Interview with Jason Pratt, author of Cry of Justice

About the Author:

Jason Pratt is a native of West Tennessee, and the systems manager for Dyer Fiberglass, Inc. He holds a bachelor of communications degree from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

When he isn't freelance editing other people's books or writing philosophical treatises as a respected guest on various Internet sites, he can be found pondering tactics and strategies in the lates war game or studying metaphysics and world history. Occasionally he finds the time to instruct, judge and compete in the art of fencing; and has been known to write cinematic epic fantasies when people aren't looking. Cry of Justice is the first book of an initial trilogy, the third book of which he is currently composing.

I was fortunate enough to be able to ask Jason some questions. Here is what he had to say:

Where are you from?

West Tennessee, for most of my life. (Very briefly upper Mississippi near Memphis after birth; several years in East Tennessee at UT Knoxville during college; back here working the family business after college.)

When and why did you begin writing?

My non-fiction writing I started after college, as an intellectual exercise; also because I like to have rationales for my beliefs (or else better beliefs with better rationales!) My fictional writing I started sporadically in 1998 and 99, but really got working on in 2000 and 2001 (when I wrote CoJ); because I've been creating a huge story in my head since I was 8 or 9 years old and it just seemed time to try to tell it. (I was helping a friend edit her own first novels at the time, Marie Brennan, whose fourth published novel will be released by Orbit this June, In Ashes Lie. Go read her books, plug, plug. {g} We kind of grew up as baby authors together.)

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

Oh, good question... hm... I had written two huge non-fiction books (around 1400 pages worth together) back in 98 and 99/00, but I did those for my own self-discipline and maybe for a few friends. I don't think I considered myself an author yet with them. Late in 2000 when I was trying to draft the first section of chapters for Cry of Justice (hereafter CoJ) and not succeeding very well, I didn't consider myself a writer yet. But when I sat down in April of 2001 and revised Section One and most of Section Two retyping them from scratch, and then went on to draft the rest of the book before the end of May... I'd have to say that was when I started seriously feeling like a writer. That concentrated level of creative composition for 206 thousand words... I don't know that I could do it today. (I later trimmed CoJ down to under 154 thousand, by the way. For an epic fantasy novel it isn't very large. Edge of Justice, EoJ, is shorter at around 136Kwords. Song of Justice, SoJ, looks like it might run 225K in its first draft, though. Grand finale to a trilogy, that's not unexpected.)

What inspired you to write your first book?

Ow. Lots of things... Some of which I wasn't very much conscious of at the time (but became very conscious of later. Which is why I said 'ow'. {wry g}) I had been working on a mega-huge story for years, since I was 8 or 9 (as noted earlier), and in a way CoJ was a solution for how to start pulling it all together and putting it on the page. Meaning almost none of the mega-huge story is in this first book! {lol!} Except for two things, one of which is that I wanted to try writing a story that looked at the medieval enchantress/paladin paradigm in a way that fused it with the Judeo-Christian marriage-relationship-to-God analogy. Which I didn't think (and still don't know) had ever been done before, despite the paradigm being so popular in the Middle Ages. (The other notion is a big plot secret, so I'm not talking about that right now.)

In the original paradigm, the enchantress is just a speed-bump or pitfall in the road of the heroic paladin. Interesting in its own way, and certainly a theme that had been used by the church after the composition of the canon, but not in the way I was thinking about. In modern (by which I mean late 20th century) revisions, the paladin is likely to be a speed bump or pitfall in the way of the heroic enchantress! Again, interesting, but I thought more could be done with the characterizations. Specifically, I wanted to do the medieval paradigm from the perspective of the enchantress as the protagonist without simply reversing things and making her the heroine. And when I thought about that, and what kind of avenues that opened for an exploration of our humanity and our struggles with selfishness even when (maybe especially when) faced with self-sacrificing love, it suddenly occurred to me that the Jewish scriptures had already done that thousands of years ago! Israel is the great heroine of the story that we're all supposed to be rooting for; but she's also the great villain and betrayer and enemy of God and His chosen servants. (That's before Christianity gets going, which picks up both those themes and runs with them in an ultimate narrative climax.) Classical Judaism is probably the most self-critical religion in human history; certainly they wrote the most self-critical scriptures as religious canon. That rich critical character-study is one big reason why Judaism became the founding religious belief (or at least tradition) for now around 2/3 of the people living in the world today.

