An Interview with Tris Lawrence
Feb. 26th, 2025 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
duckprintspress
Meet Tris Lawrence! Tris has been with Duck Prints Press since our very first anthology, Add Magic to Taste, and is the author of multiple novels, including seven books of the Welcome to Pine Hills University series. We’re currently crowdfunding the second book of that series, Missed Fortunes, so what better time is there to get to know this awesome author?
About Tris Lawrence
Tris Lawrence has been writing since she was a child, filling notebooks with the worlds, dreams, and voices from inside her head. She declared in sixth grade that she wanted to be a writer, promptly started drafting her first novel in seventh grade, and never looked back.Tris has always been fascinated by the way people work: how their relationships fit together, how they interact socially, how they learn and discover. She has read avidly her entire life, devouring mysteries, romances, science fiction, and fantasy novels, and as an adult still loves all of these genres. Her favorite stories center on people who are learning or discovering new things, and coming-of-age stories top that list, which is how Pine Hills University came to be. She wants to share stories of people who are learning how to relate to each other, how to adult, how to college, and how to just be. She hopes to share stories about diverse characters with representation of everything she wishes she could have read growing up, and she hopes that these stories will touch the lives and hearts of those who read them.
When not writing, Tris is a wife, a mother (to two children, two cats, and a dog), a knitter, a system administrator, a black belt in taekwondo, an avid reader, and a music aficionado. Sleep, she claims, is optional.
Links: Bluesky | Dreamwidth | Facebook | Mastodon | Patreon | Pillowfort | Tumblr
An Interview with Tris
How did you pick the name you create under?
I’ve written in the past under multiple variations on my meatspace prior-to-marriage name, but that was always separate from my fandom identity. When I started the Welcome to PHU series, I made a conscious decision that I wanted to lean-into my fandom self. I’ve been tryslora online for over thirty years, and many of my friends called me Trys. The names are pronounced with a short I, so the shift from Trys to Tris was easy for me, and the surname Lawrence is another callback to the other half of my fandom name. The fact that my surname is also the (full given) name of the very favorite character of the first short story I ever had published is just a happy bonus.
When and why did you begin creating?
Oh. Goodness. Apparently my first short story was written in the first grade. I was in the resource room–taken out of my class for enrichment time so I didn’t get Bored since I was the only one in the class who could already read. They gave me a picture, and I wrote a story about a sad little boy whose parents were getting a divorce. The school called my parents, very concerned. Spoiler alert: my parents were NOT getting a divorce.
I started writing in earnest in seventh grade. I was already a voracious reader, and it seemed like the next step to start creating the kinds of stories I wanted to read. Sweet wistful romances. Stories where I could be the hero. As an only child, I’d been making up stories in my head all my life; putting them down on paper and sharing them was fun. And I quickly realized that writing was like breathing. I couldn’t stop. I filled notebooks. I started submitting short stories to markets (and being rejected) when I was fifteen. I wrote a serialized novel my senior year of high school and sold it in thirty issues to other kids in my high school. To be fair, I got the idea from a friend who started his serial the year earlier, and I wasn’t the only one. We were a whole little crew of writers in high school, and we beta read and encouraged each other.
Why I wrote changed over the years. At first, I just wanted to tell stories. The kinds of stories I had going in my head to entertain me when I was bored/alone/whatever. Then I started to need to write to tell stories that worked out problems in my head. Then I started creating the kinds of stories I really needed to read when I was a kid/teen/young adult. Which is what I’m still doing. In a way, everything I write is to tell younger-me that the future is different. Better. More expansive and diverse and accepting. That the world has words for things, and we are working toward change.
Are you a pantser, a planner, or a planster? What’s your process look like?
I am a plantser. I used to be a straight-up pantser, but when I started writing serialized novel-length works (first for fic, then original), I found that I needed some kind of structure to help keep me on schedule. My process involves a lot of random talking to myself on paper to spew ideas, then trying to form the ideas into a loose timeline of major events. Sometimes those events are tropes (like: “the only one bed moment should come relatively early”) or they could be something more plot-related. Once that’s done, I figure out how many chapters I want and put blank docs for those in my Scrivener file. Then I index card the first few, but which I mean make a 1-3 paragraph set of blathering to myself notes about high points that need to occur in the chapter. I can’t call it an outline. It’s not really specific. Sometimes it’s a quote I want to include and a note about who is interacting and why.
I can’t overtell the story when I’m planning or I won’t want to write it. Or I WILL write it, right then, instead of planning. So. Yeah. Plantsing is the way to go. And every time I approach the end of the chapters I’ve done index cards for, I do the next few. Somewhere in the last third, I find myself needing to do it for the rest, at which point I can roll on through and finish the story.
Which of your own creations is your favorite? Why?
