We caught up with the brilliant and insightful C. S. FRIEDMAN a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi C. S. , appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
I have to credit my parents for that, among so many other positive traits. My mother in particular faced tremendous challenges due to heart damage she suffered as a child, but never let them stop her from doing what she wanted. Near the end of her life we took a trip to Hawaii together so that I could research volcanoes for my next book. I wrote about that trip in the dedication to This Alien Shore:
“…everywhere there were signs warning people away from various places if they had heart problems or respiratory distress. She had both, and at that point was dying of them. Still she ignored the signs. No mere heart disease was going to keep her from doing what she had come halfway across the world to do.”
She was an amazing woman in her strength, determination, and resiliency. I hope wherever her spirit is now, she’s proud of me.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
From my youngest days I had two competing interests. One was costume design, the other science fiction. In school I scribbled stories in the margins of my notebooks alongside clothing for past and future settings. In college I became involved in the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism) and began to spend my weekends in medieval and renaissance costume. It was my mom who suggested I pursue a career in costuming, and after getting an MFA in Costume Design I took a position as a designer for a major university, teaching classes and creating costumes for their many productions. Simultaneously I was writing stories set in fantastic worlds, strictly for my own pleasure. But one day I realized my work was good enough to get published, so I took a summer off to put together my first novel –In Conquest Born–and submit it to DAW Books, who published it in 1985.
Now I was a costume designing science fiction writer. But though two careers are great for the creative spirit, they made for a grueling schedule. So when I had several successful novels under my belt I quit costume design to write full-time. My most recent work is Nightborn, a standalone prequel to my bestselling Coldfire Trilogy. Thus far readers have loved it!
Recently I took up glasswork and opened a shop on Etsy (www.etsy.com/shop/glassfantasies) to sell hand-made jewelry. Somehow that evolved into my creating accessories for other people to display their creations, and now my shop is full of custom-made chains, keychains, and other items for bead artists. I also opened a shop to sell some of the vast collection of antique clothing I accumulated during my costuming years, Pastfantasies. It’s closed right now, but I hope to reopen it soon.
And recently I launched a shop on Redbubble.com that features merchandise from my books as well as fantasy art and historical costumes at www.redbubble.com/people/csfriedman/shop.) Both branches of my creative spirit keep growing!
People often ask, where did these two interests come from, seemingly unrelated but equally compelling? I used to have no answer for that. But after my mom died and we were going through her stuff, I found an early scrapbook of hers. And it was full of artwork clipped from magazines, featuring period costumes and medieval knights. In her youth she’d been as fascinated by the clothing of that period as I was. So maybe there is a “period costuming” gene that I inherited. 🙂
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
How about one really important one?
My dad taught me that no knowledge was ever wasted, and that advice has shaped my life. You never knew what the future would bring, he said, what skills you would need, or what opportunities might come your way. So I should pursue every interest, learn whatever appealed to me, and as long as I always had some way to support myself, not worry about whether that knowledge would be “useful” in the future.
In college I took a course in basket weaving just to see if he really meant it…
As a result of his advice I have spent my life accumulating knowledge, which fuels my insatiable hunger for artistic inspiration. Some time ago, for example, I came across an article describing underground fungal networks that connect trees in a forest, allowing them to share resources and even communicate. How alien-sounding is that? It became the model for the fae in my Coldfire Trilogy, whose nature I explored in my most recent work, NIghtborn.
You never know what skills you will need, or what information will matter in the future, so go where your heart leads you, drink in all the knowledge you can, and someday it may open doors for you that you didn’t even know existed.
Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
The influence of my father on my writing career cannot be overstated. Though he died right before my first book was published, the years that I spent growing up with him, being fed bits and pieces of writer’s wisdom, made me the writer I am today.
Dad starting writing technical articles in mid-life, and when his regular job was done, spent his evenings working on that while mom and I watched TV. Every now and then he would come out to read something triumphantly, so we could appreciate the quality of what he had just written. I recall one day he read a sentence that had a colon in it and said proudly, “that is a PERFECT use of a colon! Many writers avoid colons altogether, but look how beautifully it completes this sentence!” My love of words (and my pride in using colons correctly) definitely comes from him.
Writing was a craft, he told me: something you could study, practice, and learn to do well if you were properly committed. If you sat around waiting for inspiration, you would never earn a living at it. And all writing was the same. The principles of how to communicate effectively were the same for any genre, including technical writing. I believe that is all true.
There were so many small tidbits of the craft he taught me, that at the time I thought were things he had come up with himself. Years later I would discover Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (4th edition), and there they were in the style section! Don’t rely on adjectives. Don’t overwrite. Clarity of communication is the bedrock all good writing. I’m glad I didn’t know that at the time, so I could just imagine my father was the wisest writer who had ever lived.
I only wish he had lived long enough to see where his love of words led me.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.csfriedman.com
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/c.s.friedman
- Patreon: www.patreon.com/csfriedman
