These Books Are My Treasures: An Exclusive Guest Post from Josiah Bancroft, Author of The Hexologists

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Early readers are already raving about your worldbuilding. How did you go about dreaming up this world, and what were some of the biggest challenges in creating it?

I did something rather unusual — at least for me — with this project. I began at the beginning. By that I mean, I commenced my exploration of this world with the creation of a planet. From there, I went on to describe the intervention of gods, the emergence of humanity, the eruption of magic, the coalescence of societies and the eventual dawn of the industrial age. It was all very lighthearted and silly and aimless. But that tends to be when I’m at my most inventive: when I’m playing. It was essentially a writing exercise undertaken for my own amusement.

And the project might’ve ended there (as many do), had it not been for the appearance of Isolde Wilby whose presence in my notes had a marshalling effect on what had begun as a joke. She sobered the tone of my invention, imposed some order upon my larking, and introduced that most vital element of any imagined world: a point of view. The greatest challenge, then, was jurying all the material I had produced. Behind each good idea lurked ten bad ones, and as the besotted originator, it took concerted effort to sort the gems from the junk. 

You’ve had your hand in many creative endeavors such as rock musician, aspiring comic book artist — and now author. What drew you to focus on writing prose, and when did you know you wanted to write fantasy full-time?

For me, music and art were primarily collaborative; they were opportunities to socialize. I never wanted to strum an acoustic guitar on a stool by myself at the local open mic. I wanted to damage my hearing with friends in a practice studio with spongy floors and party lights. The majority of my comic book efforts were undertaken with a partner. We’d work elbow-to-elbow drawing panels and lettering word balloons for days on end. It was chummy, often jubilant work. I was never particularly fussed by our failure to find a publisher, nor was I bothered that the band never produced a hit. I always preferred our intimate practice sessions over our public performances. The shared experience was the reward.

Writing for me has always been a different sort of pursuit, one that is obsessive and uncompromising. When one of the band members wanted to change a fill or insert a solo, I was all for it. But it takes every ounce of maturity I possess not to go to war over the slightest bit of (generally useful and reasonable) editorial feedback. I’m a jealous scribbler, and though I am intimately acquainted with the quirks of my voice and the shortcomings of my storytelling, they are entirely my own. I’ve never been particularly interested in accruing wealth or stuff. Instead, I collect experiences; I amass stories. These books are my treasures. Quite simply, I love making things up. Writing fantasy novels is socially sanctioned lying with chapter breaks. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably be appearing in court.

This is your first book since The Books of Babel series. How did it feel to start something completely new and step away from a world and characters you have spent so much time with?

New beginnings are always exciting. I spent nearly a decade working on The Books of Babel, and while I was extraordinarily fond of those characters, the fact that they were so fleshed out in my head was also constraining. There were some things that they simply could not do without breaking character. I loved the world of the Tower and the crew of the Stone Cloud, but I was also left with a strong desire to write about relationships that were generally less dysfunctional. I wanted to explore a healthy, loving partnership — one distinguished by open communication, unambiguous affection and genuine happiness. I felt I had to say farewell to Thomas Senlin to accomplish those things. The Hexologists is very much a honeymoon book, but I hope that, like Isolde and Warren Wilbies’ marriage, future entries in the series will embody a continuation of the joy that pervades this opening adventure.

What authors and/or stories have influenced and inspired you throughout your career?  

Thomas Hardy taught me painterly prose and that verisimilitude dwells in detail. Emily Dickinson taught me that poetry was pliant; it could flout convention and still resonate with an audience. E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf revealed the internal landscapes that are invisible to the eye but consequential to the world. Gabriel García Márquez educated me in the recursive properties of family and its entanglement with history. Vladimir Nabokov demonstrated the gravity of irony and the absurdity of institutions, and he exposed me to scads of beautiful words. And Italo Calvino proved to me that a curious mind did not also have to be dour.

Some of the novels that I consider to be perfect masterpieces are The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin, The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. I will never write anything half as great as any of those, but that won’t keep me from trying.

Could you talk about your writing and revising process and how you use notebooks throughout?

Like many writers, I primarily work on a laptop. As a thirteen-year-old kid, I wrote my first fantasy novel on a Radio Shack’s TRS-80 Model 100 computer. Word processors have always been my most essential writing tool. But I’m also aware of how they affect and sometimes short-circuit the writing process. Word processors accomplish, as if by magic, a sort of instantaneous publication. The lines and paragraphs of a still-warm draft look much as they might on the printed page. As a result, there looms a sense of finality in every word that is pecked out on the keyboard. And even as those freshly minted words evoke an unearned augustness, they are also perfectly supple. Whole paragraphs can be moved, swapped out and deleted at a stroke. Wording can be endlessly revised. I could spend hours just fiddling with typefaces and all the formatting foofaraw, which is entertaining enough, but not particularly productive. Word processors are brilliant vessels for catching bursts of inspiration, but they also supercharge my obsessiveness. I have squandered hours of my life tweaking lines in my word processor because I want the end of a line to fall in a particular spot — work that is not only obscure in its necessity but also pointless in the attempt, because those stultifying efforts will never be reflected in the published piece. It’s like attempting to arrange raindrops on a windowpane or birds in the garden.

So, I make frequent use of (mostly Moleskine) notebooks. Writing notes by hand results in a product that is both more deliberate and more playful. That might seem like a contradiction. But because I dislike crossing out words and am unreasonably proud of my penmanship, I write slowly. My typing speed is around 60 words a minute. My handwriting speed is perhaps half that. But since the medium is removed from any semblance of publication, I’m more likely to take risks with the content. I’ll push the characters, and experiment with dialogue, and try on outlandish scenarios. I recently handwrote a scene where Warren Wilby revisits his past as a professional wrestler, an absolute absurdity that I don’t think I could’ve ever written on my laptop. The whole handwritten process is much less prone to distraction, too. On the word processor, diversion and entertainment is always just a mouse click away. When I sit down with my notebooks, it’s effectively like putting on blinders. For a moment, the world shrinks down to the size of a pen-point that is skating along an open line into the enticing void of a promising blank.