Peg Cheng

This month, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sam Wiebe, author of Vancouver crime novels Last of the Independents, Invisible Dead, and just released this year, Cut You Down.

I’ve been following Sam for a couple of years on Twitter, and recently got the chance to see him in conversation with Seattle mystery writer Brian Thornton at Third Place Books. After enjoying Invisible Dead and meeting him in person, I knew I wanted to learn more about Sam and his writing.

Peg: Sam, how did you decide to become an author?

Sam: From a very early age I liked making stories. In my teens and early twenties I wrote, submitting short literary pieces and accumulated rejections. When I started grad school, I realized that it was “sh– or get off the pot” time. I focused on writing a novel, revising it, and submitting it. That became my first book, Last of the Independents.

P: So many writers have that “sh– or get off the pot” moment. But not many moments lead to writing a novel that wins the Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished manuscript. Congrats, Sam! What made you decide to write crime fiction?

S: I didn’t see the through-line until much later. I always read everything: from lit fic to sci fi, westerns, you name it. But mysteries and crime were a big part of it, ever since Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys. My first attempt at a novel was supposedly mainstream, but had a violent crime and an investigation. There was a point I remember looking at my bookcase, overstuffed with predominantly crime novels, Sue Grafton, Elmore Leonard, etc., and thinking, “Hunh, I guess I like crime fiction the most.” It was an important moment of recognizing the tendencies which were already there.

P: How did you develop your writing chops?

S: I’m basically self-taught, though I took a great screenwriting class in college. I read a ton of how-to books, starting with Michael Newton’s How to Write Action Adventure Novels. Mostly, though, it was work—just writing stories, learning through trial and error. I’m probably part of the last generation that got actual physical rejection slips.

P: Hey, I’m part of that generation too. You wrote your first book while in graduate school, but you were also self taught in terms of writing. What did you think of your graduate school experience? Did it help you with your writing?

S: I studied English literature, which of course is helpful, but doesn’t have a lot to do with learning how to write novels. I clarified some parts of my writing process in grad school—writing my first draft by hand, for instance. It helps to figure out your true thoughts on something.

P: Wow. Do you still write your drafts by hand? Also, are you a pantser or plotter or both?

S: For the most part, yeah. All three of my books started out as handwritten first drafts. However, I’ve been working on a stand-alone novel, and I wrote the first draft of that on my computer. As for pantser/plotter, I’m somewhere in between, like most people. I like to have a rough idea of where I’m going, but that can take the form of a “beat sheet,” or just an idea of the ending. But anything can change as the book’s written.

P: Do you have a job? If not, what job did you leave to write full time?

S: I taught college English for five years. I write full-time, though I’m also doing more speaking events and also teaching writing. Last weekend, I ran my first seminar, a “Mystery Writing Masterclass,” and it was resoundingly successful. I hope to do more of those.

P: Congrats on the masterclass. I’m glad to hear it went well. What was it like teaching college English? How did you decide to leave?

S: I really enjoyed it, for the most part. Most of my students were science and economics majors, for whom English was a second language. It was challenging to find readings that would speak to them. I left when I was chosen as the Writer in Residence for the Vancouver Public Library (VPL) in 2016.

P: You said at the Third Place Books reading that being VPL’s Writer in Residence was the best job you’d ever had. What was it like?

S: The residency was split between time spent writing and designing workshops and events that would help aspiring writers. I ran three craft-related writing courses, led an Asian Mystery Novel book club, moderated a panel of historical crime fiction authors, and did events for low-income writers and seniors. It was great.

P: Asian Mystery Novel book club? That sounds awesome. Do you earn a full-time income from your books and speaking/teaching, or do you support yourself in other ways?

S: The short answer is yes; the longer answer: a writing career is very dependent on outside forces, the choices that agents and publishers make. Income varies book to book. At the moment I’m supporting myself through writing, with the odd seminar and speaking event. But there’s no guarantee or safety net.

P: That’s great that you’re supporting yourself from your books and speaking gigs. Is there a novel out there that you wish you had written?

S: True Grit, The Long Goodbye, Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein…there’s a lot of brilliant fiction out there. I try not to allow myself to get too jealous about contemporary writers, but I have tremendous respect for Peter Temple and Sue Grafton, both of whom we lost in the last year.

