Chatting with David Zweifler

David Lee Zweifler (he/him) spent years in places like Jakarta, Hong Kong, and New York City, working in journalism and other less-dignified pursuits. Now, he spends his days sowing the seeds of his own demise in technology communications. By night, David writes speculative fiction, currying favor with the robot overlords and old gods. David has recent work in The Saturday Evening Post, Analog, and Nature Futures, and is currently querying his first novel. You can connect with David at davidleezweifler.com.

David is the author of “Dad Jokes” from Issue 9.

Q: What led you to becoming an “inactive active-level SFWA member”?

When I first started in fiction in 2021, I had a fantasy that once I became SFWA active-level—what was, in my mind, the “professional-tier” for that organization—I’d join an elite group of writers who represented the best of the speculative fiction space.

Can you imagine my disappointment when I achieved my goal a year later and still felt like a novice who had gotten lucky on every single sale up to that point and would probably never sell another story again?

Even if my expectations for reaching SFWA active-level did not turn out to be a not-at-all-unrealistic, chrysalis-like experience where I would emerge, transformed, as a modern-day Ray Bradbury, I figured that it would, at least, put me in touch with other writers like myself.

Unfortunately, due to the ‘Sad Puppies’ fiasco a decade before, the SFWA member roster is kept on lockdown, even from other members, and there seemed to be few local IRL social networking opportunities.

I decided to save my membership fees the year after, but I can’t quit the desire to tell everyone who will listen that I’m a ‘professional-level’ writer, hence the “inactive, active-level” line in my bio.

Q: Are you still in the midst of querying your dark comedy/urban fantasy novel?

I don’t think I’ll ever stop querying that novel.

I’m very fortunate that I’ve never had a dog run away or lost a lover at sea. I suspect people who have gone through those experiences still hope that, someday, despite all evidence to the contrary, those precious individuals will return to them.

In much the same way, I’ll always hold out hope that one of the ‘no reply’ agents will get back to me. No matter that there have been no full requests. No partial requests.

No requests for anything at all, really.

There is a great deal of empirical evidence that this book of mine is terrible. Any other rational, self-respecting human being would have put it well and truly ‘in the trunk’ at this point and expunged any reference to it from their biographical information.

Yet, I am still querying.

And I always will be.

Q: Are there any influences that have shaped your comedic voice?

I’m a bit of an anachronism from a writing perspective, and not just because I am hundreds of years old. When I was a child, my father used to do a lot of business travel. Cassette tapes (I told you: I’m old) of old radio shows were a common airport gift store item back then. My father brought many home for me and, because I wasn’t allowed to watch much TV, I listened to them incessantly.

I remember War of the Worlds with the Orson Welles Mercury Theatre and Groucho Marx hosting You Bet Your Life in particular. All those tapes gave me an ear for the clipped language of radio storytelling. They also oriented me towards humorous verbal exchanges and, most significantly, trained me to be a very aural and dialogue-centric storyteller.

Several years later, I heard some writing advice from David Mamet (not coincidentally, another major influence on my writing): to create strong stories, playwrights should create scripts as if they were radio dramas that could stand on their own without a visual element.

That approach is why I try to keep my writing exposition-light and highlight only the details that are important for the reader to understand what’s going on, usually with the help of organic dialogue. It also positions what I hope is witty, revealing conversation as the main device to drive reader engagement and character connection.

Q: What is your approach to crafting dark comedic writing?

I believe that the mechanisms for humor lend themselves to speculative writing—even horror—and you can move back and forth seamlessly between them without diminishing the emotional impact of either.

I covered this in a story called The Laughing Wolverine, about a comedian who dies taking care of his toddler son and tries to protect his child in a ghostlike form that can’t interact with the physical world:

“Imagine you’re reading a story about a guy in a bar, and you don’t know what genre it is. The protagonist is talking to a gal over drinks, and it turns out she is the ghost of a woman who died there five months ago. That’s an unexpected shift in perspective.

“If the protagonist thinks the ghost is real and only realizes she’s dead when the bartender asks him why he’s talking to himself, that’s scary. If the protagonist discovers the ghost died of thirst while waiting to be served by the inattentive bartender, that’s funny.”

“It can go either way.”

Q: What science facts do you enjoy writing?

My day job in technology communications involves finding novel, captivating, and inspirational stories buried in mundane processes and industries. I might have spent too long as a financial journalist, but I truly believe that, with enough skill and patience, there are always great stories to be found in these ‘boring’ businesses.

The people who work in these industries are usually very smart, high achievers, and, because of their chosen professions, carefully avoided by others at cocktail parties. They tend to be intellectually curious, which makes them treasure troves of interesting information, anecdotes, and predictions . . . if you have the patience and skill to find out what they are excited and worried about.

That type of source cultivation, combined with a little bit of detective work, often helped me unearth some discoveries that only a handful of people knew about.

Those ‘science facts’ are the ones that create the best predictions, and the most interesting stories when I brought them to light. That helped produce some of my best professional writing, and the most interesting days in my writing ‘day job.’

Q: How do you find yourself approaching ghostwriting projects compared to your own creative writing?

