Author Unplugged: 10 Questions With Liz Moore

Liz Moore (Photo credit: Olivia Valentine)

By Daniel Ford

Liz Moore’s recent novel The Unseen World defies easy categorization. It’s a story about family—specifically the bond between a daughter and her father—humanity’s relationship with technology, and how love, communication, and identity can span decades.

Booklist called The Unseen World “a stunner,” and author Alex Gilvarry praised it as “beautiful, redemptive, and utterly devastating.” The novel has also received positive reviews from the likes of The Washington Post, The New York Times Book Review, and The Boston Globe.

Moore recently discussed with me what inspired The Unseen World, how her writing process involves writing between the cracks of life, and why writers should completely unplug from technology while they’re writing.

Daniel Ford: Did you grow up knowing you wanted to be a storyteller or was it a passion that developed over time?

Liz Moore: I definitely always wrote. At first it was mainly poems, and it was mainly in a journal. I actually didn’t discover how much I wanted to write fiction until well into college.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

LM: Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Russell Banks, Zora Neale Hurston, Stephen King, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce’s Dubliners.

DF: What’s your writing process like?

LM: I take four or five years to write a novel. I don’t have an outline of the story; rather, I begin with characters and really get to know them over the course of dozens of false starts. Once I’ve found the beginning of a problem or a plot for them, I move forward, slowly, with lots of backtracking and starting over.

I usually turn off all technology when I write, and try to set aside at least four consecutive hours for a writing session, but as my life gets busier and my family gets bigger I have to squeeze writing into the cracks of life more.

DF: In addition to being a novelist, you’re also a short story writer. We’re huge fans of the short story genre here at Writer’s Bone. What is it about the format that appeals to you?

LM: I love thinking of short stories as gems to polish; I go over and over and over them, trimming excess words from them, substituting language that is more precise or beautiful when I can think of it.

DF: What inspired your recently published novel The Unseen World?

LM: My father is a scientist, and I grew up surrounded by “lab culture” and by computers that evolved from the earliest personal Macs to fairly sophisticated machines over the course of my childhood. Unlike the novel’s protagonist, Ada, I was never strong in science, and I went to public school and had a more traditional upbringing than she has in the book; unlike her father, David, my father is a physicist, not a computer scientist. Also, as far as I know, he has no secret past, which David decidedly does. However, as a child, I had fantasies about being a prodigy like Ada—unfulfilled fantasies, of course—and today I have fond memories of spending time with many of my father’s colleagues and with their spouses and families. Finally, my father works in Boston; I grew up in the suburbs of Boston; and I have an aunt who lives in Dorchester. These are the parts of my upbringing that were most resonant as I was writing this book.

I’ve also always been interested philosophically in the fraught relationship between humans and machines. I first heard the so-called “Turing Test” described as a child, and that concept—combined with the many hours I spent in my youth talking to the Eliza program, a primitive chatbot that came pre-loaded on many early Macs—sparked my curiosity about what truly intelligent machines would act like.

DF: The novel not only spans several decades, but also has interweaving plotlines and a fresh take on artificial intelligence. Did you have all of these elements planned out beforehand or did they flow organically as you were writing?

LM: I didn’t have any of them planned out in advance, which is part of why the novel took so long to write!

DF: I know writers hate talking about themes, but I’ll ask this anyway. Did you want to touch on specific themes in The Unseen World?

LM: I never write “to theme,” and I tell my students not to either. In my opinion, having particular themes in mind when one begins writing results in flat characters that act in unnatural ways. At the end of a strong first draft, I might look back and ask myself what themes happen to be in it, and then try to pull them out in certain ways, but that’s about it.

DF: This being your third novel, I imagine you find yourself putting less and less of yourself, and those in your orbit, into your characters and plot. Is that true or do you still find pieces of your real life that fit perfectly into your narrative?

LM: I’m not sure that’s true; in many ways, this novel is very autobiographical, as it’s set for the first time in Boston (near where I grew up) and deals with a lab (around which I grew up).

DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?

LM: Disconnect from technology! Leave your phone behind while writing, and turn on a program like Freedom while you’re writing. If your writing requires research, do your research in separate sessions.

DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?

LM: I was born in the early hours of May 25, 1983, the day after the centennial celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge. My grandfather was president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden at the time, and was in attendance at the celebration. He made a deal on the spot with the then-borough president that if I’m alive for the bicentennial (the day before my hundredth birthday), I’ll speak at the ceremony. Apparently there is a letter to this effect on record someplace in Brooklyn, but presumably it is a paper record and it’s buried very deep in an archive!