P: Your first novel, Last of the Independents, is a stand-alone, but your second novel, Invisible Dead, turned out to be the first book in the Dave Wakeland mystery series. Did you know when you created Dave that he would be part of a series?

S: I knew that Invisible Dead, because of its subject matter, was tonally different than Last of the Independents, darker, and more realistic, more based on the Vancouver and Pacific Northwest that I live in. I wanted to build on that world.

P: What inspired you to create Dave Wakeland? Is he based on someone you know?

S: He reflects some of the concerns and issues I’ve confronted in my own life. He’s a young guy, trying to find his place in a rapidly changing and occasional hostile city.

P: Something I love about Invisible Dead are all the Vancouver details such as Jefferson Chen being Dave Wakeland’s business partner instead of a white guy, his coworker Shuzhen offering him a Chinese donut, and Dave walking down real streets such as Thurlow and Pender. It’s obvious that you love your city, while at the same time, you’re aware of its growing problems. Will your future novels be set in Vancouver or other cities?

S: I’ll definitely continue to write about Vancouver as long as I can. I find it a fascinating place. At the same time, I’m working on a stand-alone novel set closer to the US-Canada border.

P: The beginning of Invisible Dead starts off with, “I don’t know why this city sees fit to kill its women. Answers won’t be forthcoming.” Did you gain any insights into this dilemma by the time you finished writing your novel?

S: Yes and no. I did a lot of research on the subject of murdered and missing women, and while I think I have a good understanding of the systemic forces at play, I can’t claim any special insights. My hope for the book was to point out and acknowledge the lack of those stories in the cultural discourse—to focus on one disappearance and use that to illustrate some of the social forces at play.

P: This was one of the main reasons I picked up Invisible Dead. Not many mysteries have a social justice component, but I appreciated that yours did. Thanks so much, Sam, for taking the time to answer my questions. It was great getting to know you, and learning more about your background and approach to writing. I’m looking forward to reading Cut You Down and your future books!

Sam Wiebe is the author of the Vancouver crime novels Cut You Down, Invisible Dead, and Last of the Independents. His short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Spinetingler, and subTerrain, and he was the 2016 Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence. He lives in Vancouver.

Hope you enjoyed this interview. To learn more about Sam and his books, visit his site, follow him on Twitter and Facebook, and check out his books on Amazon.

Peg Cheng is the author of The Contenders, a middle-grade novel that asks, can enemies become friends? She is currently writing another novel that is a re-imagining of the Snow White fairy tale set in 1980s Seattle. Peg is also the creator of Fear & Writing, a workshop for procrastinating writers from all walks of life.

I’m launching a new blog feature today called, Interviews with Creatives! I love chatting with fellow writers, artists, and makers, and learning from them–and thought you might too.

This month, I had the pleasure of interviewing Lauren Sapala, author, blogger, and writing coach. I’ve been following Lauren for a couple of years on Twitter and have found her to be a fount of advice on writing and the writing life. After reading her book The INFJ Writer and loving it, I wanted to know more about her and how she writes.

Peg: What motivated you to start your blog?

Lauren: Well, I had started a writing program in Seattle in 2009, and then when I moved back to San Francisco in 2010, I opened another branch there. As I was running these groups I noticed that the writers who showed up seemed to suffer from the same kind of writing problems I did—self-doubt, a lot of strong fear about showing anyone else their work, and sometimes, crippling writer’s block.

Week after week, I ended up counseling these writers and helping them overcome these problems, but because it was an in-person group, I only had so much time and energy. So, I could only help a handful of writers at a time. I thought of starting the blog because I knew it would be a way to reach much larger numbers of writers, and it wouldn’t be dependent on my physical presence to do so. That led to me starting my blog in 2013, and I’m still going strong with it today.

P: I like how your blog manifested from an actual situation. You saw a need and started your blog as a way to help other writers who weren’t in your in-person writing groups. That’s so great and so smart. When you first started blogging, how did it feel to have your writing out in the world?

L: My first two years of blogging were really tough. It wasn’t the learning curve of using the technology or getting into a regular posting routine, it was finding my own voice as a blogger that was so challenging.

I started out trying to do what all the other writing bloggers were doing, because I thought that was the road to success, and also, because I was scared of being “too much me” and being rejected by readers. So I wrote on topics that were very middle-of-the-road, had mass appeal, and didn’t rock the boat.

