Since I last updated my personal website (craigcliff.com) in May 2013, not a lot has changed in terms of my writing career. No new books have been published (funny that, since I've completed none in that time). Only two short stories have been published, and two translations (a Spanish version of 'Copies' and a Romanian version of my novel) which, in truth, represents not effort on my part (at least not in the last three years). I went to Iowa for a writer's residency and didn't write enough. I quit writing my Dom Post column and wrote an essay about how blah I felt about four years of output. I read a lot about watching video games and wrote an essay about it.And that's it.
(I think. I haven't been a fastidious blogger over this period either, so my records are sketchy.)
But my online bio and bonus blather is more out of date than all that. I got promoted twice at work (and turned down a third promotion). I co-created another human being. That first human being that was but a pooping, suckling lump in May 2013 is now a singing, twirling Frozen reenactment. I sold a house and bought a new one. I am so fucking middle class it hurts.
(Or maybe I'm just really committed to researching the bourgeoisie?? Seed of doubt: planted.)
Ahem.
Like I did last time, I'm posting the old version of the Q&A section here (well, after the jump) because I am bad at filing things / have trouble knowing what to be embarrassed about / get public and private mixed up.
You can read the new version (small tweaks for now; some bigger changes will appear if I can think of bigger questions) on my website.
Standard author bio written in the third person
Craig Cliff was born in Palmerston North and spent most of his childhood on sports fields or in the city library, which started life as a department store. His collection of short stories, A Man Melting, won Best First Book in the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. According to the judges A Man Melting was ‘of the moment and is rightly at home on a global platform. Cliff is a talent to watch and set to take the literary world by storm.’ In 2012 he was a judge of the inaugural Commonwealth Short Story Prize and had stories translated into Spanish and German. He writes a column for the Dominion Post about his double life as a writer and public servant in Wellington, where he lives with his wife and daughter. The Mannequin Makers is his first novel.
Bonus Q&A with myself
The banner of this website describes you as a 'Writer, columnist, public servant'. What do you do for a day job?
I'm a Senior Policy Analyst for the New Zealand, Ministry of Education.
When do you find time to write?
I was lucky enough to work part-time for a while in 2011 and 2012 and that's when I broke the back of The Mannequin Makers. But I've been back to full time, five days a week, at the Ministry since September 2012.
These days I write between 5am and 7am on weekdays, then head to work. That's the plan, anyway. I became a father late last year and that's meant getting up at 5am isn't always easy.
Is your dream to become a full-time writer?
That depends. I'd like more time to write, of course. But I really enjoy my job. I think I'm good at it. It's nice to use a different part of my brain, to collaborate on projects and deal with other people, to have a beer on Friday and toast a good week's work. You don't really get that as a writer. And you don't get paid every fortnight. That's a biggie.
I've made the choice to live in New Zealand, have a family and a mortgage and be a writer. So I'm going to have a day job for a while yet. And that's cool.
You attended the International Institute of Modern Letters MA programme back in 2006. Is that when you wrote the stories in A Man Melting?
No. I actually tried to write a novel that year — a great experience but I think it was a mistake to try and write a novel from go to whoa in eight months. Too many decisions were made for the sake of expedience that then became so integral to the fabric of the novel that it was beyond fixing. The manuscript now sits in my bottom drawer along with the novel I tried to write when I was twenty-one.
So when did you turn your attention to short fiction?
I've always written short fiction. It's a natural progression to start with the shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that's your goal. I mostly read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk), so that's what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my MA, I really wanted to keep writing, but didn't have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I returned to short fiction.
The first two stories I wrote after doing my MA were 'Copies' (which has since been included in three anthologies) and 'Another Language' (which won the novice section of the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards). Something clearly clicked and things began to fall into place.
In 2008, while living in Edinburgh, I tried to write one million words in 366 days (it was a leap year). I only wrote 800,737 words, but it was a very successful failure. Almost every story in A Man Melting was written or revised during that year.
Your novel, The Mannequin Makers, is quite different to your short stories. For one, it's historical. Was it a deliberate choice to go in a different direction?
Yes and no. After finishing the stories in A Man Melting, I started working on a novel that took a character from one of these stories and spent more time with him. I plugged away at this project for quite a while, but always seemed to get bogged down. The novel was set in the present and focused on a dude about my age, with experiences not dissimilar to mine.
When I finally gave up on this novel, I decided that the next thing I worked on would either be set in the past or the future. The future seemed too easy - I could just make things up - and I thought doing research would help me feel like a proper writer. So I chose to focus on two ideas that I'd been kicking around for a while that needed to take place in the past and devote the next two or three years to them.
Having said this, I don't think The Mannequin Makers is a million miles away from my short stories. I was on a panel discussion at a writers festival once about 'Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary'. I do that a little bit (like in my story 'Evolution, Eh?'), but more often I think I'm finding the ordinary in the extraordinary. In a story like 'The Skeptic's Kid', the extraordinary (extinct animals begin reappearing all around the world) is there front and centre, but the story is ultimately more concerned about the relationship of the young narrator and his mother. Same goes with The Mannequin Makers, which could be described as high concept - a window dresser raises his children to be living mannequins - but is secretly (not-so-secretly, now) more interested in what it's like to stand very still for a long time.