To learn more about Liz Moore, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @LizMooreBooks.

The Writer’s Bone Interviews Archive

The Storymaker: A Conversation With Novelist John Benditt

John Benditt

By Daniel Ford

Here’s the first two lines of the description for author John Benditt’s debut novel The Boatmaker:

A fierce, complicated, silent man wakes from a fever dream compelled to build a boat and sail away from the small island where he was born. The boat carries him to the next, bigger, island, where he becomes locked in a drunken and violent affair whose explosion propels him all the way to the mainland.

That’s what we like here at Writer’s Bone.

Benditt writes in such an earthy and rhythmic tone and so deftly tackles issues that plague humanity that one forgets his previous profession was as a science journalist for the likes of Scientific American and Technology Review. He answered some of my questions recently about how he developed his voice, his inspiration for The Boatmaker, and how his journalism background helped his fiction writing.

Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer and how did you develop your voice?

John Benditt: I’ve known that I wanted to be a writer since I was sixteen. It wasn’t really something I chose; it chose me. I had other ideas, generally more practical ideas, about what I wanted to be. But that was what I was. I think my voice emerged first by imitating writers I liked and later by just writing and writing, even though what I was writing wasn’t very good.

DF: Who were some of your early influences?

JB: My first influences were poets, since that’s what I wanted to be. The biggest early influence was Robert Creeley. I loved how spare his poems were, how chiseled they were, how much was left out. Creeley led me to William Carlos Williams, whom I loved as a poet, a prose-poet, and also as a writer of fiction. He wrote three great novels about his wife and his wife’s family. More people should read them.

DF: You’re a science journalist by trade, so I’m curious if any of those skills transferred over to writing fiction. What is your writing process like in general?

JB: I think journalism, if it’s done well, enforces clarity and the need to get the reader through the story to the end; those are skills every writer should have. My writing process begins with little bits and pieces scribbled on scraps of paper that later coalesce into something larger.

DF: Where did the idea for The Boatmaker originate?

JB: The Boatmaker began as a short story, written for a fiction workshop I was taking at the New School with Catherine Texier, who is a wonderful teacher. I wrote the story for a collection of short stories I thought I was writing at the time. The story was about a man who builds a boat and sails away from the little island where he was born. Later I wrote a second story about the same character when he reaches his first destination, Big Island. I thought I was done with him. But apparently he wasn’t done with me. That’s when a lot of other bits and pieces of his story began to appear.

DF: How did you go about developing your main character? In the novel, he’s reacting to a lot of things he’s never experienced, so how did you put yourself in his mindset in order to tell your story?

JB: Mostly it was a question of being receptive. The boatmaker arrived with a pretty fully developed personality and way of seeing things. I just tried to stay out of the way of that. I was tempted to prettify him a little, but I tried to avoid that. He is what he is.

DF: Your book touches on subjects that tend to spark intense debate—religion, race, etc. What were some of the ways you made your themes original while also tackling these issues?

JB: The story kept coming in, as I mentioned, in bits and pieces. And it held my interest. So I kept following along. I wasn’t thinking at all about “themes,” such as religion or race, while I was writing. I was just interested in the story of the boatmaker. When I was finished, I realized that these themes were there. But I didn’t pay much attention to them while I was writing, at least as themes. I just wanted to do justice to the story—to make it as vivid and compelling as it had seemed to me.

DF: Your use of language is so earthy and primal. Did that come out during the writing or was it fine-tuned during the editing process?

JB: Something of the tone was there in the original short story, which was called “Big Island.” But it evolved during the writing and editing. It got simpler, and it found a groove. The published book is definitely the outcome of a lot of polishing and weighing individual words and sentences. And a lot of deft suggestions from my editor, Meg Storey at Tin House.

DF: Now that you have a novel under your belt, what’s next?

JB: I have a bunch of short stories I’ve been working on. I also have the first part of a memoir about my father, who was a famous scientist. I suspect that the idea for another novel will also emerge, more or less the way The Boatmaker did. I’ve been blown off course enough times now to suspend judgment when it comes to plans for my writing.

DF: What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

JB: Keep writing. I read somewhere an English writer said: “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t give up.” I like that.

DF: Can you name one random fact about yourself?

JB: If I named it, would it still be random?

To learn more about John Benditt, visit his official website. 

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