Fiction Writers Review » writers on writing

Get Writing: Word Salad

Natalia Rachel Singer — Wed, 23 May 2012 13:00:55 +0000

Some of the students loved words like “denial” and “dysfunction.” Characters in fiction “had issues.” It was the early 90s and people talked like this.

I’d just gotten a flyer in my mailbox announcing the World’s Best Short Short Story contest sponsored by Florida State University and the late Jerome Stern. I made copies of the 1991 winner, “Baby, Baby, Baby,” by Francois Camoin. We read it out loud. Everyone admired the story’s energy and wild inventiveness.

“Baby,” I wrote on the blackboard. I asked everyone to name a food.

“Rutabagas,” said the country singer.

“Pigs’ knuckles,” said the clown who liked to shock vegetarians.

“Honey,” said the shy, sweet girl from Vermont.

I asked for energetic verbs. “Anything but ‘to be.’”

“Spit,” said the boy who loved chewing tobacco.

They were catching on.

In my own notebook I wrote: “The sun spit honey.” I would never have thought of that sentence without the help of Vermont Sweetie and Mr. Chew.

On the blackboard we soon had our vocabulary. Simple words, edible, agricultural: stew, squash, dirt, fields. Body parts and household goods: Toenails, combs, castanets. Country Singer gave us a pick-up truck.

“We’re only allowed two abstractions. Loss and desire. Go.”

I gave us ten minutes. A student on the track team leant us his watch. When I do this exercise now, I use a meditation timer.

Everyone turned what they wrote into a 250-word story that night. Some of them would publish their stories later, others would never write fiction again, but they still liked what had come from this exercise.

I had never entered a national contest before and in May I found out that this thing I’d scribbled in the company of my students, then revised, had won. Twenty years on, I still do this exercise to limber up when I’m starting a new chapter or scene. It’s the best antidote I know for the problem of overthinking a story. Scavenge a salad of simple but sensory-rich nouns and active verbs then watch your brain spit honey—and dirt and rutabagas—onto the page.

Natalia Rachel Singer teaches creative writing at St. Lawrence University. She is the author of a memoir, Scraping by in the Big Eighties, and is completing a novel. You can read her daily posts at Winter with Zoe.

Want more prompts? FWR’s entire “Get Writing” Archive.

Metaphysical Description, Or How Many Potatoes Make How Much Vodka?

Michael Byers — Wed, 16 May 2012 13:00:02 +0000

While it is hard enough to describe something effectively in fiction¹—how a thing smells, moves, looks—sometimes it is useful to further describe how exactly a thing seems or appears to be, above and beyond any discernible physical characteristics. The ineffable sense of how things are often makes up the best and most memorable aspect of a piece of writing, but it can be among the hardest things to get right. It is useful for writers to remember that often this aspect of seeming and appearing will be conveyed through metaphor; and often the seeming and appearing will touch in some way on the meaning of what is being observed—or will include a mention of a character’s feelings about, or engagement with, the thing observed.

Note that the description of the ineffable sense of a thing will almost always be preceded by a more basic, sometimes quite extended, physical description. The writer in this case takes on the role of Dr. Frankenstein. With Igor’s help, the writer assembles legs, arms, torso, neck, head, and brain. The writer arranges all this stuff on the table, sews it together. But it is still dead (if vivid) matter. Then the writer applies the electricity—describes the mysterious, often quasi-metaphorical sense of a thing—and the thing opens its eyes and comes to life.

For example, in Alice Munro’s 1979 story “The Beggar Maid”, we find Rose, a scholarship student, just entering college. She is compelled to attend a meeting with other scholarship students, and, arriving with an unprepossessing companion at the room where the meeting is held, Rose hesitates outside the door.

There was a little window in the door. They could look through at the other scholarship winners already assembled and waiting. It seemed to Rose that she saw four or five girls of the same stooped and matronly type as the girl who was beside her, and several bright-eyed, self-satisfied babyish-looking boys. It seemed to be the rule that girl scholarship winners looked about forty and boys about twelve. It was not possible, of course, that they all looked like this. It was not possible that in one glance through the windows of the door Rose could detect traces of eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes. That was only what she thought. But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.

Notice how Rose’s observation of this long exact list of gross-out sufferings—”eczema, stained underarms, dandruff, moldy deposits on the teeth and crusty flakes in the corners of the eyes”—is implicitly disowned twice (we are told that this is only how “it seemed”) and very explicitly disowned three times: “It was not possible, of course….It was not possible….That was only what she thought.” (And notice further that Rose’s disowning of the list in no way erases the impression the list has made on us.)

But no, Munro is onto something with these disavowals—because it’s true, these physical complaints are not what Rose has seen, not exactly. What she has seen is something else, something further, an impression of something, that she cannot really point to. She has seen “a pall”—literally, “something that covers, shrouds, or overspreads, esp. with darkness or gloom.” But where is the pall? Where is it in the room? Is it hovering “over them”, up near the light fixtures?²

We understand from Munro’s unusual insistence that we are not meant to take this as just a metaphor: “But there was a pall over them, she was not mistaken, there was a true terrible pall of eagerness and docility.” But what is this, really? What is being described here? Nothing less than the sense of how things are, a sudden, almost mystical understanding of the truth about these people. And with this description, zap, the world of the room takes on meaning, and life. The Frankenstein Effect, at its finest.

Munro is a past master at this (and a million other things). In her story “Dance of the Happy Shades” (1961), a group of mentally disabled children arrive at a much anticipated piano recital. The narrator senses something going on:

It is while I am at the piano, playing the minuet from Berenice, that the final arrival, unlooked-for by anybody but Miss Marsalles, takes place. It must seem at first that there has been some mistake. Out of the corner of my eye I see a whole procession of children, eight or ten in all, with a red-haired woman in something like a uniform, mounting the front step. They look like a group of children from a private school on an excursion of some kind (there is that drabness and sameness about their clothes) but their progress is too scrambling and disorderly for that. Or this is the impression I have; I cannot really look. Is it the wrong house, are they really on their way to the doctor for shots, or to Vacation Bible Classes? No, Miss Marsalles has got up with a happy whisper of apology; she has gone to meet them. Behind my back there is a sound of people squeezing together, of folding chairs being opened, there is an inappropriate, curiously unplaceable giggle.

And above or behind all this cautious flurry of arrival there is a peculiarly concentrated silence. Something has happened, something unforeseen, perhaps something disastrous; you can feel such things behind your back.

You can’t, of course—not really—but then again, yes you can. The many tiny details have added up to something impalpable and profound, something that goes beyond description—something that has, almost literally, entered the air of the room.

Almost literally is the point here. On the verge of literalness.

Note that not every description calls for a metaphysical component. Usually this sort of technique is most useful when a character is observing a complicated scenario—an airport concourse, a crammed bookshelf, a busy restaurant—in which a number of objects or people are involved, and where it is useful to convey both a sense of particularity and an overall impression of things. But always when you see a writer deploying the terms

an air of

an atmosphere of

a sense of

an impression of

and other similar shortcuts, you ought to feel the hair rising on the back of your neck, because Dr. Frankenstein is warming up his generator. And things are about to get metaphysical.

The P:V Ratio

If a metaphysical understanding is to be in some fashion arrived at through the medium of the world, then we may note that different authors derive this metaphysical understanding differently. Some writers prefer to assemble more world on the table before applying the electricity that represents a greater understanding.

We may therefore find it suitable to change our underlying metaphor, leaving behind all these dripping body parts our assistant has so obligingly harvested, and propose instead a more congenial potatoes-to-vodka ratio, where some writers prefer to assemble more potatoes (or “world”) and others fewer, to arrive at a given amount of distilled spirit (or “understanding”).

In this new potatoes-to-vodka model, the potatoes, of course, are the physical matter of a story—shoes, ceilings, arguments, sentences, eyebrows, wind, cat hair, Coca-Cola, and jump ropes³, while vodka is the metaphysical understanding derived from these physical things. We may call this a writer’s p:v ratio, representing the efficiency with which a writer typically makes use of the world.

In the following selections, potatoes are set in bold and spirit, in italics.

Alice Munro will, as always, provide a useful—and in this case usefully typical—example. In “Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage”, a middle-aged, unattractive woman shops for a fancy dress, thinking (at this point falsely) that she is going to be married in it. She enters the shop:

Along one wall was a rack of evening dresses, all fit for belles of the ball with their net and taffeta, their dreamy colors. And beyond them, in a glass case so no profane fingers could get at them, half a dozen wedding gowns, pure white froth or vanilla satin or ivory lace, embroidered in silver beads or seed pearls. Tiny bodies, scalloped necklines, lavish skirts. Even when she was younger she could never have contemplated such extravagance, not just in the matter of money but in expectations, in the preposterous hope of transformation, and bliss.

Here the metaphysical understanding has plainly been reached by means of the physical observation. The potatoes of the shop provide a sort of ballast to the abstracted thought, but also provide the means by which to arrive at it. A reasonable amount of world (the rack, the net and taffeta, et cetera) produces in a character a reasonable amount of mind-stuff.

Munro is unique in her ability but not in her technique; most writers’ habits in this regard at least superficially resemble Munro’s, deploying a moderate amount of stuff to arrive at a moderate amount of spirit. And perhaps it is this moderation that allows us to qualify a writer as “realistic”—most of us seem to experience the world at something like this measured pace, after all, as we move through our days both beset by sensory input and at the same time subject to the addled and improvisatory workings of our own brains.⁴ In a similar vein, John Updike observes before he transcends, in “The Afterlife”:

A broad-faced strawberry blonde, she had always worn sweaters and plaid pleated skirts and low-heeled shoes for her birding walks, and here this same outfitseemed a shade more chic and less aggressively “sensible” than it had at home. Her pleasant plain looks, rather lost in the old crowd of heavily groomed suburban wives, had bloomed in this climate; her manner, as she showed them the house and their room upstairs, seemed to Carter somehow blushing, bridal.⁵

If this balance between world and mind allows us to locate Munro and Updike in the solid realistic mainstream of contemporary fiction, what of some others? What happens if you prefer fewer potatoes? What if you prefer more? What if you’re not interested in describing spirit at all? Or what if you’re more interested in meaning than in matter, like some spats-wearing evangelist, waving your hands in the air in hopes of producing something from nothing? Clearly this requires an inadequate, seat-of-the-pants survey.

Tweaking the P:V Ratio

Some writers, of course, prefer to avoid the explicit statement of spirit entirely. Hemingway and his ilk have a very high ratio of potatoes-to-vodka, with Hemingway’s followers arranged around him in a haphazard spatter array. To take a familiar example, Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance” lives almost entirely in the present, physical moment; a man, now without his wife (we gather she has left because of his drinking, among other reasons), puts his household belongings out in his yard and driveway, arranging them for sale just as they have been arranged in the house. A young couple comes along; the girl dances with the man, and is evidently affected by his plight. The story is told in simple, factual terms, with little or no reference to thoughts, feelings, or epiphanic realizations. The story’s final section, in its entirety, goes:

Weeks later, she said: “The guy was about middle-aged. All his things right there in his yard. No lie. We got real pissed and danced. In the driveway. Oh, my God. Don’t laugh. He played us these records. Look at this record-player. The old guy gave it to us. And all these crappy records. Will you look at this shit?”

She kept talking. She told everyone. There was more to it, and she was trying to get it talked out. After a time, she quit trying.

Potatoes? Vodka? It is debatable. The girl is feeling something, of course, as the story suggests, but she can’t express it, possibly because she hasn’t got the equipment to do so. And because she can’t express it, we don’t get an explicit statement of it either. It’s possible to read the whole story as a pile of potatoes, with that last 26-word paragraph serving as the equivalent of the story’s spirit. The story’s last paragraph is in fact the mental result, finally, of a worldly encounter. At any rate, the ratio of potatoes to vodka here is very high, if indeed there is any vodka to divide by.

By contrast, a writer may be particularly interested in spirit—literally so in the case of, for example, James Baldwin, whose stories and novels tend to avoid physical description while dwelling more on abstract concerns. In his story “The Outing”, three boys are on the make in various ways during a church retreat. Then they enter the meeting room:

During his testimony Johnny and Roy and David had stood quietly beside the door, not daring to enter while he spoke. The moment he sat down they moved quickly, together, to the front of the high hall and knelt down beside their seats to pray. The aspect of each of them underwent always, in this company, a striking, even an exciting change; as though their youth, barely begun, were already put away; and the animal, so vividly restless and undiscovered, so tense with power, ready to spring had already stalked and trapped and offered, a perpetual blood-sacrifice, on the altar of the Lord.

We sense here that, as is often the case for Baldwin, conflict is played out in an almost literal sense on the field of the personality, where such matters as identity and the fate of one’s soul are best and most frankly considered. The rendering of the Baldwin’s physical world is often minimal, as though such surface concerns are too trivial to consider.⁶

With these opposing practices in mind, we must now consider a minor and possibly self-evident corollary aspect of this idea, that of scale.

Scale

The scale under consideration here is the differing P:V ratio we find in stories versus novels. We know that novels tend to be richer in their effects than stories; specifically, we find that novelists tend to describe much more matter than a story writer will, but will derive from this matter roughly the same amount of spirit (or sometimes slightly more).⁷ In other words, novelists pile up more potatoes as a matter of course, but don’t derive giant gushing fountains of vodka. Longer descriptions leading to bigger heaps of stuff, but not a concomitant increase in the amount of understanding derived. You can only understand so much at once, after all.

