Free-Range Characters: 7 Questions With Author Justin Taylor
Justin Taylor
By Sean Tuohy
Justin Taylor’s short story collection Flings was named an Amazon Best Book of the Month in August 2014 and praised by the likes of The Daily Beast, Booklist, and Publisher’s Weekly.
Taylor talked to me recently about the authors he worshiped growing up, how he allows his characters to roam freely, and his short story collections.
Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Justin Taylor: From when I was very young. I filled notebooks with stories almost as soon as I learned to write. Later, in early high school, I got into writing poetry, though they don’t really teach poetry in my high school so I didn’t have much to go by other than song lyrics, a vague notion of Beat ethos, and at least one volume of Jim Morrison’s verse. Oy. It really wasn’t until college that I discovered craft, line-editing, revision, etc. But putting aside questions of skill, the fundamental ass-in-chair-pen-in-hand urge was always there in me, as close to instinct as such a thing could possibly be.
ST: What authors did you worship growing up?
JT: Stephen King throughout most of adolescence, which I’ve discussed in some detail elsewhere. Some other genre stuff that came through him one way or the other; he recommended it somewhere, or it was next to him on the shelf. Since most YA writing is designed to encourage binge consumption, writers like R.L. Stine and Christopher Pike—both of whom I actually came to after King, probably because my folks thought it was more age-appropriate for a 10-year-old—primed me for series in general, so I remember reading most of the Anne Rice vampire books, and many of Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series—though both of these gradually dissolved into weird housewife pornography.
Or maybe that was always what they were and it just took me a while to catch on. Where I grew up there wasn’t much “literary” reading going on, so it took me until about halfway through high school to start looking beyond the horror shelf at the bookstore, and then what I found—or didn’t find—was as close to pure chance as these things get. I read Darcey Steinke’s Jesus Saves, The Human Stain, and Our Gang by Philip Roth, a book called The Quartzsite Trip by a guy named William Hogan, which I actually found in the high school’s library, and mostly remember for its weird tone and an abortive sex scene. Those books, and a few others like them, must have been my introduction to the idea that a book didn’t need to live or die by its plot—though Darcey’s book at least had a kidnapping in it. I ended up studying with her when I went to grad school. I think I’ve read all her books. Other than that, there was typical druggie high school stuff: the Morrison, which I mentioned, and Robert Hunter’s collected lyrics, Box of Rain. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, which I am 100 percent certain I read on account of Strauss’s tone poem’s having been repurposed by Stanley Kubrick for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” which itself I had only come around to because Phish used to cover it, though it turned out later that they were mostly riffing on the Deodato remix from “Being There.” A lot of Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, William Burroughs. I could never deal with Kerouac—he just bored me—but I tried.
Of the books they made us read in school, I remember loving Frankenstein, and Tale of Two Cities. I remember reading and hating Their Eyes Were Watching God, a hatred I now understand as a product of ignorance and fear. All the awful cultural programming of snotty white kids, of middle-class “gifted” students… I complained about that book every minute that we spent on it—have many mortifying memories about mocking the way the characters spoke: black English, hayseed English, whatever sin we were so sure they had committed—but I have never, ever forgotten it. The moment we finished the unit, and I didn’t have anyone to perform my ignorance for anymore, I realized I had actually loved the novel, and more than that, was drawn to it, as one is drawn to a great and mysterious power whose purpose and depth one can sense but not comprehend. It planted itself like a tree in my mind, perhaps like Rilke’s “tall tree in the ear.”
ST: What type of writer are you: outline before you start or just write and see what happens?
JT: I don’t make outlines because I don’t care what happens. I’m interested in language, and in people—who they are and the choices they make, which necessarily at a certain point translates to “the things that they do.” But that’s the least compelling part of it for me. I am an anarchist in my heart, still and always. The characters should go forth and do whatever they want to do, or do nothing. Eventually the author is obliged to impose some kind of structure, even if it’s just a beginning and ending, but within the space of the story the characters are awarded as much freedom as I can possibly grant them. Or rather their freedom is assumed by me to be inherent, and paramount. I honor it as much as I am able given the limits imposed by the form that I am working in and the fact that they are not real.
ST: The characters in Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever pop off the page. How long do you develop a character before putting them on the page?
JT: Thank you. Characters develop by being allowed to roam freely. They do not gestate like babies, but rise like the sun. You hear a sentence or a phrase and wonder who is saying it. To find this out you let him talk some more. You imagine a scene, an event or a landscape, and wonder who is looking at it or standing in its foreground—and go from there. This is less mystical than I am making it sound now. It’s just about—as per my previous answer—being open to surprising yourself, and being willing to write a lot of scratch pages. That’s it.
ST: The paperback edition of “Flings” is coming out at the end of the month. What can readers expect in this new work?
JT: Well the hardback came out last year, so the short answer is a new cover, some nice quotes, and nothing else. Though as NBC used to say during reruns season, “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you.” My hope is that this will be a second chance for me to connect with new readers, maybe court some folks who were on the fence about the hardcover, but will prove more temptable now that the price is down and the reviews are in.
ST: What does the future hold for Justin Taylor?
JT: Death and taxes? A couple bigger magazine pieces (nonfiction) over the course of the fall, and a new issue of The Agriculture Reader, the tiny arts magazine that I co-edit with my buddy, the poet Jeremy Schmall. Not sure what the release date is for it yet, but we’ve got all the material in and it’s going to be crazy-good—lots of work in translation, several short stories by debut authors, and a small book of haikus included as part of the issue.
ST: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?
JT: I’m listening to Bob Mould’s "Beauty and Ruin" right now. The record store where he shot the video for “I Don’t Know You Anymore” is like twelve blocks from my apartment. My cat is stretched out on the dining room table, on top of my wife’s laptop. I thought she was asleep but I just looked up and she’s staring at me, kind of intently, which makes sense since it’s a little past her dinnertime, so.
To learn more about Justin Taylor, visit his official website or follow him on Twitter @my19thcentury.
Blue-Collar Fiction: 11 Questions With Author Diana Sperrazza
Diana Sperrazza
By Daniel Ford
There’s nothing better than promoting books based in your own backyard!
Author Diana Sperrazza, who was raised in a blue-collar neighborhood in West Springfield, Mass., recently talked to me about her journalism career, the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture, and the inspiration behind her debut novel, My Townie Heart.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to become a writer, or is something that grew organically over time?
Diana Sperrazza: Journalism was really my first real calling and it was a strong one. But eventually I wanted to tell stories that were more personal. I was very specifically interested in the influence class has on how a person makes her way in the world. I left my job as a producer at CNN so I could do the low residency MFA program at Bennington College, where I did their nonfiction track. The only thing I could possibly imagine writing then was a memoir. But by the time I had finished writing my thesis, I was getting sick of talking about myself. I also began to doubt my own life was interesting enough to sustain a book. So I tried writing fiction that was influenced by my own life but told a more dramatic, bigger story. After a while, I knew it was the way I wanted to go. That said, I’m still getting used to the idea of actually being a fiction writer.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
DS: I remember reading all of Jane Austen as a child and young teen. Then there was this blackout period in my adolescence and early adulthood where I didn’t read fiction at all. I thought only nonfiction stories were worth anything. Once I began to write, I happened upon Russell Banks and Dorothy Allison and felt the truth behind their fiction and it changed how I thought about things.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
DS: I write intuitively, like I’m listening for the story inside of myself, but it sure wouldn’t look that way to an observer. I wrote My Townie Heart in bed with the television on (the sound was turned down) tuned to reruns of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” In a way, she kept me company. I also like to write in noisy coffee shops. Perhaps it’s the result of all the years of working in news, but it’s hard for me to work if it’s too quiet. I enjoy feeling the buzz of others around me.
DF: As someone who was trained as a journalist and made a living at it for a couple of years, I have to ask what you think of the current state of journalism and why was it something you pursued when you first started out? Also, what’s the most entertaining story you ever worked on?
DS: I’m almost 61 years old, so I was drawn to journalism back in the late ‘70s, in that heady post-Watergate time. I really did believe it could change the world. It seems incredibly naïve now to have placed so much faith in that institution, but back then, being a journalist was about having a higher calling and working to reveal the truth so things could be made right. These days, the news business is more involved with making money, often at the expense of just about everything else. There is still some great and courageous work being done out there, but it’s harder and more dangerous that it was when I was doing it.
DF: What inspired you to write My Townie Heart?
DS: I was tremendously moved by the movie, “Mystic River.” Someone in my extended family was attacked as a child and I witnessed for myself how it changed everything. I went right out and read Dennis Lehane’s book. I was struck by how the blue collar characters were like the people I had grown up with and in my heart, I knew I had to write a story about them and about myself too.
DF: What made you decide to set the novel in the 1970s?
DS: So much changed in that era! Certainly it all started in the ‘60s, but it took the ‘70s to metastasize those changes, for people to feel them in their daily lives. So suddenly feminism, drugs, the counterculture, eastern spirituality—all of that became a felt reality, even in more traditional blue collar neighborhoods.
DF: What were some of the themes you wanted to tackle in the novel?
DS: Certainly I wanted to talk about trauma, and how and if you get over it. But I also wanted to talk about class. For the record, I don’t view those two subjects synonymously. Everyone is vulnerable to trauma. But if you grew up blue collar, you were probably told to quit your whining if you had problems, that it was better never to mention that your parents hadn’t finished high school (never mind college), or about how you had to work in a factory in the summer to pay for school. If there was violence or alcoholism in your family, you were supposed to cope and bury your shame. On the other hand, you also learned how to be self sufficient, how to work hard because no one was going to hand feed you anything, and, if you didn’t fall into the tempting traps of envy or bitterness, you gained a sense of your own integrity, because whatever you’ve done in the life is truly yours, not propped up by someone else’s efforts or money. I wanted to take those subjects out of the closet.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
DS: Most of the characters in my novel are composites of people I knew in certain periods in my life. Some are made up completely. Laura’s character is emotionally true of me. The details are invented, but the major themes are not: I am from a blue-collar neighborhood in West Springfield, Mass., and my father was an alcoholic. I had no sister, but I have two brothers. I had a hard time with college and left. The counterculture had an enormous impact on me. I got overwhelmed and agoraphobic as a young woman and had to work very hard, mostly on my own, to recover. I moved to New Mexico for a new start and went back to school, but I studied journalism, not law. I think my characters come together in my subconscious, where the real and the imagined can comfortably co-habitat.
DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?
DS: I’ve started writing another book, but am not going to say much about it yet. I’m still feeling my way with the story, but it’s about a middle-aged man who also has class issues.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
DS: A number of years ago my writing partner, Janice Gary (author of Short Leash: A Memoir of Dog-walking and Deliverance) heard this lecture at an AWP conference by Walter Moseley. He had just written his book on how to finish a novel, and he said that you have to work every day on your writing, even if you only visit it and read over the previous day’s work; you have to keep the connection current and alive. It was the best advice either of us had ever heard and both of us managed to finish our books. He was also the one who introduced me to the idea that writing comes out of your subconscious. It’s like a pipeline you have to keep open and clear.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
DS: I love the Showtime series “Ray Donovan,” but I don’t talk like that. People from western Massachusetts sound nothing like people from Boston. Totally different accent!
To learn more about Diana Sperrazza, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @mytownieheart.
A Conversation With Author and Professor Eric Bennett
By Dave Pezza
Eric Bennett's recent publication, A Big Enough Lie, is a novel about writing, the Iraq War, and fiction's role in American life. Entertainment Weekly called it "a paean to writing and reading...a depiction of literary fraud that's completely authentic and original."
I recently asked Bennett, a former professor of mine from Providence College, a few questions about his novel and American fiction.
Dave Pezza: A Big Enough Lie covers so much ground: the Iraqi war, self-deception, the state of contemporary literature, writing in academia, and more. How did this story begin before enveloping so much?
Eric Bennett: Why did James Frey get in so much trouble and George W. Bush so little? That was the originating question. But A Big Enough Lie wasn’t conceived, even at the start, as a diatribe against the Bush administration. At its core it’s more about American attitudes toward various kinds of truth and narrative than about that war or any given public figure—although plenty of the pages deal topically with events from 2003 to 2005. “TEX News” is not subtle satire. Maybe to some readers it will seem like a diatribe. But it was my priority to write something more than a protest novel. I also wanted to spend time thinking about how the early phase of the war must have felt for American soldiers and Iraqi civilians in Baghdad.
DP: Part of your novel takes place on the fictional “Winnie Wilson” television show, a clear parody of “The Oprah Show,” amongst A Million Little Pieces-esque scandal. Was this a critique on the American obsession of “true” stories and necessity for transparency?
EB: My least favorite dimension of 21st century literary culture is its oversubscription to memoir and that sensibility. There’s a collective valorization of unmediated common experience and also of a close association between author and hero or heroine. Agents and editors want you to resemble, more or less, the protagonist of your manuscript, even if it’s fiction. Oprah’s shaming of Frey reflected this sensibility. The simple fact of his lying doesn’t strike me as the true heart of everybody’s outrage.
The increasing taste for the “real” in literary writing deflates the morally interesting work that literature can do and narrows our sense of reality. It sidelines well-established and powerful modes of thinking. In my private thoughts as Eric Bennett, I can imagine a far better Eric Bennett than the real one (more patient, more lighthearted, better at small-engine repair, less haltingly awkward during his one chance to make small talk with Rashida Jones at a college party in 1996).
A Big Enough Lie was meant, among other things, to offer a challenge to the memoir paradigm. Ben Lerner’s novels are voraciously readable even as their protagonists stink. Lerner’s non-heroes seem to cleave closely to some version of the actual biographical Lerner, the guy who’s out there writing. He taunts the reader with the thinness of the fictional premise, and it’s an interesting game but a limited one and one that delivers very little by way of transcendence, which, even in 2017, I can’t give up wanting to believe in. I similarly enjoyed Tao Lin’s Taipei and similarly found the main character, who seems Tao Lin-like, to be abominable. The pleasure of reading Leaving the Atocha Station or Taipei is the pleasure of non-idealistic drug use (a big subject for both Lerner and Lin). As you turn the pages and attain that literary high, you tingle with intimations of profundity. But once the trip is over, you’re left with a remorseful memory of spiritual or ethical crappiness.
