This article originally appeared on latterdayauthors.com, May 1, 2004.

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBISON WELLS

By C.S. Bezas

Robison Wells is not your ordinary accountant – he is funny. (Oops, my past experience with accountants is showing through!) As proof, I invite you to read his new novel, On Second Thought, available at your local LDS bookstore or online. Not only is it funny, it is well-written. On Second Thought, although newly released, has already reached the LDSBA and Seagull's Top Ten Bestseller List.

On Second Thought may be Robison Wells’ first novel, but it is definitely not his last! His next work, the first book in the three-volume New Order Series, will be released Spring of 2005. Recently he joined the latterdayauthors.com forum. Utilizing at times terrific wit and timing, he acts as a thought-provoking and sound voice. He recently shared with me insights into his creative choices. I asked him some fairly serious questions and he responded with important pieces of advice. I hope you enjoy the following few moments together with this insightful author.

C.S.: Please share with us a little about you, your family, and your writing background.

ROB: Where to begin... I’m Robison Earl Wells, named after one of my great-great-grandfather’s wives (he had six), Eliza Robison. I have lived in the Salt Lake valley my entire life, with the exception of my mission, which I served just down the street in New Mexico. Currently I live in Holladay, Utah, with my lovely wife Erin and my insane, possibly rabid two-year-old daughter, Holly.

My day job is working for Weyerhaeuser. I handle accounts receivable for the local building materials service center. I graduated from the University of Utah last year with a degree in Political Science: International Relations and a minor in History.

My writing background is fairly limited. I wrote briefly for the University of Utah’s Daily Utah Chronicle as the theater critic, although I got the job purely because of my knowledge of theater, rather than my skill at writing. I’ve also written on and off for an internet gaming magazine, The Official Timewaster’s Guide (www.timewastersguide.com). One of my articles for them was later published in the science fiction periodical The Leading Edge.

C.S.: So when did you first recognize you wanted/needed to write something longer than articles?

ROB: Good question. I read bios of authors all the time that say “I was writing stories at three years old, and fell in love with the English language” or “from the time I could hold a pencil, I knew that I was pre-destined to become an author.”

Not me.

I used to like writing a lot, back in elementary school, and had a good time working on little creative writing assignments. But I think that the love of English was pretty severely beaten out of me in high school. After my mission, I was planning on becoming an architect (and later I was planning on becoming a anthropologist, and later a history professor, and later a CIA analyst...).

Writing was the furthest thing from my mind. Fortunately, due to the prodding of my brother (who was working at the time on an English/Editing degree at BYU) I started writing. I did it more as a whim, never intending to get anything published. After I pounded out a few rough chapters of a book, he invited me to join his writing group. I attended for about a year, working through my first novel, a strange hybrid of World War Two and High Fantasy. The writing group gave me invaluable advice – specifically they told me that I really ought to learn how to write.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long to take their recommendations to heart – On Second Thought was the very next writing project I undertook, and it was, miraculously, published.

C.S.: I know many readers are glad it was. What has your wife thought about your new life as a novelist? How do you balance the demands of family, church callings, work, and writing?

ROB: My wife has been wonderfully supportive. At my current job, I work a lot of overtime, after which I come home and cloister myself in my office and write. Erin never complains and always offers me helpful advice. She reads my drafts and tells me when I’m getting boring (both in my writing and in my real life).

My daughter has found that the best way to get my attention is to come into my office and take everything off of the bookshelves.

Really, though, the best way to find time to get everything done and still see my family is to make a schedule and stick to it. We always have family home evening without fail, even though my daughter has the attention span of a caffeinated chipmunk. We always try to eat dinner together. Once a week, every week, my wife and I go on a date.

C.S.: Hmm. Words worth listening to. Your first book, On Second Thought, can be explained simply as a romantic comedy. But share with us a little more – a few yummy details, if you don't mind. How did it get its start?

ROB: At my writing group, even though I was getting better technically, I was hitting a brick wall in all other ways. The rest of the group was writing fantasy (so was I, sort of), but it was a genre I was largely unfamiliar with. I couldn’t offer a lot of good advice, simply because I didn’t read a lot of fantasy, and a lot of their recommendations for me were useless because they were genre-specific: the rules of fantasy writing.

So I stopped going to the group, and determined to follow the old adage “write what you know.” I decided to base my next project on my mission experiences.

My initial idea was simple: a fish-out-of-water story about a guy who is forced to adapt to the oddities of small town New Mexico. I chose to write about Grants, an area I served in for a little over a year (I think the mission president forgot about me).