Um. My true and absolute favorites are horror pieces for an old fandom that has a lot of conflict around it now, so I hesitate to point to those. They make me want to write modern horror, though. I miss horror. In current writing, I’d have to say “Delta” from He Bears the Cape of Stars. It’s hard to say why other than that Ellis is a character of my heart, and I was so so thrilled to be able to write a story that had a positive outcome for him. “Worldplay” in the anthology Game On! from Zombies Need Brains is a close second. I went into it with a goal it having a particular taste and feel to the words, and I achieved that. I also went into it with the goal of the main character never being gendered, and am really happy with how it reads. The fact that it is only 4,000 words long and everything fits so neatly within that amount of words gives me incredible joy. In terms of craft, I am intensely proud of this piece.
Do you like having background noise when you create? What do you listen to? Does it vary depending on the project, and if so, how?
I need music going, but it has to either be music I know and can ignore, or sometimes classical. And it does vary with the project, but I don’t make playlists specific to the book. I did listen to a LOT of pop punk while writing Rory’s book (Marked #2: Not Your Love Song) in the PHU ‘verse, because that fit with his band’s theme. What I can’t do is use headphones – if the music is right in my ears, it’s interruptive. I need it to be low and truly in the background, so it doesn’t draw my attention. Once upon a time I could write while watching TV (and I wrote a lot of early fic that way- t hat would be where a Deadliest Catch inspired fic came from!) but not any longer. It’s too distracting.
When you look at your “career” as a creator, what achievement would you most like to reach – what, if it happened or has already happened, would/did make you go “now – now I’m a success!”?
When I graduated high school, as part of our writeup under our picture, they asked for our life goal. Mine was “2 go 2 SF cons 4 free” because at that time, being invited to be the guest of honor at a convention was the best goal I could see. I’d still love for that to happen. But really, more than that, I just hope to hear someday that something I wrote meant something to a reader. That the book impacted them in a positive way. That would be a success.
If you could give one piece of advice to a new creator who came to you for help, what would that advice be?
All words are awesome words. There will be days where you hate everything you write, and that’s okay. Put them on paper anyway. Burn them later if you want, or edit them, or tuck them in a drawer to look at in a year. But write them. Give yourself that chance to grow. Remember that everyone starts at the beginning – no one is a pro from moment one. Keep at it, and those words will change as you learn. But never forget: every word you put on paper is incredible, because you did it. You wrote. Keep writing.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
You have to write your million words of shit. Which in my mind, I have turned it around to “All words are awesome words” whether you make one or a thousand, whether you keep them or cut them. The gist is: in order to improve, you have to write. You have to get it down on paper, and yeah, it may not work and it may get tossed in a drawer (or lost in a virtual file folder named “omgDoNotLook-this-is-awful.docx”), but the writing is how we learn.
Additionally, ALL words count. Original fiction. Fan fiction. Non-fiction. Blog posts. Carefully worded emails. Everything that makes you slow down and consider your word choice and seek a direction and find flow. It’s all important, and it’s all part of the learning process. Which is the flipside of writing that first million words of shit. Much like gaining a black belt in a martial art – achieving that goal isn’t the end of the journey, it’s the start. Keep going. Keep making words. Every single one is important, and we always have more to learn.
What’s the worst advice you’ve ever received?
That you are only a writer if you write every day, and that to be successful, it should be at the same time, in the same place. I get that it works for some people. In fact, it’s great advice for a lot of people! But for me, I internalized that as “if I miss a day, I’m a failure” or “if I can’t get into my home office, I’m a failure” and that meant I stopped writing.
I had to learn that zero days are okay. It’s how much you work, not necessarily having a strict schedule, and learning to roll with the changes in schedule is important, too. I started tracking my word count in a spreadsheet so I could see those ups and downs, and visualize my averages, even when half the days out of the year I wasn’t writing at all. In 2023 I started tracking time, as well, because I’ve been spending more and more time on authorial tasks that aren’t just the creation of new words – editing, social media, publication prep, buying supplies (business cards, etc.), conventions. Being able to see that I am still spending a lot of time on this career, even if I’m not making words, has helped me come to terms with times when I’m not writing.
What book or media franchise or other creator’s work do you always come back to? How many times have you rewatched/reread/reviewed it?
Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, and I honestly do not know how many times I’ve read it. My view of it has changed over the years, certainly. It still impacts me a lot when I think about it; there are so many spaces and so many ways to take inspiration from it. It was a perfect story for a lonely teen who wanted a way to believe in a life beyond where I was. I read it many times between the ’90s and ’00s because I got involved in playing an RPG based in the universe – diceless roleplaying with a heavy emphasis on character and story. It was perfect for me, and was something that kept me writing (for my characters) during the times when my children were young. The last time I read it was in 2017 so I could write a postscript canon-based story for a Yuletide prompt. That’s another one I’m very proud of from a craft perspective, because I feel like I did a good job of mimicking Zelazny’s style (but more modern).
Thank you for sharing, Tris!
