DIRECTOR'S BLOG: Interviews

On September 16^th, we’ll announce the 2009 First Novel Prize Short List and on November 9^th at our Annual Awards Dinner, we’ll announce this year’s winner. The First Novel Prize is one of the most important ways the Center for Fiction supports emerging writers, along with our low-cost writers studio space, our writing classes, and our many readings and events featuring new writers. We hope you'll read all the short-listed writers this year and join us for the annual dinner to meet them and join in the excitement as we announce the 2009 winner.

In the meantime, you might enjoy reading this excerpt from my interview with Hannah Tinti, our 2008 First Novel Prize recipient, who won for The Good Thief.

Hannah and her Random House editor Susan Kamil will appear at the Center of October 21st at 7pm as part of our new Wine and Words series. Susan is one of the finest editors working today, so it will be interesting to hear how she ushered this wonderful debut novel into print.

The Good Thief is not your usual literary novel. It’s a riveting page-turner set in a Dickensian New England that tells the story of a twelve year-old orphan, Ren, who is missing his left hand. He was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony’s Orphanage and remains there until a young man named Benjamin Nab appears, claiming to be his long-lost brother. As Ren begins to find clues to his hidden parentage he comes to suspect that Benjamin not only holds the key to his future, but to his past as well.

After winning the First Novel Prize, The Good Thief also received an Alex Award given to adult novels likely to appeal to young readers. (YA category) So if there’s a pre-teen or teen in your life suffering from post-Potter depression, think about giving them this beautifully written, gothically spooky book.

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The Good Thief is in some ways a very dark novel, steeped in the grotesque and full of murder and mayhem, but the tone is often playful and full of humor. What made you decide to write this particular kind of a novel in this particular way?

I grew up in Salem so this kind of darkness, the world of the witch trials, was very much a part of my growing up, and it felt very natural as a place to explore. I grew up playing in graveyards; that wasn’t usual at all in that part of the country. One of my first jobs was working at the witch dungeon in Salem, a basement filled with torture devices used on witches. So my book doesn’t feel that dark or morbid to me. I chose to write in this tone because I find it very difficult to read a book that is all dark—that can be brutal to the reader--and I wanted to write the kind of book that I would want to read, something that would have thrills and would explore the dark side of experience, but also have some humor and an element of hope. I wanted to write something that would be a bit of an adventure tale.

Can you talk about the many damaged characters in the book?

The scene I wrote first was the graveyard scene and as I was describing the scene I described Ren holding the horse’s reins and his breath clouding in the air, but when I tried to describe what he was doing with his other hand, I realized he didn’t have another hand. So that deformity came out of the ether. I didn’t purposely set any of these deformities into the story, they evolved as I was writing, but maybe they relate to the idea of people wearing their hurts on the outside.

But Ren sees all these people beyond their deformity, doesn’t he?

Yes. In that sense there are elements of me in Ren. I was drawing on that ability I somehow developed growing up of being able to relate to and become friends with all sorts of people. He’s a listener and he observes and it isn’t really until the middle of the book that he begins taking responsibility and making decisions for himself.

What were you influences outside of particular books or writers?

Movies, I love good movies, visual art. “Star Wars” was a huge influence, my brother and sisters and I would make our own super8 movies, a lot of it based on our excitement about “Star Wars.” We’d use these old fencing swords, then draw on the film to create the lasers.

Also, my mother was a librarian at the Brookline Library and ingrained the habit of reading in all of us. We’d read every night, sometimes aloud. And we’d eat together, each having our own book at the table. That was a treat, a special night, when we could all bring our books to the dinner table!

What were some of books that shaped you as a writer?

Danny, the Champion of the World and all the Roald Dahl books had an impact on me. He’s probably one of my favorites. And, growing up, I read Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, as well as all those fairy tale books by color—The Red Fairy Tale Book, The Green, the Blue. And I loved the Wrinkle in Time series by Madeleine L’Engle and Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales. The Italian folktales collected by Calvino were a big influence.

Of course, when you’re writing you don’t always realize what your influences are or you’re writing about; your unconscious is tying the threads together. In this book, I knew I wanted to explore the concept of resurrection in various ways, not only in the religious sense, but also in the physical sense. I was also thinking about the reinvention of the self through story-telling. Benjamin Nab tells story after story and each story is a reimagining of who he is and who Ren is and what their situation is. He teaches Ren how to tell a story, and in the end Ren is able to tell a story that saves his life and turns out to be true. He stumbles on the truth through lies.

Do you think we tell stories to save our lives?