In Couples, John Updike describes Harold little-Smith’s house; Harold has just learned that his wife may be having an affair. This has the effect of rendering his house “more transparent”, and the description that follows is limpid to the extreme, if sometimes verging on the purple. The house is:

…a flat-roofed redwood modern oriented along a little sheltered ridge overlooking the marsh to the south. The foyer was floored in flagstones; on the right an open stairway went down to a basement level where the three children (Jonathan, Julia, Henrietta) slept and the laundry was done and the cars were parked. Above this, on the main level, were the kitchen, the dining room, the master bedroom, a polished hall where hung reproductions of etchings by Rembrandt, Durer, Piranesi, and Picasso. To the left of the foyer a dramatically long living room opened up, with a shaggy cerulean rug and two facing white sofas and symmetrical hi-fi speakers and a Baldwin grand and at the far end an elevated fireplace with a great copper hood. The house bespoke money in the service of taste. In the summer evenings he would drive back from the station through the livelong light hovering above the tawny marshes, flooded or dry according to the tides, and find his little wife, her black hair freshly combed and parted, waiting on the longer of the sofas, which was not precisely white but rather a rough Iranian wool bleached to the pallor of sand mixed with ash. A record, Glenn Gould or Dinu Lupatti playing Bach or Schumann, would be sending forth clear vines of sound from the invisible root within the hi-fi closet. A pitcher of martinis would have been mixed and held chilled within the refrigerator toward this precious moment of his daily homecoming….

The description in the original goes on at about this length again, and includes such additional stuff as a chewed sponge ball, Jonathan in bathing trunks, the liquid branches of the lawn sprinkler, and so on. The overwhelming feeling is of an assembling stillness and a slant-lit suburban glamour—a hushed, beautiful hesitation—until at last:

Marcia would pour two verdant martinis into glasses that would suddenly sweat…and his entire household, even the stray milk butterfly perched on the copper fireplace hood, felt about to spring into bliss, like a tightly wound music box.

Here possibly we may see that a writer’s natural habits align better with one form than with another; in his best work Updike the novelist seems to be much more confident that his gist will come across than does Updike the short-story writer. There is far less—relatively speaking—summarizing and explaining, as though Updike feels confident that surely, given all the matter he has presented to us, we will be able to see what he means.

Turn the ratio down somewhat to discover Ian McEwan at work in Atonement, gathering his many finely described potatoes in order to derive, on behalf of Briony, a rather considerable draft of spirit:

…in a prized varnished cabinet, a secret drawer was opened by pushing against the grain of a cleverly turned dovetail joint, and here she kept a diary locked by a clasp, and a notebook written in a code of her own invention. In a toy safe opened by six secret numbers she stored letters and postcards. An old tin petty cash box was hidden under a removable floorboard beneath her bed. In the box were treasures that dated back four years, to her ninth birthday when she began collecting: a mutant double acorn, fool’s gold, a rainmaking spell bought at a funfair, a squirrel’s skull as light as a leaf.

But hidden drawers, lockable diaries and cryptographic systems could not conceal from Briony the simple truth: she had no secrets. Her wish for a harmonious, organized world denied her the reckless possibilities of wrongdoing. Mayhem and destruction were too chaotic for her tastes, and she did not have it in her to be cruel. Her effective status as an only child, as well as the relative isolation of the Tallis house, kept her, at least during the long summer holidays, from girlish intrigues with friends. Nothing in her life was sufficiently interesting or shameful to merit hiding; no one knew about the squirrel’s skull beneath her bed, but no one wanted to know. None of this was particularly an affliction; or rather, it appeared so only in retrospect, once a solution had been found.

And observe Henry James, masterfully interweaving matter with spirit through the mind of the young and impressionable Isabel Archer, suggesting that to the greatest and most knowing practitioners, mind and matter are really inseparable aspects of a fundamental unity. Notice how difficult it sometimes is, in the following example, to decide which side of things a sentence or a phrase is addressing, and how, for James, matters of custom and perception can be seen to blend:

The foundation of her knowledge was really laid in the idleness of her grandmother’s house, where, as most of the other inmates were not reading people, she had uncontrolled use of a library full of books with frontispieces, which she used to climb upon a chair to take down. When she had found one to her taste—she was guided in the selection chiefly by the frontispiece—she carried it into a mysterious apartment which lay beyond the library and which was called, traditionally, no one knew why, the office. Whose office it had been and at what period it had flourished, she never learned; it was enough for her that it contained an echo and a pleasant musty smell and that it was a chamber of disgrace for old pieces of furniture whose infirmities were not always apparent (so that the disgrace seemed unmerited and rendered them victims of injustice) and with which, in the manner of children, she had established relations almost human, certainly dramatic. There was an old haircloth sofa in especial, to which she had confided a hundred childish sorrows. The place owed much of its mysterious melancholy to the fact that it was properly entered from the second door of the house, the door that had been condemned, and that it was secured by bolts which a particularly slender girl found it impossible to slide. She knew that this silent, motionless portal opened into the street; if the sidelights had not been filled with green paper she might have looked out upon the little brown stoop and the well-worn brick pavement. But she had no wish to look out, for this would have interfered with her theory that there was a strange, unseen place on the other side—a place which became to the child’s imagination, according to its different moods, a region of delight or terror.

As a further and final aside, and related to the example of James, it is worth noting that as the efficiency of narrative distillation increases, and as the ratio of world-to-mind approaches the perfect balance of 1:1, peculiar things can begin to happen. John Cheever’s novels and stories live fruitfully at this stylistic event-horizon, the authorial eye shuttling so swiftly between world and mind that the boundary between the two begins to fade away. In “The Ocean”, one of Cheever’s prototypically imperiled householders fears he is being poisoned by his wife:

I mixed a Martini and went into the living room. I was not in any danger from which I could not readily escape. I could go to the country club for supper. Why I hesitated to do this seems, in retrospect, to have been because of the blue walls of the room in which I stood. It was a handsome room, its long windows looking out onto a lawn, some trees, and the sky. The orderliness of the room seemed to impose some orderliness on my own conduct—as if by absenting myself from the table I would in some way offend the order of things. If I went to the club for supper I would be yielding to my suspicions and damaging my hopefulness, and I was determined to remain hopeful.

Cheever’s rough 1:1 p:v ratio seems to go some way toward producing his trademark sound—a sort of tremulous, searching flight, as a claustrophobic eye shuttles ceaselessly between world and mind in search of an elusive certainty. The feeling becomes one of weird immersion and a kind of synesthesia; the character experiences the world, has an immediate mental reaction, and is then at once experiencing the world again. Fitting perhaps that we find the fraught and frenzied Cheever here, seeing and feeling, seeing and feeling, helpless to prevent his marvelously fruitful mind from making something of everything.⁸

The Visual Aid

Finally, with all these dubious propositions behind us, we can suggest that every writer might be plotted on a p:v graph, giving rise to the highly dubious Figure 1:

Surely we have gone too far with this, and certainly it is entirely wrong to put novelists and short-story writers together, rather as though we have tried somehow to pen up tigers with barracuda, but it is interesting to note the opposing and intersecting groupings, one of which we may very generally see is composed of Worriers—writers less at home in the world, and who have taken the self, or some version of the self, as the subject—while the other is composed of Composed Describers, writers who have taken the world as their subject and, generally speaking, written about society. That this is a byproduct of the individual personalities in question seems plain. We should also note that the very greatest tend to find themselves at rather the far points on the graph, outliers here as elsewhere, and that certain stylistically versatile folks can be imagined to be plotted in more than one place (Welty’s various moods, Updike’s, Faulkner’s come to mind), rather as though they have both a city house and a country one.

But what are we to do with this, then, as writers of prose? Probably we ought to note the relative scarcity of successful examples on the left side of the chart, whose few denizens have managed, like those extremophile bacteria who manage to flourish on ocean-bottom vents or in sulfuric acid pools in the depths of limestone caves, to survive in difficult environments, deriving great hogsheads of spirit from mere armfuls of potatoes. We ought to observe the cluster of sturdy realists trading remarks around the 10:2 mark, with the anomalous Coetzee somehow standing there too, all cool and gray and saying absolutely nothing whatsoever to anybody, and we may further admiringly note the high, plush posts of the great novelists, who manage to furnish their work with not only a great amplitude of matter but also of insight. We will leave it to the poets and especially to those lucky vessels who feel themselves recipients of divine inspiration to aspire to the ratio of 100:100, wherein the great unimaginable gigantitude of the world is, leaf-by-leaf, quantum-by-quantum, infused with the fullness of a supernaturally omnipresent understanding. We here are only prose writers, and we have deadlines to meet, so something like “just enough, not too much” will have to do. A little vodka is good for you, let us be satisfied to say, and too much ain’t.

Notes

1. Person, place, object, situation, idea—they’re all hard.

2. I see pall people.

3. Nouns are especially weighty. Descriptions are usually made of nouns and adjectives. But actions and lines of dialog must also be recognized as potato-esque in their effects, too, and a very good description will usually contain some element of action. Notice where your attention tends to catch and where it tends to slide in this description of Gabriel, from “The Dead”:

He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.

When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin rapidly from his pocket.

Observe Joyce’s well-intentioned attempts to ‘actionize’ the description: “pushed upwards,” “scattered itself,” “scintillated restlessly,” “screened.” But these are tricks, and not very successful. The mind’s eye is most engaged when Gabriel is actually doing something—”he pulled his waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body.” And it is least engaged where he is simply being something—”He was a stout tallish young man.” We see what is done more easily than we see what simply is. In this our eye is amphibian, registering change, becoming blind to stasis.

4. This is, it may be argued, the fundamental work of narrative art: the description of the metronomic interaction between the private mind and the constantly impinging world.

5. Updike’s reliance on seemed here and throughout his mighty oeuvre suggests his general preoccupation with the truth that lurks behind appearances, with making sure that everything be understood; and if it is this impulse that gives rise to his occasional overweening anxiety that we get the point of something, it strikes me as a fitting impulse. Very tall, he was terribly gawky as a child, with a gigantic nose, debilitating eczema, a comical stutter, and to top it all off a world-class mind. No one looking at him could have guessed what he really was. No wonder that the Rabbit books feature a man who, on the surface, is mostly unremarkable—a former high school basketball star, a printing press operator, a car salesman, a middling husband and father—and yet who has perhaps the most florid, nuanced internal life of any character ever composed. Related to this, surely, is Updike’s chronic affection for adverbs, those gravitational devices that control the flight of a verb even after it has been set loose. What other author would give us a character who “steered sullenly”? A life that is “majestically rooted”? Why else would he describe a hoard of treasure as “surreptitiously hidden”? Because of a mostly generous desire to make sure we get what he’s saying. That we get him, really, the kid with the big nose and the hideous skin, who also happens to be, as he might say, transcendently alight.

6. This is complicated by the fact that Baldwin’s characters also often struggle against their own bodies in various ways.

7. This is true even when the novelist and the short story writer are one and the same person; Doctorow the novelist has a much higher P:V ratio than Doctorow the short-story writer.

8. That Cheever was subject to the workings of his peculiar brain seems obvious; it has always struck me that the hysterical, sensory-enhanced well-being expressed in so much of Cheever’s work resembles the feeling that accompanies an epileptic’s ‘aura’, wherein the universe seems infused with mysterious meaning. Late in his life, with his brain ruined by booze, Cheever in fact had two epileptic seizures; it is my unsupportable crackpot belief that he had been experiencing mild seizures all his life, and that his habitual drinking may have been, in some small part, a means by which he attempted to reproduce the lovely feelings that unpredictably descended upon him, and which must have seemed, undiagnosed as they would have been, messages from a greater, senselessly benign power. Poor, mean, helpless, brilliant Cheever.

Serving the Story: An Interview with Richard Bausch

Emily Besh — Mon, 14 May 2012 13:00:46 +0000

Richard Bausch, © Mark Weber

Richard Bausch is an exacting writer. With precise language that lends a breathtaking verisimilitude to his fiction, Bausch lays the groundwork in which settings and characters—their smallest actions and passing conversations—seem not only memorable, but inevitable. Immersed in his books, you see with new clarity.

I recently had the privilege of joining him in the Moss Workshop at the University of Memphis, a model he began more than sixteen years ago. Just in time, too. He has recently accepted a position with the faculty at Chapman University in California, a post he assumes in August.

Bausch is colorful, uncensored, and opinionated—unruly, even—like someone who would (and did) leave his car idling by railroad tracks to jump a passing train. He often wears a baseball cap pulled low over his brow, beneath which his eyes have a mischievous gleam. He’s willing, always, to try his hand at something new: the guitar, say, or stand-up comedy. He loves theater and film, often tossing out a quick quote or recounting a salient scene. Through eleven published novels and eight collections of short stories, Bausch has proven to be not only prolific but consistently excellent, a writer whose discipline equals his passion.

Bausch’s dexterity with short stories elevates the form. His straightforward, minimalistic style doesn’t pull shazaam endings, or plot pyrotechnics. But a story like the O’Henry-winning “What Feels Like the World” chokes me with emotion every time. Using simple, direct dialogue, Bausch fixes his stories’ terrain in the mind. It’s as if he turns your head and says “There. Now look.”

Interview

Emily Besh: Who ignited your desire to write, and when did you begin to identify yourself as a writer?

Richard Bausch: I had a teacher named Helen Garson when I was in my first year of college, who looked at me after reading something I’d written and said, “You’re a Southern writer by definition with all this family stuff in here, and you’re going to be a great one, I can tell.” I lived on that for a long time—through a lot of bad times. I ended up teaching with her for twenty years, and sending my own students to her. And she got a signed copy of every book as it came out, and with every one she wrote me a lovely letter, appreciating what she found in it. A great teacher.

And there was another, Lorraine Brown, who one day when I said I didn’t think I had it in me to write one more scholarly paper, smiled at me and said, “All right then, write me a verse play, like Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.” That was the Yeats we were reading. She was another great one.

