“Starting to write is the hardest part of the whole process.” – Interview with Maclean J. Storer

Maclean J. Storer is an English-born Australian writer who is currently living and working in Bangkok, Thailand. His debut novel, Forward O Peasant! (And Total Victory Shall Be Ours!), a humorous book about contemporary Vietnam, has been well-received by critics worldwide. In this interview, Storer talks about Vietnam, the craft of writing, and books.

Mihnea Voicu Simandan: You wrote a humorous novel about Vietnam, a very politically incorrect one. Is it available in Vietnam? How was it received by the expatriate community over there?

Maclean J. Storer: It is not officially available there, and I doubt it ever will be – the Communist Party of Vietnam is not noted for its sense of humor. I heard that pirated copies had somehow found their way onto the market in private bookshops. Expats who have read it have said nice things about the book, and many claim to recognize scenes and characters from the book, which was gratifying and makes me think my portrayal of Vietnam was accurate.

VMS: How would you describe the 14 years you spent in Vietnam? Will you ever go back?

MJS: “Never” is a very strong word, but I don’t feel any desire to go back. When I first went there in 1993 it was an extraordinary place, a time-warp really, with none of the western comforts or even much of an expat community. As one traveler observed, you don’t travel to interesting places; you travel to places that make you feel interesting. That was true of Saigon in 1993. Now it’s just another big, polluted, Asian city, full of Japanese restaurants and marketing executives. The charm has gone.

VMS: How long did it take you to write Forward O Peasant!? Was it a strenuous task?

MJS: It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. The first draft took me almost five months of continuous work, and nearly every day I felt I had lost control of my story, or that the book just wasn’t working. After finishing the first draft, I put the MS away for a couple of months, and when I came back to it, I thought I had something I could just about work with. But it wasn’t until well into my third draft that I really began to feel I had got a grip on my story. The overall process was just under a year from concept to the final MS, and it took me a month more to wind down. But I ended up with exactly the book I had hoped to write.

VMS: Tell us about your writing routine.

MJS: I tend to write in scenes of about 1000 words each (three scenes to a chapter, 30 chapters to a book). I start early and hope to have a scene completed by lunchtime or thereabouts. The rest of the day I might do some editing of other scenes, or just think about the book as a whole. I was thoroughly absorbed in this book; all day and quite a few nights for months on end it was drumming in my head. Overall, I think Jackie Collins was right when she said that you should wake up and go straight to your desk and start writing. Get half an hour’s work under your belt and then have your first coffee of the morning, because starting to write is the hardest part of the whole process.

VMS: Has the fact that you had a successful career as a journalist had any influence on your fiction writing? Are there any “tricks” that you have used from your background as a “newspaper man”?

MJS: Journalism has given me a solid background in the correct and economical use of words, grammar and even some idea of how to construct a story. Garrison Keillor once said that all fiction writing is basically journalism, so from that perspective I think that journalism has helped me. I also learnt about deadlines, which often mean that you have to keep on writing even when you don’t feel like it. But fiction is very different; you have to develop the confidence to relax and free up your imagination. And when writing fiction, you have no facts to fall back on, so you have to fill that void from your own imagination, which is scary sometimes.

6. VMS: In a recent interview you confessed that there will be a sequel to Forward O Peasant!. What phase are you in?

MJS: I have a broad idea of what it will be about, I will begin doing the detailed planning soon. My feeling is that this should be an easier process than writing the first one, because I know what to expect, and I also have the knowledge that I can do this, having already done it once. There will still be enormous challenges, although they will not be quite the same challenges as I faced when writing Forward O Peasant.

VMS: Would you say that political satire is your niche? Do you think of writing other genres too?

MJS: Satire is my niche, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be narrowly political. There are so many things going on the world which need to be satirized, so I am confident I will never run out of material. Satire is always aimed at some power structure or other, so the areas of politics and business are always going to be fertile ground. The genre of your writing has to be aligned with your overall view of the world, and because I believe the world is fundamentally absurd, satire must be my genre.

VMS: What advice can you give to aspiring fiction writers who are still working on their first novel?

MJS: Every author feels moments of self-doubt, and this is especially true with first novels. It is important to recognize and feel that self-doubt, and then just put the doubt aside and keep on writing. You cannot just write when you feel like it; if you do that, you will never finish your book. And I found sometimes that the stuff I wrote when I didn’t feel like it had an interesting quality to it, perhaps because every word felt like it had been dragged out of me. “Feel the fear and do it anyway,” as Jack Canfield said. Writing fiction is not easy; if it was, everybody would be doing it.

VMS: You have lived in quite a few Southeast Asian countries. What is your take on the expat writer communities that you have been part of?

MJS: In most of the countries I have lived in, expats tended to mix on a rather superficial level rather than forming interesting communities. From a writing perspective, if expats follow their own path, they often tend to feel they have discovered something unique, where in fact they are all discovering the same thing, and their writing tends to be rather obvious and shallow. You only have to read the feature articles in expat magazines to see what I mean. Bangkok is the first place I have been part of a writers’ group in Asia, and looking back, I wish that some of the other countries had had something similar.

VMS: I share Paul Theroux’s opinion that “The books in a person’s house reveal an enormous amount of what’s going on in his head.” (My Other Life) What are you reading at the moment?

MJS: I’m sure Theroux is right, but I’ve noticed that nowadays I read from a professional standpoint – I look to see how other fiction authors handle their material, and I try to learn from them. So I will re-read excellent writing again and again, which is what I am currently doing with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman series. When you know that Fraser’s greatest fans include the late P.G. Wodehouse and Kingsley Amis, you understand that here is an author whose technique should be studied in detail.

VMS: Thank you for your time and happy writing. I’m looking forward to reading your next novel.

MJS: I’m looking forward to writing it – most of the time, anyway.

Voicu Mihnea Simandan
Bangkok, Thailand
September 15, 2009