Well duh. Who wouldn't want that complex (and successful!) as a narrative model to follow after?!

That being said, the story isn't an allegory for Israel's (and, in Israel, all humanity's) relationship with God. But that was, and remains, one of the main thematic sources in the background.

Do you have a specific writing style?

Yes; and I'm afraid it's annoying except when readers manage to ignore it. {wry g} Several years ago I started redrafting the first book into a big varying-rhythmic poem (not usually rhymed; it's supposed to read like good Shakespear, or what I consider to be good Shakespear anyway, but with the rhythm varying on a regular basis instead of just being the same iambic pentameter most or all of the time.) It was primarily a way of helping me reduce my wordcount; but then I got used to doing it. And now I doubt I could feasibly stop it, because the back of my mind would always be saying, "No, blah, that phrasing sucks, try this rhythm instead".

The upshot is that there are these peculiar uses of punctuation and grammar and extra return lines between paragraphs sometimes; which all make sense when the story is thought of as being performed out loud (which is how ancient people used to read anyway, even in private), but which look goofy, like I just forgot to capitalize a word or end a sentence with a period or whatever.

This would probably be a good time to point readers over to Rebeccasreads.com where there's a 20 minute excerpt from the book in the Author Reading section, and a 5 minute sort-of sequel (summarizing the rest of the book with snippets of plot out to the end--without any major spoilers though) in the Book Teasers section. You can hear me trying to

read the thing aloud with the various effects I'm trying to get across in print and not necessarily succeeding very well at. {lol!} (The 20 minute excerpt covers the first nine full pages of the story, introducing the Preface Author narrator and two of the main protagonists.)

How did you come up with the title?

I named the book "Cry for Justice" originally as a working title, thanks to an early chapter where one protagonist, Seifas, argues himself out of suicide by coming up with a reason to hope that justice would be fulfilled someday. (Not a problem I've ever had myself, by the way, though I can see how people could get to that point, and it was a state of mind I wanted to narratively explore.) Seifas spends his first two chapters more or less literally crying for justice; his first chapter ends with the concept that as a soldier his words are his tears, but they aren't enough to wash away the glow of fires that shouldn't be burning--images he can see even when his eyes are closed. And then, his

very first appearance in the book (during the Introduction) involves this terrible hunting cry which he's using to spoof a deer into doing something reactively fatal. Seifas and his brothers are modelled not only on Zulu but on black panthers; and the South American word from which we derive both of the terms "jaguar" and "cougar" is "Guacu-ara". I was never able to find out what that meant (any readers happen to know!?), but I figured it could mean "hunting cry", so that's the name of their group in the story. And there's "cry" again. Seifas is the first protagonist you meet, and a lot of the story is about whether the cry in his heart for justice is going to be answered someday, and if so how. So, "cry for justice".

Then however I noticed that at two key points, at the climactic action sequence and on the final page of the story, the phrase was "cry of justice"; both in the sense of God speaking ethically in hope and power (not merely one or the other), but with creation cooperating with Him in doing so. And at about the same time I noticed that my plans for the immediate sequels all involved titling them "[X] of Justice". So I changed the title to match.

Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

Plenty of messages! Maybe dozens and dozens. But none of them are terribly original, and I'd rather let readers suss them out for themselves.

How much of the book is realistic?