As to when I truly began to identify myself as a writer, it must have been when I sold the first novel. I remember going to the door and pushing it wide open and standing in it with my legs slightly apart, like a man expecting a high wind, and cupped my hands to the sides of my mouth and shouted “Listen up everybody! I’m a novelist!”

When I was a lot younger than that, I went around a lot with the suspicion that I might be a writer, afraid to think about it too directly, and feeling presumptuous and pretentious for the thought.

And of course the doubt is always heavy and never goes away, nor does the tentativeness about it ALL.

You give subtle attention to seemingly minor moments in your narratives. How often do you find yourself saying “too much,” rather than “not enough?”

I seldom question or edit much as I’m writing. During the process of thinking about it all and trying to revise and be sharp, I go back and forth, sometimes feeling it is too much (usually in this case it is more about showing off my own skill, or giving forth the best and most flattering sense of my tender soul and my ‘bag of sorrows,’ as Frederick Busch put it once—than contributing to the reader’s visceral feeling of the events I’m describing)—sometimes feeling it is too much, and sometimes feeling it is not enough, anemic because I’ve gone past it without looking at it coldly and as a stranger might. I want there to be enough for the reader to care what happens; and I want the words to disappear, in a way, so the reader is not so much aware that he is reading. It is indeed a fine line, but when you go through it 75 times, it gets a little clearer. You’re better able to tell the difference between the anemic or slipshod, and the self-indulgent or excessive for its own sake. Everything should be subservient to the story, including all my opinions and all my attitudes and all my ambitions, too.

You hit the literary world running—your first two novels published back-to-back. Could you tell us about that? With eleven novels and eight collections of short stories, it doesn’t seem like you’ve slowed down much.

It went like this: I sold my first novel, Real Presence, under the title, The Vineyard Keeper in early April of 1979. I was 33 years old, about to turn 34. James Dickey, having read the book, called me and suggested the title Real Presence. I didn’t like it at first, but can see now that it is the only possible title for that book. Later that summer, after experiencing the heady validation of selling the first one, and on the good advise of my pal Susan Richards Shreve, who already had two books out, I began a second novel.

I was calling that one I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back, because it began with a kid obsessed with baseball. I finished that one in early January, under the title Take Me Back. Just as I delivered that novel, news came in that Real Presence would be a Book of The Month Club Alternate Selection. And then in early June, after the book came out, it was reviewed in Time. Take Me Back was sold and in galleys before Real Presence appeared. And when in May a year later Take Me Back came out, Jane Smiley said to a mutual friend, “Maybe he’s dying, and trying to get them all out before it happens.” That’s Jane’s humor, and I laughed when I heard it.

Anyway, because the second one came so quickly, I got it into my head that I had it figured out now, and would be delivering a novel roughly every four months. Take Me Back got nominated for the PEN/Faulkner award, with a citation written by Walker Percy. I got to know him at the awards ceremony. And pretty soon I was walking around trying to write a philosophical novel a la Mr. Percy, and it was my wife, Karen, who finally called me on it, after two years of misery and four different manuscripts that I never let out of the house.

Now I don’t know what the average is, and am not inclined to use the math necessary to figure it. I do know that I have never gone longer than three years without publishing a book since 1980. And if I can finish the present novel and deliver it and have it accepted, I will publish it in 2013, probably, which keeps to the never-more-than three years pattern.

How does the germ of a story begin? Does the process still surprise you?

They come in different ways and with different matters trailing along in them. I carried “What Feels Like The World” around—the floor of it: a man and his overweight daughter, and the sorrow parents feel watching their children go into a building where they can have no immediate effect on what happens to them in there—I carried that around for a year or so, because each day for a long while I’d seen this heavy man with his overweight daughter walking up to the door of my kids’ school. There was a special bond between them. And then carrying that around as I was, that image and that sense of the helpless love I knew he felt in the circumstance, his heavy darling walking up to the door and in, where, children being as they are, she would suffer all that they both knew she would suffer the whole day long, and it was in their faces, too.

Carrying that around as I was, I happened to be at a gymnastics demonstration at that very school, where about nine of the seventy kids ran around the vaulting horse instead of going over it. (I think the heavy girl was in an earlier class, or was absent.) But of course there were other heavy kids and watching them go around the vaulting horse, I had an image of this man, this father of the heavy girl throwing a fit in the hallway of the school about his child, saying “What the hell. Everybody can do SOMETHING, can’t they? Why put her through this humiliation?” I had that picture of him shouting down the hallway of the school, and I knew then that I would write the story. Or, a story. Something to do with that helpless feeling the parent suffers when his child has to go through the badness of that kind of situation.

When I got to the end, I read the last paragraphs to my wife, who said, “You can’t leave it there.” I read the end to some friends, all of whom said, “No, you can’t leave it there. The reader will want to know.”

So I tried like hell to render the rest of the scene, and I did it both ways. [The first], where I wrote her sailing over the vaulting horse, felt like cheating, like treacley television Hollywood cotton candy reality existing only to pander to the already asleep. The second way, where she failed to get over, felt like cheating it another way, rubbing a smart reader’s nose in it purely for the self-indulgent pleasure I could get out of what I could do with English sentences to make him squirm and hurt past the experience. So I left the end as it was and sold it to The Atlantic a couple of weeks later. And it won an O. Henry Award and I still get people who want to know if she gets over that vaulting horse.

It was after it had been in the magazine, and sometime just before it appeared in my first book of stories, that I was visiting a class my friend the poet Roland Flint was teaching and he pointed out what the story was really about: “It is soaked in grief,” he said. “And of course grief, the thing you can’t get over, is that vaulting horse.” I did not know this in the writing of it and this is why I talk so much about trying to let go of what you think and just feel your way through it like a child making that drawing, seeing it directly and without attitudes or opinions or, really, beliefs, either.

I never sketch out any plot, and will only make a note as to the next minute or so in the life of a character or some idea of where he/she’ll go in the next couple of pages, if I have some sense that I won’t be able to call it up when I sit down again. If the story does not surprise me, I do not trust it, and will usually not let it go until it does surprise me. The surprises are all the fun of it. And if you trust them enough you’ll write a lot of stuff that will please you every time you look at it for the surprises it gave you. Somehow they always stay fresh.

When you return to a scene, how do you go about adding to depth and texture?

There is a simple answer to this one, though it is difficult as hell in practice. In re-writing, along with paying attention to the writing, the sentences line by line, I also try to see if I am involving all the senses, how it feels on the skin, texture, smells, sounds, sight. All of it. And then in looking at what is said I try to make sure that every line of dialogue is doing more than one thing. That is, carrying the story forward, giving character, leaking in history and the matters that are at issue, the what’s-wrong, as it were, but keeping all this artifice from being visible to the reader. Then having worked all that, and gone over and over it, I go over it still again, looking at the writing again, the words and lines. I want all the artifice to disappear; I want everything to disappear except these people in their trouble, whatever it is. And it is always some kind of trouble because that is the province of the human story, and news of the spirit in narrative can only arrive through the abrasions of conflict. Conflict, which scrapes the barnacles from the soul and lays it bare.

What do you grow against? The classics?

Oh, yes, of course the classics—and books, books, books, all the time. Right now I’m reading Tolstoy—War And Peace for the fifth time, Anna Karenina, for the third; Kawabata—Thousand Cranes; Shakespeare—over these last five months, King Lear six or seven times, listening and reading; Romeo and Juliet four times, listening and reading; As You Like It twice, Macbeth three or four times; Hamlet four or five times; Twelfth Night and Julius Caesar; Graham Greene—The Power And The Glory for the third time; Eudora Welty—Delta Wedding; Percival Everett – Assumption; Alix Ohlin—Signs And Wonders; Trollope—The Eustace Diamonds for the first time (and I’ve been reading it for a year); and Philip Roth—Indignation, and I just finished Nemesis and Everyman.

In the workshop you once said it would be a “sin” for us not to write. Could you elaborate?

We live in a culture that sees trying to write as some sort of indulgence of the ego, when not a plain presumption. But if you have talent for it, you are morally obligated to do it, and all one need do is look at that passage in the Bible about the ten talents: it’s where we get the word. The very word implies responsibility.

I had a dear friend, gone now, the poet Roland Flint, who called me one night crying, because he’d had this thing happen on his way home from school: he saw a little toddler on the island between two lanes of traffic. Stopped to keep him from wandering into the road. Held his hand and walked him across the street, thinking all the while about his son, Ethan, who was run over by a car and killed before his eyes twelve years earlier. The toddler’s parents came running from a house in the opposite direction of where Roland was walking the child, and the father got down on one knee and yelled at the child. “Don’t EVER go out of the house without Mommy and Daddy.” And Roland had to say, “I think he’s very frightened now.” And the parents stood there, the mother holding the child, now, and Roland went on to say, “I must tell you, I lost my son in this way, twelve years ago.” The parents said they were sorry and went on to their house and in, and Roland went, crying, back to his car, got in, drove home, wrote about the event in his journal, then wrote a poem about it, still crying, and finally called me.

He said, “To think that I could cheapen Ethan’s death by writing a goddamned poem about it. To think that I could use it in that way.” And I listened, and told him I loved him and understood, and we hung up. But then I thought about it and I called him back. “Roland, you’re supposed to write the poem. You’re morally obligated to do it. You must do it. For Ethan, and for all those people out there who don’t have the words, who’ve gone through this very thing. It’s what you’re absolutely supposed to do now.”

And he wrote his poem, “Stubborn.” And had it printed in a large picture frame, and inscribed it to me like this: “I wondered who I’d sign this first copy to, but of course should have known all along it would have to go to the Bausch who made me write it.”

It was one of my proudest possessions for all the years I was in that house in Virginia, and as far as I know, it is still on the wall there.

But that’s what it really means: the ten talents and us, who have this talent.

Further Links & Resources

Follow Richard Bausch’s Ten Commandments for writers.
Get Baush’s latest book, the collection Something Is Out There. [Amazon. Powell's. Indiebound.]
Read Roland Flint’s poem “Stubborn” (scroll down to the second poem on the page).

Get Writing: On Desire

Eileen Pollack — Wed, 09 May 2012 13:00:13 +0000

Desire is the writer’s best friend. When you know what your main character wants, you have your entire story. When someone wants something–badly–he or she will get up off the couch and try to attain it. The object of desire might be a new winter coat (”The Overcoat” by Gogol), a boy (”City of Boys” by Beth Nugent), money for a family member’s medicine (”King of the Bingo Game” by Ralph Ellison), a business contract (”Like a Bad Dream” by Heinrich Boll)–it doesn’t matter, as long as the desire is concrete and the character can pursue it. The character’s desire not only will fuel the story’s prose, the fact that your character wants that thing will make him or her interesting (in some ways, desire is character) even if he or she isn’t “likable” (think of Humbert Humbert).

The desire will create suspense (will he or won’t he achieve his desire?) and provide your story with a simple, easy-to-follow structure. What’s the first thing someone who wants that object of desire might do to attain it? What if that doesn’t work? (A big advantage: Getting your character out of his head and out of the house and in contact with other characters.) The story’s turning point will be the scene in which the character either achieves his desire–or realizes he never will. And the final paragraph? Having achieved or not achieved his desire, what is the character thinking or feeling?

Here’s the exercise: Imagine you are your main character (or just write from your own perspective). What do you really, really want? Now, start talking about that object of desire. Don’t keep saying, “I want X, I want X, I want X” Rather, just talk about the thing you want, in all its desirable specificity. Let yourself get caught up in all that wanting. If you get stuck, reread the first few paragraphs of Lolita.

Eileen Pollack is the author of Breaking and Entering; The Rabbi in the Attic And Other Stories; In The Mouth; Paradise, New York; and Woman Walking Ahead: In Search of Catherine Weldon and Sitting Bull. She lives in Ann Arbor and is a member of the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan.

Get lost in our archives of “Get Writing” prompts.

From Story to Novel: An Interview with Ben Fountain

Steven Wingate — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:00:34 +0000

I met Ben Fountain at the 2008 AWP Conference in New York while we both grabbed a bite to eat and a cup to drink at an overpriced cart that jammed up the hallway. He was a gentleman in the best sense of the word: unprepossessing, not trying to impress himself upon the world, and a snappy dresser (I still remember wanting to trade my suit jacket for his). Naturally we chatted about writing; his first collection of short stories had come out recently, and mine was just about to. He handed me a card with his name and book cover on it, said he hoped to see me while he signed copies at the booth later that day, and then we both dissolved into the crowd.

The book turned out to be Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (Harper/Ecco 2006), and as I read its stories I desperately wished that I’d been the one who wrote them. His characters—ranging from a grad student in ornithology who gets kidnapped in Columbia to a soldier who marries a Haitian voodoo deity—seemed to leap into abysses of their own creation, and Fountain followed them all the way to the bottom before watching them climb painstakingly out. I wasn’t the only one who loved the book, as it earned its author a bevy of decorations, including a PEN/Hemingway Award and a Whiting Writers’ Award.

Thanks to Che I’ve been on the lookout for Fountain’s debut novel for quite some time, and have occasionally pestered him by email to find out when it would be published. So when I heard about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, published by Harper/Ecco just this month, I had to be the first kid on my block to read it.

From the first page, I wanted be the one who’d written Halftime even more desperately than I’d wanted to be the one who wrote Che. The novel grabbed me, started running, and didn’t give me a chance to ask where we were going. Halftime unfolds on Thanksgiving day during a Dallas Cowboys (a.k.a. “America’s Team”) football game, when a group of American soldiers on leave from Iraq are celebrated for their bravery in battle. It turns out that an embedded TV news crew caught a fierce battle on tape, which turned the “Bravo Team” into temporary celebrities.