I think so. I think we lie constantly, lots of little lies, making our way through the world. We have to lie to ourselves sometimes to get from one place to another. We have to lie to other people sometimes to alter how they look at us. All that lying is not necessarily bad. I’m drawn to things that aren’t black or white. There are elements of goodness in moments of badness, in sins.

Can you talk more about your writing process?

I don’t outline, I don’t do note cards. I try to follow my intuition. The only way I can describe it is as using a divining rod. I just sit and try to write and let things come. I don’t realize what I’m doing until afterward and then I go back and do editing and try to make things make more sense.

I saw an interview with John Irving and he said he thinks of the ends of his books first, then he spends a year plotting, and then writes. But I creep along wondering do I turn here? Do I open this door?

When I was a little girl, I once went net-casting on a fishing boat. They throw a net overboard, then drag it a hundred yards, then pull up whatever they catch into a big tank onboard, and you toss things over that you don’t want, and keep the fish that you do. I remember that the water seemed so clear and empty, but when they pulled the net on board, it was full of the weirdest things I’d ever seen. Bizarre creatures from the bottom of the sea. Novels seem to be like this—casting a net through a writers’ subconscious and pulling the unexpected into the light.

What do you think of the idea that people graduate from writing short stories to writing novels—a bit of an irritating idea, but can you respond to that?

As editor of One Story, I consider stories as completely separate works of art. That’s our format and the reason why we publish them individually rather than in an anthology. We publish one at a time so they can be looked at as separate works of art, so the reader can sit down and have a complete artistic experience in a very short period of time.

So of course I don’t feel writers graduate to writing novels. The only reason I wrote this as a novel is because I somehow knew it wasn’t a short story. That knowledge filled me with dread and trepidation. I’m a very slow writer; it often takes me six months to write a short story. The idea of devoting years and years of my life to this was daunting.

What do mean by saying you’re a slow writer? Are you revising and fine-tuning as you write?

It took me six years to write The Good Thief. I write slowly--a page a day maybe--and I revise as I write. Perhaps this is because I’ve done so much work as an editor—at Boston Review, then Atlantic Monthly, then at an agency, Writers House, for three years going through manuscripts, then editor of Washington Square magazine at NYU and then starting One Story where I’ve been for six years.

Will you continue to work as an editor?

Yes, working as an editor gives me a lot of pleasure. If I see a story that’s not done but has something really spectacular in it, I’ll work with the writer to help them say what they want to say.

But it’s more difficult with a novel isn’t it, which can say many things at once? What if someone asked you, for example, what you wanted to say in The Good Thief?

Yes, it’s harder with a novel. I don’t know if I could answer that now. There were so many things I was trying to explore, loss, storytelling, loneliness. And I wanted to explore death in different way, an unconventional way because it’s a topic most people are concerned with but block out. I try to deal with my fears by writing.

Can you tell us about your editor and agent and how the book came to press?

Susan Kamil is my editor and Nicole Aragi is my editor. The magazine Story and its editor Liz Rosenthal published my very first story and she said that when I was ready I should think about sending something to Nicole. So years passed and when I had something polished and ready, I sent it to Nicole. She called me and asked to meet. I had the collection and the two chapters of The Good Thief at that time. Later she admitted she wanted to meet me before agreeing to represent me because after reading my stories, she wanted to make sure I wasn’t crazy.

I was very lucky to have the book placed with Susan Kamil at Dial. Susan’s a great editor. She cooks me dinner and we sit down at her kitchen table and go over things page by page. She treats us, the Dial authors, like her kids. It feels like family at Dial.

What next?

I can’t say. I was revising this book right up to the last second. They were ripping it from my hands at the last minute.

Even before The Story of Edgar Sawtelle was announced as a 2008 Oprah Book Club pic, it was one of seven novels short-listed for the 2008 Sargent First Novel Prize. I interviewed its author David Wroblewski by phone in late November, just before our Awards Dinner. David grew up in rural central Wisconsin, not far from the Chequamegon National Forest, where a large section of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is set. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in computer science and has worked as a software developer for over 25 years. He earned his master's degree from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Over the years he has lived in La Crosse, Minneapolis, and Austin, Texas. Currently, he makes his home in Colorado with the writer Kimberly McClintock.

What was the genesis of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle?

