Toronto editor and author of The Death Scene Artist talks to Sabyasachi Nag about their craft & process.
Sabyasachi Nag (SN): What inspired you to write your debut novel The Death Scene Artist (2013) Wolsak &Wynn/Buckrider Books: October 2018. How did you come up with the idea?
Andrew Wilmot (AW): Without being conscious of it at the time, I was pulling from a fair number of unresolved personal issues: a multi-decade history with both anorexia (and other matters related to body dysmorphia) and gender dysphoria. The project began as a simple body horror idea steeped in my love of film and the film industry. What resulted, the subtext that emerged… it was entirely unplanned. It happened as a function of who I am and what I’ve dealt with (or to be more precise, hadn’t yet dealt with but desperately needed to). As for where the initial idea came from, I can’t point to one thing or moment that inspired me to go with the idea of body sleeves and stitching together different skins, but I do know that prior to any degree of transitioning, and without realizing it at the time, I’d already spent a significant portion of my writing life toying with the notion of being able to escape one’s body or alter it to one’s ultimate needs and desires. The book was a natural progression of those thoughts and feelings.
SN: The novel (The Death Scene Artist) is written as alternating blog posts and film scenes. What made you use this narrative structure? Were any other structures considered?
AW: It was less a decision and more something that felt necessary over time. I’d written screenplays before and really love the form, but I hadn’t thought of marrying the two, not at first. Initially, the book was much shorter and absent those parts—the screenplay segments came out of both its setting and the eventual third-act revelations (i.e., the true nature of the “sleeves”). They helped, too, with crafting an unreliable narrator—someone who wishes for the life or lives they could not have. M_____ is writing what could have been, and it felt necessary to include those screenplay segments to help illustrate that fact. Beyond that, the screenplay segments also gave me a chance to play more with dialogue and banter—things I am especially fond of.
SN: You have had an extensive career as a professional and freelance editor. Self-editing, as you know, is integral to the writing process and is considered hard because at some stage the writer is so engrossed in the work, she loses the ability to be objective. What are some of the more effective ways that you self-edited this work?
AW: The number one thing for me, besides taking time and space from a project, is to read it out loud to myself. I’ve had terrific feedback from both friends and editors I’ve hired to look over various projects, but when it comes to self-editing, it’s all about how it sounds. I’m passionate about cadence, pacing, and momentum, so when I read it out loud to myself, I’m reading how I want it to be heard and read by others. That’s a massive part of it for me.
SN: What specific incident incited/inspired your forthcoming spec novel Withered (April 2024). ECW Press: April 2024. (Winner, ECW Press Best New Speculative Novel Contest 2022.)
AW: Like a handful of longer projects I’ve worked on, Withered started life as a short story. Called “Heart Strung,” it was about a woman who defied Death itself as an act of spite. That story is still present in the novel, as flashbacks, but over time it grew and took on new life as a secondary piece to a much larger story about a nonbinary teenager recovering from an eating disorder. For me, I found a strong parallel between what is, in essence, a haunted house story and a life spent struggling to “escape” one’s body as if it were a prison. I don’t want to say too much more, though, for fear of spoiling things.
SN: In pushing your work beyond your first title (The Death Scene Artist [2013]), what were you most conscious of? In terms of the writing process, what were you trying to do different? In terms of craft were there any specific goals you had set yourself up for as you moved forward?
AW: I have been conscious of not becoming stagnant—I don’t ever want to repeat myself too much, and so I skip around with respect to style, genre, etc. In terms of my process, I’m always working to craft better realized and more honest characters. I need to truly care about their individual stories. That doesn’t mean they have to be likeable, but I do need them to be interesting, and to act with authenticity. Related to that, without meaning to, I’ve noticed that over time, whatever nihilism I’d had has worked itself out of my life and writing. My work still goes where it’s needed, however dark that might be, but I find more and more that I can’t just wallow there; I have to search for some measure of catharsis. I didn’t set forward with that as a goal, I’ve just noticed that over time, I have lost the ability to fully embrace the dark without offering some shred of light in return. Beyond that, on a technical level, I’m working on maturing my voice a little, relying less on sarcasm and endless quips, and spending more time having realistic conversations with my characters.
SN: As a fiction editor, do you ever allow yourself to be informed by a particular craft aesthetic that seeks to balance or offset the narrative modes—say, action sequences in relation to exposition and/or thought, dialogue, or description? How do you bring that kind of technical consciousness to your own fiction?
