that, I really feel of responsibility to the reader to some extent to put a bit more effort in and think about it. I also, and firmly of the opinion that you get to plot something out pretty well, not too detailed.”

But if you plot something out with good structure, there's still enormous room for movement and creation and inspiration and all of those things. So I don't think, I don't think one limits the other in any real way unless you get too far down to the reader. Yeah. Okay. Are you somebody who prefers to write longhand keyboard or something else? Quite bored?

I've always typed. I do a lot of note-taking just on apps on my phones, so I do a lot of transcription or a lot of dictation, especially when I'm writing or things like that.

But at some point, it all gets put into the reader. I don't really write in longhand. I don't have positions like physical positions that are comfortable for me to do it long term. You know, I've been using a computer since I was 14, and it's just, honestly, it's to attractive to have the ability to just edit and believe the background. Yeah. And I will say maybe as a result, probably because of that, or as a consequence, the way I tend to edit in place. So like I'm editing as I'm writing. Of course, there's a final edit and everything's put together.

But I can't get past a paragraph if I don't like that paragraph. Yeah, I understand that. It's a perfectionist tendency, right? All right, and are you more of a night owl, morning person, or just write whenever inspiration strikes? I used to be a night owl, but I've been married for 30 years, and that has been taken away to some extent. And I'm precious to the morning, so I tend to write it up. If I'm going to be writing that day, I tend to write it good up and I'm at my computer by 708, and I'm usually done, or I kind of quit by 11 or new, like, here for hours is about what I think I can get on top of the same session.

So, yeah, early mornings, quite a maybe a little factor on music, but just in just enough to keep the distracted from the world around me.

“Yeah, and actually that's another flash question is, do you have a way to set the mood or do you like to write in silence?”

For longer pieces, I will actually create playlists. And so, a novel I'm working on now, I've got a playlist of like 200 times or something like that, and I will let it just kind of promote just kind of set the tone of what I'm trying to do. For shorter pieces, or for editing, or for anything like that, it's going to be nothing with voice, just looking here. But it's so classical instrumentation, music, anything like that, they're really low volume. Again, just to kind of keep my mind focused on what I'm doing, but I'm distracted by my external environment.

Yeah, and do you share this bylists? Are they very personal and you kind of keep them on the lockdown? I mean, they're private, just because I don't think anybody's going to share that much about them, but yeah, I mean, it's something that I just do, or again, setting up a mood in the back of my mind, and I don't usually use it for much other than that.

“Okay, and honestly, I haven't done a full project doing that, so I don't know, like how successful it actually is.”

Yeah, first novel, the proliferation of like, spotify, I think in playlists didn't exist.

Yeah, I mean, technology has taken off, and now it's easier to do a lot of those things that would have been tedious before, right? Absolutely. All right, so a final flash question for you, if you could pick one writer, you know, living or historical, who would it be if you had an hour with them to just sort of sit and chat, who would it be in life? We finally stumped you. Well, it's a broad pantheon to choose from. Yeah, absolutely.

The best book that I've read has 15 years is no plan for interviews.

“I think it's just an amazing accomplishment.”

I was really captivated by the full novel, it's a entire time that I read it, completely transported, and I would end the, she used a structure in that novel. A grammatical structure, a paragraph structure, that is very different than anything you'll see in 95% of novels, whereby all of the dialogue is embedded in paragraphs with all very dense, but that's the intent because it would make it a novel. So I would love to be able to sit down with her and just talk to her about how, how she, well, one to clarify whether or not the things that I see are in fact things that she thought or if I'm just creating that out of the plot.

But then to just kind of talk about her processing and how maybe how difficult that was to execute from an ideation perspective all the way through it. That's a wonderful choice, and I think I'm going to look up that title. I haven't read it myself, and I'll put it in the show notes as well so that others can find it too. If you enjoyed this interview, make sure you're subscribed to this podcast. Please also share by-home with your friends.

It's fun to talk about stories, what you liked about them, what you didn't, what you might have done differently in the character's shoes. Next week's interview with Nicholas Pachwood will be released as a written exchange exclusively on Patreon.

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But now, dear listener, farewell, whatever the days take you. (upbeat music)