After about two years of this, I started to feel a much stronger pull to write on topics that I, personally, was very interested in, even if they weren’t apparently linked to writing—like limiting beliefs, personal growth, and personality and psychology. Funnily enough, the more I explored what truly interested me, the more I discovered that all of these topics DID lead back to writing, and the more readers I attracted who were on my same unique wavelength.

Those first two years were also a challenge because I was so hyper-focused on the blog as well. I was constantly checking my numbers and looking to see if anyone new had subscribed. If someone didn’t like a post or made a snarky comment, I felt crushed. I spent a lot of time looking for ways to promote the blog, and I also felt that it was mandatory that I post at least once a week. Now that I’ve been blogging regularly for five years, I’ve relaxed A LOT more about the whole thing. I never check my numbers, I ignore all snarky comments, I don’t really promote at all, and if I miss a week or two, oh well. It’s made blogging a MUCH more pleasurable process.

P: I know what you mean! I thought the same thing when I started my blog, but stressing about all these things made me want to blog less, not more. I’m glad you put that stuff aside and it made blogging a lot more pleasurable. How do you balance blogging with writing books?

L: This is a really hard question because I don’t have any easy answers. I live a busy life. A lot of people who only see me online assume that being a writer is my full-time job and I have oodles of free time to write and teach and work on publishing, etc.

The truth is that I still have a full-time day job (executive assistant at a startup company), and I also have a three-year-old son at home. I’m very lucky in that my husband is a fulltime stay-at-home dad—he is my rock and my support in everything. But, I’m still super busy. I blog, I coach other writers, I work on my own writing, I edit and beta read, etc.

The key I’ve found to balancing it all is being ruthless in eliminating other activities that only serve as “time fillers.” So, for instance, I watch no more than 45 minutes of TV per day, and that 45 minutes is only to spend time with my husband in the evening after our son has gone to bed. I don’t read the news, period. I spend very little time on social media. I only check my cell phone a few times a day and I don’t have social media enabled on my phone.

Basically, I’m extremely aware of activities that suck time away from me, bit by bit, and I don’t engage in them whenever possible. If I have an hour or 30 minutes unexpectedly free, I read a book or I go for a walk to think about my writing ideas. If I take public transit to commute, I read a book or work on writing ideas. Whenever I’m in a situation with a bunch of other people who are standing around and scrolling through their phones, I read or work on ideas. I’ve found that cutting out TV, most of the internet, and unnecessary texts from other people, and then filling that time with reading and ideas goes a long way toward helping me meet goals much, much faster.

P: I love how ruthless you are with cutting out time fillers. You’re inspiring me to figure out ways I can cut more out of my life too. I understand now how you carve out time to write, but how do you motivate yourself to write regularly?

L: Currently, I don’t have one method I use. I think the tricky thing about this is that so many writers have trouble motivating themselves to write, and we assume that there must be some strategy or method to get past that.

In my opinion, it really comes down to the writer and what is going on with them in their individual life. For instance, back in 2006 when I joined my first writing program, I had HUGE problems writing. I had to join that program to show up somewhere once a week and write silently for an hour with other people, because I just couldn’t do it on my own. However, at that time I was 28 years old and coming off seven years of alcoholism. In terms of being able to check in with myself internally and use my own internal signals to drive my life forward, forget about it. I just wasn’t there. That’s why I needed that writing group so badly, because I needed the support of other writers to help me along the way.

Now, in my current life, I still greatly benefit from the support of other writers, but I am much more internally directed and skilled at listening to my own intuition and what I know is right for me. So, consequently, I’m engaged in many projects that pull me to work on them. I don’t need to prod myself in any way to write anymore. This is also, incidentally, what I work on with writers when I coach them: cultivating their own unique rhythm, voice, and consciousness as a writer so that they can become internally-directed as an artist and write the things they truly want to write and that mean the most to them.

P: Over time, you turned your writing into a habit. I’m glad you followed your intuition, and it led you to do what was right for you. Speaking of which, your book, The INFJ Writer, helped me so much in understanding why I write the way I do, and how following my intuition would help me to be a more productive writer. What did it feel like to publish your first book and put it out there for people to buy?

L: Publishing The INFJ Writer was half terrifying and half totally okay.

It was terrifying because it was my first book and I had no idea what people would think of it. I had never experienced getting reviews, looking at sales figures, or anything else that came with publishing a book, so everything felt new and scary. However, it was also totally okay because I had been coaching writers for about three years at that point and I had talked to so many writers who were having the exact same very specific problems with writing.

