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This article is a part of a series of blog entries, which I refer to as “Authors Talk”. You can think of it as an author interview and, indeed, that is the name of the blog category. However, I prefer to see it as a friendly chat between fellow authors. Today I’m having this virtual chat with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland, authors of Stories from the Nation of Wisland.

Or, to be more precise, I’m having a chat with them having a chat; an interview of them interviewing each other; a meta-interview. I don’t know what to call it, things are never simple with Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland. Of course, this is what makes Stories from the Nation of Wisland such a remarkable text to begin with.

You can find a detailed list of useful links to their work at the end of this article.

A Discussion with Bryce Paradis and
Evan Coupland: General

Chris Angelis: Bryce, let’s first hear a couple of words about you as an author. Give us some background information. What kind of books do you write, for how long have you been a writer, and anything else you think readers would find interesting.

Bryce Paradis: I took my first crack at writing a novel when I was seventeen (I’m now thirty-four). I was creative, introverted, and an avid reader, and so I thought writing would be a great outlet
for me, possibly even a great career path. I cooked up a story that I felt passionately about, wrote a few chapters, and smashed into a wall where I felt deeply unsatisfied with the quality of my work. I found myself unable to progress, and after a couple years of torture, I gave up.

At about this time, I quit my day job to support myself by playing online poker (this was a thing young people actually did in the early 2000s), and I acquired a superabundance of personal time. The idea of writing crept up on me again, and I started to read several hours a day, working through stacks of non-fiction on the subjects I was interested in (primarily psychology, philosophy, and religion), as well as some great novels that helped me understand what it was I wanted to see in my own work.

I reached out to my friend Evan about coauthoring, with the hope that working alongside another human would keep the experience less lonely and more sane, and he accepted. We sketched out the details of Wisland, and six years later we completed it to our satisfaction. I am currently well into a rewrite of my second novel, which is yet another over-ambitious clustercuss.

The Process of Writing

Chris: What does writing mean to you on a personal level? Authors often say “I hate writing, and I hate not writing. I only like having written.” Does this apply to you, what’s your attitude toward the process itself?

Bryce: This past year, I came to the realization that I have a fundamental need to create new things, and this has been a key driver behind many of my life choices. Whether I’m sinking hours into a video game character, writing a story, learning a new sport, or decorating a house, I feel satisfied when I have time to explore my ideas and invest in them and deeply unhappy when I don’t.

My ability to write has mostly caught up with my imagination and so I’m generally happy to do it. My biggest peeve is feeling too tired or drained to be able to write the way I want to write when I have the time.

A Discussion with Bryce Paradis and
Evan Coupland: Stories from the Nation of Wisland

Chris: In my review of Wisland, I mentioned that people ought to read the novel for the narrative style alone. I found it authentic, original, and intelligent. In particular, your use of poetry fascinated me, perhaps because this is something I have been experimenting with in my own work as well.

To put it in plain terms, the narrative style of Wisland is simply beautiful. What was your thought process behind going for this somewhat unorthodox style, particularly in terms of audience reception? Did you at any point worry it would become too “peculiar” for readers?

Bryce: Our original intent was to build a unique narrative voice for each character, but that never materialized. Instead, I feel like we created a single narrator with a diversity of tone that was deployed consistently across all characters.

The occasional hints of glibness and eye-rolling sarcasm that bubble up whenever the characters are being overly serious are consistent with the attitudes of Alexander Wall, and this always made me feel like it was Alexander who was watching and retelling this story.

Narratively Playing with Fire

As for the more outlandish ‘flourishes’ (we have a chapter written in rhyme and another written as a theatrical script), these emerged spontaneously. While working on a chapter where politicians were having disingenuous, overblown arguments in their house of parliament, we really wanted to push the parallels to a stage production.

At one point, Evan said, “Why don’t we just write the whole thing as a script?” and we gave it a whirl. We were happy with the result, but also aware that we were playing with fire; for some people, these hard breaks from convention create doubt and discomfort.

Chris: The themes of Wisland themselves are timeless and intrinsically allude to the human condition. Truth versus deception, ethics versus practicality, personal gain versus the greater good. Above all, perhaps, dogma versus reason.

When you began working on Wisland, did you set out to write an allegory of such (also current) problems, or did you discover along the way that they are, after all, indeed timeless and common between our times and the separate world of the novel?

Philosophy and Psychology

Bryce: Wisland is definitely a book where we worked backwards from the ideas that we wanted to place in combat when we designed our characters and sketched out our plot. The main instigator was the question of value being objective (dogmatic) versus subjective (humanist) and the psychology of either position.

I audited a number of philosophy classes when I was younger and was always frustrated by the cognitive dissonance on display in the writings of moral and epistemological philosophers, and was generally delighted when they were thrashed by skeptics and absurdists.

Chris: You’ve co-authored the novel with Evan Coupland. What kind of challenges exist when more than one author participates in composing a narrative?

Bryce: By and large, Evan and I have very complimentary skill sets and had harmonious experience working together on Wisland. You were probably expecting some reflections on compromise and conflict resolution, but I don’t really have any of that to offer, so I’m going to hijack this section to do a meta-interview with Evan instead.

