Nothing appeals to my love of writing than people actually asking about why I write.
I recently did an interview with ‘The Fussy Librarian‘ (an amazing online resource for getting updates about new books and authors) and thought I would share it here for you to enjoy. I’ve taken the liberty to expand on a few of the answers, as I wanted the original interview to be a solid but solid promotional piece for my process and ideas.
What questions do you have about writing or what I’ve put together, including Extinction Event, Bliss or other projects in the works? Post your comments below and let’s chat
Intro
Today we’re interviewing Bill Wittur, who writes dystopian, climate, AI-fi, and thriller novels. Wittur is a writer, a musician-in-training, and a loyal husband, father, and friend. He has had a few career changes in his life, and through all of the variations, he has consistently been a writer and have kept a journal about his various experiences. He is equally enthusiastic about nonfiction and fiction influences. One of the aspects of writing that he enjoys most is doing a deep-dive with research and discovering details that others may have previously overlooked.
SADYE: Tell us something about your writing process that’s unusual or that you haven’t revealed before.
BILL: My writing process is a balance between instantaneous inspiration and constructive contemplation.
There are moments in my day when I feel like a flood of words are in my mind and I have to stop everything I’m doing in order to capture what’s come to me. On other occasions, I get VERY mechanical with my process.
I buy two-by-three-foot broadsheets that people use for corporate brainstorming sessions, and then I attach color-coded sticky notes that reflect the different characters and/or plot moments in the story. Each sticky note usually represents a chapter.
Once I’ve got the main storyboard organized, I physically move chapters around until the story flows between multiple characters, themes and locations.
If that’s not enough, I love words, especially developing a lexicon of sorts from other cultures and mythology. I tap into a lot of word origins and many of my characters, companies, and location names tend to have some kind of reference to something else. I make up words. In Extinction Event, I think I created at least a dozen new words, including oiligarchs (just in case we wanted a more clear connection between oil, our climate and the people in charge), hellucinations (to describe AI hallucinations) and sattelice (to generate an image of our planet surrounded by pest-like parasites for our digital world). I also enjoy anagrams and on many occasions, I like to use words that might be related to other significant ideas or words that carry significant meaning for me.
SADYE: Which of your characters would you most and least like to trade places with?
BILL: The main character — known only as LP – is moderately autobiographical, so instead of him, I’ll suggest a secondary character named Eugene Case that I would enjoy trading places with.
He’s from South America and he’s a world-renowned omnibioacoustic expert (i.e., he records and catalogues animal sounds). When he meets LP, he goes to great length to describe how AI is being used to identify animal sounds and to set the stage for learning how to communicate with specific non-human creatures.
Therefore, he’s a very important character in the novel, but I’m also drawn to the idea that he’s been very consistent with his commitment to his profession. Furthermore, he travels a lot and I love traveling!
Who would I NOT want to trade places with? Any of members of the Plutonian Council are really unpleasant.
In Extinction Event, I barely scrape the surface with ideas about how grim and cynical they are when other inhabitants of the Earth are concerned. Spoiler alert: they all die in pretty awful ways.
SADYE: What have been the most rewarding and challenging parts of your writing career?
BILL: The most challenging part has been getting off my behind, so to speak, and making things happen. I’ve been a writer as long as I can remember, but I only recently formalized the process.
The practical reason why is that self-publishing has become incredibly accessible to small authors like me. While I would love nothing more than to be brought into a publishing house, the tools and third-party services related to publishing are readily available.
The more esoteric answer? Over the last few years, I called out to the muses and they answered back. During and after the pandemic, I haven’t really been able to “turn things off” when it comes to writing. Most of it needs heavy edits, but I finally like I’m in a place where I can express myself and be comfortable with sharing my ideas.
Rewarding? Finally getting things done! I have piles of ideas, notes, journals, and other products that I’m hoping to publish over the next few years. I have a prequel and sequel planned for Extinction Event, and in between working on those projects, I will publish a book that I finished in 2007, but didn’t have the tools or motivation to get it to market.
The title of the book has been altered to ‘888‘. Without giving too much away, it’s about the early days of ‘gigging’ in the post-911 era but the contracts that the main character – known only as Mr. Kite – takes on relate to corporate espionage. He does a shitty job of it and gets himself into trouble a few times, but he’s very slippery and avoids creating any kind of papertrail for himself. Eventually, he gets a job that will change his life and quite possibly alter the economic and political profile of the entire planet, as his target company is one of the most powerful on the planet. I’ll have more to say about 888 as soon as the final revisions and draft are complete.
SADYE: What period of history would you most like to travel back to / what historical figure would you most like to meet, and why?
BILL: I’m a music fan, so I tend to think in terms of moments in time when certain “scenes” were evolving.
Some examples of what automatically come to mind: seeing Sister Rosetta Tharpe in England in the 1960s when very few people were wailing on the guitar; catching the Beatles at the KaiserKeller in Hamburg; being a fly on the wall during Woodstock or the Harlem Cultural Festival; going to some of the earlier gatherings for Coachella, Burning Man, or Glastonbury; being in Manchester, England during the late 1980s and early 1990s as the “Madchester” music scene hit its stride.
Of course, I’d love to meet with any one of the Beatles and talk with them about music, writing and what inspired them.
I’ve been a longtime admirer of the encyclopedic knowledge of Joseph Campbell. I would love to have met him at any point in his life to talk about mythology, psychology, history, religion and the human condition.
Without thinking too hard about other people, I’d want to meet Nikola Tesla and tell him that everything he did with electricity affected everyone on the planet while he was alive and after he died.
Finally, another person that comes to mind: my grandfather Alphonse Wittur when he was a young man in Poland. In the late 1920s, the racism and political environment was just beginning to take root and he fought against it for a time, but eventually fled to Canada for a better life. I’d love to know more about the backstory on life in Eastern Europe shortly after World War I and what drove him here. Of course, part of that exploration would be to gain a better understanding of my family’s history. It’s a German/Polish name, but the lineage doesn’t go that deep so I feel like there’s a mystery to be solved.
SADYE: What message or theme would you like readers to take away from your work?
BILL: We’re running out of time. Many of my characters take on the persona of Cassandra, the mythological priestess that is doomed to make predictions that no one cares about.
Planet Earth will continue to drastically change as a result of human intervention and it’s only human intervention that will steer us away from complete destruction.
Climate fiction is a relatively new category, but it should only exist as a warning and less as a reflection of reality.
SADYE: What experience in your past or general aspect of your life has most affected your writing?
BILL: Travel. I believe that when you travel, the locations you visit, the people you meet, and the institutions that you pay homage to become part of your DNA. The memories of the smells, sounds and tastes all become part of who you are and they make the world so much more fascinating, but also bring you so much more close to our fellow humans.
Voice. I won’t go into great detail, but I have a lot of issues with my vocal cords. I wanted to sing and record music – and I might get something done in between writing – but the process didn’t yield the results that I wanted. As my outward voice became more subdued, my inner voice blossomed. Honestly, it was a little like the adage about someone’s senses becoming more heightened in the face of adversity. Once I accepted what I could only describe as my fate with respect to creative output, I leaned into it and have thoroughly enjoyed getting into a regular and productive routine with writing.