At that time, almost all of my clients came to me through finding one of the articles I had written on INFJ and INFP writers on my blog, and then when I started coaching them, this same set of problems reared its ugly head. So, I knew there was a solid connection and I knew it was no coincidence that all of these INFJ and INFP writers were going through the same things. I was confident that if the right readers found my book it would be helpful for them.

P: You’re right. I’m glad you realized that connection. Whenever I meet a writer that’s a NF type on Myers-Briggs, I recommend that they read your book. Your second book, “Between the Shadow and Lo,” is very different from your first book. First, it’s fiction, and second, it’s based on your years as an alcoholic in your 20s. How did you decide to let people know it was based on your life rather than letting it be known as a work of fiction?

L: This might sound odd, but my past as a crazy alcoholic is actually something I value highly. I learned A LOT from that experience, it was very significant in helping to shape the person I am today. So I wanted to own it. Additionally, authors like Jack Kerouac, Jean Genet, and Charles Bukowski are some of my biggest influences and I wanted to emulate what they did in their writing. The idea of a book that is truth, but also fiction, but also memoir, but also pure story, really appeals to me.

P: Owning your past experiences is so powerful. I’m glad you owned it and ran with it. Your third book, which just came out, is called, Firefly Magic: Heart Powered Marketing for Highly Sensitive Writers. How did you decide on this topic for your third book?

L: Firefly Magic was born much the way that The INFJ Writer was born, from my experiences with my clients. In the past few years, more and more of my clients have decided to go the self-publishing route, and they have run into the same mental obstacles I have run into myself through self-publishing. Namely, that you have to learn how to market your work but the whole concept sounds intimidating, overwhelming, tedious, and like something awful that you just would rather not do.

When I first decided to learn about marketing. I challenged myself to sift through the business shelves at the library and check out every book that looked like I would absolutely hate it. Well, I was really surprised. Because with almost every book that I thought I would “really hate,” I found some kind of insight that changed my thinking.

I thought about all my clients and the way they felt about marketing. I knew if they started reading the books I was reading, their way of thinking would probably change bit by bit, just like mine was. But, I also knew my clients—the highly sensitive, intuitive, creative, introverted dreamers and poets of the world—were not about to start going to the library in droves to check out these very traditional business books.

So I thought, “Well, what if I wrote a book about marketing, showing my tribe (all the highly sensitive writer folks out there) what marketing could be like if they thought about it differently?”

That was how the idea was born, and then when I started writing it, the book took on a life of its own. My biggest goal with this book was to write a marketing book that is NOT boring, that is easy to read, and that is also enjoyable to experience. Hopefully, I’ve succeeded!

P: I bet you did, and I can’t wait to read it. Congratulations again! So, here’s my last question, and it’s an important one. How do you reward yourself after you finish writing a book?

L: It’s funny you ask this, because I make it a big point with my clients to teach them to reward themselves when they hit writing milestones. It’s very important to celebrate in some way in order to acknowledge your work and nurture your self-esteem. When I finish a book, I go out for lunch at my favorite sushi place with one of my best friends. We order way too much food and spend hours just talking. It’s divine.

P: I love that. Your reward includes two things that you enjoy: sushi and time with a good friend. It’s a great tip for us all to give ourselves rewards that really match who we are and what we like, and not what others define as a “real” reward.

Thank you, Lauren, for your time and all your honest, thoughtful answers. You’ve inspired me all over again. I love your writing and can’t wait to read Firefly Magic and all your future books!

Lauren Sapala is the author of Firefly Magic: Heart Powered Marketing for Highly Sensitive Writers, a guide to help any HSP, INFJ, INFP, or introvert writer move past resistance to selling and marketing their work. She is also the author of The INFJ Writer, a writing guide made specifically for sensitive intuitive writers. She currently lives in San Francisco.

If you enjoyed this interview, sign up for Lauren’s newsletter, follow her on Twitter and Facebook, and check out her books on Amazon.

Peg Cheng is the author of The Contenders, a middle-grade novel that asks, can enemies become friends? She is currently writing another novel that is a re-imagining of the Snow White fairy tale set in 1980s Seattle. Peg is also the creator of Fear & Writing, a workshop for procrastinating writers from all walks of life.