I agree with them—or with the implication of their novels—that life often seems meaninglessness and that the conditions for meaningfulness are foreclosed by the way we’ve structured our world. But writers of their caliber should resist rather than simply roll over for the status quo—not by writing politically in any narrow sense, but by dreaming of a fuller reality than the one we live in.
Vladimir Nabokov, in creating Humbert Humbert, wrote about somebody hideous, but he was clearly performing a feat of the intellect and getting at themes of selfishness and compassion in a way a memoirist never could. He was thinking in three dimensions. The moral triangulation of Lolita depends on Humbert’s vividness set over against the reader’s recurring but by no means constant awareness that that voice is only a fiction. The same goes for David Foster Wallace’s hideous men.
David Shields, in Reality Hunger, appointed himself the spokesperson for the “real” in fiction—at the increasing diminishment of the fictional as a category. But Reality Hunger, like the whole school of memoirist fiction, has no place for a theory of Lolita or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Shields’s imperatives strike me as the equivalent, for 21st century literature, of Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise—not that white people writing fiction in 2017 have anything equivalent to what was at stake with black people fighting systemic racism in 1895.
DP: I’ve always had a soft spot for novels within novels. When done right, it adds so much to the reader’s understanding of the character who has written it. How hard was it to distinguish your writing from your main character’s?
EB: I aimed to make John Townley, the aspiring writer and the “real” protagonist of A Big Enough Lie, less likeable, less sympathetic, than Henry Fleming, the war hero and the “fake” protagonist and the ostensible author of the fake memoir, Petting the Burning Dog. Townley, the real guy, is insecure, shifty, arrogant, solitary, and self-conscious in a bad way—although he has some virtues too. Fleming, the imagined figment, is compassionate, ironic, well-intended, and self-conscious in a good way. So it was easy to keep them straight for that reason alone, but also because Fleming is in Iraq and Townley in the United States, and because Fleming presents himself in the first person, while Townley appears in the third. I’m assuming that the other protagonist, Heather Kloppenberg, didn’t figure into your question. She, I hope, stands out from the boys.
DP: Late in the novel your main character writes, “I contemplated in a possibly adolescent and facile way the violence and arbitrariness of borders, how, in the age of visas, passports, terrorism, capitalism, police states, and warfare, the social became the geographical.” In a decade that has been defined by overcoming geographical distance with social media and technology, do you think we, as a global community, are at risk of pushing the social into geographical to an irrevocable extreme?
EB: On the one hand, as you point out, human beings have never lived on a smaller globe, at least not as remote spectators for everything that can possibly blow up or burn down. During the first Gulf war Americans watched sites in Iraq get bombed in real time. Ever since then, the news, in a way, has given viewers a closer and closer vantage on cataclysm. Events in Egypt during the Arab Spring were a mouse click or finger tap away. These effects have been talked about in great depth by countless commentators and are nothing new to point out. On the other hand, especially since the attacks on New York City and Washington D.C. in 2001 (not to mention in light of the American obsession with illegal immigration and more recently with the Ebola virus), the United States has locked down its borders with ever greater tightness and ever more refined technology. So depending on whom you are and where you want to go, movement is more difficult than ever.
In the scene you mention, Henry Fleming is marveling at the fact that one could actually drive a car from Baghdad to Istanbul and, with a little ferrying, from there to Western Europe. Of course it would be a hell of a road trip by any standards, merely for regions of topography and climate. But the real obstacles, the biggest ones, would all be man-made—bureaucratic and militaristic. This was untrue, in that region, within living memory but is even truer now, with ISIS in Syria, than it was when I wrote the book.
Often, during writing, I’d think to myself, “Baghdad is actually a place,” a stupid thought, but one of those stupid thoughts that’s powerful if you’re the one having it. The thought is both easier and harder to hold in mind than it would have been 50 years ago, and something about that combination of hard and easy inflects our experience of war. By “our” I mean those of us not serving overseas.
This week I’ve been reading David Mitchell’s novel about Dutch traders in Nagasaki at the end of the eighteenth century, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, and it reminds me both that strict border control is nothing new (the Japanese at that time vigorously policed western influence, down to confiscating Christian paraphernalia from sailors) and that modern technology, as applied to controlling the movement of bodies, has made impossible a certain romantic kind of sneaking around. Henry Fleming’s trip overland from Iraq to Europe was written as a kind of fantasy, and one in this romantic spirit.
To answer your question directly, I’d say that yes, we have reached an extreme, one that is irrevocable, certainly as far as a cowardly English professor with a civilian passport is concerned. But if history teaches anything, it’s that today’s irrevocable extremes are tomorrow’s trivial curiosities. My parents, when they visited East Berlin early in their marriage, watched guards dig through the trunk and sweep mirrors on long handles under the body of the car. I’m visiting Berlin later this month and will be wearing a Ted Nugent t-shirt. And maybe early next year I’ll make it down to Cuba in my Marco Rubio sarong.
DP: As a professor of English at Providence College, has teaching literature and fiction affected your own writing?
EB: The nature of higher education makes reading, often, quite different for students and professors. For the professor, a great book is a thing to master and manipulate, publish articles about, and show the tricks and secrets of to his students. By the time he teaches it, it’s been 10 or 15, or 20 years since he first read it. For the undergraduate, the same book can be a fresh window on unprecedented sensations and experiences and points of view, a radical new thing. This difference between professors and students sucks.
It sucks less if professors put themselves in the point of view of their student and remember how trippy or moving or boring or weird or powerful everything was the first time around. My mind is too stingy for me to share the awe of my students if all I do is teach A Farewell to Arms or Beloved semester after semester. So my tendency is to load up the syllabus with new books—so I’m only a step or two ahead of my students. In this way, I’m reading on my employer’s dime while also (I hope? think?) fulfilling the terms of my employment. I’m avoiding becoming Zombie Prof. Or, if in fact I’ve already become Zombie Prof, it’s for reasons beyond my control.
A kind of deadened familiarity is not only bad for teaching, it’s bad for art. What an artist should want to create is what that undergraduate experiences: a radical breaking open of consciousness. The more I experience this freshness as a reader, the more I learn about how to create it myself. Or, if that’s too hopeful, I can say at least that the more I experience it, the more I feel spurred to try to rival the dazzle of the authors I love.
DP: Any other book recommendations? We’re always looking for new books and authors here at Writer’s Bone.
EB: James Wood turned me onto Henry Green’s Loving. That and Green’s other novels aren’t easy, but they reward the effort. I’m a big fan of Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, which has more Vonnegut-like sting and comedy than your average juggernaut novel of high European modernism. And Lydia Davis’s short stories are the best thing ever to keep on the nightstand. Two European authors writing memoir as fiction and getting buzz this year, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Elena Ferrante, are much harder for me to push back against than Lerner and Lin. I actually recommend reading all four together, which I’ve been doing this summer.
DP: How does it feel to have just published your first novel? Any tips for writers still trying to get their work out there?
EB: It feels astonishingly good. If I look back and count manuscripts and years, this was novel number four, published 15 years after I first took seriously the idea of getting my fiction in print. Even with this one, it wasn’t easy. An agent tried to sell it a few years ago, and I almost gave up when she failed. But then, after a few months of yoga, whiskey, kale, and staring out the window, I started looking for editors on my own. So my advice is the same as anybody’s: keep at it.
DP: Could you tell us something interesting or odd about yourself?
EB: Writer’s Bone has a blue and white aura, according to my synesthesia. Your name, Dave Pezza, is blue and red with a big green D.
To learn more about Eric Bennett, pick up his novel at Barnes and Noble or check out Entertainment Weekly’s review of A Big Enough Lie.
Grabbing Coffee With Aliza Licht: 8 Questions for the Social Media Queen
Aliza Licht
By Stephanie Schaefer
Aliza Licht (who you may know by her former Twitter alias DKNY PR Girl) is a digital Jaqueline of all trades. The social media guru—who in college traded a promising career in medicine to chase her dream of working in fashion—is more than just a trendsetter. In addition to a 17-year stint at DKNY, where she has most recently served as the senior vice president of communications, Licht can also add top-selling author, TEDx speaker, and career coach to her resume.
In her debut book, Leave Your Mark, Licht schools readers (including myself), on the art of getting what you want out of your career. Mixed with a heavy dose of inspiration, a sprinkle of sass, and a pinch of tough love throughout, the book is a must-read for millennials hungry for success.
Licht was kind enough to answer my questions about writing, social media, brand building, and, of course, fashion.
Stephanie Schaefer: You rose to fame with your popular social media presence. What inspired you to expand your 140-character limit and write your first book?
Aliza Licht: I was actually approached by my U.S. publisher (Grand Central Publishing) to write a book. An editor there had been following me on social media. I was intimidated at first by the prospect. I also didn't want to write a book for the sake of just being able to say I did; I wanted it to have a purpose. I had been doing a lot of mentoring on Twitter for years, and when I realized that I could write something to help mentor people, I jumped right in. It has a coffee cup on the cover because Leave Your Mark is my way of grabbing a coffee with everyone who is reading it.
SS: Throughout the three months it took to write Leave Your Mark, did you ever get stumped by writer’s block? If so, how did you get over it?
AL: I gave myself a daily word count of 596 give or take. That was 75,000 words chopped up into little digestible bites. I didn’t write an outline for this book because to me that was daunting. As I wrote nightly between 9:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. I strived to reach my word count. If I was feeling inspired, I blew past it. If I was stumped or too tired, I slammed that laptop shut. Curing writer’s block is simply leaving the project. Taking even a 25-minute break can refresh your brain.
SS: Speaking of overcoming obstacles, I love how you associate fashion with confidence. If you had to choose one outfit in your closet that makes you feel like you can take on the world, which would you choose?
AL: I have this amazing DKNY cape dress that quite literally makes me feel like a superhero. Statement clothing will often do that.
SS: Let’s switch back to social media. There are so many outlets that some people feel if they join all of them they’ll spread themselves too thin. Can you pick your top three must-use platforms?
AL: Everyone’s number one right now is Instagram. Mine is still Twitter, then Instagram. Facebook would be third. I never got into Snapchat. Content creation is hard enough, why would I want to post it somewhere it disappears?!
SS: Since Writer’s Bone is a website that caters to up-and-coming wordsmiths, do you have any advice specifically for writers on using social media to either promote their work?
AL: Build your network before you need it. Get your website up and running months before pub date. Secure your book’s Twitter handle and start building that audience. I recommend this even if you plan on responding from your personal handle. Having your book’s own Twitter handle is like giving it a home. All the conversations around it come launch should be amplified through that handle.
SS: Unfortunately, the famous DKNY PR Girl account is no longer in existence [insert sad face emoji]. Since it’s launch in 2009 the witty Twitter personality became a friend to more than 500,000 followers. Was it hard to say goodbye?
AL: Starting a week prior, I alerted people on @dkny to follow me personally. But honestly, I don’t think of it as goodbye. DKNY PR GIRL has always been my personality and my personality is alive and well @AlizaLicht.
SS: Luckily we can still tweet you at your personal handle @AlizaLicht. Can we still look forward to the insider fashion scoop and Olivia Pope discussions?
AL: Of course! I can’t wait for #TGIT
SS: We like to end our interviews by asking our contributors to share a random fact about themselves. Since your known as a social media guru, we thought it would be fun to ask you what your favorite emoji is and why?
AL: I love the monkey covering his little face. I often feel like that monkey.
To learn more about Aliza Licht, visit her official website, follow her on Twitter @AlizaLicht, or follow her on Instagram.
Writing Ritual: 12 Questions With Author Rebecca Dinerstein
Following the Story: 12 Questions With Author Jack Livings
Jack Livings
By Daniel Ford
Author Jack Livings’ short story collection The Dog, which explores contemporary China, won the 2015 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut work of fiction and has received copious amounts of praise throughout the literary landscape.
Livings graciously answered my questions about his writing process, why he enjoys writing short stories, and how his experiences in China inspired The Dog.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Jack Livings: In high school I spent most of my time playing basketball and writing bad poems. I had absolutely no sense of how narratives worked, and I knew it, so when I did try fiction, I’d be deliberately obscure or quirky to try to hide my technical failings. By the time I was 20 years old, I had only a loose grasp on how to make a story, but I definitely wanted to be a writer—of course, by then, the question had become, “When do you get to call yourself a writer? When you’ve published a book? When you’re writing a book? When your only means of income is your keyboard?” I still hesitate a little. I write, and I consider that work to be the most important work I do, but I have a day job. Not sure I’m a writer yet.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
JL: Raymond Carver, Rick Bass, Tobias Wolff. Almost anyone in Best American Short Stories between 1987 and 1992 got my serious attention. They were my first guides to writing fiction—this was when I was in high school. I still remember certain stories. “The Black Hand Girl” by Blanche McCrary Boyd. Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel.” “The Pugilist at Rest” by Thom Jones. Denis Johnson was always in there. Alice Munro. Wolff’s “Firelight.”
It’s funny—there are only a few literary novels I can recall having read in high school. The usual Twain and Orwell assignments, Salinger and Thomas Hardy. It was short stories almost exclusively until I got to college. Then came the novels—Kafka and Nabokov and Joyce and Dos Passos were in constant rotation.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
JL: I try to be regular about it—just sit down every morning and do the work—and I usually fail. Getting down a first draft can require all sorts of tricks, like special pencils and sketch paper or index cards or the pen my wife gave me, which is a Parker 51 that I maintain has some powerful first-draft magic. Once I have a draft, I tend to be able to show up at the desk more regularly. I need silence to work. The apartment has to be empty, or else everyone has to be asleep, and even in a quiet room I’ll sometimes put on noise cancelling headphones. No music for me. I’m writing a novel now, and I’m constantly modifying the outline, trying to keep chronologies straight, but with stories I can generally do without one.
DF: We’re huge fans of the short story genre here at Writer’s Bone. What is it about the format that appeals to you?
JL: A story really has to grab you by the collar and not let go—it does have to forcibly arrest your attention, I think, because as readers we won’t give a story the same room to develop that we’ll give a novel. Our expectations are different. We expect compression, which requires a precision in the language that I love. I don’t want to make it sound like it’s an entirely technical process, but to me a story works like a clock. There’s no room in the cabinet for a spare flywheel whirring away at its own pace. All the gears have to mesh, and they’d better all be working together flawlessly or the whole thing will seize up, and I like the challenge of trying to build that. When I’m reading and get to the end of a story, I want to feel like I’ve been dealt an emotional blow. When I’m writing, that’s the reason for all the revision, all the time spent on mechanics—it’s all so I can convey something to the reader that can’t be done any other way.
