Chris Panatier lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife, daughter, and a fluctuating herd of animals resembling dogs (one is almost certainly a goat). He writes short stories and novels, “plays” the drums, and draws album covers for metal bands. The Phlebotomist is his debut novel. You can find Chris on Twitter and Instagram, along with at his website.
There is probably nothing more intimidating for a writer who has come to the craft later in life than reading the myriad interviews of other writers. More often than not, they repeat variations on the same tale. Avid childhood readers who began writing early, and who knew even back then that they wanted to be writers.
I was not one of these children. Even though my mother read to me night after night for years, I pushed back on reading when it meant I had to do the work. My aversion to the task was so great, that over the course of grade school I delivered more than one made-up book report while my teachers, unpersuaded, looked on.
Throughout school, I didn’t develop strong reading habits. I was more interested in doing bike jumps, hunting the “Satanists” using the field down at the end of the street for human sacrifice (no evidence of this!), and planning to eventually join the Air Force (I didn’t). A small step came during college, when I managed to actually do the assigned reading and produce essays that were genuinely based on the books. But outside of required reading, I might add two books a year on my own. To me, that was a lot.
Starting in my late twenties I experienced an unintentional evolution. I became an avid reader, but primarily of nonfiction. Favorite subjects were astronomy, basic theoretical astrophysics (what of it I could understand), histories of the American West (Blood and Thunder by Hampton Sides and The Heart of Everything That Is by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin are favorites), and anything by Jon Krakauer or Sebastian Junger.
I had no interest in becoming a writer until I read The Science of Interstellar by astrophysicist Kip Thorne after watching the 2014 movie Interstellar. The movie was great, but the book knocked something loose in my brain that triggered a creative drive to write that I’d never felt before. The urge to create had never been a foreign sensation – I’ve been a visual artist for years, doing art nouveau style album covers for metal bands. But after having read Thorne’s book, I was inspired by the wonder of the universe, and I wanted to write about it; to create my own story using all that I had learned. I was thirty-eight.
I quickly conjured a plot and sat down to write a young-adult space opera (turns out, it was neither young-adult nor space opera). One thing I had a basic handle on was how a story should progress. By no means was this skill refined, but movies, television, and video games had given me a basic *feel* for whether or not things were working. Continued reading, of course, honed that internal gauge.
But when it came to the rudiments of writing, I was starting at the bottom – below the bottom. I had to google how dialogue tags worked, because I’d forgotten. Where does the comma go? How do you intersperse dialogue within a paragraph along with action? It was all very tortuous.
The lessons came with brutal speed. Overused adverbs, synonyms piled atop one another for fear of using the same word twice, details for the sake of details. But the biggest hole in my repertoire was not in technical proficiency, it was that I simply hadn’t done enough reading. Of all the axioms you are told as a fledgling writer, from “show don’t tell” to “kill your adverbs”, the one that holds absolutely true in all cases, is that you must be a reader.
And so, I dove in, reading classics from Madeline L’Engle to soon-to-be classics like the Binti trilogy by Nnedi Okorafor. Some people might use “best-of” lists or seek out canonical works. I picked up most of my reading from what I saw people talking about on Twitter and branched out from there. It made for a diverse, if not scattered, reading experience. I finished a new book every week or so, while also devouring hundreds of short stories and manuscript drafts written by my growing cadre of aspiring writer friends. It was quite a lot like waking up for me. Walking through a door that had only before been cracked and was now blown open.
Thankfully, being a professional artist had prepared me for the journey. I knew that it would take a lot of time and a lot of work, and I was fortunate that I did not expect instant success – unlike Robert Walton in letters to his sister in Shelley’s Frankenstein, which so happens I am reading right now:
…I perused, for the first time, those poets whose effusions entranced my soul, and lifted it to heaven. I also became a poet, and for one year lived in a Paradise of my own creation; I imagined that I also might obtain a niche in the temple where the names of Homer and Shakespeare are consecrated. You are well acquainted with my failure, and how heavily I bore the disappointment.
This cracks me up because I understand. I totally engaged in flights of fancy on my novel’s future fame, though my delusion never quite reached Walton’s level.
After ten months of writing for hours every day, I had a first draft. During that time, I read book after book in an effort to get back some of those lost years. And while I regret that a passion for reading fiction did not find me earlier, I count myself lucky that it found me at all.
I can look back and identify points when I became ready for the next thing, where beforehand I wasn’t. Fatherhood was like that for me. My daughter was born a few months before I saw Interstellar. And I knew I was mature enough by that point to be a good dad. In the same respect, I’m not sure that had I tried to write in my twenties or early thirties, I would have had the patience to put in the necessary work. Today, I am a more avid reader than I have ever been, and I see the difference it has made in my writing.
By the way, that first manuscript was extensively queried and finally shelved. It was only after a second, almost-finished novel and a pile of partials, that I had the idea for The Phlebotomist, which found a home at Angry Robot Books. And while my writing has come a long way, I still haven’t caught any Satanists.