What are you working on at the moment?
Links
The Quest for a Million Words - the record of a year spent writing like stink.
This Fluid Thrill - My blog, where you can catch my thoughts about writing, reading and whatever else passes my field of vision.
Bonus Q&A with myself
The banner of this website describes you as a 'Writer, columnist, public servant'. What do you do for a day job?
I'm a Senior Policy Analyst for the New Zealand, Ministry of Education.
When do you find time to write?
I was lucky enough to work part-time for a while in 2011 and 2012 and that's when I broke the back of The Mannequin Makers. But I've been back to full time, five days a week, at the Ministry since September 2012.
These days I write between 5am and 7am on weekdays, then head to work. That's the plan, anyway. I became a father late last year and that's meant getting up at 5am isn't always easy.
Is your dream to become a full-time writer?
That depends. I'd like more time to write, of course. But I really enjoy my job. I think I'm good at it. It's nice to use a different part of my brain, to collaborate on projects and deal with other people, to have a beer on Friday and toast a good week's work. You don't really get that as a writer. And you don't get paid every fortnight. That's a biggie.
I've made the choice to live in New Zealand, have a family and a mortgage and be a writer. So I'm going to have a day job for a while yet. And that's cool.
You attended the International Institute of Modern Letters MA programme back in 2006. Is that when you wrote the stories in A Man Melting?
No. I actually tried to write a novel that year — a great experience but I think it was a mistake to try and write a novel from go to whoa in eight months. Too many decisions were made for the sake of expedience that then became so integral to the fabric of the novel that it was beyond fixing. The manuscript now sits in my bottom drawer along with the novel I tried to write when I was twenty-one.
So when did you turn your attention to short fiction?
I've always written short fiction. It's a natural progression to start with the shorter form and work your way up to the longer, if that's your goal. I mostly read novels when I was younger (Douglas Coupland, Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk), so that's what I grew up wanting to write. Tastes change, of course, and eventually I found an appreciation for subtlety (though I still love me some Vonnegut). After finishing my MA, I really wanted to keep writing, but didn't have the reserves of energy needed to start another novel. So I returned to short fiction.
The first two stories I wrote after doing my MA were 'Copies' (which has since been included in three anthologies) and 'Another Language' (which won the novice section of the 2007 BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards). Something clearly clicked and things began to fall into place.
In 2008, while living in Edinburgh, I tried to write one million words in 366 days (it was a leap year). I only wrote 800,737 words, but it was a very successful failure. Almost every story in A Man Melting was written or revised during that year.
Your novel, The Mannequin Makers, is quite different to your short stories. For one, it's historical. Was it a deliberate choice to go in a different direction?
Yes and no. After finishing the stories in A Man Melting, I started working on a novel that took a character from one of these stories and spent more time with him. I plugged away at this project for quite a while, but always seemed to get bogged down. The novel was set in the present and focused on a dude about my age, with experiences not dissimilar to mine.
When I finally gave up on this novel, I decided that the next thing I worked on would either be set in the past or the future. The future seemed too easy - I could just make things up - and I thought doing research would help me feel like a proper writer. So I chose to focus on two ideas that I'd been kicking around for a while that needed to take place in the past and devote the next two or three years to them.
Having said this, I don't think The Mannequin Makers is a million miles away from my short stories. I was on a panel discussion at a writers festival once about 'Finding the extraordinary in the ordinary'. I do that a little bit (like in my story 'Evolution, Eh?'), but more often I think I'm finding the ordinary in the extraordinary. In a story like 'The Skeptic's Kid', the extraordinary (extinct animals begin reappearing all around the world) is there front and centre, but the story is ultimately more concerned about the relationship of the young narrator and his mother. Same goes with The Mannequin Makers, which could be described as high concept - a window dresser raises his children to be living mannequins - but is secretly (not-so-secretly, now) more interested in what it's like to stand very still for a long time.
What are you working on at the moment?
Fatherhood, full-time work, finishing off The Mannequin Makers, doing publicity and judging the novice category of the BNZ Literary Awards mean I don't have anything major on the go at the moment.
But I have a long list of short stories I want to write and relief is in sight: I'm off to Iowa City in August 2013 to take part in the International Writers Program. In addition to writing some killer short stories, I'll do a spot of research for what might become my next novel. At the moment I'm describing it as 'Jonathan Franzen meets Douglas Coupland meets H.G. Wells'... but it'll be something entirely different when I'm done with it, no doubt. It's early days.
But I have a long list of short stories I want to write and relief is in sight: I'm off to Iowa City in August 2013 to take part in the International Writers Program. In addition to writing some killer short stories, I'll do a spot of research for what might become my next novel. At the moment I'm describing it as 'Jonathan Franzen meets Douglas Coupland meets H.G. Wells'... but it'll be something entirely different when I'm done with it, no doubt. It's early days.
Links
The Quest for a Million Words - the record of a year spent writing like stink.
This Fluid Thrill - My blog, where you can catch my thoughts about writing, reading and whatever else passes my field of vision.
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