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I write novels. It's hard to be definitive beyond that because there aren't many more consistent characteristics of my writing. I write for adults, teens, and children in any genre that strikes my fancy, though I mostly write fantasy and historical fiction. (I suspect my consistent devotion to fantasy in particular stems from the liberating inconsistencies it allows me as a storyteller.)

In that past I've written everything from academic essays and journalistic articles to short stories and commentaries on writing and literature. I've also worked as an academic editor as well as a professional technical writer and freelance editor. Now I'm completely devoted to my novels, where I write about Olympic penkrationists suffering marital trouble, and obsessive-compulsive robber barons committed to mental asylums at the turn of the twentieth century, and redneck fairies, and demonic angels patronizing towns in puritan America, and cows falling on dragons, stuff like that.

(For samples of Clint's writing, essays on writing and publishing, chapter annotations, blog, Clint's calendar, and a contact page, visit clintjohnsonwrites.com )

Thank you Clint for taking the time to answer a few questions for us! Please tell us about the latest project you've worked on.
 
Ever heard “Three times a bridesmaid never a bride?”  I recently finished a proposal package for a novel that answers that question, as well as explores the notion of marriage across a multicultural colonial American context—with the leader of the Biblical Nephilim thrown in.  Whatever you call that, that’s my latest project.
 
Do you also do speaking engagements, or seminars?
 
I frequently serve as a panelist at writers’ conferences and like to present a number of workshops I’ve developed whenever possible.  I enjoy speaking and teaching narrative even more than writing-specific topics, and do so often.  Also, as my debut novel is middle grade, I’m preparing for an ambitious schedule of elementary school touring starting in September.
 
Is there any aspect to your profession that gets you in touch with your readers directly?
 
Occasionally my students learn that I’m a published novelist.  While I don’t try to hide my life in publishing, I don’t seek to publicize it either.  Tutoring writing, even more than most subjects, depends on students being proactive and maintaining authority over their work.  Glitzing them with images of me as the proverbial legendary writer—complete with idiosyncratic compulsions and erratic behavior—isn’t exactly constructive. 

When I work with my students, I want them to consider me a friendly equal as much as a teacher, so I try to avoid anything that might intimidate.  As my publishing career continues, I may find it increasingly difficult to marginalize the focus on publishing when I teach, but that hasn’t been an issue at this point.
 
Who inspires you on a personal or business level?
 
My students.  As I work at an open enrollment college, I meet a wide variety of people, many of whom are remarkable.  Roughly half of my students are non-native English speakers, so I meet many people who are studying and working in drastically challenging conditions: building new lives in a new country, dealing with new culture and new language. 

They’re quite remarkable.  Many individuals stand out.  I’ve worked with Moroccan playwrights and Nepalese doctors, sixteen-year-old aspiring novelists and Chinese grandmothers who have been speaking English for less than a year, even a young North Korean conscripted as a bomb disposal soldier.  And working with my Sudanese students, survivors of twenty plus years of civil war and the tragedy in Darfur, never fails to inspire and humble me.     

What type of work is the most rewarding or satisfying for you?
 
Whenever my creative impulse takes me places I haven’t gone before.  I enjoy writing slipstream fiction, works that aren’t easy to categorize, but I feel still have substantial commercial potential.  Essentially, any themes or concepts that I want to communicate are only justifiable when delivered in a great story; giving people an experience they’ll enjoy is always paramount.  Striving to please readers without following all of the conventions they expect—that is a rewarding challenge.      
 
What can you recommend for writers who are just getting started and are trying to make a name for themselves?
 
1) Set goals. Any real goal means making a firm choice, which entails sacrificing other options. To know how to approach your writing career, you need to know what you most want and what that will mean giving up. If you want to publish profitably, you’ll have to compromise on your stories and write, to some degree, according to market demands. You won’t be able to write in certain genres or forms, or be too adventuresome or experimental in your composition. And you’ll have to do an awful lot of marketing and educating yourself into publishing. Finally, you’ll have to accept that fact that as a professional artist you’re competing with the best in your field, not so different from a professional musician or athlete. If you aren’t confident that you can work yourself into the truly elite, you may never reach your goal. If none of this dissuades you—and nothing else I or others could say will—then decide to publish and work until you do. If other things are more important, such as creative control or not sacrificing time and other aspects of life for your writing, then accept that you probably won’t publish to the degree you’d like, or at all. Whatever your choice, make it and accept it, good, bad, and all.
 
2) Read. Read inside and outside the genre you write. Read classics and current bestsellers and whatever catches your eye. Recognize what you like and don’t like, then try to figure out why. Learn to read like a writer. Evaluate a text as a performance, and try to understand why you applaud or pointedly do not. Read and don’t stop.
 
3) Write. Write what you want to publish and experiment in ways you’ll never seek to publish. Write fiction and non-fiction, short and long form, in every perspective and tense, with point of view characters of different genders. Write to the best of your ability, totally invested in the product, then be dissatisfied with what you end up with and revise it. Revise it until it gets good, then edit it. Then write something new.
 