At the center of this is Billy Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texan who earned a Silver Star in Iraq but must, like the rest of his fellow Bravos, return there after his Thanksgiving reprieve. Fountain drills into Billy’s life and psyche, not relenting until he has brought all of his protagonist’s dreams, fears, contradictions, alliances, and assumptions to light. The pointlessness and release of war, his own virginity, his miserable wheelchair-bound father, the patriotism that he wishes would be simpler than it has become, the sister who wants him to go AWOL from the war.

Along the way Fountain sends us into the lives of Lynn’s comrades and the smorgasbord of people he meets at Texas Stadium. There’s Sergeant Dime, who rides his men non-stop but often appears like a mythological trickster, a Loki or Coyote who sees through the world’s folly. There’s Shroom, poor dead Shroom, who expired in Billy’s arms in Iraq and who still offers him, beyond the grave, an alternative way to make America and human life itself add up to more than the sum of its parts. We meet a movie producer who can’t quite land a deal to get the Bravo Squad’s story on the big screen, Beyoncé Knowles (from a discreet distance), the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, and a bunch of angry roadies armed with pipes. Along the way, Billy and his fellow soldiers will gradually learn just how completely they’ve been sucked into the American spectacle-making machine.

It’s as kaleidoscopic and unflinchingly absurd as the novel with which it will most often be compared—Joseph Heller’s Catch-22—or as Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of Night. Fountain’s language, from start to finish, takes brave chance after brave chance as it rages through the book like a storm. I don’t like to throw the “G-word” out casually, but let me say this: Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is the first great novel of America’s twenty-first century wars.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: May is national short story month, and you’ve made your name thus far as a short story writer. Can you describe your experience of making the transition from one mode to another?

Ben Fountain: The transition started around 1992, and has been painful, slow, and riddled with failure. I’ve got two complete novels in the drawer, along with a big chunk of another, and my only excuse is that I must not be very good at this, and what I’ve managed to figure out about writing novels took me a long time to learn. I think one of the main problems with the defunct novels is that I felt the need to set everything up in logical, painstaking detail—so much backstory before the real story got going, which was maybe my way of being lazy, of avoiding coming to grips with the real story and all the gut-it-out work that would involve.

They say that every project teaches its author how to write it. What was the process like of learning how to write Halftime, and how did that differ from learning how to write Che?

Handling “time” in Billy Lynn was much more of a challenge than I remember it being in any short stories I’ve written. Billy Lynn takes place over the course of one day, but to do what I wanted to do I had to figure out how to slide in significant chunks of past action without, hopefully, slowing down the speed and momentum of the present-tense narrative. There’s one long flashback in the book, but otherwise I found myself going for bits and pieces of flashback, layering those fragments within the present narrative. So maybe I learned a little bit more about how to deal with time in the novel form.

Your relationship to language in Halftime differs from that in Che. It has a load of F-bombs, not only in the mouths of the soldiers but in the narrative voice as well. There’s a go for broke-ness to your language, a verging toward the edge of control. How did you arrive at that?

I arrived at it by the seat of my pants. With pretty much everything I write, the conception of the story seems to arrive with a sound in my head. It’s supposed to sound a certain way, and part of the challenge in writing the story is tuning into that sound, finding the words and rhythms that will get it on the page. It’s always very rough at first, trying to locate that signal, trying to find the right language, and for most of the time you’re flying blind, basically picking your way along.

To write Billy Lynn correctly it seemed I had to find this dense, rude, pummeling, in-your-face sound that maybe–and this is the rationale I arrived at in the course of writing the book—is the sound of the basic insanity of American culture.

From what I can tell of your biography, you don’t seem to have been in the military. But there are soldiers in Che, and Halftime is entirely immersed in the soldier’s world. How do these characters enter your imagination, and how did you inhabit their language and worldview?

You’re right, I was never in the military. So I did what writers always do to appropriate experience that’s not their own—I read everything I could get my hands on, watched all the documentaries, talked to all the soldiers and ex-soldiers who I came across, and generally tried to immerse myself in that world. In other words, research, but that’s just laying the foundation. Ultimately, if you’re to succeed in this type of endeavor, it takes an act—or maybe serial acts would be a better way to put it—of imagination, but you can’t launch unless you’ve done that sort of immersive research. And then you’re also bringing in pieces of your own experience, episodes that might be comparable with the experience you’re trying to imagine your way into. Say, the writing equivalent of method acting? I’m the kind of desperate writer who will use any and every thing that might help me write the story.

After the success of Che, you had a novel called The Texas Itch that never made it off the ground. What happened with that book, and what did you learn from the experience that you could bring to bear in writing Halftime?

The short answer to what happened to that book is that it wasn’t good enough. I’d started that book a long time ago, when I was a much different, and dare I say less able, writer, and despite all my lumbering efforts I couldn’t quite drag it up to whatever level I was operating on once Che was done. Too much backstory, maybe too much labyrinthine plot, and a voice that didn’t quite ring true, or at least fell short too much of the time. I spent a lot of years on that book, many more than I care to admit. The cliche about your greatest strength always being your greatest weakness? That seems to be true in my case—I’m stubborn as hell and find it hard to walk away from anything, but the same hard-headedness that kept me writing long enough that I seem to have arrived at some sort of “career” was also the trait that kept me at The Texas Itch long after I probably should have put it away.

What did I learn that I brought to bear on Billy Lynn? Well, maybe I learned something about compression, about economy of backstory and present narrative. And that I could take a hit like that—having a novel crash and burn in the most spectacular way—and move on to the next thing.

The midpoint sequence of the novel involves the Bravo Squad meeting Dallas Cowboys owner Norm Oglesby, who whips a room full of cheerleaders into a calculated frenzy for media types. You write “The bullshit part of it, isn’t that part of the story too? But not a word, not a murmur, not a peep from the press about how thoroughly they’ve been used this day.” It’s hard not to see this is a critique of American media. I suspect you don’t have a specific “message,” but I’m curious to hear what’s roiling around in your head about media and war.

Right. Well, so much of what passes for “news” in our culture is actually marketing of one form or another, these premeditatively staged public events or PR verbiage that are spoon-fed to and dutifully swallowed by the media, to be in turn shat out into the wider world. I remember something Hunter Thompson wrote about a Super Bowl he was covering, how with all the hundreds or thousands of reporters on hand, with all the tonnage of copy and video stories produced that week, there might be only a couple of stories in which the writer alluded to the actual story that was unfolding, namely, that it was a huge, carefully staged corporate PR event that happened to have a football game attached, and the media were serving as the tacit delivery system for the message that would generate the profits.

My question is, why shouldn’t that be part of the story that’s reported? The experience of the reporting itself, and the varying degrees in which it might be authentic or artificial? Do pay attention to that man behind the curtain.

As for including this line of thought in the book, it wasn’t so much that I have a “message” as that it’s part of the story. To write the story correctly, this needed to be a part of it.

One of your most intriguing characters is Sergeant Dime, who has a complex relationship to the war and to his men. On one hand, he berates his men for representing their country poorly. On the other, he’s an absolute scofflaw who ruins several takes of a publicity video by revealing the true level of violence behind the Iraq war. How did he come to you, and what is he all about?

I don’t think it’s so much that Dime is berating his men for representing the country poorly as it is he stays on their ass because he’s their sergeant, and that’s his job. And, face it, 20-year-old males probably need that kind of constant harassment to stay on task. Dime is part of the machine, but he also has an acute awareness of what the machine is about, and he doesn’t mind sharing that awareness with his men in his own, ah, unique way. I think Dime takes tremendous wicked pleasure in pointing out stupidity—the stupidity of particular individuals, and of the culture at large, and his main method of doing this is speaking the truth. Maybe it’s not so much that he’s on a mission for truth as it is that’s where he gets his pleasure and his energy, by rubbing our faces in it.

Let’s say you can give three bits of advice for short story writers who want to take on the novel. What would they be?

I’m probably the last person who should be giving advice on how to go about writing a novel, but since you asked:

First, and this is obvious but still worth saying, make a close study of the good writers and see how they do it. Read with a pen or pencil in your hand and mark the hell out of the page. Pay attention to the decisions the writers are making, what they decide to leave out just as much as what they put in, and where, and how much, with what degree of directness. Their “technique,” if you will.

Second, don’t wait for that huge block of time to materialize, that chunk of days or weeks or months where you’ll have little or nothing to do besides work on your novel. Those big blocks of free time are hard to come by—harder to come by every year, it seems, the way the culture demands more and more of us. If all you can do is chip away at it for an hour or two a day, well, that’s what you have to do. Maybe it’s the interior equivalent of sailing a small boat by yourself around the world. It’s a long haul, and on any one particular day you aren’t going to make much progress, but if you can string together a bunch of days where you push the book along, after a while you start to see yourself getting somewhere.

Third, don’t make all the mistakes I made.

Further Links and Resources

Read Three of Ben Fountain’s short stories on Zoetrope: All-Story.

The New York Times Book Review calls Brief Encounters “exceptional” and says that each of the short stories is “as rich as a novel” in this rave review.

Pick up a copy of both of Ben Fountain’s books from your favorite indie bookseller.

Get Writing: Be Authentic

J.R. Angelella — Wed, 02 May 2012 13:00:19 +0000

Write what you know without simply writing what you know …

Write What You Know. I’ve never felt wholly comfortable with this phrase. I tell my students to abandon the literal idea of it on the first day of class. How bored and boring we’d all be if that were all any of us ever wrote. There needs to be an imbalance—more fiction than fact.

Be Authentic. I ask my students to be authentic on the page instead, to create relatable characters navigating real stories. Our goal as storytellers is to engage our readers and spark a reaction in them through a relatable and believable world. We succeed in our stories by executing a sustained level of authenticity.

My Own Medicine. For years I struggled to write a story about an artist who receives a bad review and shotguns the critic’s apartment, seeking an apology. I knew nothing about art, shotguns, or art criticism and while the story made sense, it wasn’t grounded in any relatable reality. Eventually, I introduced a new character, an old woman suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease, who teaches the critic to make marinara sauce. I used my knowledge of making sauce as the new beginning of the story, which better grounded the characters, making them more accessible and real. This new character inspired every other character to change and the story became wholly different for it.

Give It a Go. Dust off an unfinished or incomplete short story that has caused you dire frustration. Do not re-read it. (If you do, I promise you’ll get stuck again.) Create a new character, one that does not currently exist, one that is completely different from than what currently exists in the story. Next is the writing what you know part—give this new character the specific knowledge or expertise of something that you yourself possess. Place the new character into an action related to that knowledge. This is the new beginning to your story. Introduce the old characters to the new one and begin the heavy lifting of weaving the new section into the old. Be patient, but persistent. Your new material will inflict change upon the old and an entirely new story will be born.

J.R. Angelella lives in New York, where he writes and teaches fiction. His debut novel, Zombie, about a boy who filters his messed-up world through an encyclopedic knowledge of classic zombie films, will be published by Soho Press next month. Pre-order it on Amazon.

Jonesing for more prompts? FWR’s entire “Get Writing” Archive.

The Deep Eye: On the Embedded First Person

Michael Byers — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:00:45 +0000

The first person is seductive. It feels, for many, like the most natural way to tell a story. We are all first person narrators of our own lives, after all, and surely it is the easiest thing in the world to translate personal experience to the page. That way there is no need to fuss with the peculiar questions that arise when a mysterious and sometimes too-knowing third person narrator appears on the scene.

But the first person is in fact more difficult than the third. As we approach the first person narrator we may discover that it is essentially unlocateable, rather like the electron in orbit around the atomic nucleus. We can approach it, but we cannot actually put our finger on its nature precisely. This has to do with the recursive properties of consciousness, probably, but also with the unavoidable fact that the presence of any teller prompts us to ask how trustworthy the teller is. We never trust anyone telling us anything.

Of course when we write first-person narrators, we must in fact not only locate but convincingly inhabit our speakers, trustworthy or not. If we don’t, our work suffers. We discover there is a subtle but crucial difference between something like “reporting from the scene of a consciousness” and “reporting from within a consciousness.” The former is weak and unconvincing, while the latter feels like life. One finds the difference in how deeply the writer has managed to seat the perspective of the narrator—how firmly we embed the reader in the narrator’s point of view.

A few techniques can be brought to bear to increase the reader’s sense of embeddedness.

Jeffrey Eugenides’s prose is typically lax and underpowered (which accounts for the bagginess and unproductive length of a work like Middlesex). Over and over in that flabby, overwritten novel he can be observed struggling to seat the point of view in Calliope’s head. In the following passage, insufficiencies such as “the next thing I knew” point to a narrator who has not yet arrived on the page, as do such infelicities as “I let it keep burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart.” But amid the wreckage here there are some successes. Our narrator is at a party with some other teens:

The Object’s green eyes were watering. But she took the joint and inserted it between her lips. She leaned toward Rex Reese, who opened his own mouth wide.

When they were finished, Jerome took the joint from his sister. “Let me see if I can master the technical difficulties here,” he said. The next thing I knew, his face was close to mine. So finally I did it, too. Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my mouth a long, dirty plume of smoke.

Smoke filled my lungs, which began to burn. I coughed and let it out. When I opened my eyes again, Rex had his arm around the Object’s shoulder. She was trying to act casual about it. Rex finished his beer….

“I can’t see my feet,” I said. “It’s dark in here.

[Jerome] passed me the joint again and I took it. I inhaled and held the smoke in. I let it keep burning my lungs because I wanted to distract myself from the pain in my heart. Rex and the Object were still kissing. I looked away, out the dark, grimy window.

“Everything looks really blue,” I said. “Did you notice that?”

“Oh yeah,” said Jerome. “All kinds of strange epiphenomena.”

The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age. All day long she sat over a hole in the ground, the omphalos, the navel of the earth, breathing petrochemical fumes escaping from underneath. A teenage virgin, the Oracle told the future, speaking the first metered verse in history….