A Meta-Interview with Evan Coupland

The thing that stands out to me when I think about working on Wisland is that I would always try and write my way around problems, whereas you were much quicker to find structural solutions. Were there any other areas where you felt like we had synergistic skills?

Evan Coupland: That’s definitely the biggest difference in our approach. Your bursts of writing allowed me to see what was working rather than being critical of what wasn’t. My skeletonized chapters allowed you to fill in the gaps more cleverly than I could.

Style-wise, completely distilled you might be Twain and myself McCarthy (note: not a claim of skill; Americana purely coincidental). There was never really a point where we were writing over top of one another or choosing hills to die on.

Poetry and Prose

Bryce: We have a few songs in this book. These are always tricky, because unless you have a very simple and consistent rhyme scheme, it’s almost impossible for the reader to interpret the flow. Some people don’t mind these, but I know others really hate them. What are your thoughts on deploying songs in novels?

Evan: ​The first time I read The Lord of the Rings when I was 12 or something, I skipped all the songs. I think lots of people probably did. I just wanted to know what was going to happen next, and I can tell you that nothing happens when songs are a’singing.

It wasn’t until much later that I saw how those songs control tone, pace, and play an absolutely vital role in describing a culture. Songs are difficult and intrusive if done poorly. The upside of a well written (and well placed) song can be a very immersive experience.

The Learning Curve of Co-Authoring

Bryce: What was our biggest bungle on this project? I feel like a few of the longer chapters (“The Revelry”, “Unstitched”) took a disproportionate amount of time and energy to write, but I’m not sure if this could have been avoided.

Evan: Maybe not a bungle, but there was definitely a big learning curve as to how we were actually going to go about the process of co-authoring. Neither of us had worked on anything like this before. It took time to figure out our best roles, which greatly evolved over time.

And we had to learn to write both together and apart, if that makes sense. That and once we had finished we had no idea what to do with the novel… So do I just phone up Netflix and they’ll option this?

A Discussion with Bryce Paradis and
Evan Coupland: Writer’s Life

Chris: I often tell my blog readers that they should write for themselves. That is, that they shouldn’t try to please others. It’s of course a balance. Still, do you think there’s too much literature out there that follows a certain pattern, designed to please everyone and offend no one?

Bryce: I agree wholeheartedly, although I think this can be expressed in a variety of ways. Some people enjoy mastering the technical aspects of writing, whereas others write primarily to explore their consciousness.

I lean heavily towards the second category, but the part of my brain that enjoys games can empathize with an author who enjoys mastering the skills needed to bang out a serialized novel with a good hook every twelve months.

For myself, the relationship with the reader is central to the experience, and so I make it a rule to always aim to engage the reader, but others may find writing to be a more introspective exercise where the reader is a secondary consideration.

Chris: In our email exchange we talked a bit about audiences. Particularly, how a novel (especially one that is unique, perhaps) finds its readers. Do you feel upset when you see mediocre works receiving a lot of attention whereas high-quality ones do not? 

Audience Reception

Bryce: I don’t perceive art as being great, mediocre, or bad, but rather a ladder of concepts that people climb. Much of what is considered ‘great art’ is work that pushed back technical boundaries and/or the limits of our cultural consciousness.

If you’re a writer who actively seeks out challenges, you’ll naturally arrive at these spaces as a sort of ‘end game’. If you’re exposed to extreme adversity and end up vying with the nature of consciousness involuntarily, you may feel compelled to write about that experience.

Most people, however, do not feel compelled to strain the limits of consciousness, and so they engage with the world at the level of day-to-day challenges.

This is fine. I do, however, draw a distinction between art, which reaches beyond the sphere of identity to touch on universal experiences, and entertainment, which aims to excite and build up the identity by reinforcing the familiar, and I feel many people spend too much time engaging with the latter. Cocooning oneself in an identity is easier in the short term, but I think it usually leads to disaster in the long term.

The Future of Literature and Reading

Chris: Overall, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of literature and reading? Are literature and knowledge under-appreciated in this era of instagratification?

Bryce: When it comes to action-oriented stories, movies and TV are generally superior mediums to live theater and novels (exorbitant production costs withstanding). Novels, however, are far from defunct, as they excel at exploring psychology.

A novelisation of Infinity War that focused on the external events would just be a cheap version of the movie, but a novelisation focusing on Thanos’ personal experiences could have great merit.

Novels do feel somewhat culturally dormant right now, as many are just cheap movies, but I think there’s plenty of room to go toe to toe with the values that underpin our culture(s) and show people exciting things that they didn’t know they needed to know.

Bryce Paradis and Evan Coupland: Important Links

You can see more details about the authors and their work visiting the links below.

Bryce Paradis: Goodreads Author Page
Stories from the Nation of Wisland on Goodreads
Stories from the Nation of Wisland on Amazon

Interested in other author interviews? Check out my author talk with Scott Peters. Or, if you want to know more about me, see my answers to some of your questions!