4) Educate yourself into publishing. Research agents and publishers and how to communicate in their world. Learn the language they use, such as SASE and simultaneous submission, then become fluent in its use.
 
5) Submit. Start with the best agents and houses five at a time, if they allow simultaneous submissions, and move down your list. When you get form rejections, send out another round. When you get personalized rejections, use their information to refine your pitch. Keep sending. Enter contests and other opportunities, anything respectable to gain you some acclaim and legitimacy. (And keep writing. And keep reading.)
 
6) Network. Go to conferences, listen to what people say and mark who they are, then go home and record everything in a database. Join writers groups and attend them. Get to know people. Don’t bother professionals when you meet them, but do greet them, have them sign books, and tell them you enjoy their work (but only if you really do).
 
7) Always, always be professional. Publishing is a really small world with a lot of dreamers and aspirants who, quite frankly, aren’t serious enough to realize how competitive and laborious it is to make it in this industry. There is no diploma you can show others that verifies your credentials as a professional writer; there is no club card to open doors. The only things you have to distinguish you from the vast majority that will never make it and conduct themselves accordingly are your writing and your professionalism. Take the business seriously, as you would any other occupation. Respect those in the field whether or not you like them. Always behave in a way that makes you stand out as more serious, respectful, and professional than other aspiring writers. Finally, be nice. Genuine niceness will get you a long way.
 
How did you get started as a writer?
 
By accident, I suppose, would be the best way to characterize it. I was twenty-two when it happened, however it happened. Previous to that moment, I’d never felt the need, impulse, inclination, or even an itch to write. Growing up, I didn’t keep a journal or write letters or anything that involved putting ink on paper. I was a voracious reader of many genres—though I did keep mostly to fiction—but that appetite never translated into a desire to write.

It was only after nearly a decade of chronic insomnia, a condition that turned my entire teenage years and young adulthood into a desert of lethargy, isolation, and depression, that I first felt an inexplicable need to DO something. Reading was no longer enough; I needed to create something, anything that would challenge my mind to wake from the static torpor of sleep and social deprivation. Why I decided to write a story, I don’t know. Maybe because my reading had become my only real connection to the world and people in it, even if only through dramatic distillations of reality.

Whatever the reason, I challenged myself to write three hundred pages, all the while certain that was impossible. Roughly nine hundred pages later (280,000 words) I finished my first novel, which is also the first story I ever wrote. At some point around this time I realized I wanted to be an author, or perhaps needed is a more appropriate term. For the first few years my writing became the only relevant and material thing in my life. Now I can’t imagine not telling stories through words.
 
Which is your favorite book/work published? Is there a favorite?
 
I no more have a single favorite story of others than I do of my own.  The collective discussion on what it means to be human that is art is far too rich and has far too many wonderful voices.  I can tell you some of my favorites, though.  A Christmas Carol and A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens, the first because it literally determined the international concept of Christmas—without the crass commercialism—and the second because the redemption of Sydeny Carton never fails to give me hope. 

While I’m a huge fan of Shakespeare, I must admit that my favorite play is Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, because it’s clever, and quick, and fun, and heartbreaking, and because, like all men, in moments of rejection I like to believe I’m a little like Cyrano, even if it isn’t true.  Poetry—as defined by me as being metric or rhymed or both, but not neither—has never been my favorite, and I’m not entirely certain I get it, but I do enjoy W.H. Auden.  The Screwtape Letters never gets old, which is a trait of C.S. Lewis.  Louis Sachar’s Holes is one of the few books I can think of that I genuinely wish I’d written.  To wrap up —and this is far, far from comprehensive—you can add just about any work of two authors to my Wow-it’d-be-cool-if-I-could-do-that list:  Neil Gaiman and Haruki Murakami.
 
What does a typical work day look like for you?
 
Get up and write my 1,500 daily words; then do correspondence, handle my web site, do marketing legwork, edit other projects, and anything else that’s on my table until every last minute is gone; run for half an hour, jump in the shower, and jet to work; work with somewhere between six and ten students, sometimes more, all one-on-one; drive home and either run again or lift weights; finish all the work I didn’t get done in the morning, or at least as much of it as I can before night; eat dinner, my one and only meal of the day; sleep until I wake up and do it again.  I know it works because somehow I’m not dead.  
 
Who is your favorite writer/author?
 
I can’t give you one name that’s better than all others, but I can give you one name that no others surpass: Neil Gaiman.  I said earlier that just about all his work makes me envious.  In every book there are areas that I literally think, “I wish, I wish, I wish I had done that!”  I’m sure a few others out there are as good, but right now we have no better storyteller in the English language than Neil.  He’s worth going fanboy over.
 
Finally, a most important question: what was the last song you sang out loud when you were by yourself?  :)
 
Probably “C is for Cookie” from Sesame Street.  (I leave it up to you to decide if this was when I was five or just five days ago.)   

Thank you Clint for an inspiring interview! We wish you ongoing success with your novels!