One of the telltale signals of a first person not yet completely inhabited is often the overuse of simple subject-verb constructions: “I looked,” “I wanted,” “I thought about,” “I remembered,” “I imagined,” “I felt,” and so on. These constructions of consciousness are defensible in early drafts but should be substantially controlled in later ones. They originate from a positive and necessary impulse — to attach what is happening to the experiences of the point of view character — but they are not rendered from within the narrator’s actual experience. Rather, they are reported from a safe distance.

This seems a small point but it is a crucial one, really the crucial one when considering the first person narrator. In life, we do not engage in anything so controlled or constructed as an act that can be described as, for example, “remembering.” In fact, we simply have images and thoughts occur to us, immediately and all at once. There is no process of remembering, only a moment before we have remembered something and the moment after which we have remembered it.

Similarly, we do not really “look” at things. Rather, visual stimuli enter our eyes and brains and make an effectively immediate impression upon us. The things we see are before us at once, unmediated by any agency of consciousness. They are simply there. The verb “look” is, when considered this way, inadequate to describe the speed and immediacy with which images arrive in our awareness. There is no action of “looking” per se. As with remembering, visual stimuli are not there in one moment, and are there the next. Eugenides’s mistake is to describe an activity rather than recreating, through other means, the subjective experience of actually engaging in the activity. After all, it is only someone else who may be said to “look” at something. What we do, in our own minds, is simply experience the result of looking.

But there are two (two and a half, maybe) successful moments in this passage: 1) “She was trying to act casual about it” and 2) “The Oracle of Delphi had been a girl about my same age.”

“She was trying to act casual about it” works because the awareness of the narrator is for once unfiltered. How does Calliope know that The Obscure Object “was trying to act casual about it”? Calliope’s process of information gathering and processing is undescribed. But speaking literally, she has engaged in a long series of complicated mental calculations based on the visual stimuli she has received. She has received visual and aural information about The Object’s stance, facial expression, tone of voice, and she has from these bits of evidence concluded something like a fact about the Object. Whether this “fact” is true is unknowable, as it should be, because this is Calliope’s truth unfiltered. This is a successfully embedded point of view.

In the second example, Eugenides spares us the awkwardness of anything like “At that moment I remembered that the Oracle of Delphi had been…” Instead, he delivers the thought unmediated. In this way the memory arrives on the page in the same way memories arrive to us in life — all at once and unaccompanied by anything like intention. As in life, this thought about the Oracle simply arises. At the instant it is occurring to Calliope it also occurs for us, and in the same fashion.

A small success might also be noted in the first half of the sentence Leaned forward, closed my eyes, parted my lips, and let Jerome shotgun into my mouth a long, dirty plume of smoke. Eliminating the pronoun “I” is a shortcut and a cheat, and Eugenides is likely doing it here mostly to achieve some rhythmic and aural variation (perhaps tired of the “I [verbed]” construction himself). But eliminating the pronoun does work to short-circuit our sense of an action being reported from outside the reporter. It is not much, but it is something, and if we are getting tired, this is okay. But Eugenides undoes his accomplishment in the second half of the sentence: “a long, dirty plume of smoke” would be invisible to Calliope.

We can contrast Eugenides’s struggle with Michael Chabon’s customary effortlessness. The florid, exuberantly demonstrative first-person narration of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh provides a fine example of a point of view deeply embedded in its purported perspective. The novel opens:

At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business. We’d just come to the end of a period of silence and ill will—a year I’d spent in love with and in the same apartment as an odd, fragile girl whom he had loathed, on sight, with a frankness and a fury that were not at all like him. But Claire had moved out the month before. Neither my father nor I knew what to do with our new freedom.

“I saw Lenny Stern this morning,” he said. “He asked after you. You remember your Uncle Lenny.”

“Sure,” I said, and I thought for a second about Uncle Lenny, juggling three sandwich halves in the back room of his five-and-dime in the Hill District a million years ago.

I was nervous and drank more than I ate; my father carefully dispatched his steak. Then he asked me what my plans were for the summer, and in the flush of some strong emotion or other I said, more or less: It’s the beginning of the summer and I’m standing in the lobby of a thousand-story grand hotel, where a bank of elevators a mile long and an endless row of monkey attendants in gold braid wait to carry me up, up, up through the suites of moguls, of spies, and of starlets, to rush me straight to the zeppelin mooring at the art deco summit, where they keep the huge dirigible of August tied up and bobbing in the high winds. On the way to the shining needle at the top I will wear a lot of neckties, I will buy five or six works of genius on 45 rpm, and perhaps too many times I will find myself looking at the snapped spine of a lemon wedge at the bottom of a drink. I said, “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray.”

The unparalleled excellence of the writing is a joy: “carefully dispatched” is visually and characterologically exact (we can see Art’s father, vested and buttoned, methodically working away at his tidy plate, leaving only the parsley garnish), and “snapped spine of a lemon wedge” shows us what we have not bothered to notice until now, the segmented and organic nature of that unconsidered thing in our glass, and by saying not “glass” but “drink” Chabon also gives us the ice cubes and perhaps the swizzle stick, as well as the shape, size and weight of the glass, the table on which it sits, and some qualities pertaining to the space in which that table stands. These excellences function as keys to the mind of the speaker, arriving as they do unmediated into Art’s consciousness: it’s not “it occurred to me that my father was carefully dispatching his steak” or “I looked at the lemon wedge…”

On a deeper level, note that we can usefully distinguish, on the one hand, between the Chabonian constructions “I had lunch with my father” and “I was nervous and drank more than I ate” and, on the other hand, the Eugenidean “I coughed and let it out” and “when I opened my eyes again.” Eugenides’ efforts to track Calliope’s consciousness moment by moment fail because they do not reflect what it really feels like in a subjective sense to cough or to open one’s eyes. By contrast, Chabon mostly uses the pronoun “I” to report on larger-scale occurrences — things that are happening over a longer span of time — and so avoids this pitfall. Having lunch with one’s father is not an immediate or all-at-once experience. Nor is being nervous and drinking more than one eats. Our experience of these events differs fundamentally from our experience of coughing, seeing, hearing, thinking, and speaking, in that they are events that, with their complicated social and behavioral aspects, must be understood with several sets of mental instruments, including those having to do with family history, taste, manners, and so forth. Most importantly, having dinner is not one experience but a set of extended experiences which can really only be described or apprehended in synthetic terms, while sensual experiences are discrete and immediate. The Chabonian “I” in this sense is a more complicated device, albeit a slightly more removed one, than the Eugenidean.

Notice, too, that when Chabon does use simple subject-verb constructions they are often in some fashion filtered through Art. Even the usually deadly “I thought” is here first improved by “for a second”, which at least acknowledges the fleeting nature of any thought; then “I thought” is redeemed entirely by the thought having nothing to do with anything that has come before, such that even this usually worrisome construction, once successfully moderated in this way, manages to suggest the impinging influences of an unstructured brain. Why is Lenny jugging three sandwich halves? How do they stay together in the air? Why three halves? Where is the fourth? Eaten, perhaps, by Uncle Lenny. But who is Uncle Lenny? We don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know, we don’t know. And then Lenny is gone.

Notice, too, that there is an important distance between “I said” and “I said, more or less”, and there is a very great gulf indeed between a character declaring “I will wear a lot of neckties” in a strictly literal sense and saying “I will wear a lot of neckties” in a fit of metaphorical brio. The passage is so fanciful, in fact, and by its end has so separated itself from any claim to strict literality, that we may reasonably suspect its concluding line of dialog (“I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray”) is not what is actually said aloud, and that in fact what is said aloud is something else entirely that just sounds or feels like “I anticipate a coming season of dilated time and of women all in disarray” to Art’s subjective consciousness. There are very few constructed elements to Art’s thinking, and those that are to be found are intentionally undermined, such that the effect (and purpose) of this passage is both to convey the impression of what it is like to be Art and to suggest that our best reading of Art should include not only what he says, but what he appears to mean.

On the other end of the spectrum from Chabon are first-person narrators who might be described as reticent or formal. Reticence and formality can have powerful effects, and often this kind of voice is deployed in the service of hiding some otherwise unmanageable emotion on the part of the speaker. In such a case the habits of the voice itself often become part of the narrative machinery of the story, and the developments in the voice mirror, oppose, or otherwise assist the events on the page. For instance, a voice may work to undermine itself, or will seek to hold off powerful emotion by refusing to attach to what is being reported. Other effects are possible; often a formal or unforthcoming voice is used to depict the mind of someone working to maintain sanity, to prevail over trauma, or to rationalize an otherwise inexcusable act or set of behaviors, as in Jane Smiley’s “The Age of Grief.”

Ethan Canin has deployed many different kinds of restrained voice over his long career. In his early work his narrators were often models of delicate understatement, as is the case with the narrator of “The Year of Getting to Know Us”:

I’m an only child, and I grew up in a big wood-frame house on Huron Avenue in Pasadena, California. The house had three empty bedrooms and in the back yard a section of grass that had been stripped and leveled, then seeded and mowed like a putting green. Twice a week a Mexican gardener came to trim it, wearing special moccasins my father had bought him. They had soft hide soles that left no imprints.

My father was in love with golf. He played seven times every week and talked about the game as if it were a science that he was about to figure out. “Cut through the outer rim for a high iron,” he used to say at dinner, looking out the window into the yard while my mother passed him the carved-wood salad bowl, or “In hot weather hit a high compression ball.” When conversations paused, he made little putting motions with his hands. He was a top amateur and in another situation might have been a pro. When I was sixteen, the year I was arrested, he let me caddie for the first time. Before that all I knew about golf was his clubs – the Spalding made-to-measure woods and irons, Dynamiter sand wedge, St. Andrews putter – which he kept in an Abercrombie & Fitch bag in the trunk of his Lincoln, and the white leather shoes with long tongues and screw-in spikes, which he stored upside down in the hall closet. When he wasn’t playing, he covered the club heads with socks that had little yellow dingo balls on the ends.

At first glance the work here, while very good, appears uncomplicated. But as detail accumulates, something happens. A tone emerges: measured, even distant. One source of this tone is the lack of the speaker’s summarizing judgment. Nowhere does the narrator describe what thoughts or feelings these facts produce in him. He is simply reporting the facts. There is a taffy-like motion here, as the longer the passage continues without the narrator’s summarizing presence in it, the more we feel him pulling away. Apart from the carefully deployed exception (”the year I was arrested”), the speaker is effectively absent. It is the opposite of Chabon’s wildly interpreting Art, who, at the gentlest prompting, erupts in gouts of hyper-responsive feeling. The restraint on display in “The Year of Getting to Know Us” is elegant; Canin achieves this effect through an absence, a difficult feat that accounts for much of this story’s wistful tone.

In the later example of “The Accountant,” Canin’s customarily restrained and semiformal style has hardened into habit and lost some of its nuance. But there is still something to be taken from him. The novella opens:

I am an accountant, that calling of exactitude and scruple, and my crime was small. I have worked diligently, and I do not mind saying that in the conscientious embrace of the ledger I have done well for myself over the years, yet now I must also say that due to a flaw in my character I have allowed one small trespass against my honor. I try to forget it. Although now I do little more than try to forget it, I find myself considering and reconsidering this flaw, and then this trespass, although in truth if I am to look at them both, this flaw is so large that it cannot properly be called a flaw but my character itself, and this trespass was devious. I have a wife and three children. My name is Abba Roth.

This voice, a much less subtle instrument than the one at work in “The Year of Getting to Know Us,” might be said to occupy two zones: 1) the highly built formal zone in which the sentences are long and polyclausal, and 2) the unbuilt, demotic zone in which the sentences are simple and declarative. By occupying both zones in one paragraph, Canin proposes a consciousness that has one half of itself in one zone and the other half in the second. Half of its energy is deployed in constructing a presentable truth, and the other half, like a muttering chorus, relates those facts that can be delivered without polish or interpretation – the real truth, as it were. The voice that propels the short sentences ” I try to forget it” “I have a wife and three children” and “My name is Abba Roth” will be the voice of the flawed, criminal Abba. The other is a mask.

The Retrospective Eye

Several techniques create a first-person eye that, even from a future vantage, create vivid action. Alice Munro provides a subtle, canny example in the opening of “Walker Brothers Cowboy”:

After supper my father says, “Want to go down and see if the Lake’s still there?” We leave my mother sewing under the dining-room light, making clothes for me against the opening of school. She has ripped up for this purpose an old suit and an old plaid wool dress of hers, and she has to cut and match very cleverly and also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool, ungrateful. We leave my brother in bed in the little screened porch at the end of the front verandah, and sometimes he kneels on his bed and presses his face against the screen and calls mournfully, “Bring me an ice cream cone!” but I call back, “You will be asleep,” and do not even turn my head.

While there is a great deal in play in this paragraph it is the word “ungrateful” that allows us to see this action as being observed from the future. In any retrospective narration, the first-person narrator sees with two pairs of eyes, one occupying the occasion of telling and the other the moment in which the event occurred. The immediate eye relates the details: the “dining-room light,” the “old plaid wool dress,” the lines of dialog, and so forth. The eye that sees from the future is mostly content for the event-eye to do the seeing. The girl whose mother is making her a dress notices, in the moment, that her mother “has to cut and match very cleverly” and she will naturally complain because her mother will “also make me stand and turn for endless fittings, sweaty, itching from the hot wool.” But it is the eye from the future that can declare her past self “ungrateful.” The girl in the past may feel ingratitude, but she will likely be unable to articulate such a thing; surely she will be unable to confess it. It is the work of the future narrator to see that she was in fact ungrateful, and to note it, and thereby to hold that earlier version of herself to account.

