Continuing in our interview series, we have a delightful interlude with our favorite Chairsniffa. If you don't already know him, he's the writer of Trinity, Dream Academy, The City, Mr. Scrooge of Australia, The Normal One, The Last Human and a few others that I would highly recommend you check out.
So, direct from Melbourne... here's chairsniffa sr.!
1. Starting off with the personal questions, what got you started writing? What or who motivated you or gave you the impetus to share your writing with the rest of us?
When I was around eleven years of age I wrote a story that I thought was alright but it had no descriptive writing in it whatsoever! It was basically "The barbarian attacked the knight and chopped the knight's head off and ran away on his dragon. And then the wizard attacked the barbarian but again the dragon beat the wizard up and left him dead."
Then my good friend Justin Jacobs read it and said to me that I needed to write things more descriptively, and when I asked "What do you mean?" he said "Well what time of the day is it? What season? What's the weather like?"
And so I rewrote it something like "In the morning the knight and barbarian had a fight. It was summer. It was rainy."
And he said "No, I mean start off like this. The sun rose over the rolling hills of Naveron kingdom, drenching the valleys in long shadows that meandered about in the summer mist."
So I started writing descriptive and was blown away with how easily I could do it!!! It seemed as though a light was turned on for me, and after that I couldn't get enough of writing!
I used to like choose your own adventures, storytelling with my younger brother and my friends and giving them decisions they had to make. For example: You go into the dungeon and the tunnel goes left and right. Which way do you go? And they would answer and I would make something up for what happened! But they weren't that into it until I got really descriptive then they loved my story telling and would always be asking me to tell them my stories!
"The darkness of the cave invokes a fear in you that is indescribable. It wracks your senses and causes your heart to pound, wary of what lay ahead...... Arranged one after the other, column style, you move ahead cautiously until you come upon a fork that goes left and right. Using your torch, down the left tunnel in the distance you can make out what looks like a door of some sort. To the right, you hear a deathly moan......."
They loved it, especially on the long car trips we often did back then; and I loved storytelling, orating some adventure with ogres, orcs, trolls and whatnots!
Thus began my journey into the dark abyss of my own weird mind!!!
2. Do you feel that being a writer has influenced your own life in any way? Is your family supportive of you?
I never really had a good childhood in some respects, and writing was a way for me to escape the drudgery of real life.
I always got crap from my older brother as my parents used to call me the professor of the family (hehehe, he still runs me down about it, now I am just a lousy arborist and never went to university!). Then my younger brother, who I mostly said my stories to, grew up and saw how uncool it was, my descriptive style of orating and writing, and didn't like it anymore.
I did tend to over-dramatize even the most basic things.
Once I wrote a whole short story about a blind girl who could feel leaves falling around her under a tree and so she puts her hand out and a leaf falls in her hand and I get way too deep about her emotions and describing that single leaf and stuff like that.