DF: How did the idea for The Dog originate?
JL: I had been a student in China in the 1990s, but it took me a while to get around to it because I had this idea that fiction needed to be purely fictional—I somehow felt it was cheating to write so plainly from my own experience. I don’t know how or why I developed that crazy idea, and it really weighed me down. I certainly don’t feel that way now. I probably started writing the first story about seven years after I’d studied in China.
DF: How long did it take you to complete the collection?
JL: The stories trickled out over a period of about 10 years. At the same time, I was working on other stories and didn’t really conceive of the “China stories” as a collection until I had five of them. FSG took a leap of faith and bought those five and I promised I’d write three more in the next year. That might be a normal output for another writer, but I’d taken nine years to write the first five. There’s nothing like a deadline, though. One of the stories I wrote during that last year was “The Crystal Sarcophagus,” which is about a team of glassworkers who are given 10 months to build a flawless coffin for Mao. Probably not a coincidence.
DF: Did the ideas for each story originate differently when you were planning out the collection, or did you find ways to connect them during the writing process?
JL: I more or less wrote each story as it came to me, with no larger design in mind. Once they were all finished, though, I tried to arrange them in such a way that the collection crescendos and then spins down to a quieter finish, but I don’t know that it comes across to the reader that way. I wonder sometimes about the efficacy of these large structural choices. I’m not sure I yet know how to properly arrange the entire orchestra, if that makes sense.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
JL: The situations these characters find themselves in are certainly reflections of the emotional and dramatic states I find most perplexing and want to explore. Sometimes I’ll borrow characteristics from people I know, but if I base a character on someone I know, the more I write, the farther that character drifts from the model. The characters in the book who are the most faithful portraits of people I knew tend to appear just for a flash, and usually only because their presence helps characterize the protagonist. They’re details, of a sort. As far as I can tell, developing characters isn’t anything less than the process of writing the story—there’s nothing else to a story but the characters. There’s setting, of course, and philosophical asides, and questions of voice, but for me, those things develop in lockstep with the characters. I don’t know that I’m capable of separating any of it when I’m working on a story. If I change the scenery, that will inevitably change the character who’s walking through it, and vice versa.
It’s been a slightly different process with the novel I’m writing now. The characters seem to be less at the mercy of the language, the setting, and so on. Possibly because I’ve been thinking about them and taking notes on them for years now, these characters feel more like wholly formed entities who exist as themselves regardless of the situation they’re in. They’re the center of the novel’s motion, and the story is entirely theirs, but they’re not woven into the landscape in quite the same way the characters are in the Chinese stories. Working on the novel has been looser experience—for better and worse, I’m not writing with the same formal restrictions I’ve put on myself when I’ve written stories. Part of this came from having felt like I was playing soccer with my legs tied together for the ten years I was working on the Chinese stories. Not only did those have to be formally tight, I chose to write some of them in a voice that came to me as a translation from Chinese, so there were linguistic restrictions. And then I was crosschecking details constantly, something don’t have to do (as much) for a book set in New York, even one set in the 1970s. I told myself when I started the novel that I could do anything I wanted. We’ll see how it turns out.
DF: What are some of the themes regarding China that you wanted tackle while writing these stories?
JL: None, really. The stories come out of my confusion, usually, about how a character got him or herself into a jam. I’ll imagine a situation and then have to write a story to figure out what’s happened. Any larger themes that appear are incidental. I don’t mean to be disingenuous. I can see themes in the book—people acted upon by forces beyond their control is one—but those appeared to me only after I’d finished. There are so many ways to spoil a good story, and writing from the top down is a great one. Starting with a political motivation or some message—for me, at least, that’s a recipe for disaster. That’s an essay or a position paper. Fiction is about people who might live under the umbrella of some larger political forces, for instance, which will be borne out in the way they eat their oatmeal, how they sit in a chair, what they say when someone steps on their toe. As I’m writing, I try to blind myself to certain areas of the story so as not to disturb the currents that flow beneath the surface of the action. When I try to direct my fiction to say something, it always turns out rotten. I have to force myself to follow the story and let the action unfurl and once I’m done, then I can step back and see what my subconscious was up to.
DF: The Dog won the 2015 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for a debut work of fiction and has garnered rave reviews from a variety of media outlets. What’s that experience been like and what are your future plans?
JL: I have been very, very lucky that the book has been written about in some of the places readers look to for guidance. I’m just happy people have been reading the book, and I’m thankful that they have been. I’m working on this novel now, and holding on for dear life. It’s really all I can do to stay on top of it.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
JL: I doubt I’m qualified to give anyone advice, but you can’t go wrong by reading lots of good literature, and by trying to understand how it works. If you fall deeply into a section of a book and you’re blazing through it, enjoy yourself but then go back and read it again. And then again, and look hard at the points you found most engaging. Take apart the structure of the passage. Same for the sentences. Look at the punctuation. Check out the rhythm and figure out where it pauses for breath. Apply any information you have at hand to the passage to better understand its mechanics. The second part of this is, read the classics whether you like them or not. Part of learning to write is discovering that it can be a real struggle and requires intellectual and emotional stamina that we don’t naturally possess, and there’s no better training than working your way through something you’re not crazy about, but need to get under your belt because you want to be a serious writer. Why do we need to get these things under our belts? If for no other reason than not to reinvent the wheel. I’m not speaking from a high pulpit here—I’m only repeating what I tell myself all the time.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
JL: My left leg is longer than my right.
To learn more about Jack Livings, visit his official website.
Setting Off Sparks With Poet Lisa Chen
Lisa Chen
By Sean Tuohy
Poet Lisa Chen guides readers through vivid landscapes filled with lively characters and weird plot lines. While reading Chen’s poetry collection “Mouth,” you’ll find yourself transported from Chinese ghost stories to tales of assassins on deadly missions by short but beautifully written sentences.
Chen agreed to sit down and talk with me about her writing process, poetry, and what she feels when she’s done writing for the day.
Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Lisa Chen: I suppose early on, as with many other writers, you write things and a few people who are not your parents tell you that have some talent, and this buoys you and you write some more. That early encouragement is important. But that moment of knowing when you want to be a writer is less interesting to me than what it means to be a writer, which isn’t easy because the criteria is writing itself.
Earlier this year there was a story in The New York Times about a painter who, after receiving some initial critical attention in the 1970s, struggled to sustain notice. He withdrew from the “art world” and vanished into obscurity. But he never stopped painting. When he died, he left behind some 400 paintings. He was an artist.
ST: What authors did you worship growing up?
LC: Stretching the notion of “worship” and “growing up:” Laurence Yep, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury, Emily Bronte, Kafka, Emily Dickinson, Cesar Vallejo, Maxine Hong Kingston, Yasunari Kawabata, Leonard Michaels, Paul Beatty, James Salter, Chris Kraus.
ST: What was the first poem that you read that made a real connection with you?
LC: Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” A 24-word, eight-line heavyweight of atmosphere and meaning.
An important book, development-wise: An anthology Robert Hass assigned in his undergraduate poetry workshop at UC Berkeley, Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, eds. Mark Strand and Charles Simic. It was my first introduction to writers like Calvino, Cortazar, Ponge, Parra.
As one gets older and becomes a more discerning reader, it’s sometimes hard to remember how influential and explosive a great anthology can be. It’s like walking off the street into a party where you don’t know anyone.
ST: As a writer what is the biggest challenge you face?
LC: The Internet.
ST: How important is it for a writer to set tone early in their writing?
LC: Hm. But doesn’t every poem/story/book have its own gravitational force when it comes to tone? It gets reset depending on the thing being made. I reflexively bristle whenever I read a review of a film or a collection of short stories in which the critic gripes about how the tone changes. Why is that a bad thing? Maybe my definition of tone is buzzing at a different frequency.
ST: For “Mouth” you pulled inspiration from your email’s spam folder. Where else do you pull inspiration from?
LC: Human behavior on subways, advertisements, news items, conversation, "On Kawara," the Chris Marker retrospective at BAM, Young Jean Lee’s approach to playwriting, Hokusai’s 100 Views of Mount Fuji, Myrtle Avenue, the commercial strip nearest where I live in Fort Greene.
One project I’m working on right now is inspired by the performance artist Tehching Hsieh whose works include spending one year punching a clock once every hour, one year spent locked in a cage, one year spent entirely outdoors, no roofs. So for one year I have been gathering “material”—both directly about his art, but also from the effect and experience of time passing in my own life. The project may all fall apart, but for now it provides a constraint and a structure to filter my corner of the universe. Certain things as I experience them in real time start vibrating and setting off sparks because they provoke the project and vice versa.
ST: What is your writing process like?
LC: A few hours of productive bliss followed by many more hours of self-loathing, doubt, not-writing. Repeat.
ST: How long does it take you to write a poem?
LC: Three hours to five years. That three hours bit is probably a lie. The moment of pure invention is usually brief, and rarely immaculate. Then comes everything else.
ST: What advice do you give to first-time writers?
LC: Read a lot, ask other people what they’re reading, experiment with form, write badly, write to people you know, be in and of the broader world. Very few people care if you write a poem or publish a book. Write anyway.
ST: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?
LC: “Lisa” is not the name I was born with. Like with many other immigrants, it was assumed I would take on an Americanized name when I moved here. My stepfather, who met my mother via Adamsville, Ala., the Vietnam War, and Taipei, drew up a shortlist of possibilities, which included “Ginger” and “Mary Ann.” I chose my name because I thought it would be easiest to remember, clocking in at four letters.
To learn more about Lisa Chen, visit her official website.
A Conversation With Author Louise Walters
Louise Walters (Photo credit: Ian Walters)
By Daniel Ford
Author Louise Walters’ Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase features a dual timeline novel set alternately in the early 1940s and modern-day Britain, love and betrayal, and rich, earthy characters. The novel, which comes out Aug. 4, was hailed by Kirkus Reviews as being “a breathtaking, beautifully crafted tale of loves that survive secrets.”
Walters recently talked to me about her love of reading, the inspiration for Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase, and how her writing process always starts with a character.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Louise Walters: At a young age. I have loved reading for as long as I can remember and attempting to write as well as read always felt like a natural progression. However, I lacked self-belief for many years and I didn’t begin to write seriously until I was in my thirties, when I wrote poems. In my forties I finally felt ready to seriously attempt a novel.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
LW: Reading was, and still is, my favourite thing. Many writers and books influenced me—Noel Streatfeild, especially Ballet Shoes; The Chalet School books by Elinor M Brent-Dyer; L M Montgomery’s Anne books, Penelope Lively’s A Stitch in Time. The Katy books by Susan Coolidge were particular favourites. I read voraciously. Childhood reading has influenced my whole life, not just my writing life.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
LW: I start with a character, always. I tend to think about them for a while, inventing them in my imagination. I juggle quite a lot of characters and stories at the moment! The writing process is quite difficult, especially the first draft. I find it hard to get going on a project and usually end up with around a 60,000-word first draft, which is a little too short. But I breathe a sigh of relief if I get to the magical 60,000 because then I have the material to work with, and can start the shaping end editing process. I usually have an ending in mind but have to find my way through to it.
I do listen to music. Sometimes for inspiration, I will listen to my favourites, just to make me feel good—Kate Bush puts me in a positive frame of mind—but I also listen to music for research and to help with the “feel” of a project. When writing Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase I listened to Billie Holiday constantly.
DF: As a history buff, I love historical fiction, so I’m always interested in up-and-coming writers who delve into the genre. Did your writing style mesh well with historical fiction or was it just something that appealed to you?
LW: I don’t regard myself as a historical writer, actually. But I can’t imagine writing a novel without delving into my characters’ pasts. We are all a product of every day of our lives so far and I love exploring my characters’ histories.
DF: How did the idea for Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase originate?
LW: I have a suitcase with a label inside which reads “Mrs. D. Sinclair” and I remember thinking Mrs. Sinclair’s Suitcase would make a great title for a novel. I started to wonder about this Mrs. Sinclair. I also found a letter in a book written by a Polish Squadron Leader during World War II. I kind of put those two unknown, unconnected people together and invented a narrative for them. I also once worked in a second hand bookshop, which was the inspiration for the bookshop in the novel. And I once lived in a cottage in rural Lincolnshire, which bore quite a resemblance to Dorothy’s cottage.
DF: What were some of the themes you wanted to tackle in the novel?
LW: I wasn’t really aware of any themes, at least to begin with. I was just trying to write the story. As I worked more on it and became more familiar with the world of the story, I became aware that motherhood, in all its guises, was pretty much the theme.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
LW: My characters are invention. I don’t base them on real people, certainly not wholesale. I borrow traits from people I know or have known. Also expressions. For instance, when Dorothy gives the baby a wash she refers to it as a “lick and a promise,” which is a phrase my mother used when I was a child. I think if I’m honest there is quite a lot of “me” in most of my characters. But essentially I make people up, which is such a fun thing to do.
DF: You’ve had a bunch of different jobs while you pursued your dream of becoming a writer, so I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if you had a favorite or a story from one of them you hold dear (or not so dear).
LW: I worked in a secondhand bookshop for six years and that was my favourite job. I met a lot of interesting people during that time. A few famous people popped in from time to time, which was quite exciting! And like Roberta in the novel, I enjoyed finding things left behind in second hand books.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
LW: I think it’s important to love reading and to read a lot. I read whenever I get the opportunity and I read while I’m writing too. If I write and don’t read, I feel too disengaged from the art I’m trying to participate in. I know not all writers feel that way, but for me I have to read often while I’m working on a novel. I don’t worry about somebody else’s writing influencing mine. Actually, I welcome it. Never be afraid to beg, borrow and steal techniques, it’s the best way to learn and to find your way to your own voice and style.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
LW: I am currently working on a patchwork quilt for my daughter. I started work on it years ago but have promised it will be ready for this Christmas. It’s entirely hand sewn and I’m very behind schedule!
To learn more about Louise Walters, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @LouiseWalters12.
A Conversation With Author Maria Kostaki
Maria Kostaki
Author Maria Kostaki, a native of Moscow, has bebopped between Athens, Greece and New York City much of her life, and managed to collect an impressive writing resume along the way. She has worked as an editor and staff writer for Odyssey magazine in Athens and New York, and her nonfiction has appeared in Elle Décor and Insider Magazine.