Many Souths: An Interview with Wiley Cash

Brad Wetherell — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 13:00:17 +0000

Wiley Cash’s much anticipated debut novel, A Land More Kind Than Home (William Morrow, 2012), was recommended to me after I championed Tom Franklin’s most recent novel for this site. And I can see why: as southern writers, both Franklin and Cash deftly portray rural southern life and the power that secrets long kept have to disrupt typically sleepy small towns with generations of tangled relationships. But while Cash’s novel may tip its hat to Franklin—and other southern authors, ranging from Faulkner to Ernest J. Gaines—it is very clear that this is a gesture of respect, not imitation. A Land More Kind Than Home is an original novel by an exciting new voice in southern fiction.

The novel is narrated by three distinct first person voices: Adelaide Lyle, a midwife who has welcomed generation after generation into the mountain cloistered world of Marshall, North Carolina; Clem Barefield, a streetwise sheriff who thought he’d seen everything this town had to throw at him, including his own son’s premature death; and Jess Hall, a curious young boy caught up in a clash of beliefs and deceits more complex and sinister than he can comprehend. Together, these characters tell the story of an entire community, as their hopes and fears are prayed upon by the stranger come to town, Carson Chambliss, a fiery and mysterious preacher with his own troubling interpretation of God’s word.

Wiley Cash’s stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Roanoke Review and The Carolina Quarterly. He holds a B.A. in Literature from the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an M.A. in English from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He has received grants and fellowships from the Asheville Area Arts Council, the Thomas Wolfe Society, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. He and his wife currently live in West Virginia where he teaches fiction writing and American literature at Bethany College. He also teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Fiction and Nonfiction Writing at Southern New Hampshire University.

Clearly a very busy man, Wiley took the time to correspond with me via email, as we discussed his inspiration, his methods, and what it means to him to be a “southern writer.”

Brad Wetherell: What was the initial germ of this novel for you?

Wiley Cash: I got the idea for the story of the novel when I was in graduate school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in the fall of 2003. I was taking a course in African American literature, and one day my professor, Reggie Scott Young, brought in a news story about a young African American boy with autism who was smothered during a church healing service in a storefront church on Chicago’s South Side. Although I was raised in an evangelical Southern Baptist church, I was familiar enough with charismatic belief to understand its power, and I was particularly drawn to the Pentecostal tradition, especially the Holiness movement that takes the Bible as the literal word of God, particularly Mark 16: 17-18:

And these signs will follow those who believe: In my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will place their hands on the sick, and they will get well.

The story of the young boy’s smothering was clearly tragic, but given my interest in the Holiness movement, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by it, and given my own memories of growing up in the evangelical church, I couldn’t help but be compelled to write about it.

But when I thought about sitting down at my desk to begin the story, I knew I’d immediately face several insurmountable problems: as interested as I was in this story, I’d never been to Chicago’s South Side, and I knew nothing about the experience of growing up in the city’s African American neighborhoods. It was impossible for me to attempt to speak for a cultural experience that existed so far outside my own.

But then I imagined the same tragedy unfolding in western North Carolina. In my mind, I saw a church sitting on the riverbank in Marshall, a small town in Madison County only a short drive from Asheville, where I’d spent countless days and nights driving back roads, taking photographs, camping, and swimming in the French Broad River. I gave the autistic boy a younger brother named Jess whose doubts about the church only intensify once he loses his brother inside its walls. The more I wrote, the more the community around Jess flourished in my mind: a church matriarch who struggles to protect the children, a local sheriff who must deal with his own tragic past to solve the mystery of the boy’s death, a mother who’s torn between her faith and her loss, and a father whose pain portends only tragedy. In creating these people and the place they live I got to live in both Louisiana and North Carolina, and it was wonderful.

At what point did you know you had a novel worth writing?

I figured I might be onto something when my friends, who were also great writers, began to take an interest in the project. I was incredibly fortunate in Lafayette to have three best friends and fellow students who were dynamic and talented fiction writers; they were also very different writers with very different strengths and interests, and when they read excerpts of the novel-in-progress they brought their diverse strengths and interests with them. Their feedback was invaluable, and so was their support.

There were many nights when I had to go home early because I was usually up and writing by 7 a.m. I got teased a good bit about acting like an old man for going to bed so early, but after my friends saw how serious I was they began to understand those early nights and early mornings. They’re still some of my best friends, and they’re still some of the most talented writers I know.

Can you describe your writing process during the creation of your book? Were there particular stumbling blocks?

One of the most difficult challenges I faced was in writing about North Carolina while living in Louisiana. First of all, I was desperately homesick, and every time I tried to write about North Carolina, especially western North Carolina, the page was colored by my misty-eyed, romantic memories of life there. My exaltation of the place was a serious roadblock in portraying the region realistically. Second, in Louisiana I immersed myself in a culture that was very foreign to me, and being surrounded by such distinct dialect and music sometimes made it difficult to hear the dialect and the music I’d left behind.

I accidentally stumbled upon the solution by rededicating myself to the literature and music of North Carolina. I poured over work by authors like Clyde Edgerton, Kaye Gibbons, Fred Chappell, and Thomas Wolfe, and I listened to music by Malcolm Holcombe, Sons of Ralph, the Biscuit Burners, and David Holt. I began to hear and see North Carolina again.

As I mentioned, I was in graduate school when I began writing the novel, and, like most graduate students, I was teaching two classes and taking three. Making the necessary time to write became a challenge, but I solved it by getting up incredibly early in the morning, sometimes as early as 5 a.m. I liked the feeling that the world was quiet and I was the only person awake at that time; I knew something about the day that no one yet knew. Of course this wasn’t true, but it helped to cut out the noise of life if I thought I was the only one awake in those hours. I maintained this early morning schedule for years; it used to drive my wife crazy when I’d get up at dawn on the weekends.

You say that you maintained the early morning schedule “for years.” How long did it take you to write the novel?

In the spring of 2004, I wrote a short story from the perspective of a grandfather whose autistic grandson is smothered during a healing service one Sunday morning. The grandfather and the autistic boy’s father find out the terrible news after the local sheriff comes out to the farm to tell them. The story was about twenty-five pages, but it wasn’t really a story; it was more of an event. I sat on it for over a year before I went back to it and tried to reimagine the scene. I realized that the story was much larger than one person’s perspective. In 2005, I decided to attempt to write a novel with the autistic boy’s death at the center. I experimented with several different narrators, and, as a result, the grandfather’s narration was cut even though he remained a very important character.

By the fall of 2008 I’d landed a great agent who represents several authors whose style and regional focus are very similar to mine. This agent submitted the manuscript to a few houses, but it was rejected by all of them. We worked on the manuscript for about a year and a half, and, eventually, it seemed like there was nowhere else to go in terms of revising it. We agreed to go our separate ways in January of 2010.

I turned to Nat Sobel of Sobel Weber. He’d contacted me after reading an excerpt of the novel that had been published in Crab Orchard Review in the fall of 2008, right after I’d agreed to work with my former agent. I called Nat’s office late on a Friday afternoon, and I was very surprised that he remembered my story. He agreed to consider the manuscript, but he made clear that I’d follow the same process everyone else followed, from submitting the query letter, to submitting the first fifty pages, to finally submitting the full manuscript. I was ready to give up on the novel at this point, and I probably would have if my wife hadn’t encouraged me to give it one more shot with Nat.

I submitted the full manuscript to him in February 2010. He read it and offered some comments toward revision. At this point, I had to decide whether or not I wanted to go back and revisit a manuscript that I’d thought was complete months and months earlier. Maybe it was hope, or maybe it was desperation, but I sat down at my desk and considered Nat’s comments. I worked on the novel the entire summer of 2010. Nat started submitting the novel in the fall, and the first editor who saw it purchased it in a two-book deal. Roughly five years passed from the time I decided to write the novel until the time it was accepted for publication.

Let’s now talk a bit about the book itself. Why did you choose to tell the story with multiple first person narrators?

I think I relied on a multi-voice narrative for two reasons. One, I come from a place where every member of my family and every good friend I have tells wonderful stories. Over the years, I’ve found that when something happens that involves a number of my family members or several of my friends, everyone has their own perspective of the event and narrates their version of it based on their individual perspective. I suspect this is the same with other people’s family and friends, but hearing that chorus of voices narrate separate stories that coalesce around a single event always stuck with me. Two, this is a pretty popular model with Southern novels and stories; I’m thinking of Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men, Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, and Thomas Wolfe’s novella The Lost Boy. Each of these works is focused around a single event, but the authors rely on the community or the family to fully communicate that event’s importance.

What was the biggest challenge of structuring the novel in this way? I can imagine that it might complicate how you manage the narrative time.

The biggest challenge was staying clear on what each narrator knows at each point in the story, a problem amplified by the fact that the novel takes place over six days. This tight schedule didn’t allow for a lot of summary or exposition. Aside from the opening scene, the novel is pretty linear, so that made it a little easier to keep the narrators’ stories and their knowledge of events chronological. Toward the end of the revision process, I actually found myself making calendars to track the development of the story over those six days. I really wish I’d done that earlier. Structuring a novel is a lot like solving an equation, and it helped to see all the values and integers in the visual equation instead of trying to keep them straight in my head.

Authors often say that the beginning and ending of novels are the hardest to write. Was this true for you? Also, why begin and end with Adelaide in particular?

Beginnings and endings are important in just about every process, from writing novels to romantic relationships to basketball games. I don’t know if creating the events that transpired at the beginning and the ending of A Land More Kind Than Home were any more difficult to create than any other section of the novel, but it was difficult to decide who would be responsible for narrating those events and the tone that narration would take.

Originally, Jess narrated both the opening and closing sections of the novel, but something never felt quite right about that, even though I liked the symmetry of it. I kicked around all kinds of ideas about how to grab the reader in the opening scene, but nothing seemed to work. One night, my wife was proofreading some of the manuscript pages when she read the scene of Adelaide and Carson Chambliss in the church. She looked up at me and said, “You should put this at the beginning; it’s a great hook.” I made the revision and it worked; my agent used those opening twenty pages to sell the novel to William Morrow.

With this cast of narrators, I wonder: whose story do you think this is?

If I had to assign ownership of this story to one particular character, I suppose I would say this is Jess’s story. He’s the one who carries the largest burden for the tragedy that befalls the family; he’s the one who sees something he shouldn’t have seen; he’s the one who keeps the secret until the very end when divulging it can only lead to disaster.

But I really feel like this is the community’s story. I tried to make it as rich and all-encompassing as possible. There are a lot of lives wound up in what happens to the Hall family. Only a community can tell this story; because of that it just seems right for a community to own it as well.

Can you speak about the role of place in the novel?

A sense of place is really important to me in general. I’m one of those readers who opens new books in the same manner I enter my dreams at night: I immediately want to know where I am. So much about us—our motivations, reactions, fears, and hopes—emanate from the places we’re from. There’s no escaping the fact that home, as both a physical locale and a remembered idea, are either restrictive or emboldening or sometimes both, and characters who bear the mark of their place are simply more believable to me.

That’s what I loved about living in Lafayette, Louisiana, for five years during graduate school. The language, food, and landscape were different from any other place I’d ever visited, and while I lived there I took every opportunity to immerse myself in it. I think it made me a better writer because it made me more curious about North Carolina, the place I call home.

Speaking of place, how would you define “Southern Literature”?

That’s a difficult question to answer because just as there are many “Souths,” there are also many types of “Southern Literature.” But I think one thing that defines the South broadly and Southern literature in general is the idea of struggle and all the forms it takes. Because of its historically agrarian economy, Southerners have always struggled with the land and tried to figure out the best way to reap the most from it. Unfortunately, that led to centuries of slavery, and there was a long struggle to end that and an even longer, on-going struggle to stamp out the racial prejudice that accompanied it. You can see both the struggles with land and the struggles with racial prejudice in the work of writers like Jean Toomer, Charles W. Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ernest J. Gaines.

Also, because of the South’s agrarian economy, people tended to live on large swaths of land and relied on their family members for everything from labor to emotional support. I believe this is why family struggle has so long been a hallmark of Southern literature; here I’m thinking of writers like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, and Alice Walker. On the other hand, the tight cohesiveness of the Southern family can quickly turn those who aren’t related into real outsiders. So much of Southern literature, especially its local color, revolves around the mysterious and sometimes evil outsider who attempts to plunder something from those on the inside. Ron Rash, Flannery O’Connor, and several of Kate Chopin’s stories come to mind.

Do you consider yourself a “southern writer”?

Absolutely, but I can’t really explain why, and I don’t know why it’s so important to me. The first time I visited West Virginia, where my wife and I now live, I asked someone if West Virginia considered itself a northern state or a southern state. The woman thought about my question for a second, and then she said, “I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.” It mattered to me, but I couldn’t explain why; I still can’t. Perhaps it’s something about my wanting to feel at home. That’s why I started writing about the South in the first place—to feel at home.

I know you worked with Ernest J Gaines. Can you speak to his influence on your work? Also, what other authors have influenced your writing the most?

The effect that Ernest J. Gaines has had on my writing life and my life in general are immeasurable. I chose to attend graduate school at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette because it gave me the chance to study fiction writing under him. Before I left North Carolina, I didn’t have any idea of what kind of writer I was or what kind writer I wanted to be, and then I got to know Ernest J. Gaines, and I learned his own story of leaving home and becoming a writer.

He was born and raised in the quarters on a plantation just west of Baton Rouge where his ancestors had spent generations working as slaves and later as sharecroppers. In 1948, at the age of fifteen, he’d had to leave Louisiana and join family in California because of the lack of education available to African American children living in Pointe Coupee Parish. But, once he arrived in Vallejo, he realized that he ached for the sugar cane fields and the twisted oak trees he’d left behind. Because he couldn’t afford to return home, he decided to read about it, but after discovering that he couldn’t find any books about the lives of rural, African Americans in the South, he decided to write about them.