I don’t know how many readers here know their Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood trivia, but Mr. Rogers used to perform a lot of short operettas in The Land of Make-Believe. In his best, a show which should have won an Emmy, the Land of Make-Believe performed “Windstorm in Bubbleland.” It was performed as an edict from King Friday: he wanted to see an opera about sweaters, bubbles, a porpoise, and a hummingbird. When he told his subjects, one of them volunteered: “Well, I can be sailor on a banana boat!”

It was this kind of random collection of ideas that got my plot together for On Second Thought. I decided, since I was basing the story on Grants, that I wanted the following: an observatory, lost Spanish gold, and a tomato greenhouse. Eight months later, I had a completed manuscript.

C.S.: Okay, you’ve got our readers’ creative juices flowing! As you mentioned above, you served your mission in the New Mexico area. How much did that influence or help the book's setting?

ROB: Immensely. The book is based on a town I lived in. The name of the town has been changed, because I took just a little too much artistic license to feel good about still calling it Grants (for example, in the book, the town is hours away from anything green, whereas, in real life, Grants is on the border between desert and forest). A lot of characters are based on real people, and a lot of the events are based on real events.

For those of you unfortunate souls who have never had the pleasure of visiting scenic New Mexico, what are you waiting for? It is a country unto itself–entirely different from anywhere else in America. Santa Fe is the second oldest city (Anglo-European city, that is) in the United States, established nearly five hundred years ago. The Sky City pueblo on the Acoma reservation claims to be the oldest continuously inhabited dwellings in North America (originally built sometime in the eleventh century). The Navajo tribe has the highest population of any Native American tribe in the country. It’s truly a different world. It’s no coincidence that the state is filled with writers, poets, and artists–the combination of culture, scenery and history is just begging to be captured on paper.

C.S.: I would quite agree. New Mexico is amazing. Is there an underlying message to the story or is it a "feel good" story, meant entirely to bring upbeat moments to the reader?

ROB: Originally, there was no moral to the story. Of course, there was a somewhat moralistic character arc, where the main character grows to love the town, not only in spite of its quirks but because of them. But there was no “and the moral of the story is: always read your scriptures.”

When I got the revision suggestions back from my editor, Angela Colvin, she told me that I did in fact need a moral. Nothing preachy, but at least some lesson learned. Her exact words were that “the book should edify as well as entertain.”

I wasn’t too pleased, but that was mainly because I thought my manuscript was perfection incarnate. After the editing/haggling process, we ended up with a moral that I think is amazingly good–there actually was a running joke throughout the book that we were able to tie in at the end. I take no credit for it, however–it was Angela’s genius.

And no, I’m not going to tell you what it is. You’ll have to read the book.

C.S.: When did you first hit your stride in this genre? In other words, how did you find your "voice" as an author? Comedy can be a tough genre and you’ve done extremely well.

ROB: Oddly enough, I found my “voice” for comedy in the most banal and dreary of places. To get through school, I worked for a local hospital in the communications department. I had enough authority that I was invited to meetings, although I was low enough on the totem pole that I was told to take minutes. I soon found out that it’s a pretty tedious job–writing down the various participant’s ideas about lunch breaks and privacy policies. Riveting stuff.

So I started to make jokes about it in the minutes. In actuality, I started to make fun of just about everything that was said, and everyone who said it. And amazingly, I wasn’t fired. Instead, I was told to expand the minutes into a monthly newsletter that would be distributed to every employee. (In the first newsletter, I actually declared that I was the propaganda minister of the communications department–specifically, I compared myself to Goebels, and the Department Director to Hitler–and I still wasn’t fired. Go figure.) We found that the depressing policies that get handed down from management to employees seemed to be accepted much more readily when humor was woven into them.

I wrote that newsletter for over two years. When I quit, they tried to get me to stay on the payroll just so I could go to meetings once a month and make fun of everything.

C.S.: What is your creative process when you sit down to write? Do you outline or do you give the characters the "steering wheel" and just hang on for the ride?

ROB: As I mentioned earlier, I use the Windstorm in Bubbleland method of writing. I have certain scenes in my head—events, conversations, etc—and then I begin to find ways to string them together. In On Second Thought, it was observatories, lost Spanish gold, and a greenhouse. In my next book, Awake, it’s messy mission apartments, a statistics class, and the concept of using scrapbook supply stores as a front for a counterfeiting ring.