I am starting to hate the term “ghostwriter” since I now see people writing paid product reviews, creating online training programs, and selling email marketing services using that title.

To clarify, ghostwriting, to me, is more old-school: I create stories and then slap my client’s name on the byline.

Most of those involve creating executive (usually CEO) ‘thought leadership,’ where I furnish them with opinions or predictions about what will happen next in their space.

My time as a wire-service reporter in Hong Kong trained me to extrapolate from current events to things that haven’t happened yet. Unfortunately, it’s not true prognostication. (If I could predict the future, I’d be living on an island somewhere with a Mai Tai in both hands.) What I’m doing is really just exhibiting ‘news sense’

The thought process is: “We are at A, on our way to B, so it’s almost certain that C will be a fast follower to that.” I must make sure that I’m conservative enough that ‘Reality C’ is likely, credible, and positive. (The shareholders don’t like it when the CEO is predicting the apocalypse.)

Many of the premises for my fiction stories come about through a similar process, except I can push the credibility envelope for Reality C a little further out, and I can make this reality as dark as I want. Then I find a compelling character—usually one uniquely ill-equipped to deal with the new reality I’ve created—and I let them run and see how things pan out.

I have a penchant for dark premises. Still, I always try to find a positive resolution for my protagonists. Things are so dark right now, I believe you need to at least try and create happy endings for your characters if you want to call yourself a speculative writer in the US in 2025.

Q: “Dad Jokes” is intimately layered with unfolding time-travel changes as the reader progresses. Often more will appear on a second or third re-read. Did you find creating such an intricate microfiction difficult or arduous?

I spent much of my post-journalism career in marketing communications—advertising and public relations in particular. As a marketer, I was always trying to make things shorter, fighting to get people to read just one more sentence, and devote just five more seconds of their precious attention.

So, tight, thrifty stories are my writing default.

My sad, unsold novel was a lot of fun to write. It was the first time I could relax a bit with my characters and go deeper into their world, without the pressure to cut, cut, cut.

Given the less-than-unbridled success of that effort, I’m keeping my current writing mechanics geared towards creating literary wristwatches most of the time, not 100K-word automobiles.

Q: In your 2023 Analog interview, you talked about how current affairs influence your writing. Has this relationship changed or developed since the interview?

It would be hard to discuss current affairs without discussing politics, and I’m trying to keep them confined to my fiction.

I’ll just restate that I truly believe you need to at least try and create happy endings for your characters if you want to call yourself a speculative writer right now, if not from any sense of genuine optimism, then just to contrast with current events.

Q: As somebody who self-describes as getting into fiction “late in life,” can you share what led you to fiction writing?

My whole career has been about writing, so it’s really just the ‘fiction’ part that’s recent. (If I were being less charitable, I would say that much of my prior writing was, in fact, fiction, although I didn’t call it that at the time.)

What led me to fiction was the usual self-indulgent nonsense: A desire to leverage art to transcend the paltry allotment of years I get to walk around here on earth, living on in the memories of a large audience of readers. As one does. (Understand that this was a more optimistic time before generative AI became ubiquitous and threatened to destroy all art, lo, two score months ago.)

Q: Our journal has encountered a growing intersection of journalists and creative writers. Journalism demands objectivity, while fiction allows for personal perspective. Do you feel more freedom as a short story writer, or do ethical questions still linger with you?

I’m not sure I agree with some of the initial premise of the question. I think that Journalism demands that the reporter is aware of their own lack of objectivity. It also requires that the journalist act in good faith with her readers to address that bias.

Still, I think she knows, and the industry demands, that she is writing stories that are “true” but also reflect her perspective.

Fiction writing, especially speculative fiction writing, gives me the freedom to create in a way that’s very different from journalism. I no longer need to obtain quotes from sources or facts from reputable third parties to support my assertions.

Ironically, I feel like I’ve come full circle at this point. I often set my stories in another universe, populated with people who don’t exist. Still, my best fiction reflects my personal perspectives and biases yet still manages to be “true.”

Q: With a lengthy and storied career (pun intended), is there anywhere in particular you hope to go with your writing moving forward?

I spoke a bit about creating happy endings for my protagonists, and I’m also trying to do that for myself.

As far as specific plans go, I’ll probably take a crack at another more marketable novel at some point, and I’ll continue to write short stories, which I enjoy a lot. After selling the novel and watching it become a bestseller, I will follow up with the obligatory screenwriting adaptation. This script will be turned into a full-length motion picture by someone I’m convinced does not understand the source material. Despite this, I will sign away my creative rights in exchange for points on the gross and an on-screen cameo that will be edited out of the final cut. I will demand that the producer removes my name from the credits as an act of protest, despite earning millions of dollars from my fractional portion of the box office receipts.

Or, perhaps, I’ll just be able to create and be read in a world that values the written word, and my written words in particular, which would also suit me just fine.

Neither of those two outcomes may seem very plausible in a world that will soon be dominated by generative AI.

Still, I’ve pulled my main characters out of some pretty tight jams. I’m optimistic—genuinely optimistic—that I’ll be able to come up with a nice twist for myself as well.