MEET BAX RICH

THE LUNATIC BEHIND THE STORIES

A Conversation with Bax Rich

So how the hell did you become a writer?

 COVID. Seriously.
 I'm nearly deaf, and when COVID hit, suddenly everybody was wearing masks. That's when I learned something interesting about myself: I apparently lip-read far more than I ever realized. So now I couldn't hear people or see their mouths.
 For years I'd joked that if I ever went to prison, I'd finally have enough time to sit down and write a book. Well, COVID was a sort of imprisonment. So I started writing.
 When I looked up a couple of years later, I'd written six full-length novels and a ton of shorter stuff.

Did you have any idea what you were doing?

 Not really. But I'd spent my career in the insurance business selling complicated ideas. To do that successfully, you have to learn how to articulate something complicated and take another person down a path until they understand the concept—and, ultimately, how it benefits them. It was a survival skill.
 Then I started writing fiction and discovered something much more interesting about myself. I wasn't just writing stories. I was escaping.
 I wasn't particularly happy with my personal reality, so I created fantastical worlds I could go live inside. They were places where I could explore what I knew, what I believed, and all my strange theories about things. Most of what I wrote was in first person.
 Then I noticed something: my protagonists rarely experienced much adversity.
 Why would they? I was escaping from my problems. Why the hell would I escape into another universe and give myself problems there too?
 I even fell in love with one of my fictional characters, Lori, in The Man from Pyramid Lake. And you know what? At that particular point in my life, loving someone—even someone who wasn't real—was healing.
 Writing was incredibly powerful because I finally had control over something.
 I could be God.

When did you realize you might actually be good at this?

 I don't remember exactly. I remember reading my own stuff and getting excited.
 Writing is probably the only thing I've ever done that I genuinely think I'm good at. That and driving a car around a racetrack.
 The frustrating part was that for the first few years I couldn't get anybody to read the damn things. Except my son. And he's probably one of the toughest critics you'll ever meet.

What did he think?

 I gave him The Woman from Canyon Diablo. I'd edited it once at that point. Since then, the damn thing has probably been edited and rewritten fifteen times.
 He was very pragmatic. He liked the conflict involving the captured prisoners, which meant a lot to me because I thought those were some of the most cerebral and philosophical parts of the book.
 Then he told me he didn't like Jesse.

Your protagonist?
 
Yep.

Why?

 She was too perfect.
 I listened. And then I did absolutely nothing about it.
 Apparently I needed to hear it again. Eventually an editor read the book. She said essentially the same thing.
 Still didn't quite get through.
 And then there was Renaiss.

THEN THERE WAS RENAISS

What was different about her?

 Renaiss knew how to talk to me.
 She appealed to my logic to get me to show emotion.
 Smart woman, that one.
 She said, "You're a smart man. I'm going to challenge you."
 Then she asked me to imagine what would actually happen if I were thrown 140 years into the past. You've lost your career. Your friends. Your dad. Your cat. Your car. Your phone. Grocery stores. Fast food. Conditioner. Everything.
 Suddenly everything becomes complicated because of simplicity.
 She waited for me to think about it.
 Then she said, "She's going to grieve, Bax."
 The five stages. Put them into Jesse's character arc.
 Then Renaiss told me something harder. Maybe if Jesse experienced all of that, Renaiss might actually start having some compassion for her. Maybe she'd even like her.
 "Give the reader something to like about her. Make her real."
 And then she added two more things.
    Romance.  Geez.  I couldn't write romance. But, she could.  She understood it.  I'm still learning.  I have a ways to go. 
    The other thing was this is 1881. The men aren't going to listen to her.
 Jesse can be brilliant. She can know things nobody else knows. She can be the smartest person standing in the room. Doesn't matter. She's going to have to earn their respect one person at a time.

And you listened to Renaiss?

 Yes.
 Because she didn't tell me my character needed to become less extraordinary. She showed me why an extraordinary character still needed to be human.
 And something else changed too. I didn't need quite as much validation from the original fantasy anymore.

What did Renaiss ultimately change in you?

 When we wrote together, she challenged me. She'd find a problem, and I'd become motivated to show her how I could solve it.
 Writing became collaborative. It became fun in a completely different way.
 
 She really is a significant catalyst that makes me want to be a better writer. 

So what do you want readers to think about your writing?

 I honestly don't know.
 I'd probably feel weird if people started gushing over it. That's a great question. I might need therapy to figure out what I actually want people to think.
 I don't want my value as a human being dictated by my ramblings of lunacy.

That seems oddly reasonable.   

Don't get used to it.

What makes something a Bax Rich story? 

 I'm such a contradiction.
 I'll create an almost impossible premise. I'll create chaos. I'll break the rules of civilized society. And then I'll spend weeks researching some completely esoteric detail because I have tremendous respect for the intelligence of the reader.
 If I'm asking you to believe something impossible, I'm going to work my ass off making everything surrounding the impossible thing plausible.
 I know exactly what I don't want is somebody reading my work to say:
 "Oh, come on, Bax. You're being lazy."
 That would bother me.

Where does the humor come from?

 When I was a kid, I wasn't liked very much. I wore a hearing aid. Maybe that made me insecure. Maybe kids were just mean. Probably both.
 So whenever I got positive attention, I felt a little more appreciated in the world.
 William James, the Harvard psychologist, said we all crave appreciation. He's probably right. I don't think any of us are immune to it.
 Even Fred Flintstone needed to hear Wilma say, "You're my rock, Flintstone."

You know Fred Flintstone isn't actually part of William James's work.
 
Pretty sure it was in the footnotes.
 Anyway—God, I go off on tangents even while we're talking.
 Around fifth grade, I had a teacher who made us write a lot of stories. And something weird happened. There was this group of guys who couldn't wait to see what I was going to write next because apparently I was kind of funny back then too.
 Suddenly I was getting acceptance because of something I'd written.
 Earlier this year something occurred to me that I'm still trying to understand.
 Maybe somewhere inside me there's still that kid who thinks writing is how he gets love.
 I'm not saying that's the answer.
 I'm saying I've started asking the question.

Where do the stories themselves come from?

 The stories I like writing most usually start with a premise. Then I wake up every morning and decide where that life is going today.
 Sometimes I'll take a long walk, figure it out while I'm walking, come home and write it. That's fun.
 When I already know the story has to reach a certain place and I'm engineering everything to get there, that's different. It's more of a challenge.
 I like discovering the world while I'm living in it.

What scares you more: running out of ideas, or dying someday with 500 stories still inside your head?
 
Definitely closer to the second one.

  One thing I want to mention is that I think I've always been a team player.  I get greater satisfaction out of a team win than a personal win.  Writing the Woman from Canyon Diablo was more fun and satisfying than any of the books I wrote solo.   I want to write more co-authored books.

So let's remove all the publishing bullshit. No Amazon rankings. No sales figures. No Goodreads. No agents. Nobody ever decides whether Bax Rich is a "successful author."

 Sounds better already.

Instead, there's one person sitting across the table who loves building these ridiculous worlds with you. And somewhere out there are a few thousand readers who genuinely look forward to seeing what lunacy you come up with next. Would that be enough?

 God yes.

Last question.

 Okay.

Someone you've never met finds BaxRich.com. They wander into The Lunatics. They read this ridiculously long interview. Maybe they laugh a couple of times. Maybe something in here makes them think about their own life.

But for whatever reason, they stay.

They make it all the way down here. They've never bought one of your books. They don't owe you anything. You get one sentence before they leave.

What do you want to say to them?

 I love you.