A slightly tricky question to answer. I had been writing short stories and I knew I wanted to try writing a novel and I had been casting about for months trying to decide what I cared enough about to spend that long writing about. I grew up around dogs, my parents had a dog kennel when I was a kids and I’m one of those people who can walk into a party of 50 people and one dog and go straight for the dog. There’s something very profound about our relationship with dogs. So I had a very vague notion that the novel would have something to do with dogs. Then I had what I call an idea package—it all landed in my mind in just a few hours. In a very short period of time the idea of a very structured story that draws part of its inspiration from Hamlet, but make the state in the story not the state of Denmark, but the state of some dogs. That was Day One for the novel. I knew very shortly thereafter that that was far too schematic, at least in terms of plot, that I didn’t want to simply sit down and copy out the plot of Hamlet. But that was essentially the starting point and it was a discovery process from then on, asking, “Who is this boy?” Why does he care so much about the dogs? What is his connection? Why are the dogs so important in the first place?

And all that came about through the natural course of writing and discovering as I was drafting what I wanted to talk about. That took several years, years that I consider preliminary work, pre-novel work, flailing attempts to get started. I realized I didn’t know how to writer at novel even though I’d been reading them all my life. But when I began to write one, a thousand questions came up about why a 500-page story doesn’t fall apart into 50 ten-page stories.

I read that it took you over a decade to write this. Was most of this that preliminary work you describe?

There were three phases. One was the early phase in which I would make attempt at chapters and come up against this basic question of what holds a novel together. When you sit down to write the beginning of new chapter, what should that first sentence and why. In a short story, the idea of coherence and the unitary experience of the reading of a short story seemed to me to be so self-evident that no one needed to explain that to me. So there was a lot of fumbling around in Phase One.

In Phase Two, I decideded I need to study formally. I’d read everything I could read,but wasn't getting where I needed to go and it was keeping me awake at night, so I enrolled in an The Warren Wilson MFA program. I was interested in it as a low-residency program because I was working full-time as a software developer. And I live in Colorado and love living here and didn’t want to relocate. So in phase Two, I spent two and half years in that program and during that time I asked every one of my great teachers this question: What is the idea of structure in a novel? What holds a novel together? It was finally in the last semester that I finally came upon an answer for myself and that’s when I date the real beginning o f the writing of the novel. That was 1998.

So what does hold a novel together? What was the answer for you?

For this novel, the answer is that the structure is a braid. What holds the novel together for me is not plot, not formal attributes like chapter structure. And that discovery was important to me because I had envisioned the book initially as a novel in five acts, and, as it turned out, that was not a helpful metaphor. What was a helpful was the idea of a braid, of many small threads of concern, whether concern with a thematic element or an image or a person or a word or a phrase, surfacing and then submerging and then surfacing again later in some slightly different form and having that happen over and over again. And if you have enough strands in the braid these things intermingle and almost magically it holds together.

I came to this after spending a fair amount of time studying The Great Gatsby and the letters Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Max Perkins. Before he began the novel, he wrote Perkins saying that he wanted to write something “intricately patterned.” I’m not sure what Fitzgerald meant because he never expanded on that, but I supplied an answer for myself after dissembling Gatsby and putting it back together many times. Then I looked at many other novels. I looked very closely at Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, a wonderful, beautiful story.

So I had an answer. The novel is not a hierarchical structure, it’s a braid. I used to tell my teachers at Warren Wilson that while I understood the micro structure of an individual scene and understood the macrostructure--Freytag’s triangle and rising action and climax and all that--wat I needed was some middle structure. And that was wrong. The problem with the novel, really, is that it is an unnaturally long story, a ridiculously long story, and once you understand that’s the problem you’re solving, some things begin to fall out, begin to make sense.

When you describe your thinking and talk about structure, a little bit of the software developer is leaking through, it seems.

There are many, many things in the world of software development that are useful habits for a writer. But one of the things that in counterproductive is the software world’s obsession with modularity and reuse. You learn structural thinking as a maker of software and you think in terms of design and that’s all good--you have to hold these really complicated ideas in your head and the ideas have motion to them and you learn to imagine how the processes dovetail over time—very helpful skills that transfer into writing. But the regular modular structure used in the world of software would lead to terrible, terrible fiction.

Influences? What about Kipling?

Thanks for asking about Kipling. One of the things I asked myself when I began Edgar Sawtelle was, “Why do I crave this story?” And I knew that as a reader I wanted to read a really good story about people and their relationship to dogs. So I looked back to the stories I knew and didn’t find much that fit the bill—especially in contemporary fiction. But you could go back and find The Call of the Wild and the Kipling Stories--these tremendously interesting stories with tremendous heart in them. I grew up with the Jungle Book in all its different forms. My favorite was the version of the book as taken from the Disney movie. And at some point I discovered the real book. The poetry of the writing and the depth of feeling between Mowgli and Bageera and the wolf pack were very striking with me and I carried that with me. I took it as permission to operate somewhat outside the bounds of realism, to tell a story that had the hint of the flavor of a fable. Suffused through the novel, but especially in Edgar’s relationship to the dogs, is that sense of tenderness and kindness.