This method, though odd, has been used by a lot of famous writers. Alfred Hitchcock was a big proponent of the Bubbleland school of thought (although he probably called it by a different name). His movie North by Northwest was based entirely on the idea that it would be really cool to have a chase scene on Mount Rushmore. The rest of the plot was devised solely for the purpose of allowing that scene.

Once I know the key events and ideas, I build the plot around it. I always try using outlines, and I rarely get them to work. Generally, I find that I’m far more creative when I let the characters go where they want to go, with only a few restrictions here and there.

C.S.: Great advice. Did you share your manuscript with anyone before pitching it to a publisher? "Workshop" it with any groups?

ROB: I was in my brother’s writing group, affectionately known as “The Dragons” (for reasons I’m unaware), for about a year. Eventually I left because I just wasn’t really in the same groove that they were. They wrote fantasy, and my genre was changing rapidly. Since many of their suggestions for my first book were extremely genre-specific, I decided to move along.

Shortly thereafter, I formed another small writing group, consisting of only myself and two other authors. They weren’t writing LDS stuff or comedy, but they were a little more in line with what I was doing.

The biggest help for On Second Thought, however, was my brother Dan. Even though I was no longer in the writing group, I still trusted his opinion. It was his evaluation and suggestions, in my opinion, that allowed me to get the book published.

C.S.: How did you select your publisher?

ROB: Quite honestly, very little thought was put into choosing a publisher. I knew nothing about the market, and didn’t know any authors that could steer me in the right direction. The deciding factor was, simply: Robert Farrell Smith.

I knew him fairly well from my mission (he used to own the LDS bookstore in Albuquerque), and I read all his books. Knowing that On Second Thought was quite similar in genre to Smith’s Baptists at our Barbeque (published by Deseret Book), and imagining that Deseret Book wouldn’t necessarily want or need another author of the same genre, I chose Covenant. Miraculously, I never had to undergo the torture of a rejection letter—they accepted it first try.

Let me say one thing here, in all seriousness. There seems to be an odd little rift in the LDS writing community when it comes to Covenant. It appears, from my limited experience, that the rest of the LDS publishing world is one big happy family, but that Covenant is an evil outsider. I heard these rumors long before I’d even considered writing in the LDS market.

But here’s the truth: I love Covenant. They have treated me incredibly well. My editor Angela Colvin is fantastic, and the rest of the staff has been helpful and friendly. I have NEVER felt ill used, never regretted my choice, and would never have any trouble recommending them to anyone.

C.S.: Thank you for that insight. It is valuable information for our readers. Now, how did writing the second book compare with the first? ROB: It was easier in some ways, and harder in others. I feel that Awake is far superior technically, and I hope that every book gets better than the last. The characters feel more rounded, and the plotting is more solid. I got a little more creative writing-wise, making the plot a little less linear (through the use of extended flashbacks), so I feel that stylistically it’s a better work.

It was difficult, however, because I had set some pretty serious deadlines for myself. Now that I knew I could get published, I didn’t want to wait around very long before I put out another book. (The deadlines weren’t too tough, though—in the year after On Second Thought was submitted, I actually wrote two and a half books. I did feel a lot more stress to get things right, though.)

C.S.: Anything bubbling in that brilliant mind of yours you care to share with us? Your first book of a new series is due out some time next year. The other two will follow. What are your plans after that?

ROB: Who knows? The New Order Series will keep me plenty busy for the time being. I also, as alluded to a moment ago, have another manuscript that’s just sitting on the shelf waiting for some serious revision. I wrote it in between On Second Thought and Awake. It’s titled Turquoise House, and it’s a cross between a murder mystery and Survivor. I chose not to send it into the publisher yet, simply because it is such a big departure from my first book. (Turquoise House, while still LDS fiction, has a very serious, gritty overtone.) Once I get a little more established, and I feel more comfortable stepping out of the comedy genre, I’ll focus back on that book.

C.S.: Your words have been most helpful and we’ve appreciated the time you’ve taken to talk with us. Any final thoughts to help those who may be feeling discouraged with their writing talent?

ROB: Simply put, don’t be discouraged by your writing talent. I had no real talent, I just wanted it really badly and put in a lot of effort.

Write, write, and then write some more. It’s not hard, but it does take a lot of time and practice.

Write!

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I’d like to thank Robison Wells once again for speaking with us. To read a sample chapter, go to Robison's website. On Second Thought can be purchased at most LDS bookstores, including Seagull Book and Tape. We wish him the very best!

© 2004 C. S. Bezas. Used with permission.