This was never clearer to me than the first time I visited Gaines and his wife Dianne where they’d built a new home next door to the land where he was born and raised. It was All Saints Day, and a group of us were working to beautify the old slave cemetery that sits about a half-mile behind the still-standing master’s house. In North Carolina and other parts of the South, these events are known as Decoration Days. Gaines and I had paused in our work, and we were talking about his memories of growing up on the land and the stories of the people buried in the cemetery. At one point, he looked at me and then gestured toward a grave. “Do you know Snookum from A Gathering of Old Men?” he asked. “He’s buried right over there.”

In our workshop back at the university, Gaines had helped me learn to write better stories, but that day, standing in the cemetery with the master’s house barely visible through the trees and the ghostly sound of the wind rustling the sugarcane, he showed me what my stories would be about. Later that evening, while driving home in the fading light through the flat farmland of Louisiana, I saw the clouds sitting low on the horizon, and I realized that if I squinted my eyes I could make them look like mountains. I started A Land More Kind Than Home not long after.

As we wrap up, I wonder if you had any advice for aspiring writers who hope to publish a novel of their own someday.

My advice is simple: write a book. A lot of people want to talk about writing a book, especially when they find out that you’re a writer, but very few people are actually willing to give it a real shot. Writing a book is hard. It requires a lot of time alone, and there will be many times when friends and family won’t understand why you can’t have another beer or watch the game or go out of town for the weekend. There will be a million reasons not to sit down and work, but you have to dedicate yourself to your work to finish a novel.

But don’t simply write a book; write the best book you can. Only then should you be concerned with getting an agent or finding a publisher. Don’t put your book out there before you’re certain it’s ready. Don’t query agents with an unfinished manuscript; don’t pitch ideas about a book you haven’t yet written.

Finally, what a name! Wiley Cash. Tell me it’s real.

It’s a real name, for better or worse. It’s actually a family name: the middle name of my grandfather, Odus Wiley Cash, and my father, Roger Wiley Cash, Sr. I’m Jr., but my parents decided to call me Wiley. As far as my last name goes, I’ve always heard that we’re distantly related to Johnny Cash’s people, but I never received a Christmas present or a birthday card from him or June, so I can’t really vouch for it.

My name used to drive me crazy when I waited tables, a job I’ve held at too many restaurants to name. I’d say, “Hello, my name is Wiley and I’ll be your server.” The people at the table would ask me to repeat my name, and then they’d make the usual Wile E. Coyote joke. I’d smile along, waiting to get their drink orders. Then they’d ask about my last name and make the usual joke about Johnny Cash. I probably would’ve made more tips if I hadn’t been standing around listening to the same jokes every night.

Further Links and Resources

For more on Wiley Cash and his debut novel, including tour dates and excerpts from the book, please visit the author’s website.

You can also watch a trailer for the novel here:

Or watch a conversation with Ernest J. Gaines as part of The Big Read:

Messy Experiments, Elegant Solutions

Celeste Ng — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 13:00:45 +0000

I.

In a recent-ish piece for NPR, “A Deathbed Story I Would Never Tell,” Robert Krulwich describes an incident in the life of physicist Richard Feynman. It is 1945, and Feynman’s young wife has just died:

The nurse records the time of death: 9:21 p.m. He is empty with loss. What few things she had, he packs up; he arranges for a cremation, walks back into her room and sees that the clock had strangely stopped ticking. The hands are frozen at 9:21, the very moment of her death.

Feynman refused to believe this was anything but coincidence, and that, Krulwich insists, shows the difference between a storyteller and a scientist. As an avowed storyteller, “I couldn’t do that,” Krulwich insists. “I would want to, almost need to, imagine a higher audience for a moment like that.”

This alleged dichotomy—storytelling vs. science—is familiar to me. I grew up in a family of scientists: my father was a physicist for NASA, my mother a college chemistry professor and research chemist, my sister an aerospace and mechanical engineer. And that’s just my immediate family. My point is, though I may be a storyteller myself, I know something about scientists and what makes them tick. Moreover, my dad had a particular fondness for Richard Feynman, and he gave me copies of Feynman’s two memoirs, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and What Do You Care What Other People Think? when I was about eight or nine. They were hilarious, and I loved them.

So the NPR essay struck a chord with me—it’s a prime example of how scientists and storytellers tend to treat each other: like one is from Mars and the other is from Venus. Says Krulwich:

Storytelling is what humans do. It’s part of our nature —but natures, I’ve noticed, differ. I am not a scientist. I don’t have a mind for what they do, which is to stick, doggedly, to hard facts, keeping emotion out of the room. It’s a discipline for them, a way of being, that makes them, well, scientists.

Actually, Krulwich makes a few surprising errors in this piece—for example, Feynman’s wife did not have Hodgkin’s disease, but tuberculosis, and in fact, the confusion over Arlene’s disease is one of the stories (yes, stories!) Feynman tells in his memoirs. But the most surprising error is more fundamental: he mischaracterizes both what scientists do and what storytellers do. We think of science and storytelling as polar opposites: Research versus art. Cold, hard facts versus hot, gushing emotion. But the truth is, they’re not even opposite sides of the same coin. They’re joined together on the same Möbius strip.

II.

Scientists are, at heart, what-iffers. They are pokers and prodders. They are perpetual kids at play in the sandbox of the universe. Every science experiment boils down to this: what if I took this scenario and let it play out—what would happen? The child scientist wonders, what if I mix bleach and ammonia? (Answer: run.) The adult scientist wonders, what if I take this gene and change this little part of it? What will happen then? They may have ideas about what will happen: I think it’ll foam up. I think it’ll protect you from diabetes.

But often, when the scenario plays out, things don’t turn out as expected. The scientist pauses. Hmm. That’s weird. And almost always, the unexpected is more interesting than the expected. Take an experiment by another scientist in Krulwich’s essay, Ernest Rutherford. In his most famous work, Rutherford fired tiny particles at a tissue-thin leaf of gold foil. Based on the understanding of atoms at the time, he expected the particles to shoot through the metal in a straight line, like bullets through fog—and some did. But others riccocheted off at an angle. Some bounced straight back into a startled Rutherford’s face, leading him to say, “It was as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a sheet of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.” Maybe, he realized, they had the layout of the atom all wrong. (They did.)

So when the unexpected happens, as a scientist you perk up in delight. The universe has surprised you. You poke and prod a little further: Okay, so what if I mix THESE two things? What if I change this other part of the gene? You draw up a new scenario, a half-step different from the last, and let it play out, again and again and again, until you manage to pin down one small corner of truth.

Because let’s dispel two misconceptions here here: (1) that scientists steer their work with the precision and efficiency of steamship captains; and (2) that they are dispensers of infallible truths. Nothing about science is efficient. You pick and feel your way, as if through a very large, very crowded, very dark room. And in the end, what you have is your best guess as to what would happen, your most informed answer to this one what if. If you’ve done a good job, others will look at what you’ve done and say: Yes. This is important. And I believe you.

III.

At heart, writers, too, are what-iffers. Where the scientist pokes and prods the atom, the brain, the genome, the writer turns on society, human behavior, the human heart. Every attempt to write a story boils down to the same question: what if I took this scenario and let it play out—what would happen? So-called genre writers do it all the time: What if robots could feel emotions? What if teens had to fight each other for survival? But literary fiction writers do it, too. What if three girls in swimsuits walked into a grocery store? What if a mother found a blood clot in her baby’s diaper? What if a lawyer defended a black man in the deep South from a charge of rape—and his young daughter watched it all unfold? Like an experiment, every good story starts with a what-if.

As a writer, you may have ideas about where the story will go. The clerk is going to get together with the girl in the pink bikini! The lawyer’s going to convince everyone that Tom is innocent! And then you start writing, letting the scenario play out, and things veer off course. Characters surprise you, wiggling their way into situations you did not intend, balking when you try to kill them off, or save them, or make them call their mothers. Out of nowhere, an astronaut brother appears, or a mute old man, or a golem. Suddenly you find yourself in the jungle, at the hospital, atop the Empire State building. The writer pauses. Hmm. That’s weird. And almost always, the unexpected is more interesting than the expected.

So when a story takes an unexpected curve, as a writer you, too, perk up in delight. The universe of your story has surprised you. You expected none of this, and yet you feel, in your bones, that this is right. You poke and prod a little further. Okay, so what if Scout confronts the angry mob at the jailhouse? What if the clerk quits his job? You draw up a new scenario, slightly different than the last, and let it play out, again and again and again. You stick to the hard facts of the story as you discover them, silencing your own emotions, killing your darlings, until you manage to pin down one small corner of truth.

And you fight the same misconceptions: despite the Hollywood image of a writer tapping industriously at the typewriter, nothing about writing is efficient, either. Writers pick and feel their way through the same very large, very crowded, very dark room. And each story, even when it’s finished, is your most informed answer to this one what if, your best guess at truth, anchored in total fiction. If you’ve done a good job, others will look at what you’ve done and say: Yes. I believe you. And this is important.

IV.

Both science and stories struggle to make meaning—however small—from the apparent chaos around us. And sometimes, small truths are enough. Understandably, Krulwich—like many others—wants Big. He wants to feel

as though the universe had somehow noticed what had happened, that some invisible hand slipped into my world and pointed, as if to say, ‘We know. This is part of the plan.’ [...] I just want to imagine that the things that happen to me just might have — and deserve — the attention of the universe.

But can you imagine a story in which the main character’s clock stops at the exact moment his wife dies? Cliche! the critics would shout. Club us over the head a little more, please? It’s so easy to conflate “storytelling” with “symbolism,” or maybe with “sentimentality”—to forget that in the best stories, the meaning is made not in the telling, but in the mind of the reader.

So let me give you another example of science and storytelling. Here’s a passage from Feynman’s memoir: the moment of Arlene’s death, written some 40 years after the fact. He has raced from Los Alamos to Albuquerque—hitchhiking the last 30 miles after not one, but two flat tires—to find that his wife no longer seems to see him, or anyone.

I kept imagining all the things that were going on physiologically: the lungs aren’t getting enough air into the blood, which makes the brain fogged out and the heart weaker, which makes the breathing even more difficult. I kept expecting some sort of avalanching effect, with everything caving in together in a dramatic collapse. But it didn’t appear that way at all: she just slowly got more foggy, and her breathing gradually became less and less, until there was no more breath—but just before that, there was a very small one.

[...] I sat there for a while, then went over to kiss her one last time.

I was very surprised to discover that her hair smelled exactly the same. Of course, after I stopped and though about it, there was no reason why hair should smell different in such a short time. But to me it was kind of a shock, because in my mind, something enormous had just happened—and yet nothing had happened.

[The next day] I called the towing company and got back the car, and packed Arlene’s stuff in the back. I picked up a hitchhiker, and started out of Albuquerque.

It wasn’t more than five miles before … BANG! Another flat tire. I started to curse.

The hitchhiker looked at me like I was mentally unbalanced. “It’s just a tire, isn’t it?” he says.

“Yeah, it’s just a tire—and another tire, and again another tire, and another tire!”

We put the spare tire on, and went very slowly, all the way back to Los Alamos, without getting the other tire repaired.

Tell me that—though he sticks to the cold, hard facts, though he refuses to ascribe any divinely-prescribed meaning to the moment—his heartbreak doesn’t come through here. Tell me there isn’t a small truth here. Tell me this isn’t a story.

Further Links & Resources

Listen to the NPR story discussed in this essay, Robert Krulwich’s “A Deathbed Story I Would Never Tell.”

Curious about Richard P. Feynman’s memoirs? Read an excerpt from Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! or pick up a copy of What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Surfers and Cowboys: An Interview with Robert Garner McBrearty

Steven Wingate — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 13:00:43 +0000

Robert Garner McBrearty is a quiet guy. He doesn’t walk into a room glad-handing and trying to work the crowd, and you’re not likely to find him tracking visitors to his website via Google Analytics. He’s more like a person you find on a back porch at a hectic party and sit down with, only to learn that he’s earned quite a few accolades that louder writers would crow about.

I know this because I experienced it firsthand, working with McBrearty at the University of Colorado-Boulder, where he has taught fiction, creative nonfiction, and composition for the better part of two decades. I don’t know how many times we ran into each other before I knew that he had a short story collection out (A Night at the Y, originally published by John Daniel & Company , or that he had an MFA in creative writing from the storied Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, or that he had won a Pushcart Prize, or that he had received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Like I said, a quiet guy. Fortunately I got to know him a bit, and heard early on about his second collection (Episode, from Pocol Press), and his selection for the 2007 Sherwood Anderson Foundation Award. Since he doesn’t crow about himself, I’ll refrain from crowing too much more about him. Suffice it to say that he has enviable amounts of perseverance as a fiction writer and a new collection out, Let the Birds Drink in Peace, from Conundrum Press in Denver.

Interview:

Steven Wingate: You’re one of those writers who seems particularly dedicated to the short story. Have you tried the “dark side”—novels—and if so, can you delineate your feelings toward both mediums?

Robert Garner McBrearty: I have indeed tried the novel and will continue to do so, though I do feel most at home in the short story form. I think I’m not all that bad at novels—I’ve had three unpublished novels represented by literary agencies, and way back in 1992, I had one novel that passed through several editorial approvals before being turned down by the senior editor at Houghton-Mifflin. That was sort of discouraging. One week I was riding high with anticipation of a nice advance, and the next week I was working in a warehouse. Just a few years ago, I had another close call with another major publisher. I think, though, I’ve never gotten any of my novels completely right. They had some good writing in them—maybe some of my best—and in fact I’ve raided sections over the years and used them in short stories, but I think there’s always been some flaw, perhaps structural, perhaps a need to explore more deeply when I felt like cutting away. The short story provides a fairly clear path, once the idea sets in, so it’s easier to get from start to finish without making too many wrong turns, and if one does make a wrong turn it’s easier to get back on track.