Her debut novel, Pieces, follows Sasha as she is abandoned by her mother and shuffled between older relatives in Cold War-era Moscow.
Kostaki recently answered some of my questions about how she developed her love of writing, her journalism background, and the inspiration for Pieces.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Maria Kostaki: Never. I think I just always was, in some form. I remember from a very early age, it was the only way I could express myself. From elementary school onwards, I’d come home, go to my room, and write a story about my day in my diary.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
MK: I was born in Russia, so a huge library of a rich literary culture hung above my head as a child. Metaphorically speaking. In high school, I feel in love with Jane Eyre, in college with the postmodernists, Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch fascinated me, the nonlinear, the unconventional. Then the magical realists, with Gabriel García Márquez on the throne, and, finally, Toni Morisson, my all-time hero.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
MK: Outline? What’s that? Music, yes, always. But classical. Lyrics interrupt my train of thought.
DF: As someone who was trained as a journalist and made a living at it for a couple of years, I have to ask what you think of the current state of journalism and why was it something you pursued when you first started out?
MK: After finishing my BA in Literature, I got a job at a small English-language magazine in Greece. By the end of my two-year full-time stay there, I was torn between pursuing an MFA in nonfiction and a graduate degree in journalism. I applied to two universities, one for each, and let fate decide.
Having said that, the state of journalism in 2000, when I stepped into my first class at NYU, and the state of journalism today, are extremely different. We barely knew what online journalism was, there was one class that you could take as an elective. Our biggest dream was to get published in The New York Times, and back then, it was an attainable one. Today, everyone is a journalist. The thing that I treasure most from what I learnt while working as a journalist is to double check sources, assess their credibility, double check sources, assess their credibility. There’s so much information out there, so many opinions, misquotes, misinformation, it’s crazy. You have to know how to filter. The best example I’ve lived through is Greece during the past few weeks. People are bombarded with sensationalism here; it’s created a misinformed nation of panic.
DF: Also, what’s the most entertaining story you ever worked on?
MK: I interviewed Nia Vardalos a few days before “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” hit the screens. She was hilarious, scared, self-conscious, real. I called up her father who lived in a town in Canada I’d never heard of, and I remember him saying about how he’ll wave to me from the bleachers of the Olympic Stadium in Greece in 2004. He also mentioned that he doesn’t use Windex as a cure for everything.
DF: How did the idea for Pieces originate?
MK: It originated from me. The book is about me. Anyone who talks to me for more than five minutes will be able to figure it out. But it’s not a memoir. There is lots of fiction, lots of exaggeration, lots of combining numbers of real people into a single character. It’s a story of a girl’s life that just happens to have a lot in common with her author.
DF: How much of yourself and your experiences in Russia and the United States. did you put into your novel?
MK: Oops, got ahead of myself there, above. Russia, a lot. The story about waiting in line for butter only to find it sold out, was very true. The United States, very little, almost nothing. My time in Russia was richer in material for fiction. In New York, we all have our glory stories.
DF: How did you go about developing your characters?
MK: I took people I knew and built on them. Most of them are a kind of caricature. I took their worst and best characteristics and turned them up ten notches. And then made some stuff up. I also chose real people who may have disappointed me at times in life and wrote them into who I’d wanted them to be, had them grow as I imagined they should have. It’s an amazing power, writing.
DF: What are some of the themes you tackle in Pieces?
MK: Abandonment. Loss. Grief. Resilience. Love. Friendship.
DF: How do you balance writing and marketing your work (i.e. book tours, engaging with readers on social media, etc.)?
MK: To be completely honest, so far, I’ve managed to do one at a time. I’m currently trying to combine a form of writing with the marketing of my work. I’ve started a social media project on my Facebook page called #wegreeks. I use it as a creative outlet, yet at the same time, as it’s on my professional page, it gives me a way for thousands of people that read my posts each week, a glimpse into Pieces.
DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?
MK: Novel two.
DF: What advice would you give aspiring authors?
MK: Just write. Let go of fears, insecurities, what ifs. Even though they fuel the writing process, you must let go of them to actually write. Trust me, they don’t really go anywhere. No matter how much you let go, they’ll be back.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
MK: Soft cheese, ripe fruit, and the smell of mushroom soup gross me out.
To learn more about Maria Kostaki, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @MariaKostaki.
Writing by Hand With Author Matthew Thomas
Matthew Thomas
By Daniel Ford
Matthew Thomas’ We Are Not Ourselves was one of the best novels I read in 2014. Honest, compelling characters, a heartbreaking and intimate plot, and a Queens, N.Y. setting made it a book that I couldn’t put down.
Thomas recently answered some of my questions about how he developed into a writer, how he used his personal experiences to create the foundation of We Are Not Ourselves, and how writing longhand opened up his voice.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Matthew Thomas: I remember as a kid having a sense that I wanted to write, but it was more that I enjoyed reading and being absorbed in words and how they were put together, and I wanted to create that feeling myself. In my early teens, I started writing “poems” (heavy quotes around that word), and in college I began writing short stories, nothing I would show anyone now. I guess I started “deciding” to be a writer when I began to shape a life trajectory that excluded the usual possibilities for advancement. I wasn’t studying anything immediately “useful”; nor was I on a track that led to the academy. I wasn’t pursuing summer internships. I never went to jobs fairs or considered applying to any of the corporations that recruited on campus. When I graduated, I avoided taking jobs that might be absorbing and creatively fulfilling, and instead found work that left something in the tank when the workday was over. After graduate school, I had to make enough money to be able to afford living in the city, so I took a job as a high school English teacher, and there was more danger that I would fall into that life for good, because it was absorbing and worthwhile. But I kept making the time to write. So in some ways I “decided” I wanted to be a writer when I kept doing it no matter what. I suppose we decide every day that we want to be writers.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you outline? Listen to music?
MT: I write by hand. Every couple of months I stop and type what I’ve written, which serves as an editorial pass. Then I go back to the notebook. When I have a big chunk typed, I make hand edits to a printout, type those in, and then resume writing longhand. I work from an outline in my head, and when I’m deeper in and know what I’m writing, I get one down on the page. But it’s just a set of suggestions to myself. I’ll go where the book takes me.
When I wrote my first book, I had over a hundred students, and every section met every day. Papers were due every three weeks or so, and there was always something to grade. The only way I could write with any mental clarity was to have all the work done for the next day, which often meant I started writing around midnight or one in the morning. I tried to write two hours a day or a thousand words. There comes a time, somewhere between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning, when it’s really hard to fall asleep. The good thing about being scared of insomnia is that if I sat down to write at one in the morning and wanted to write for two hours, I would get right to work. When you’re tired it’s easier to avoid getting caught up in distracting thoughts. A strange kind of clarity emerges.
I worked in libraries, in classrooms, wherever I could. I wrote a big chunk of the book at Paragraph, a workspace for writers on 14th Street in Manhattan. It was close to where I taught, and I could pop over there after teaching to get some work done before heading home.
When my twins came around, my wife and I were living in a one-bedroom apartment, with the kids in the bedroom and us in the living room. I wrote at the kitchen table. Sometimes I went to a coffee shop so that my wife wouldn’t have to be quiet on the other side of the room. I didn’t think I’d be able to work effectively at coffee shops with all the noise, but I was happy to find I could. I read something recently about low-level, ambient noise helping concentration. Now that I live in a house, I write in an office, looking at a blank wall. I never put on music.
DF: How did the idea for We Our Not Ourselves originate?
MT: My father was dead a year, and I had a little distance from his death. I started writing this book that I’d been intending to write for a while.
The very first thing I wrote in the novel was an in medias res moment—a version of the section in the book where Eileen gives Ed a surprise party for his birthday. I had an idea of the sweep of the life of this character and this family, but I wanted to start somewhere in the middle. There's something useful about getting into the middle of something and looking around to see where you are. I was drawn to that as an entry point.
At some point, I figured out that to create the emotional impact on the reader that I wanted to create, I would need to tell the story of Eileen’s entire life. If the reader had a window into Eileen’s early childhood experiences and the way she spends a lot of her energy seeking a kind of psychic equilibrium, then the reader would understand how Eileen’s husband’s getting this particular chaos-steeped disease would be hugely disrupting, like a bomb going off in her life.
I remember as a young boy being impressed by my mother, her friends and colleagues, and the corporate professionals and elected officials I read about in the newspaper. Even as a kid, before I could put the pieces together with any real understanding, I knew that there was something remarkable about the way in which that generation’s women were remaking civilization. They were the first to hold positions of authority in the workplace in any real numbers. They seemed able to balance so much—pursuing high-powered careers, being mothers and wives—and they possessed apparently inexhaustible reserves of energy. This wasn’t yet the era of sensitive, duty-splitting fathers; the expression “Mr. Mom” was significant for the divergence from expectation that it conveyed. Women ran households in the evening and still marshaled the fortitude necessary the next morning to win workplace battles in the fight for equality. Maybe they were heeding the encouraging arguments feminist thinkers were making, or maybe they were individually answering a more personal call that they simply weren’t going to stand any longer for the prevailing unequal conditions.
I decided to write about a woman who is intimately aware of how much the power structures in America favor men. Throughout her career, she’s seen male colleagues take for granted their place atop the pyramid. And part of why she’s frustrated with her husband is that she sees how many more opportunities for advancement American society wants to offer him than her, opportunities he turns down. And when she was younger, she watched her father frustrate her mother in a similar way. I decided to give Eileen’s mother enormous intellectual potential and have her get swallowed utterly in the maw of the immigrant experience as she disappears into a job as a cleaning woman. That leaves a deep impression on Eileen.
I pursued a storyline that would suggest how women’s roles in society have changed over the years and how their assumptions about the possibility of their own agency have evolved. At the outset of her career, when she’s still in nursing school and paying her tuition as a model at Bonwit Teller, Eileen dreams that a man might come and save her from the career that awaits her. But she eventually figures out that she has to be her own savior. And she experiences great success in her career.
I decided to pick moments—Eileen’s cousin Pat going off to Vietnam, for instance—that would bring the historical backdrop to life without having to foreground it. Most people’s lives are lived off to the sidelines of history. I wanted to argue implicitly that individual lives are just as important as the lives of historically significant figures.
As for the Alzheimer’s aspect of the book, I didn’t set out to write an Alzheimer’s novel. I wrote a novel that had a plotline in it that concerned itself with Alzheimer’s disease. Rather than write a case study, I tried to write a set of convincing character studies, a string of carefully-wrought sentences.
DF: Your name comes up a lot when I talk to other authors (in a positive way, trust me), and one of the things that always gets mentioned is how long it took you to write the book. As someone who has also been writing a novel seemingly forever, I’m curious if you ever had doubts about actually finishing it.
MT: Is there a writer alive who doesn’t have doubts?
Of all the doubts I felt, the worst came during stretches when I wasn’t writing. The demands of paper grading made it difficult to carve out time to work on the book. It’s not hard to lose your connection to what you’re writing if you get away from it for a couple of weeks. It can start to feel like someone else’s book.
Even if you deliberately tell yourself that you’re leaving your book alone for a while, that you’re giving yourself a break from trying to be hyper-efficient and productive all the time and you’re just going to read for a few weeks and just be a teacher and a person, the book doesn’t leave you alone. It doesn’t let you off the hook or give you a guilt-free day or a mental vacation. It makes you feel like an imposter.
Several years in, there was a period of a few months when I found it difficult to write at all because I was preoccupied by not being finished. I knew that it must have looked to my friends and family that this thing I thought of as my calling, writing, was really only a hobby I was doing. I became preoccupied by the desire to finish and to publish my book, and this preoccupation ground my work to a halt.
One day, I asked myself why a successful publication would be meaningful to me. And I realized that it would be meaningful because it would give me time to write. And then I thought: Every time I sit to write for a couple of hours, it’s no different from what I would do if I were a successful author. It hit me with the force of an insight that it wasn’t about the product, that the enjoyment of doing the work was the point of the work. Everyone, published or unpublished, has to sit (or stand) at the desk. And so I got back to work.
It strikes me that one needs to wear horse blinders to get a novel done. Otherwise you can get spooked by doubt and just stop.
DF: You told The Guardian that you were “a fool” when you started writing, and that by the end of the process you were a different person all together. I don’t know if you’ve actually done this, but when you look back at any or all of the early drafts of the novel, do you remember where in life you were at each point and notice where your evolution as a writer and a person happened?
MT: To see the evolution of my writing, all I have to do is to look at the earliest pages and see how little of them remains in the book. You work at something long enough and you get better at it.
I think apprentice writing often tends to be more defensive in the prose. As you mature as a writer, you settle into something that's a little more comfortable in its skin. I stopped writing for the sound of my own voice and started writing for the story that wanted to be told. I got out of its way.
Teaching helped me. My students were a pretty good crowd of critics. They were skeptical about everything and easily moved to frustration and impatience with books. I watched them connect to the more character-driven work—Chekhov, Hemingway, the Joyce of “Dubliners,” Saunders.
I would say the biggest leap forward I took came when I went back to writing by hand. The shift from computer to pen and paper opened my voice.
Life teaches you. There are parts I could never have written had I not been a parent myself. I lacked the insight into that slice of human experience.
In the last half-decade of writing, I rewrote almost the entire book. Other than the brief prologue, the book is arranged chronologically, but I didn’t write all of it in a straightforward march from page one to page 620. The earliest pages ended up getting completely rewritten.
Rewriting what you thought you’d already written takes patience, and I learned to have more of that. The deeper I got into the book, the more willing I was to sit at the desk for hours and not wonder what he rest of the world was doing. You begin to find in the mundane textures of life something that is actually exciting.
Ultimately, the enforced concentration on other people’s problems and emotional lives requires you to get outside yourself and grow up.
DF: Those were two heavy questions, but I swear it’ll get easier from here! How much of yourself and your interactions with family, friends, and the rest of the world did you put into the story?
MT: My father had Alzheimer’s, and the emotional life of this book is informed by my experience with that disease, but the characters are invented, and the plot is made up.
When you’re hamstrung by fidelity to real people, you end up making saints out of everybody. When you invent characters, you can ascribe to them the flaws we all possess, the textured humanity that makes us interesting. You get away from hagiography and begin to paint a more realistic portrait.
Eileen was originally rooted in my mother, but as she became a character in her own right, I started making decisions to give her predilections my mother didn’t share. Eileen is fearful of the change in the neighborhood, for instance. Early childhood experiences make her crave order and stability, and now the balance of her adult life is being upset. And that fear is expressed in a kind of racist thinking. My mother never had that attitude, but it’s an attitude that many had during the white-flight years in New York. I was interested in dramatizing the psychology of the fear of change leading to fear of the Other. It was fear of the future, I think, that created the ugly historical moment known as “white flight” that we as a civilization look at with more perspective now. There was fear that the economic and hegemonic promise of postwar America wouldn’t be fulfilled, at least in one’s own life, and it came out, I think, for many white Americans, as a fear of people who didn’t look like them.
I also faced the dilemma of possible readerly conflation of character with author. I decided to go at that problem head-on by being a little hard on Connell, having him make mistakes that I didn’t make. I remembered something Jim Shepard had said to us once in class: be a little tough on your characters and your readers will be easier on them. Your readers will say, Hold on a second, this isn’t such a bad guy as you’re saying! Once I knew that Connell was a fictional creation, once I actually believed it, I wasn’t worried anymore that anyone might think he was me, because I knew he wasn’t. But I had to risk the Rothian response: Well, this author wasn’t very responsible when he was younger. He treated his father shabbily.
I believe I did a better job than Connell of taking care of my father, but the truth is that the missteps, the faltering, the moral failures are all things I could imagine for the book precisely because they were never far from the realm of possibility. I was young when my father’s disease hit, and not always responsible at times. I was, in short, a kid, though I had the benefit of a couple of extra years of life on Connell, who is younger when the disease hits than I was. I was able to avoid more future regret than Connell is.
And with Eileen—well, my mother never had an affair with a Russian man. She never got pulled into a kind of cult. I had to risk that her friends would read the book and say, I had no idea she was that kind of woman.
Thankfully I wasn’t writing a book that was trying to skewer anyone. I was trying to capture a certain amount of the truth of lived experience as I perceived it. And I was trying to bring to life on the page a people and a place and time, and so if people influenced these characters, they were many in number, and not just the immediate people in my nuclear family.
DF: Since you’re a New York writer, I have to ask if you were conscious about avoiding the clichés that can crop up when writing about the city, or did you feel comfortable knowing that Queens was unexplored territory for most readers?
MT: I think what you mean by clichés is the way in which New York so often stands in symbolically for other things: capitalism, immigration, decadence, urban living, race and class relations, inequities in the distribution of resources. I would say the bigger preoccupation for me wasn’t the avoidance of cliché so much as the permanent awareness of the impossibility of ever capturing on the page something so gargantuan and sedimentarily layered as New York. And yet there was the desire to attempt to do so.
In some ways writing about Queens did offer me a partial way out of the traditional New York narrative, while also offering the chance to attempt to do something like what William Kennedy does with Albany. Queens is a world of its own. It offers the writer tremendous opportunities, because it is such a crossroads, populated by working class people, middle class people and even some wealthier people, who are basically all living together in close quarters. It doesn't have the glamour of a borough like Manhattan or even lately Brooklyn, but it has about it the texture of real life, and as a novelist that is extraordinarily interesting and useful.
DF: Your novel made me incredibly homesick for my beloved Queens (You get bonus points for having one of your main characters attend my alma mater St. John’s). What’s one of your favorite Queens-related stories that may not have made it into the novel?
MT: There was a lady in Jackson Heights everyone called “the goddammit lady.” She walked up and down the block in front of St. Joan of Arc church pushing a shopping cart and saying, “Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit, goddammit,” over and over and over. She was suffering from some kind of mental disturbance, but she was as much a part of the neighborhood as anybody else. Then one day she was gone. Or it’s more accurate to say, one day you noticed you hadn’t seen her, and then enough time passed and you knew you would never see her again. You would never hear the “goddammit” call again. It was something that would live now only in your memory.
DF: The accolades for We Our Not Ourselves could fill an entire bookstore! After working on the novel for so long, what did it feel like to have the novel so celebrated and has the response affected the way you think about your work?
MT: I’m grateful that some people have enjoyed it. But I’m also just grateful that I finished it in the first place, after working on it for so long, and that now I get to work on something else.
I remember hearing once from Alice McDermott that writing one book doesn’t prepare you for writing another. Now I see firsthand now how right she was.
If having a book out in the world has made me conscious of anything with respect to composition, it’s the fact that while the form a book is written in may be the organic outgrowth of the book’s internal logic, form is also a signifier. The choice of form suggests something about a writer’s poetics. If I write another traditional, linear, realistic, character-driven human drama, as opposed to, say, a work like Invisible Cities or Wittgenstein’s Mistress, I am implicitly making an aesthetic statement that may in fact be a poor representation of the range of my interest in many forms and modes. And yet my next book is taking shape in a realistic, straightforward mode, because the emotional life of the book is demanding it. You can only write the books you’re drawn to write. This next book will inevitably be read as a response to my first, even if the two have nothing to do with one another.
DF: What advice would you give aspiring writers?
MT: Work as hard as you can and forgive yourself when you’re either not working as much as you think you should or producing work that you think is worth showing anybody. It’s a hard life in the first place and as productive as it can be to censure oneself, and as useful as it sometimes can be to feel bad about things like a lack of productivity, it can also be damaging, because there may be a reason you aren’t writing much at a certain time. Maybe you’re soaking up some of life, reading more, internalizing unconsciously the rhythms of the language, or learning about human beings and understanding people as characters. I think that if one chooses the writing life, there is so much failure, difficulty, and seemingly fruitless striving in it that the kinder one can be to oneself at any point in the process, the better. Also, I would say the most important thing is to not look at one’s first draft as the final draft—not to be discouraged by what you see when something is in its nascency, as it’s not, in fact, proof of anything. It’s not proof of your inability to ever do it for it not to be done yet. This is crucial because everybody’s first drafts are terrible. Even when they’re not, they are. If you have a real inclination to write, there has to be a kind of self-protection, because there are so many reasons not to write. Part of that self-protection comes in just realizing in advance that for a long time the work will not be very good. But if the work gets done, and done enough, you sweat out all that bad writing you have to do. On the other hand, if you look at that bad writing and you tell yourself that this is who you are as a writer, this is the limit of what you can do, what’s going to happen is, unless you have an iron constitution, you may just stop. I just think that there has to be an openness to failure, and to failure as the opposite of proof.
I would say also that as soon as it's possible for you to get into a habit where your writing becomes a regular part of your life, however regular it can be, make it a habit. Because the more it’s a habit the easier it is to keep going. Work within the limits of what is available to you psychologically and in terms of your resources of time, energy and spirit.
I’d also say write longhand if it’s possible because it give the writer tremendous power over his or her circumstances. There is no need for a plug-in. It can be just done in a notebook anywhere. And there isn't a way to go on the Internet because there's no internet to go to.
DF: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?
MT: I did Irish step dancing as a kid. I quit when I was young, and I don’t remember any of the steps—not that I could do them all that well to begin with. But having done step dancing allowed me to write with some familiarity about Eileen doing it. So the kilt was worth it after all.
To learn more about Matthew Thomas, visit his official website or like his Facebook page.
FULL ARCHIVE
A Conversation With Writer, Poet, and Comedian Bucky Sinister
Bucky Sinister
By Sean Tuohy
Reading Bucky Sinister is like reading the inner workers of a dream being created. Bucky’s new novel Black Hole is a cocktail of dark humor mixed with characters ready to leap off the page.
Sinister (what an awesome name!) took a few moments to sit down and talk to me about writing, punk rock, and creative fuel.
Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Bucky Sinister: In 1987, I heard Black Flag's “Family Man” record. There's a whole spoken word side of that record. I had never heard anything like it. I was immediately captivated. I wanted to do it.
I grew up with aspirations of being an evangelist, but earlier that year I had lost my faith. I had no more place in the world. Society as a whole looked like a lie. The church offered nothing for me anymore. I turned to them for help and got none.
That's when I found the punk world, and subculture in general. I can't explain to anyone who grew up in an Internet world how difficult this was to find. Everything was like a secret you had to uncover by knowing someone cool or reading a zine. I wanted to belong in this world, not just watch it go by, and here was this thing I could do: I was good at talking to groups of people.
I was doing a lot of tape trading then, which is what we did before file sharing, and I ended up with these cassettes of Giorno Poetry Systems albums. It was this really great record label that put out comps like the “Smack My Crack” record. It was where I got exposed to a lot of bands like The Swans and The Butthole Surfers but also to writers like Jim Carroll and William S. Burroughs.
I still didn't really connect it with books. It was more of a performance thing. I wanted to write for spoken word shows. I didn't care about anything in print.
I moved to Los Angeles in 1988. I went to open mikes, partly because they were free. I heard real poets there, who were also really good live. I had no idea you could say the things they were saying. Their message was so far beyond the punk band lyrics. That's when I found the little magazines, the local poetry rags, and such. There was one reading in the Midnight Special Bookstore, which had a really good poetry section. The open mikers showed me which books they liked. I would show up there early and stand around in the poetry section and read. I think that's when I wanted to write a book.
ST: Which authors did you worship growing up?
BS: I grew up fundamentalist, so I loved CS Lewis. During a hard time in high school, I was befriended by a great group of nerds, who loved The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. I read those pretty much to be in on the joke.
I didn't really have a fire lit under me until I read Charles Bukowski's Ham On Rye when I was 19, after I had moved to Los Angeles. I moved to all the obvious counterculture stuff: Hunter S. Thompson, Burroughs, beat poets, some of the Black Sparrow authors like Wanda Coleman, Eileen Myles, and Jim Carroll. Then there were harder to find books like Adulterer's Anonymous by Exene Cervenka and Lydia Lunch, and Rollins was putting out chapbooks that I bought at Hi De Ho Comics.
Bukowski freed me. It was the first story I had ever read about a kid who grew up in an abusive childhood, and he just shook it the fuck off. Somehow I would be okay. He also destroyed all the rules for American poets. There's a lot of obnoxious Bukowski fans, and a lot of people hate him without reading his work, but I don't know if anyone's ever written anything better than his output from 1960–72. I catch shit for liking his work, people put it down, but I still reread it and find things in there at 46 I didn't notice at 19.
I moved to San Francisco and met a bunch of people who were into cyberpunk stuff, so I got into William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, George Alec Effinger, KW Jeter, and John Shirley. This also led me to Philip K Dick, which was a huge deal for me. This book definitely would not be the same without Dr. Adder or City Come A-Walkin'. This also coincided with a big meth streak I was on. I'd get high at a party and go home and read all night.
There were also a ton of local writers in San Francisco. Black Hole was heavily influenced by Jon Longhi and Peter Plate. I was part of a scene there that included Michelle Tea, Beth Lisick, Daphne Gottlieb, Justin Chin, and many more. A. Razor was, and is, a close friend of mine from those days, and we had a lot of adventures together. There's like, 30 people I've left off this list, whose writing I competed with week after week. I was pushing to keep up with them.
ST: Where did the plotline for Black Hole come from? Was it based on anything personal?
BS: I had a recurring dream where I worked at the mini-whale company. In the dream, I would remember my waking life as if it were a dream. It was really messing with my head.
I tried to keep the dream structure for the novel. I wanted it to be in and out, recurring imagery, inconsistency-ridden, and just not make sense in the way that dreams don't make sense when you're thinking about them.
When you're doing drugs, especially meth, you end up talking for hours and hours, sometimes days. You hear the weirdest shit, and people tell you with the utmost sincerity. I wanted this book to have that feel, of the rambling nightmare conspiracies you hear on the second day of meth, when you're trying to not come down.
This is all either stuff I've dreamed, seen, or heard, and some of it is true, but only believable when I wrap it in bullshit. I did know a conspiracy theorist who covered himself in shit and got 5150'd and had both his arms amputated and was found dead with a syringe in his neck. I did know a 500-pound crack head junky thief who lived in the Tenderloin. I did move to the Bay three months after Op Ivy broke up and regretted it ever since. Last week I met a bodybuilder who gets $800 to let fetishists touch his arms while they masturbate, and I really thought I made that part up. So I'm not sure what is real or not.
ST: The opening paragraph to Black Hole is one of the funniest and most honest things I have read in a while. How important is it for a writer to set a tone early in their work?
BS: That paragraph was originally about 40 pages in. But I really loved how it sounded. So I put it first. In standup comedy, you find a few jokes that are essential: your opener and your closer. I read that paragraph on my second draft, and knew it was my opener. I thought it was abrupt, but fuck it.
ST: What kind of connection do you want to form with your reader?
BS: I hope this book entertains the ordinary reader. I hope recovering drug addicts find another layer of humor. We're funny people. You will never find darker humor than in recovery.
ST: What kind of writer are you: Outline and then write or just write and see what happens?
BS: I write everything I can think of, and then remove what doesn't belong. Then I rearrange it. I don't write sequentially.
ST: What advice do you give to aspiring writers?
BS: Read at least one book a week and write 10 pages a week. After two years, you'll have read 100 books and written 1,000 pages. If you're not better after that, quit. Your last 10 pages should be drastically better than your first 10 pages.
I came up when television sucked and there was no Internet. I had little else to kill time with other than reading. I read a lot. You need that. A new writer today needs to sacrifice other distractions and get those books in.
A lot of people can't get that first manuscript done. Just get it done, It's okay if it's bad. Just finish it and write another one. Too many writers wait for some thing that will never come to get started. Start now.
This is my seventh book. I'm 46. I can't get literary representation. I want to. I hope to. But if I don't, fuck it. The literary world knows who I am, they just don't care. Still want to be a writer? It can be done. It won't be on your terms.
A lot of people want to be authors, but not so many want to be writers. They want to sign a hardcover for a line of adoring fans after whisper-reading the first chapter to a crowded bookstore. They want to be interviewed on NPR. They want to complainbrag about how different the movie is from their book. They want to be at whatever events Dave Eggers and David Sedaris go to. They want to say something insightful to the press when David Foster Wallace kills himself. But they don't want to write, they don't want to go through the extraction process and run the gauntlet of rejection trying to get it published.
ST: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?
BS: I compete twice a year in Russian kettlebell sport.
To learn more about Bucky Sinister, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @bucky_sinister.
Booze, Drugs, and Screenwriting: A Hollywood Fairy Tale With Author Liana Maeby
Liana Maeby (Photo credit: Jeremy Hunt Schoenherr)
By Daniel Ford and Sean Tuohy
Author Liana Maeby’s novel South on Highland starts like this:
The pills spilled to the ground like debris from a tornado, landing in various wet spots around the toilet. No, they tumbled out like a wintry mix: Klonopin hail OxyContin rain, Vicodin snow. No, like that moment on the 101, somewhere around Barham, when accident traffic suddenly unclogs and the cars shoot forward at once.
Hello!
Loosely based on Maeby’s life, South on Highland follows a young screenwriter who toggles between crafting inspired screenplays and ingesting more drugs than a Tim Dorsey character. The novel rumbles like a freight train powered by addiction and Hollywood. You’ll need a stiff drink while you binge read, but the prose will make you question whether or not you want to keep refilling your glass (or powdering your nose with a blast of cocaine).
Maeby took a timeout from promoting her novel to answer some of our questions about how LifeCall influenced her early writing, how the idea for South on Highland originated, and her ketchup phobia.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Liana Maeby: I’m sure I’ve retrospectively self-mythologized a little bit, but I really don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing. In kindergarten, I was penning—or, more likely, Crayoning—stories about mermaids and self-aware unicorns instead of playing tag like a normal, fun kid. There was a satirical kid’s book at eight [I’m still tremendously proud of Earl Can Hurl (You Can Hurl Too)], and then some god-awful early novel and screenplay attempts as a teenager.
Both of my parents are writers, so I grew up surrounded by it. I basically just took up the family trade. We’re like dentists, but poorer!
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
LM: Okay, so honestly? That infamous “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” medical alert commercial came out when I was four, and I remember finding it to be the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my entire life. Like, I would just laugh and laugh and laugh, a little toddler sociopath. So that absolutely had an effect on my comedic development. God bless you, LifeCall!
On the lowbrow side, I also grew up really loving dudes like Faulkner and Nabokov and Baldwin. And I can’t undervalue how important it was for me to have been lucky enough to come of age in the era of Tina and Amy.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
LM: I do like to outline, but I’m also not a linear writer at all. If I have an idea for an out-of-order section, I’ll just write it. And sometimes I’ll write, like, the second and the sixth paragraphs of said chunk, and then go through and fill in the rest.
At the same time, I’m super precise and can’t move on from a section unless I’m happy with every word. Which is great in that I don’t have to do a ton of line editing at the end of the process, but also not exactly ideal when I’m cutting stuff out.
Music? Never. It’s too distracting. I need my brain to pure, like Wonder Bread, ready to sop up the world and expel it back onto the page (I wrote that last sentence while listening to music).
Sean Tuohy: Does your writing style change when you are writing a screenplay? Do you focus more on dialogue when writing a screenplay?
LM: Definitely. I love writing dialogue and structuring jokes, but there’s really nothing more satisfying to me than crafting a good prose sentence. So much so that in South on Highland, I actually had to go back in and add more dialogue.
ST: Be honest: Do you think my screenplay about commando puppies that break dance on weekends will sell?
LM: I mean, this isn’t a deal-breaker, but I’ve already identified a logic flaw…to a puppy, every day is the weekend.
DF: How did the idea for South on Highland originate?
LM: It started out as a story about breakdancing commando puppies, but then I identified a logic flaw and decided to look at our culture’s fascination with the addiction memoir instead. The book was initially conceived as straight satire, but became more of a novel as I went along—mostly because that felt more interesting and easier to sustain.
DF: Your novel is based on your life, but after all the writing, re-writing, and editing, how much of yourself—and your interactions with friends, family, and others—ended up in the final draft?
LM: Really, the book is only loosely based on my life. I wanted to take a kernel of truth and see that through to its logical extreme. So part of that process involved challenging myself to come up with fictional ideas, which has always been much more appealing to me than just writing fact-based stuff. I kind of figured out a way to live vicariously through myself, which basically makes me Elon Musk or Willy Wonka.
DF: Sean and I talk all the time about how writers can be self-destructive when they’re not working on their craft, or things aren’t going very well with their work. How did you go about putting those themes on the page and how did you tie it into our culture’s view of addition and sensationalism?
LM: This is, in fact, one of the main themes of my book. Our culture is set up to reward wild, sensational behavior as long as we come out on the other end to write (a book, a song, a movie) about it. And as writers, we can justify this kind of behavior with the pretense that we’re gaining necessary life experience. It’s a very dangerous cycle to enter, especially if things aren’t going well, because you’ve set yourself up with the perfect toolkit for utter self-destruction.
DF: B.J. Novak, whose short story collection we loved, said your book is “the kind of book that kids will steal from each other.” How does it feel receiving warm praise for a story so near to your own life?
LM: I mean, I’d rather people buy the book… stealing it won’t exactly put my dog through college. But really, it feels indescribably amazing to hear these nice things, especially from folks I admire. Every single kind word I hear about the book makes me feel so insanely lucky, like all those late nights spent in front of my computer have been worth it ten times over. Compliments: I recommend them!
DF: You also landed on a few “best of” lists for your Twitter account! How do you balance promoting yourself and your work on social media and actually sitting down and writing?
LM: I’d say a good self-promotion-to-actually-writing ratio is 80:20. But I’m not even on Snapchat, so this could feasibly go up to 85:15.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
LM: I wish I had something better than “sit down and write,” but I really don’t. Write, and rewrite, and don’t be too hard on yourself if something isn’t working. There’s a huge learning curve, and the only way to get through it is to keep your head down and work for longer than seems sane or reasonable.
The good news is that if you have a writer’s heart, the above will seem like a fun challenge rather than a chore!
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
LM: I have a ketchup phobia. Not as in, I don’t much care for it on a burger, but more that I can’t look at it or smell it without getting nauseous, and if some happens to accidentally end up in my mouth or on my body, I will have a full-blown panic attack. It’s really weird and inconvenient! Like, even using the stupid word in this answer means that I will have to lie down on the couch for 15 minutes to recuperate. You’re welcome, you monsters!
To learn more about Liana Maeby, visit her Good Reads page or follow her on Twitter @lianamaeby.
A Conversation With Fantasy Author Aya Knight
Aya Knight
By Sean Tuohy
Author Aya Knight lives in a world of fantasy that she has created and none of us blame her. Knight is the author of the much loved Chronicles of Kales series and is currently working on her next project. Knight took a moment to step out of her fantasy land to speak to Writer’s Bone about the craft of writing.
Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
Aya Knight: I think a part of me has always been into storytelling. Since a young age I would engage in activities that would put my (at times) overactive imagination to use. Dungeons & Dragons was something that I enjoyed since it revolves around stories that push you to use no more than your mind. I also love to read, though I’ll admit, I don’t get to as much as I’d like. As I grew into my 20s, an idea began to brew that I just couldn’t stop thinking about. It was the core concept of my first novel and I knew that I needed to get it onto paper. What started as the desire to write a “cool concept” down, quickly turned into page after page of content. I found myself invested in the world and knew at that point there was no turning back. I was determined to make writing novels my profession. Since then, I’ve never looked back and hope to continue this passion for many years to come.
ST: What authors did you worship growing up?
AK: Stephen King is definitely a top-runner. One of the first books I remember carrying around (and the only book I’ve ever read through twice), was Pet Sematary. I can still remember how gripped I was on every page, how he was able to pull me completely into this alternate reality with no more than words on paper. I also really enjoyed Dean Koontz. I find he has a natural talent to blend genres together. A couple of his books were great thrillers, yet had fantastical elements to them. Lastly, I’d like to credit a more recent author on the timeline. J.K. Rowling. What can I say? I’m a sucker for the Harry Potter series. It was a very well written story and I think a lot of people don’t realize how difficult it is to craft a tale that takes place across seven books, while masterfully wrapping up all loose ends and tying the characters together with closure.
ST: What kind of writer are you: Outline and then writer or just write and see what happens?
AK: Definitely outline! I’ve tried both methods, and found that without outlining, I end up investing a lot more brainpower into developing a plot. It not only ends up taking me longer, but I end up missing elements that could have been avoided if I’d taken the time to block out main events in advance. For me personally, I’ve found outlining to be a great cure for writer’s block.
ST: Did growing up in South Florida have an effect on your writing?
AK: I would say that the location itself had no influence on my writing, but the people I’ve met and experiences encountered (while in South Florida) played a role in my writing.
ST: What advise do you give to other authors?
AK: It may sound cliché, but I always urge anyone who wants to complete a book, to write every single day. Set a realistic goal for yourself, (such as 1,000 words per day) a goal that fits your lifestyle. Don’t try to set your goals too high or you’ll end up disappointing yourself, and possibly un-motivating your drive. Set a goal that is realistic to accomplish—then, if you happen to achieve more, it’s icing on the cake.
ST: Can you tell us about Silver Knight Publishing?
AK: Silver Knight Publishing was an amazing experience and enabled me to learn a great deal about the inner workings of the industry. We represented many wonderful and talented authors. However, the company has since merged and is no longer operational for submissions.
ST: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?
AK: Hah, all right. I’m a huge fan of amusement parks (I think I get even more excited than my kids)! And, when I say a huge fan, I’m talking the whole nine yards—I’m that person who walks around with Mickey Mouse ears or a Harry Potter wand.
To learn more about Aya Knight, visit her official website, like her Facebook page, or follow her on Twitter @AyaKnight.
The Coolest Way To Interview Author Nicholas Tanek
By Sean Tuohy
Filled with an unheard of amount of honestly, The Coolest Way to Kill Yourself is a love story in its rawest form. Author Nicholas Tanek writes from the heart, infusing his novels with his wild past and allowing readers to peek inside his mind. Covering everything from the ‘90s New York City rave scene to kinky sex and a little drug use, Tanek’s novels never flinch and always tell the truth.
I was lucky enough to chat with Nicholas about his career, his writing style, and what makes him tick.
Sean Tuohy: When did you know you wanted to be an author?
Nicholas Tanek: I had a need to write the book The Coolest Way to Kill Yourself because the love of my life died at the age of 37. We both loved to write. When we were teenagers, in the New York City rave scene in the 1990s, we would write all the time. The thing is that I got published and she did not. All my poems and stories were for women. She used to get upset and say, “No one will ever write anything for me.” So, I wrote a book for the girl who thought no one would ever write about her. The book is filled with hard drugs, kinky sex, and an endless amount of music references. It is a very true and very raw love story that takes place over the course of 15 years. It deals with addiction, kinky sex, abuse, depression, crime, and the need to be creative. After I published The Coolest Way to Kill Yourself, I had to tell another story. Chipped Black Nail Polish is a tribute to the very first love of my life. It’s a coming of age story about a very wild punk rock girl and what we went through in the hardcore/punk rock scene in New Jersey during the summer of 1989. So, I wanted to become an author to pay tribute to these magnificent and unique women who were in my life.
ST: Who were your early writing influences?
NT: As far as writers go, Hunter S. Thompson, Richard Shannon, Herman Hesse, Truman Capote, and others. But, stand-up comics have always been a major influence on my life too. People like Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor, Mitch Hedberg, were some of the early stand-up comics that influenced me.
ST How much of you is in The Coolest Way To Kill Yourself?
NT: All of it. The whole crazy story is true. I just changed some names and labeled it fiction. Yeah, sure…fiction. The Coolest Way to Kill Yourself and Chipped Black Nail Polish are all true. I narrate them.
ST: What kind of writer are you? Do you outline the story and then write or just write and see what happens?
NT: Since every book is something that happened to me, I know the story in my head. The first part is getting it out of my head and onto the page. Since the stories are true, I do not just write to see where my imagination takes me. I have a purpose for each part that I write. So, I have a basic outline in my mind which includes the character arcs and the beginning, middle and end. There are various themes in the books. I try to use symbolism in many ways. The rest of the process is editing. For The Coolest Way to Kill Yourself, there are some time shifts. It starts out with me actually writing the book. I wrote the book during Hurricane Sandy. There was no electricity and I had to plug my laptop into the generator. So, I write about writing the book while telling my love story with Lynn. In editing, we played around with the time shifts to make it work. Chipped Black Nail Polish is more of a linear book.
ST: What does the future hold for Nicholas Tanek?
NT: Well, I am working on a sequel to The Coolest Way to Kill Yourself. It is a tribute to the wild and wonderful kinky people in the New Jersey BDSM fetish community. After Lynn died, I just dove in the fetish community for a couple of months and explored, like Nicholas In Wonderland. The book is very kinky, but it’s not masturbation material. Many books represent the BDSM fetish community as a dark and dangerous place. Sure, it can be sometimes, but many of the people are quirky, friendly, and fun. The working title, which I may change is, The Good Kind Of Pervert. It’s a tribute to those who are not scared to sexually express themselves.
ST: What advice do you give to other writers?
NT: Write! Just write! Write something from the heart! Then, edit, edit, and edit more. Write for a purpose. Please do not write just sell books or because you think that is what your audience will buy. So many authors just jumped on the bandwagon and started publishing BDSM books that truly do not represent the culture. I want to help change that and give them something real. But…most of all, for the love of everything cool, please be original and write something original.
ST: Can you tell us one random fact about yourself?
NT: I own an actual straight jacket.
To learn more about Nicholas Tanek, like his Facebook page or follow him on Twitter @NicholasTanek.
Characters Are Everything: 11 Questions With Author Ace Atkins
Ace Atkins
By Daniel Ford
As I mentioned in last month’s “5 Books That Should Be On Your Radar,” Ace Atkin’s latest novel, The Redeemers, features dopey criminals, tortured heroes, and a plot that hits you like a bulldozer.
Atkins recently took some time away from promoting his new novel to talk to me about how he became a writer, how he developed his main character Quinn Colson, and how eavesdropping helped him hone his dialogue.
Daniel Ford: Did you grow up wanting to be a writer or was it a desire that built up over time?
Ace Atkins: I always loved books but didn’t seriously want to become a writer until I was about 16 years old. That’s when my love of my books really got serious. I started off reading Ernest Hemingway and Ian Fleming and never looked back.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
AA: Hemingway and Fleming for sure. But I also got deep into Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. No doubt Robert B. Parker and Elmore Leonard. Dutch Leonard, to me, wrote the exact kind of book I love to read and wanted to write. I college, I developed a real love for Southern lit. Flannery O’Connor for sure. She was twisted and fantastic.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
AA: I work in an office on the Square in Oxford, Miss., I treat my office like anyone else with a job or a business to run. I’m there Monday through Saturday. I try and take off Sundays. Hemingway was always superstitious about working on Sundays. I do listen to some music to help me get ready to write but rarely listen to anything I’m writing. Although I did listen to a lot of Chris Knight while working on the last few Quinn books. I wanted the books to sound like a Chris Knight song.
DF: How much of yourself ends up in your main character Quinn Colson?
AA: I believe in a lot of the same things as Quinn, and we both have a strong sense of justice. But with Quinn I never want to write an alter ego. That really doesn’t interest me, and I hope my writing ability is better than that. At Quinn’s core, he’s a warrior, a career military man who speaks in few words. He likes to get up early. He likes to hunt. He is wholly adept finding himself deep in the woods (My idea of heaven is room service at a good hotel). I know people like Quinn and respect them a great deal. But he’s no more me than Johnny Stagg or Lillie Virgil is me.
DF: How did the idea for your upcoming novel The Redeemers originate?
AA: I had a friend, a local attorney—who has recently passed away—who let me know about a break-in and its aftermath here in north Mississippi. The unraveling after the job is what interested me. People playing off each other, wanting to pin the crime on each other, the crumbling of relationships and deep lies. For me, the crime is always secondary to the people, the characters. Characters are everything.
DF: Your dialogue in The Redeemers is snappy and downright fun. What is your process like for developing the dialogue between your characters?
AA: Thanks much! I’m a trained journalist and I love to eavesdrop. I love finding characters, listening for their quirks. It may be at a restaurant or a back aisle at Home Depot. I also sometimes ride with our local sheriff’s department and have taken a trip to the Mississippi State pen at Parchman. Characters are everywhere down here. My writing heroes in writing authentic dialogue were Elmore Leonard and George V. Higgins. I am definitely from their school of writing. It has to come from real people.
DF: The crime genre has certain built-in tropes that can deter some writers from taking the plunge. How do you ensure that each novel you develop is original?
AA: What some people don’t seem to get is that a crime novel can be anything. You have to have some type of criminal act take place. But other than that, a good crime novel focuses on the real world. I truly could care less about writing a book about some self-absorbed middle-aged guy pondering his life. Some would call that literary; I’d call it boring and philosophically light. A novel has to be about something. I like crime because it involves so many aspects of society and culture. If you start a novel with a sense of telling a real and authentic story, you won’t be trapped in tropes.
DF: You were selected by the Robert B. Parker Estate to continue the Spenser series (your most recent Kickback came out in May). What has that experience been like and has it changed your writing process at all?
AA: My writing process hasn’t changed, but my writing style has. It’s not easy trying to continue in the voice of such a popular and talented author as Robert B. Parker. I do think my background as a reporter helped a great deal. Parker’s genius was in minimalism. I spend more time subtracting words than adding them. I write in his voice which is a little tricky. For the Quinn books, that’s all me and more natural.
DF: How do you balance writing and marketing your work (i.e. book tours, engaging with readers on social media, etc.)?
AA: I do enjoy social media. I like interacting with readers and other writers. But I hope I know when to turn it off. That stuff can consume your life. And mostly I should be a quiet place working on a new novel!
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
AA: Read as much as you can. Write as much as you can. Take criticism, only from people you respect.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
AA: In addition to classic noir films and gritty crime novels, I really enjoyed “The Gilmore Girls.” Don’t tell anyone.
The Redeemers is available for purchase starting today! To learn more about Ace Atkins, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @aceatkins.
Author in the Moonlight: 9 Questions With Charles Dubow
Charles Dubow
By Daniel Ford
As fascinated as Sean Tuohy and I have been with some of our guests’ biographies, I think author Charles Dubow’s might claim top prize. He’s been a roustabout, a lumberjack, a sheepherder in New Zealand (!), and a Congressional aide. Dubow also had time to help found Forbes.com and become an editor at Businessweek.com.
After all that, why not start writing thrilling fiction?!
Dubow recently answered my questions on how he developed his craft, his straightforward writing process, and the inspiration for his latest novel, Girl in the Moonlight.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Charles Dubow: I decided I wanted to try to be a writer when I was in college. After my sophomore year at Wesleyan I took a year off to think about what direction I wanted to take in life. Until that period my ambition was to be a painter but I began to have doubts about my abilities in specific and the direction of the art world itself in general. But I still felt the need to create and gradually began to think about writing. I had never done any creative writing before then but the idea began to appeal to me more and more. I started work on a novel that I proceeded to write over the next few years. It was rejected but it was the beginning of a process that has shaped my life ever since.
In my thirties and forties I had all but given up on the idea of becoming a writer, though. Instead I became a journalist and then an editor at various business publications. In that way I was able to still work with words even if it wasn’t in the way I had originally hoped. In my late forties, however, I decided I had to give writing a novel one last shot. I had an idea that I had been mulling over for years and forced myself to find the time to write. That novel turned out to be Indiscretion. Now I am writing constantly, trying to make up for lost time. I don’t mind having had to wait this long. I am just grateful that I have been given the chance at all.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
CD: I was a wide and voracious reader from a young age. I would certainly point to Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner, but also the Russians, specifically Tolstoy and Turgenev.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline? Did your process change at all between your first novel, Indiscretion, and Girl in the Moonlight?
CD: My writing process is straightforward and has been the same for both my novels: I wake up every morning at 5:00 a.m. and write for several hours. Then I take my daughter to school. When I was writing Indiscretion I would then go to the office. Now, however, I am writing full-time so I am able to come back and work until noon. I spend the afternoon revising and, later in the day, exercise. At 7:00 p.m. most evenings I hear the tinkle of the ice in the martini shaker calling my name.
I don’t listen to music when I work—I can’t. I find it far too distracting, especially if it’s something really good. If I put on Verdi’s Nabucco or Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, I am just gone. I also don’t do much by way of outlining. I have a cheat sheet of sorts with some basic plot points and character sketches that gives me a good idea of where I want to go but which also allows me a certain amount of flexibility.
DF: How did the idea for Girl in the Moonlight originate?
CD: After I finished Indiscretion I began working on my next manuscript. However, when my agent read it he told me that it wasn’t a suitable second novel because it was very different in context from my first. Readers, he explained, demand—and deserve—a certain amount of consistency from their authors (at least when it comes to second novels) and so I would better off if I returned to some of the themes and settings that I had used in Indiscretion.
So I began to think of the most interesting people I knew and how I could turn them into characters that would work in a novel. I knew I wanted to include the Hamptons and other equally snazzy places because that’s what I did in my first novel. I knew I wanted to have some spicy love scenes because ditto. I knew I wanted to discuss the struggle of becoming an artist because it is a subject near to my heart. And, most important, I wanted the story to have a moral, one which concerned the need to find purpose in one’s life, even if in the most unexpected ways.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your six main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
CD: The characters are all composites, some more or less. The only exceptions are those of Paolo and Esther, who are based almost exactly on two wonderful people I had the great good fortune to have known very well and loved very much growing up. As far as how much of myself I put into the characters, I would say that, as should be expected, since I made them up I have put a fair bit of myself into them one way or another because their strengths and weaknesses reflect my own, whether I am aware of them or not.
DF: Your novel explores the themes of “love, passion, and obsession” with a story that spans decades and various locales. Did the structure of the book spring from the themes, or was it the other way around?
CD: I can’t really say whether it was either. Quite simply, the book required the form it took because that’s how I chose to tell it. As I mentioned above, I have never taken a creative writing program so am, in that sense, entirely self-taught. As a result, I am maybe less attuned to the formal structures or language of novel-writing that one might learn in an academic setting.
DF: Now that you have two novels under your belt, what’s next?
CD: I have just completed my third manuscript. I am also working on a side-project, which is a detective novel.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
CD: I would offer three pieces of advice:
- Persevere.
- Have fun with what you write because if you don’t, neither will your readers.
- Writing is the best part of being an author. But be prepared for how much work is involved in promoting and selling your book long after the editing process is completed.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
CD: The tip of my left index finger was cut off by a hydraulic wood-splitter when I was 17 years old.
To learn more about Charles Dubow, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @CharlesDubow.
Pouring Gasoline On the Fire With Horror Author Joe Hill
Joe Hill
By Sean Tuohy
Twisted, dark, funny, and filled with a heart (dark heart, maybe), Joe Hill is an author whose stories are filled with characters so full of life that they fill the seats beside you. His stories are injected with so much humor and original prose that you are instantly brought to another world.
Hill's novels cover the gamut of storytelling: Heart-Shaped Box is about a former rock star who buys the suit that a man died in and is haunted by his ghost; Horns features a young man who wakes up to find out he is growing horns from his head and then develops dark, magical powers; and NOS4A2, in which a young woman uses her powers to fight a supernatural evil.
I was lucky enough to speak to Hill about his writing style, his next book, and what books are currently cluttering his nightstand table.
Sean Tuohy: What authors did you read growing up?
Joe Hill: The first writer I really fell for was Arthur Conan Doyle. I had a deal with my parents: bedtime was at 9:00 p.m., but I could stay up an extra half hour if I was in bed reading a book. I soon discovered a half an hour was exactly enough time to read a Sherlock Holmes story. I read them all, over the course of about three months… The Sign of Four and the other novels usually required a week to finish. It’s possible I owned a Sherlockian Calabash pipe and sometimes wandered the house, gumming it thoughtfully, and looking for things to detect.
I loved Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe novels, which were full of slaughter and betrayal.
I read comics without discrimination or judgment: good comics, bad comics, hilariously bad comics. For a year or two I was very emotionally wrapped up in the soap opera of Chris Claremont’s X-Men. I once stalked Chris Claremont at a Boston SF Convention.
I was (and still am) a big fan of Tabitha and Stephen King. I’ve read both extensively.
ST: Was there one book that you connected with above all others?
JH: I read The House with a Clock in its Walls by John Bellairs over and over. It is, in some ways, like the perfect Harry Potter novel; it just happens to have been written about 30 years before J.K. Rowling got started. A lonely orphan discovers he’s related to a wizard and must learn how to cast spells himself, so he can defeat the doomsday plot of a terrible sorcerer who has returned from the dead. Sound familiar? But instead of Hogwarts, the setting is New Zebedee, Conn., and instead of art by Mary GrandPré, the illustrations were provided by Edward Gorey. I’ve reread the book more than once as an adult and it still retains all its old power. I’m persuaded the novel itself is a perfect, compact work of enchantment.
In a lot of ways, Locke & Key, the comic I wrote for six years, wouldn’t exist without The House with a Clock in its Walls.
ST: When did you start to have ideas of becoming a full-time writer?
JH: Both of my parents are novelists. I started goofing off on a typewriter about three minutes after I learned you could string letters together to make words.
In junior high, I discovered role-playing games, and I was a dungeon master for a couple of years (although the game my friends and I loved to play was not Dungeons & Dragons, but Call of Cthulhu). In high school, though, I was a boarding student at a tony Massachusetts academy, and role-playing more or less ended. Make-believe with a group of friends quickly came to seem a little shameful. I started writing every day, stories of fantasy and horror, to fill the hole.
ST: Do you outline your stories or just sit down and begin to write?
JH: Ah…neither really.
I work very slowly. A short story takes one to three months. A novel might take anywhere from a year to five years. Whereas I generate ideas very quickly, I have a couple decent ideas for stories every week.
When I finally start a story, it’s already been living in my imagination for months, or maybe years. I know the first scene. I have some big set pieces in mind. I know things about the key characters. I almost always know the first sentence. Very little of this is written down, although I might have a couple notes scattered across my journals. But no outline, just an unmapped island that I’ve been visiting in my daydreams.
I think outlines are a mistake. Or at least, I know they’re a mistake for me, and I suspect they’re often a mistake for most other writers. It’s more useful to develop a single interesting situation, and a few characters you want to investigate. Develop someone who has regrets, a strong personal code, a few helpless compulsions; develop someone who can’t control or can’t express their anger; someone who has a distinctive, interesting voice; someone driven, either by their demons or their angels. Drop a really engaging character into a gripping situation, and you don’t need to outline. You can just sit back and watch the fireworks. Outlines choke off any chance of discovery, of surprising yourself.
ST: Last year, the movie “Horns,” based on your novel of the same name, was released in theaters. How did it feel seeing the world and characters that you created on the big screen?
JH: In some ways I like the movie better than the novel. I’m proud of the novel. I worked hard on it, and I think it’s fun to read, that the pages turn quickly, that it explores interesting themes and ideas. But I had a nervous breakdown while I was working on it. I was terrifically depressed. My marriage ended. It was a sad, confused time for me, and my feelings about the book are wrapped up in a lot of personally unhappy memories.
The movie, on the other hand, is a lot of fun. Daniel Radcliffe and Juno Temple gave it everything they had, and their moments together are beautiful and heart-rending. Alexandre Aja got the book’s atmosphere of lush summery romance, and also its sick sense of humor, and managed to capture both things on the screen. In the end, it didn’t do well in the marketplace, but I think it was always a tough sell. In some ways I’m surprised it got made at all. It’s the least commercial thing I’ve ever written: a weird horror-satire, a surreal, “Twin Peaks”-sy riff on The Metamorphosis.
Late in the game, a PR person came up with the world’s best tagline: Horns: Grow a pair. I wish I had thought of that. If we had slapped that line on the cover of the book, we would’ve sold a billion, billion copies. Sigh.
ST: Do you have any rituals you have to complete before or after writing?
JH: Um, besides routine procrastination? Like lots of modern writers, I’d so much rather screw off on Twitter than actually do my job.
Which doesn’t make a lick of sense. When I sit down to work, and I finally begin to build sentences, it almost always makes me feel good. I like myself best when I’m writing. Or maybe that’s not quite right: maybe I mean I know myself best when I’m writing. Or have a chance to visit with my best, smartest self.
I get up every hour to make a cup of tea. That’s the one ritual. It takes three cups of tea to get through a normal day of work. Then I’ll have a fourth, late in the afternoon, when I sit down to read.
ST: Are you still a reader? If so, what are you reading now?
JH: I’d give up writing for a living before I’d give up reading for pleasure. I think of myself as a father first, a reader second, and a writer only a distant third. I love other people’s sentences much more than my own, and I hope I never get tired of a good story.