It's about as real as I can make it, considering we're talking about an epic fantasy that could be described along the lines of _The Princess Bride_: "Fencing. Fighting. Torture. Revenge. Giants. Monsters. Chases. Escapes. True love. Miracles." (I've included at least four nods to TPB throughout the first three books, by the way: the importance of the statement "As you wish"; the statement that someone had better "get used to disappointment"; the statement "There would be no survivors" as part of a bluff to disperse a crowd of opponents; and the concept that Othon, the resident ogreish hero, fights better against mobs than against skilled single fighters, which two onlookers comment about.

Incidentally, the fuller description of TPB's plot from the book, not the film, wouldn't hold up as well in comparison. What was I talking about...? Oh, right... {wry g} {ending digression})

Whenever I introduce a piece of plot, whether it's something mundane like prostitutes among the camp followers or how the economy in the camp becomes increasingly strained over time, or something fantastic like a monster or a new magical effect that hasn't been seen or mentioned before, I always try to think out the implications of having it in the story; and I try to keep those implications in mind for future reference, including when those elements are put into new situations. I'm very meticulous about how the action sequences are staged, and I try not to fudge things there, although I don't always describe everything in the meticulous detail that I'm trying to keep track of behind the scenes. And I try to keep track of time/space cues, and travel time-distances: I have a whole Excel spreadsheet for Book 3 that's dedicated to tracking multiple brigades ever since Book 1 (even when they aren't mentioned in Book 1), so that I can see what will have to happen in the plot for various people to be in which places at what times together (or apart!--sometimes the issue is that multiple people shouldn't be overlapping in the story.)

So it's far more realistic than, say, The Princess Bride (to borrow that

example again), but probably not as hard-core grognard realistic as, say, Mary Gentle's The Book of Ash or G.R.R. Martin's A Song of Fire and Ice series. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series probably makes the best realism-parallel. Maybe more realistic than Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (though not in some ways, such as photorealistic detail descriptions and

language invention).

Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?

Not if I can help it. {wry g} My real life is pretty boring by most standards, though I'm not complaining about that. (Old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times!") A few things slip in. For example, the sword-jumping ball sequence early in CoJ is directly based on an incident I had had just a couple of days earlier, where I was trying to figure out what this furshlugginer toy thing some kids I was chaperoning were playing with. (um... I _think_ the grammar of that sentence adds up... {squinting at it suspiciously}) Neither they nor I had any idea what it was for or how to use it; but I figured it out first. Once I did, I thought, huh, cool, someone could use this for agility combat training! So when I needed a way for a newly arrived character to break the ice in introducing him to the troops and vendors in the brigade, ding; I just imagined there was this boy watching from the ring of onlookers who had this toy, and Jian (the newly arrived character) sees him and says, "Hey, I see you have a sword-jumping ball!" The kid doesn't know what that means, but the soldiers around him do. Fun ensues. {g} (This scene required me to invent the Mikonese equivalent of elastic banding, too: a type of rubbery grass, elongrass.)

Later, near the end of the first section of chapters for CoJ, at the climax of the first action sequence, what happens to the bad guy and his subordinate cronies is based directly on the principles for why it's better to try to ride down a tipping piece of heavy equipment (like a forklift or, in this case, a shoulderbeast {g}) instead of doing the instinctive thing and trying to jump clear. We had just gotten forklift training videos for the shop, and I was pretty impressed by the experiments and principles there; so when I realized this thing in the story that people were riding was going to tip over... in the detail went.

What books have most influenced your life most?

All the ones I've read...? That sounds like a good answer. {g} (But obviously the Bible more than anything.)

If you had to choose, which writer would you consider a mentor?

I don't personally know many writers, and a mentor ought to be someone you personally know who has helped train you. Only one writer fits that bill, though: Marie Brennan. (Who, in her burgeoning career, has been a mentor to a lot of up-and-coming writers, not just me. She will probably be both tickled and horrified at the idea of being a mentor, so... yeah, that answer works very well! {ggg!})

What book are you reading now?