I do have a few other thoughts about it. Raymond Carver was asked once why he wrote the short story and not the novel and he said something along the lines of he wouldn’t mind writing a novel but the short story had fit in more with the rest of his life. I feel like that a bit. I know my own level of hardship was substantially less than Carver’s, but my early years always felt kind of chaotic: bad jobs, moving around, and it was hard to sustain larger works. And then the kids came along and there was a lot of distraction there, so somehow the short story always seemed more doable. Now I’m older and the kids are grown and time seems to be opening up more, so who knows?

I think the short story (I think of Cheever and Hemingway and Carver and Tobias Wolff and Flannery O’Connor and Alice Munro and Donald Barthelme and Barry Hannah and Borges and a host of other great writers) is a wonderful part of our literature. I wish we talked about short stories and short story writers more (obviously, as a short story writer I would be inclined to desire this!). People often talk about what great novel they’ve read—no jealousy here—but too infrequently someone says, “Hey, I just read this wonderful short story in…”

I guess I’m drawn to short stories, too, because I can flip from one idea to another fairly quickly. With novels, a certain level of boredom and confusion and despair always set in. If I screw up a short story, I can move on. Screw up a novel and there goes years of work. Well, not entirely. You learn something from the experience, but it’s rewarding to actually see something in print. If I go through a long period without seeing something of mine in print, the despair sets in. I spend a fair amount of energy warding off despair and the short story gives me more opportunity to ward it off. I couldn’t just write novels and wait years between publication, if they ever got published.

You’re a Western guy through and through—raised in west Texas and a longtime Coloradan—and we did an AWP panel about how writers based in the West deal with the macro-mythos of the West. How is the whole West thing going for you now, especially with the West becoming so homogenous with the rest of the country?

Well, let’s make that south Texas. I grew up in the fifties and sixties as a suburban kid in a large city, San Antonio, so I spent a lot more time riding my bike than riding a horse. In high school, there were “surfers” (who hadn’t quite earned the right to be “hippies”) and “cowboys.” I was a “surfer” by virtue of my longish hair, though I have only been on a surfboard once in my life—a not entirely satisfying experience, though I did have a brief moment of glorious gliding along.

I think, though, that distinction between “surfers” and “cowboys” reflects on the sense of duality I always felt. We were in a new subdivision of modest ranch-style homes, but on the edges of the neighborhood, there was still open land, with cactus and mesquite trees, and outlying houses with sprawling yards where people kept horses. One always knew that rattlesnakes were not far off. I don’t know how frequently it actually happened, but there was always this sense that there were neighborhood fathers cleaving rattlesnakes with hoes.

One had a sense that the frontier was not far off, both in place and time. My mother’s side of the family, especially, came from ranching roots (small ranches, not the Ponderosa), but I grew up with stories of bandits riding through, battles between the settlers and the Comanche, and of course, the Alamo loomed in my consciousness. So in a way, I was a typical suburban kid riding on a bike, but envisioning riding the prairie. And of course so many T.V. shows and movies of that time built onto the western mythos, and maybe one wanted to claim a little piece of that, the way when the home football team wins, “we” win. So, it’s like, hey, I’m in Texas so there’s a little piece of John Wayne in the Alamo in me. And then later in life one realizes how far one is away from living the myth and one plays off that a bit, so there’s some comic potential there, too.

When I write, I don’t particularly set out to be Western or not-Western. But I consider my roots, how I grew up, and those stories of my upbringing and the mythos of the Western frontier float around in my mind so they are part of who I am, and I allow my subconscious to lead me here or there. Here in Boulder County, I can be walking on a beautiful trail within minutes of leaving my house, and one doesn’t have to be a great adventurer to experience the big sky. Had I grown up in the East, in New York, say, I think I would be a very different writer than I am. I allow the “West” to show up as it shows up. I think it’s similar to the way I approach Catholicism in my writing. I don’t set out to be either a Catholic or non-Catholic writer. The background shows up as in “Hello Be Thy Name.”

In Let the Birds Drink in Peace there’s also a strain of micro-mythologizing: people viewing their lives in heroic terms. We see it in “The Helmeted Man,” “Acting Lessons,” and “The Edge He Carries.” What draws you to them?

Well, at the risk of sounding a bit pathological, I think it may stem from my own sense of self-aggrandizement. But, wait, isn’t that what we fiction writers do? Don’t we write fiction instead of memoir because we want to make the experience somewhat different, maybe larger, than it actually was? So I think as a kid, even, I was always sort of playing “hero” in my mind. Later in life, I acted and I also became a terrific liar. Though most of my lies were really more “bullshit” where I wanted people to figure out somewhere along the way that I was making it up. The reality was kind of boring, so why not tell the tall tale? I like the conflicted hero, the one who has doubts about his own heroism. He keeps replaying it in his mind: was he really brave or just lucky? Didn’t he almost not do the brave action that he did? And what about all the times he didn’t do the brave action at all, but took a pass? As they replay it in their minds, they become less and less sure about their own bravery.

I do look for those moments that stand out in one’s life. I’m talking about the regular person who isn’t exposed to danger on a daily basis, unless of course we view all of life as dangerous, which it actually is if you think too hard about it. But soldiers, say, are exposed to danger in a different sort of way, or activists in despotic countries. The average person goes about his or her daily life and there are only so many times those big moments come, when one can act or not act. I’ve had some times when I didn’t act and those times haunt me, and a few times where I did act—and those times haunt me too. At first there is a desire to pat oneself on the back, but then later the self-doubt sets in.

At any rate, though, I think those moments can make for good fiction. I have an eye toward the dramatic. I like something to happen. In “The Acting Class” the big event actually occurs as a lie/story that the narrator is telling, but I hope the story within a story still has some of that transporting effect that drama has.

Many of your characters are what used to be called “ne’er-do-wells”: people who don’t have much of a shot to succeed, and who frequently berate themselves for not having lived the life they might have. I also see lots of menial labor here: dishwashers, janitors, etc. Why is this one of your territories?

In some ways, my most formative years as a writer were in the years after I got out of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. I graduated from there in 1981, when I was twenty-six. I had an M.F.A. and no desire whatsoever to teach anything to anybody. I spent about five years just working odd jobs. Dishwashing was a big one. I’d done it in college and I was good at it. I had the best hands in the game. I don’t know if it’s still like this, but back then if you had dishwashing skills and an M.F.A, you were in. You were highly sought after… There was one night at a fancy French restaurant where the owner said to me, “You have a Masters degree and you’re washing dishes? You must really be stupid.” I think I was. I was stupid at making money. Other bad jobs ensued. I’m grateful for that time. It’s given me an affinity for people working the menial jobs. I’m very polite to waiters and waitresses or any kind of service personnel. I’m always an inch from getting up at the table and saying, “Hey, I’d better go see if they need help in the kitchen.” I was batting out my stories, working crappy jobs, married by then. I remember my wife (of almost thirty years now) calling home when we were engaged and how thrilled her parents were to hear her future spouse was a dishwasher!

After about five years of that kind of work, though, I was drained. That work experience was sort of mythical, too. I never really fit it, I was never really one of the guys. I was an outsider there, too. I answered an ad for a small school in Berkeley. By then I had a Pushcart Prize (“The Dishwasher,” what else?) and a few other publications and the director there, the poet Philip Brady who went on to become a good friend, liked me and hired me to teach composition, and it beat washing dishes or working in a warehouse.

For years, though, I would often have some crappy job to accompany my part-time teaching, so I guess there was always a feeling like “success” was something I wasn’t quite experiencing, and I guess that shows up in many of the characters I create…I also have a way, I suppose, where the “boss,” the guy who is more successful, is sort of the bad guy as in “Houston, 1984.” I don’t really mean this as some sort of class warfare statement, but it’s often been my own experience that the guy in charge is something of a prick. So I have a lot more affinity for the underling.

What I hope comes through, though, is that the characters aren’t beaten. Beaten at, certainly, but not beaten.

Colonel William B Travis , commander of the Alamo, appears in “Colonel Travis’ Lament” and in “Alamo Dreams.” He’s not-quite mythic; he’s part of the action, but not central to it. Why are you drawn to him as a character, and is your answer related to your curiosity toward the West, myth-making, and ne’er do wells?

I think that’s one of my more complex stories. First off, it should clearly be read as speculative fiction, even absurdist at times, and is not meant as a reflection on the real-life figures, for whom I have great respect. Still, I could not have written that story without having some obsession with the real life Alamo. I was interested in so many aspects of the story. One was in fact that Travis wrote some very dramatic letters during the siege, calls for help, with the letters increasingly becoming brooding as the calls for help went unanswered. In my story though, one can see that he’s having sort of a great time as he’s writing, really getting into his own mythology about glory and honor and his place in history. So I identified with Travis as a writer, and I thought about what if he was really getting into the writing, that this was the best writing of his life so the writing was kind of really energizing him even though this siege was going on. At the same time, though, the horror draws nearer.

The ne’er-do-wells does fit in here because many of the people of that time came to Texas with past misfortunes weighing on them. Travis’s marriage had fallen apart, Crockett had lost his election in Washington. They were looking for rebirth, new opportunity, redemption. Even in his own time, Crockett was mythologized, his backwoods warrior image blown up way beyond reality.

I show Travis and Crockett as realizing they’ve gotten themselves into a desperate situation, trapped by their own mythology. The situation’s gone too far. What good is being glorified by history if one is about to die? I was also interested in the relationship between leaders and followers, as it applies in many situations, even beyond the military. The little guys, the foot soldiers, get caught up and used by the grandiose ambitions of their leaders. I think of people like Custer here, too, not a whole lot of concern for the men he led to doom. In this case, Travis does care—but it’s too late.

In “Houston 1984” you play with the detective genre in an interesting way—your character actually is a private investigator, so his search isn’t a metaphor for some broader search. It’s the meat and potatoes of your character’s life, which is in no way mythologized at all. What’s going on for you in this story?

Glad you asked. The “1984” plays off Orwell. The story is set before we had as sophisticated spying devices as we have today, but the Boss has a vision of what’s to come when, “we can tap a button and zoom in on any bedroom we want to.” So part of the story is about the loss of our personal privacy and how destructive that can be. As a detective that’s what one does: invade the privacy of someone. In this case, the detective realizes it’s wrong. He’s sympathetic towards the subject of his investigation, and at the end he suspects his actions, his report, has led to a woman’s death. I also wanted to make the detective sort of a regular person—he’s worried about money, he’s got a brother he needs to take care of, and Houston itself is a brooding, violent place, so again there’s that sense of living in a world of siege. One other part, I think, is important. The Boss is also taking about a coming time when the old moral order will be gone, replaced by something else, “…the real scruples. The ones that come when the old scruples have passed away.” But of course the new scruples are pretty suspect themselves. It’s a world, again sort of Orwellian, where bad is good and good is bad, a world where any action can be justified or maybe not even need to be justified because all is okay. In the end, the detective responds with nausea, literally. Nausea at what’s he’s allowed himself to be drawn into, nausea at the situation, nausea at what he’s done.

You’ve been a small-press guy throughout your career, and Birds has just been published by the small, relatively new Conundrum Press in Denver. How is this going for you, and how has your attitude toward the press/author relationship changed for you over the years?

Well, to be honest, I would have no objections to a nice fat check from a major publisher.

But first off, let me just say what a great experience it’s been working with Conundrum Press. I met my future publisher, Caleb Seeling, at the Writing the Rockies Conference at Western State College in Gunnison. I handed him copies of my first two books, A Night at the Y, and Episode, and didn’t think too much of it after that. I didn’t make any sort of a pitch or anything: I just said, more or less, hey, hope you enjoy these. Then a couple of weeks later, he called and said he really liked my writing and wanted to do a book. At first we talked about doing a reprint of A Night at the Y, which had gone out of print. But as we talked more, we realized we wanted to do something new as well. So this is sort of a hybrid. It brings back three of my golden oldies from A Night at the Y (hope you don’t mind my calling them “golden oldies,” sort of a little more of my own self-mythologizing), and ten new ones.

But what really comes to mind with this book is personal relationships. I have sat down with Caleb and with senior editor Sonya Unrein and had good conversations about Birds, and also about possible future books. It actually makes me want to write more, as Conundrum is interested in my overall career. It’s a new press, of course, or under new ownership anyway, and I have the first new book out of the blocks, so our fates seem somewhat entwined. I’m certainly rooting for the press, and I know the press is rooting for me.

In terms of small presses, in general, I have to say Hats Off! I never would have survived, emotionally, without them. I was working as a dishwasher when I got the call from Rie Fortenberry from Mississippi Review, speaking some of the most wonderful words I have ever heard: “Robert, this is Rie Fortenberry calling from the Mississippi Review, and I wanted to tell you that your story ‘The Dishwasher’ is going to be reprinted in The Pushcart Prize.” My hearing sort of went out after that, and for a few days I was convinced that someone was playing a joke on me. But being a dishwasher who has a story about being a dishwasher appearing in the Pushcart Prize anthology somehow makes one scrub the dishes with a cheerier attitude. There were other experiences like that, times of gloom, when some acceptance from a literary magazine would come along that kept me going. Those kinds of affirmations were incredibly sustaining. I also appreciate it when an editor takes a second or a third story, as with North American Review , Mississippi Revie w, Missouri Review, and Green Hills Literary Lantern.

So, of course, not much money in small press publishing, usually not much glory, but mostly I just say “thank God” for the small presses. Brave, noble enterprises! I hope to be sending stories to them for many years to come.

Further Links and Resources

Read excerpts from Episode and other works over on McBrearty’s website.

Check out this brilliant short short published in Narrative .

You can find an excerpt from “The Dishwasher” along with other inspiring pieces to get you writing, in Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction.