Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

fiction. It's our world, as long as we are playing by rules that people
can accustom themselves to. That's why there are people who write
novels set in a time other than our own, whether it's the future or the
past - if you play by certain kinds of rules of normative behavior,
people can adjust. If you don't, it gets much harder to read. There's a
reason that great science fiction is a lot easier to read than Gravity's
Rainbow. Even if it's 3,000 years in the future and there is no gravit,y,
science fiction will still play by certain kinds of rules that you can recognize
in a way that language with Gravity's Rainbow, let's say, doesn't
really. You have to be prepared to accolnrnodate yourself to a whole set
of new rules which you are discovering as you are reading, which is
more work. What was easier about writing the nonfiction book was
that I had my characters. But it was harder to shape interesting dialogue,
because I didn't get to write it for them.
e: What does a narrative arc look like to you? Do you feel there
always has to be one?
Yeah, otherwise it's a sketch or an anecdote. I actively dislike and
sometimes even resent somebody handing me eight pages of character
description - and then the flower pot falls on her head - and
saying that's a short story. It's like, no it's not. One little weird event
taking place does not a story make. I think short-story writers tend
to fall under the category of the "interesting characterI good dialogue"
writer, and the "I've got a great idea and now I'll just try to
make up some cardboard figures to carry it around" writer. Those
are both disappointing, and I tend to be even less interested in the
"big idealcardboard characters" story. Things have to happen as
they do in life, in a way which gives people an opportunity to reveal
the depths and complexities of their character. The truth is, even if a
bus hits you and decapitates you, it doesn't matter much to me as a
reader if I haven't been interested in you as a character in the first
place. You want a depth of feeling to lead to powerful language,
and a depth of empathy and imagination to lead to characters who
are three-dimensional about whom you care. Three-dimensional
and sympathetic in the sense that they resonate with the reader - not
sympathetic in the sense one likes them necessarily.
G: Do you think that makes you more or less trustful of your readers?
You've said that you trust your readers to be as smart as you, but
otherwise you don't think of them.
It's easy for them. Two pages in, they can put n1Y book in the
waste-can - they can put it back on the bookshelf, return it to the
library, tell everybody how much it sucks. I'm prepared to think that if I
can't catch their attention in the first couple of pages, they will do with
me as they will. In terms of their trust, you're sort of in there pitching.
You keep trying to write the best sentence you know how about the
lnost compelling story you can. But they have no obligation to me. I
feel like it's my job to give my readers a world worth being in, and
then I hope that they can be in it. It's not that I don't want them to
think; it's that I don't want them to have to be painfully conscious of
the fact that the little black marks on the white page signify letters
which make words which make sentences, and you can see all that
sweat and effort on the part of the writer. I don't care when I'm
reading. I don't care if it took the author 10 years to write that shitty
sentence or five minutes. If it's not good, it's not good.
e: What makes a good sentence for you?
Lots of people have great opening sentences. But when you're in
the middle of a piece of fiction, I think it has more to do with how the
bricks are laid on either side of it. How sentence one leads to sentence
two leads to sentence three. And sometimes there are those sentences
that just leap out like dialnonds on black velvet. Those, for me, have
a certain restrained lyricism, restrained being the significant word. I
like to feel that there's all this feeling pressing against the shape of
the sentence. So that it has a nice integrity and muscularity, and this
pulsing, beating heart inside of it as well.
c: How much would you say you like experimenting, formally or not?
Are there any elements of fiction you stay faithful to?
I don't think that I'm much of an experimenter. Having had no
formal education in this, I don't ever have a sense of "I know I was
taught X, but now I'm going to try Y." Nobody ever taught me X.
When I wrote a short story in which all four characters' points of view
were present I didn't ever really feel like you can't do more than one
point of view in a short story. Why not? vVhy can't you walk around