AW: I’ll be honest, when it comes to my own writing, I don’t really think things through in those terms. A story begins for me as a single image or idea related to a character. From there, it spirals—it’s like chasing a child running through a corn maze. I know what the ending will be, but how I get there… There’s action where there needs to be action, conflict where there needs to be conflict—if it’s needed at all. I tend to think in segments (i.e., chapters, parts, etc.) and what I want to touch on in each, in terms of ideas or imagery, but I don’t ever begin a new section with the mindset that “this needs to be action” or “this needs to be a conversation”—usually one simply bleeds into the other in a pretty natural way. I’m fairly organic in that sense—I outline points and ideas I want to hit, images I want to employ, and that’s it. As silly as it might sound to some, I generally let my characters take me where they need to go. Sometimes I see it coming, sometimes I am taken by surprise.
SN: Do you have a writing routine? Or writing rituals? Or patterns you must follow regularly? Or rituals that you practice say, when you are writing in certain forms, say a longer piece of work like a novel, as opposed to a shorter piece, say a poem?
AW: Not especially. I wish I did—I wish I could say I’m one of those writers who carves out a specific chunk of time each and every day to work on my craft, but that simply isn’t the case. I’m a full-time editor, and I find it difficult sometimes to switch between the two modes, especially if I have deadlines looming. Beyond that… I suffer from chronic migraines and depression/anxiety, so there are days where for one reason or another, even if I have the space, I cannot get into the work. Generally, I try to push through such things, but life is not always so flexible—something I wish more established/successful authors would consider when stating “Well, if you want to be a writer, you need to do this, that, and the other.” Those sorts of decrees are great if this is your sole focus, but that’s not my life. That’s not a lot of writers’ lives. I find what time I can, where I can, when I can. Then I toss on some headphones, pull out a notebook (I do all my first drafts by hand—keeps me moving forward at all times), and get to work.
SN: Is your writing practice influenced or in any way informed by a sense of writing to or for others? Do you have an audience in mind when you write?
AW: Not as such. Because the audience is me. I know from experience that there are others out there who will relate to my life and experiences as I have to works by other writers and artists. But for the most part, I write the stories I want to write. I try to dig deep and write characters who are in some way or ways a reflection of me or a part of me: a fear, an obsession, a passion, a trauma, a love. Through that, yes, I hope to speak to someone. I hope to find an audience. I hope my words will have some degree of impact, or perhaps help someone see something in themselves that they didn’t previously. But I can’t predict that, and I can’t craft it. All I can do is to be honest with what I want to say and hope that I don’t inflict any unintentional harm in the process. The rest is up to the reader.
SN: Does your writing practice impact your emotional state in any way? Does it put you in a certain mood or an emotional state? Or helps you get away from a certain mood or an emotional state? Can you reflect on that?
AW: Oh lord, yes. Writing is self-therapy. I rarely write something just to write it—usually, I’m grappling with something, consciously or unconsciously, which is pushing me forward. Oftentimes, I will write my rage, my hurt, and my fear onto the page. I am not interested in couching my language or dancing around things—if I’m passionate about something, I’m going to put it out there. And in most cases, the deeper I’ve gone, the more the sense of catharsis, of release, I’ve experienced in the end. Through my writing, I’ve explored a great many facets of my own history and mental health. And in certain cases, like with The Death Scene Artist, the process of picking it apart, figuring out why I did this or that, has helped me come to a better understanding of myself.
SN: What are you writing against or towards?
AW: At the risk of sounding all high and mighty, I’m writing against a status quo that keeps us from exploring who we really are—that keeps us afraid to be our naked, messy, emotional selves. I’m writing to push against as much stigma as I can, especially when it comes to discussions of mental health. I’m writing, hopefully, toward a more equitable, honest future, one in which fascists and bigots are afraid to speak their minds. I’m writing against conservatism in general, as I find it to be an inherently flawed system that attempts to funnel the variety of human existence into a singular, flavourless soup, one that wants to tell you who to be, how to be, instead of accepting you for who you are—it’s a cold, isolating worldview that only takes and never gives. I want to normalize having queer characters in my work without their queerness or their struggle being the story. I want to have characters exist as they are, and for their stories to not be buried in the tragedy of who they are but rather the tragedy of the world that surrounds them and attempts to suffocate their uniqueness. I want to write toward growth.
Author Bio
Andrew Wilmot (BFA, MPub) is a writer and editor based out of Toronto, Ontario. They have won awards for fiction, short fiction, and screenwriting, and are co-publisher and co-EIC of the Ignyte- and British Fantasy Award-nominated Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Their credits include myriad online and in-print publications and anthologies. They are also on the editorial advisory board for Poplar Press, the speculative fiction imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. Books of Andrew’s include The Death Scene Artist (Buckrider Books, 2018) and Withered (ECW Press, 2024). They are represented by Kelvin Kong of K2 Literary (k2literary.com). Find them online at andrewwilmot.ca