I’m usually reading two or three things at once. At the moment I’m working my way through a big heavy collection of short stories by Irwin Shaw, the tenth book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series, and Carl Gottlieb’s The Jaws Log.
That’s a pretty good representative example of what I might be reading in any given month. The short story might be my favorite form; if I have a favorite genre, it’s not horror but historical fiction; and I read a broad range of non-fiction, from history to true crime to pop cultural analysis.
I just finished David Mitchell’s novel, Slade House, which is out this October. It’s his most surprising book yet, and maybe the last book in the world anyone would’ve expected him to write: a red-in-tooth-and-claw supernatural horror thriller. It’s a little like if Wes Craven hired Umberto Eco to reboot “Nightmare on Elm Street:” erudite, witty, as finely wrought as a Fabergé egg, but also unrepentantly terrifying.
ST: What advice do you give to aspiring writers?
JH: Over the years, I’ve had a lot of good advice from some brilliant writers. But I never really learned that much from all the kind, well-meant suggestions and clever tips. They didn’t stick with me. Just about everything I learned about writing a good book I learned from reading lots and lots of good books. I studied the novels I loved. I read them over and over, sometimes with a pen and highlighter, taking notes. Once, I spent a month rewriting the first five chapters of Elmore Leonard’s The Big Bounce, just to get the feel of his sentences.
ST: What does the future hold for Joe Hill?
JH: I’m the guest editor for the inaugural edition of Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy. That’ll be out this October. And I’ve got a new novel, a dark modern fantasy called The Fireman, which will be out in the summer of 2016. It’s about a plague of spontaneous combustion; it’s my version of The Stand, soaked in gasoline and set on fire.
ST: Can you please tell us one random fact about yourself?
JH: I have never lost a game of Boggle.
To learn more about Joe Hill, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @joe_hill.
A Conversation With Love and Other Wounds Author Jordan Harper
Jordan Harper (Photo credit: Mike McAlister)
By Daniel Ford
In last month’s “5 Books That Need To Be On Your Radar,” I called author Jordan Harper a “short story artist.” After finishing his debut collection Love and Other Wounds, which threatened to punch my lights out on more than one occasion and is now available to purchase, I’m more convinced than ever that Harper is headed for a special career in fiction.
The television writer/journalist/author answered some of my questions recently about his first writing experience, his early influences, and why he loves short stories.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Jordan Harper: I’m one of those who knew from a very young age. Before I could write, I made books of monster drawings on stapled construction paper. I would dictate the words of the stories to my mother, who would write next to the drawings in magic markers. I also had a line of comic books when I was 10 years old, with heroes like The Human Fly, Discus, and Werewolf. Around the same time, I wrote some adventure stories. I gave the hero the toughest-sounding name I'd ever heard: Max Factor.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
JH: I read the bulk Stephen King’s short stories and novels before I was out of grade school, and I re-read them over and over again. In high school, I worshipped Hunter S. Thompson. I’ve lost the love for drugs, but the love for short, hard Anglo-Saxon words stuck around. My interest in crime came from Ozark stories of outlaws, mixed in with Quentin Tarantino, “Miller’s Crossing,” and gangsta rap in my teenage years. James Ellroy is who I aspire toward.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
JH: I like to listen to very loud music while I write. I like weird drone music, heavy metal, Board of Canada-style electronic music. I’ve got a 4,000-song writing playlist on Spotify that I'm happy to share.
I don’t outline for short stories. They’re small enough to keep in your head. Television writing requires outlining. It’s a very structured medium. Now that I’m used to outlining, it seemed natural to use one for the novel. It’s also handy, because I like to write scenes out of order, and that’s only possible with an outline.
DF: You’ve been a movie critic, journalist, a television writer, and now you’re a novelist. Is that a reflection of your personality or were you just following where your passions led?
JH: A lot of my career has felt like luck to me. There have to be alternative universes where I never landed a job as a full-time music writer, or as a television writer. But I’ve always been heading in the direction of more creative freedom. Novels feel like the natural end to that journey.
DF: We’re huge fans of the short story genre here at Writer’s Bone. What is it about the format that appeals to you?
JH: It’s just such a pure medium. The language choices and plot choices and character choices are all so unified. There’s no stalling, no asides. Just the single most important moment in a character’s life. It’s also just the form of storytelling that comes most naturally to me. I’d have loved to live in the age of the pulps, cranking out one story after another.
DF: How did the idea for Love and Other Wounds originate?
JH: Well, “Johnny Cash is Dead” is the earliest story written in the collection. I wrote it right after the death of my grandfather, an old Ozarks badass, a prison guard who made knives in his spare time. I wrote the story in memorial to him, and then thought maybe I could get it published. I wound up sending it to ThugLit, a really fantastic crime fiction magazine, which sort of opened my eyes to the possibilities of the genre. So I kept going.
DF: Your debut collection has one of the best opening lines I’ve read in a long time. “James ran through the high desert, away from his grave.” Did you start the process with that line in mind, or did you refine it in the editing process?
JH: There are a few stories in the collection almost inspired by their own first lines. “Red Hair and Black Leather” and “Lucy in the Pit” both really fell into place once I had the first lines. This line was like that as well. I was out in Agua Dulce, driving through the desert, and I imagined a man running covered in dirt and blood—the high desert conjures these sorts of thoughts easily—and the line popped into my head. I built the story from there.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
JH: I ascribe to what I call the Stan Lee school of storytelling, which is to take larger-than-life shells—folks like white power hit men, bank robbers, or dog pit trainers in my case—and then do my best to make their inner lives as rich and real as possible. So I do try to put myself into all of my characters, even the truly horrible ones. I don’t tend to go for those Freudian just-so backstories for characters. I tend to let their characters be built by the telling of the story.
DF: Your collection has garnered rave reviews from a variety of media outlets. What’s that experience been like and what are your future plans?
JH: I’m glad the collection has been well-received. My plan now is to keep going telling stories. My next book is a novel called If All Roads Were Blind, which is a Southern California road novel about an 11-year-old girl who is kidnapped by her father because they’ve been marked for death by the Aryan Brotherhood. Sort of Lone Wolf and Cub with desert meth labs and Nazi skinheads. It should be out this time next year.
And since I’m working in television, I’m also looking to develop my own show. I’d really like to do a television show about an armed robbery crew.
DF: What’s your advice to aspiring authors?
JH: It’s better to read one book 20 times than to read 20 books. It burns useful pathways in your synapses. Notice the kinds of books you choose to re-read. That’s what you ought to be writing.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
JH: I’m very good at cutting cards with one hand.
To learn more about Jordan Harper, visit his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @jordan_harper.
Tumbleweed Tendencies: A Conversation With Author Brian Panowich About His Debut Novel Bull Mountain
Brian Panowich (Photo credit: David Kernaghan)
By Daniel Ford
I became friendly with author Brian Panowich after I crashed a Twitter conversation between him, David Joy, and Michael Farris Smith about music, bourbon, and writing. That exchange led to the creation of Writer’s Bone’s “The Writer’s Guide to Music” and an advanced reader copy of Panowich’s debut novel Bull Mountain (which comes out July 7, and will be reviewed in this week’s “Bruce, Bourbon, and Books”).
Panowich was also nice enough to talk to me about being a comic book kid, how he developed his writing style, and the inspiration for Bull Mountain.
Daniel Ford: When did you decide you wanted to be a writer?
Brian Panowich: I think I knew when I was a little kid that I wanted to write. I lived in my head a lot and read books more than I did anything else. I was terrible at sports and I was pretty geeky. But as I got older, my endless string of other interests distracted me from writing and dragged me all over the place. I definitely wasn’t the guy that stayed focused his whole life on one goal and is now living his dream. Once I got my tumbleweed tendencies under control, I returned to writing as a plausible medium for me to create something. So although the seeds were planted when I was a boy, it took nearly thirty years for me to actually nurture them.
DF: Who were some of your early influences?
BP: I was a comic book kid. I still am, to be honest. Frank Miller, George Perez, Chris Claremont, they were the guys that taught me how to tell a story. As I moved forward, Edgar Rice Burroughs became a huge influence via my father’s bookshelf, and of course I went through a Stephen King phase, but then I found Elmore Leonard and Cormac McCarthy and nothing was really the same after that.
DF: What is your writing process like? Do you listen to music? Outline?
BP: I devour music like food. It’s as big a part of my everyday life as breathing, but I need total silence when I write. I can’t even tolerate a television in the background, so writing at home with my wife and four kids is pretty tough. I wrote the entirety of Bull Mountain locked up in a spare room at the fire station where I work. I’m lucky to have the kind of job that afforded me that extra time alone at night to write, or else it would have taken me a lot longer to do it. I applaud the folks that work a nine-to-five job, come home to a family, and still find the time to write.
Nowadays I use the few hours I have to myself while the kids are at school to write and I try to do it everyday, even if it’s just to jot down a few lines. I have to write something everyday or I feel unbalanced, like I wasted daylight. I don’t anyways want to, but once I start I usually end up engrossed with whatever I sit down to accomplish. And I do outline—to a degree. With Bull Mountain, I wrote a sentence or two summarizing each chapter that fit on the front of one sheet of paper. That was my road map. I veered from the map quite a bit, and that’s the point I think, to let the story tell itself, but that road map was there to steer me back on track if it got out of hand.
DF: How did the idea for Bull Mountain originate?
BP: I always liked the idea of everyone thinking they are the heroes of their own story. The bad guy never thinks he’s the bad guy, so I wanted to write something to that end, but didn’t know exactly what about. I like to ride mountain bikes. I’m not very good at it, but I ride a lot and that’s where I do a lot of my plotting and scheming. I was out one day riding and listening to The Band’s “Up on Cripple Creek,” and the first line hit me like a hammer. “When I get off of this mountain.” I know that’s not a lot of lyric, but that line struck me for some reason and within the next few miles, I had the general plot of Bull Mountain fleshed out. I wrote two short stories that night from two opposing points of view, one from my protagonist and one from my antagonist, with the idea in mind of not really knowing which was which. Those two stories got me my agent and became this book.
DF: The crime genre has certain built-in tropes that can deter some writers from taking the plunge. How did you ensure that your tale was original?
BP: I think it helped that the crime aspect of the novel was secondary. I wanted this book to speak more about the family dynamic of these people than the actual crimes they commit. I wanted to build a saga around that idea on par with something like The Godfather, and I didn’t spend a lot of time researching if the angles of the mystery had been used before. In fact I was positive they had been. With the billions of stories that exist in the world, written or spoken, it’s hard to believe any idea can be completely original, but it was still a story I wanted to tell with my own unique perspective, and I think that comes through. I also thought I was on to something by setting it in a part of the country I feel goes unnoticed. There’s a rich history in the North Georgia Mountains that I’m proud to be a part of now.
DF: How much of yourself—and the people you have daily interactions with—did you put into your main characters? How do you develop your characters in general?
BP: I think it’s impossible not to inject yourself into the people you write all the way across the board. Your good guy is the way you’d want to be at your best, and your bad guy is still a product of what you yourself define as bad, but at some point they stop being you and take on lives of their own. Clayton Burroughs started out very similar to me, but as the story became more about him, he became his own person. My villains are the same way. They might start off as bad as I think I could be, but before long I’m shocked at what they can do on their own. The bit players are largely based on people I’ve met over the years. I file away mannerisms and turns of phrase and blend them together to form new composites accordingly, but if a character progresses, I don’t see the person I based them on anymore. Kate Burroughs, Clayton’s wife, is a great example of that. Her character grew and grew as the story developed and before I knew it, she was dictating to me how she would act. I love it when that happens.
DF: What are some of the themes you tackle in Bull Mountain?
BP: Family. Dysfunction. Loyalty. Take those three and crank it up to eleven.
DF: When you finished your first draft, did you know you had something good, or did you have to go through multiple rounds of edits to realize you had something you felt comfortable taking to readers?
BP: I knew I had a pretty good starting point, but it was a good five or six drafts later before I was comfortable sending it to my agent. Even then, I think comfortable is the wrong word. It was more like, at some point I just needed to stand back and let go. That was tough for me to do. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at a manuscript and say it’s done. I could revise and revise and revise forever and always find more things I could do to improve it. I think some authors get stuck in that and end up standing in their own way. That sucks, but I can understand how it happens.
DF: How do you balance writing and marketing your work (i.e. book tours, engaging with readers on social media, etc.)?
BP: I’m blessed in that department for two reasons.
1. I love running my mouth. I was born with the gift to gab and in most cases, when not mixed with copious amounts of bourbon, it works out for me in social settings. I enjoy connecting with people and talking about art, music, books, whatever. Social media is fun. It can be a little tedious and makes me feel a bit pretentious sometimes, but over all I enjoy it. I’m finding out that that makes me a touch different than a lot of other authors out there who are generally more secluded that I am.
2. I’m also working with a top-notch team at Putnam who knows exactly what they’re doing. That’s great because it allows me to focus on the fun part—the writing. Knowing I have the best marketing and PR people on the planet in my corner makes that balance incredibly easy.
DF: Now that you have your first novel under your belt, what’s next?
BP: I just turned in a second book in the McFalls County Series that features a lot of the same characters from Bull Mountain. That should be published by Putnam next year. I’m also in the process now of plotting out a third one. I love the idea of writing about different characters, and different eras even, that all share the commonality of place. The fictitious McFalls County is the only guaranteed recurring character. Bull Mountain acts as a springboard into that.
I also just finished a comic book script for a Hawkeye story I want to pitch to Marvel…(Hey Marvel, are you listening?)
DF: What advice would you give aspiring authors?
BP: Mainly, be wary of other author’s advice, especially those that make their money solely by giving it. There really are no rules. I’m not saying don’t ask questions of the writers you admire (I did) or that all “how-to” books are snake oil. Studying your profession and using the bits and pieces that make sense to you are essential, but any book, seminar, or pay-to-play contest that promises the moon can be downright predatory. Only three things are going to help you produce art for a living. Producing art, letting people see it, and doing both of those things with fearless tenacity. And none of that will cost you a dime.
DF: Can you please name one random fact about yourself?
BP: I rub my feet together like a cricket when I sleep. It makes my wife crazy.
To learn more about Brian Panowich, check out his official website, like his Facebook page, or follow him on Twitter @BPanowich.