Nothing very fun, I'm afraid. (Lord, I haven't read much 'fun' material in years... too much studying to do for my other writing habit.) I'm a little more than halfway through Snodgrass' Stories With Intent which is a systematic examination of the parables of Jesus (and being a footnote geek I had to write up my friends and gush about how there's, like, 150 pages of endnotes in small font!!... {gg!}) That's my travel book for when I'm eating lunch and maybe dinner. For breakfast and whenever I feel too tired to do anything else at night, I had been going to start Walter McDougall's first volume of American history Freedom Just Around the Corner (his sequel, covering and bracketing the Civil War years, Throes of Democracy, is supposed to be out at the end of the month). But my family has just finished a World War II epic film festival this month (starting with The Battle of Britain and then going through The Longest Day with a lead-in from the Eisenhower TV movie Ike starring Tom Selleck, then A Bridge Too Far and The Battle of the Bulge); so I pulled out a rare copy of Eisenhower's autobiography Crusade in Europe that I totally lucked into finding at an antique shop about 10 years ago but had never gotten around to reading. Well, okay, for me that stuff counts as fun. Sort of. {wry g} Though part of me would rather be playing wargames with other people based on that material.

Are there any new authors that have grasped your interest?

I was going to say Patrick Rothfuss (with The Name of the Wind and his forthcoming sequel The Wise Man's Fear), but that seems too easy. So instead I'll say Jim Hines, whose new book The Stepsister Scheme seems to have all my fantasy-reading friends in a gushing froth, and deservedly so. If my reading backlog wasn't already three years long, I'd be buying that thing in a hot second. It's certainly on my to-get-eventually list.

What are your current projects?

Doing analysis as a guest author (along with Gregory MacDonald and Thomas Talbott) over at the new evangelicaluniversalist.com forum has got me so busy that other writing projects are currently circling the airspace waiting to land before they run out of fuel, crash and die. (um... okay, maybe pressed that analogy too far, but still... {g}) The back of my mind badly wants to finish writing Book 3, but not badly enough yet to push other things out of the way.

That'll happen this year eventually, I'm sure. There's a decently good chance that doing this virtual book tour will kick that side of my mind into gear, by the way!

Name one entity that you feel supported you outside of family members.

And God? Right this moment I guess I'd have to say 'the publicist I hired to set up this virtual book tour, and American Chronicle, along with other sites, for agreeing to interview me'! I wish my distributor was this much in the game. (Though Atlas gets props for designing and printing my book; excellent job there, guys!)

Do you see writing as a career?

As a publisher, I see it as a business; but until I start making a real profit at it, I can hardly call it a career. I could call it a vocation though. Not to be confused with a vacation. {g}

What do you think makes a good story?

Meaningful narrative. That includes characterizations when characters are on screen, but I can think of stories I've read where there are hardly any characters per se but the narrative was still meaningful. Obviously, as a matter of taste, I prefer meanings I happen to agree with! {lol!} But I can tolerate other meanings, too; and sometimes I consider those to be more important for critical purposes, whether I agree with them or not. If we aren't looking for more light while walking according to what light we can already see, we're never going to grow, and we won't correct any mistakes we're currently making.This, by the way, is why I become impatient with political stances that

don't realistically admit the strengths and potential abuses of both liberal and conservative procedure. We need both kinds of mindset, and both kinds of mindset have to respect each other, in order to have a healthy society.

Did you learn anything from writing your book and what was it?

Other than 'what actually happens in the story to get from plot point A to Z', which I love to discover, I can't honestly say I learned much from writing my book. Improving skills, yes, but I don't count that as learning per se. I always learn a lot new when writing non-fiction books, but for some reason I don't learn much new when writing fictional books. Odd, but true. Fiction, for me, seems to be more about putting things I've already learned into practice and exploring nuances.

I do learn new things in interviews, though! For example, I hadn't thought before about how fiction, for me, seems to be more about etc. {lol!}