How long have you been writing fiction?
For quite some time, actually. Intelligence Manifesto will be my first fiction publication, but I've been writing
fiction--or trying to--for a long time. Given my other writing interests and responsibilities though, my
fiction writing has been on-again, off-again through much of my life. I can remember co-authoring a
Christmas story with my brother Ken when I was in seventh grade and he was in fifth grade. Then, all
through high school, I kept journals in which I wrote a whole bunch of fictional "fragments," some of
which I thought I might eventually turn into novels (though none of them ultimately went anywhere.) In
the late 1980s and early 1990s, I wrote quite a bit of fiction: two sizeable but incomplete drafts of novels,
and one complete draft of a novel entitled The Blade Within the Voice. That was one of those
semi-autobiographical novels that some writers need to "get out of their systems" so they can move on to
other things. I decided to write Intelligence Manifesto after a fairly long period of time-more than a decade-in
which I had produced no fiction at all. As I look back on it now, though, it's quite clear to me that the
idea for the novel had been percolating during that entire "dormant" time. So if you can argue that
working through possible details of a story in your head is part of the writing process-and I think you
certainly can make that argument--then I was "writing" Intelligence Manifesto for a long time before I started
drafting it in the spring of 2006.

You wrote a scholarly book on creative writing. When writing, have you found yourself breaking
any of your own rules?
Not really, but that's because for a long time I've believed that writing isn't--or shouldn't be--a
rule-governed enterprise. Earlier in my writing life, I tended to apply (and even over-apply) rules in a very
uncritical way. When I learned the famous "show don't tell" rule, for instance, it led to five or six years of
writing poetry that contained virtually no abstractions and no declarative statements. That was a strange
thing, actually, for someone who was studying philosophy at the time.

Eventually--thanks in large measure to my study of rhetoric--I came to realize that most rules have a
kernel of genuine wisdom in them, but when they're applied without regard to context they can do a lot
more harm than good. I think too many "rules" originate as reactions to things done poorly by novice
writers. I see this all the time with some of my students. They're carrying around all these rules, but they
have no sense of why or how those rules might have originated, or when they might profitably be broken
or ignored. On one level, in fact, Intelligence Manifesto represents a deliberate attempt to break certain
"rules": Is it possible, for instance, to reveal most of the crucial plot elements through dialogue? Is it
possible to have a mystery/thriller story with no violence, no car chases, and very little of the familiar
trappings of those types of stories?

You are a college instructor. Do you think this experience will affect your teaching?
Yes, the experience of writing this novel and winning the Paradigm Prize will definitely affect my teaching.
I work at a regional public university where teaching is always the top priority. At the moment, our course
offerings in creative writing are not very extensive, but we have just begun to offer a Writing Studies
concentration for our English majors, and a Writing Studies minor for students majoring in other subjects.
We hope that, as part of this new program, we will be able to offer a wider variety of creative writing
courses in the not-too-distant future. I love the fact that I teach a variety of courses: advanced
composition, rhetoric and composition studies, creative writing, and literary criticism, just to name a few.
And I firmly believe that even though I don't work at a publish-or-perish, research-intensive university, if
I'm going to teach writing and teach it well I've got to be a practicing, publishing writer. Not that being a
writer automatically makes you a good teacher; I think there are a lot of people who write well but
can't-or don't-teach well. But I would be willing to argue that you can't be a good writing teacher without
also being a writer. I know I wouldn't want to take golf lessons from someone who didn't actually play
golf, or guitar lessons from someone who didn't actually play the guitar. I don't see why it should be any
different with the teaching of writing.

In the spring semester of 2007 I taught a special section of our creative writing class; we focused on
writing the first draft of a novel. And so I was able to use the first draft of Intelligence Manifesto as a
teaching tool at the beginning of the semester. Students got to read it with the clear understanding that it
was a work in progress. I encouraged them to offer suggestions, and many of them offered good ones. I
was able to revise the novel before their eyes, and they got to be participants in the process. In the long
run, I think I'll be able to draw upon insights gained from this process in all of my classes.

From where did the idea for Intelligence Manifesto come?
It began in 1996 as one of those whimsical "what if" notions. What if I wrote a story for The X-Files? I
never had any actual intention of doing so, partly because I knew that the likelihood of a story from an
unknown writer had virtually no chance of being accepted for an established show like that, and partly
because I was working on my doctoral dissertation then and I didn't need to waste my time tilting at
windmills. But there was something about the story-living with it, using it as a sort of mental vacation
while engaged in all kinds of other work-that just remained interesting to me. The story in my mind soon
lost its mooring in the original X-Files context; new characters emerged and developed; plot lines started
to coalesce like clusters of pieces in a huge jigsaw puzzle. And almost without realizing it, through all this
other stuff that was going on in my life-getting married, earning my Ph.D., finding a job, moving to
Pennsylvania, dealing with my father's death, becoming a father myself, publishing a scholarly book-I was
working on a novel in my head. A lot of the things I was reading or learning about during that time wove
themselves into the fabric of this story. And I guess at some point it just reached critical mass: It no
longer made sense to keep the story in my head, because it wasn't going away. So when I actually did start
writing the first draft, it felt strange at times because it was like I was "creating" a story I already knew
very intimately.

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