In addition, Edgar always seem so present, so immersed in the moment and that seems to come out of his relations to the dogs, but perhaps also because he is mute?

You’ve identified two main ingredients there. And they both have to do with language. Our relationships with our dogs are not mediated by language, at least not human language, but it is a highly communicative relationship. Some of my early research had to do with going to my veterinarian who I’ve now worked with for over 15 years and asking her the most absurd questions you can imagine, really dumb questions like "Why don’t dogs talk?" Is it physiological, does it have to do with neuro-anatomy, what is the essential barrier given that they are so communicative and you have such a sense of social understanding on their part? In a way it’s surprising that they don’t have any language at all. Ultimately she decided I wasn’t absolutely crazy and helped me understand.

So that was part of the decision to make Edgar mute. And the flip side is that dogs are absolutely spectacular observers of people, that is what they do and they are really good at it and they are better at observing us by far than we are at observing them. So what you call Edgar’s “presence” is what I in retrospect would say was my determination to construct a character who was as good at observing dogs as they are at observing us.

It’s also a book about people who are haunted. Can you talk about the ghosts in the novel?

I view every character in the story as haunted in some way or another. The whole idea of grief and love is to me a kind of a haunting. As so Trudy is surely haunted by Gar, although not literally; Claude is haunted by Gar; in a way Gar was haunted by Claude; and they are all haunted by the figure of Schultz, the farmer who created the land. Edgar is literally haunted more than once. In terms of the braid idea we talked about, one of the thematic strands is how each character is haunted.

For me it was a given that I was departing from realism. The idea was to use those tools where they were appropriate and set them aside where it became fun to do so, to be honest. I was working very intuitively and this was something that was developed over many drafts, understanding how to bring this aspect out. Sometimes I went a little too far, sometimes not far enough. I had to learn control of the medium and get control of the vehicle. Consequently, I had to go through many drafts and this rejection of realism is part of the reason it took me so long to write this book.

One of the most interesting and moving parts of the books recounts Edgar’s walk through Cheguamegon Forest. You grew up near there and it’s very beautiful and realistically drawn, but also works outside the real--as a magical place.

I make the connection in that section to Kipling. The fictional character Edgar relates to most is Mowgli. Part of why Edgar feels that he is returning to his natural state has to do with his connection to Mowgli.

in contrast, the farm in the story is exactly the farm I grew up on. It was a 92-acre farm, about half forested,with two fields, one to the west and one to the south, and there was an apple orchard and a barn. I essentially cleared it of my family and installed the Sawtelles, and that’s exactly how I think of it—as a stage set. In terms of narrative strategy, the idea was to keep the story and Edgar as confined as possible to that stage set until the beginning of the Chewamagon section, to bottle things up, so when he finally steps over that fence line and crosses that creek he is on a trajectory away from his world. But that time is the woods is how I recall my childhood there, wandering, branches slapping back at you, thinking how easy it would be to disappear into it.

How did the book come to print?

My agent is Eleanor Jackson and my editor is Lee Boudreaux at Ecco and I love them both. A writer at a workshop told me there was a young agent in his agency looking build her roster and that was Eleanor. I sent her a letter and the first chapter, and we hit it off. We did not make many changes to the book before she sent it out. I had just finished cutting the draft. I had been submitting for about a year at that point and the feedback was that a novel this long from an unknown writer would never get published. Agents would not take it on. Someone at a workshop then read and really liked it and said I should cut every page by 20%. I resisted that, At that point the novel was 250,000 words. I thought there must be plenty of novels that long. So I looked up Moby Dick and when I found that it was 212,000 words long I was aghast. So I made it my mission to make my book only as long as Moby Dick. It took me about four months to do that and that was the version I sent to Eleanor. I told her there was a lot of blood lost in that cutting process and I wasn’t sure I could do it again and asked her, if she could stand it, to try submitting it as it was. She agreed and Lee saw it at Ecco about nine months later and it was bought at auction in December 2006. Lee proceeded to wiggle every verb in the book and we shook out another 20,000 words. It’s now 192,000 words, so we took out a lot. I don’t know other editors, but Lee was fantastic.

Ecco has done a wonderful job of marketing the books and you had great blurbs from Richard Russo and Stephen King.

Rick Russo was one of the teachers I studied with at Warren Wilson along with Joan Silber, Margot Livesey, Ehud Havazelet, and Wilton Barnhart. Rick had been very generous over the years. After I got out of the program in 1998, I would send him an email every three years or so and let him know I was still working on the book. And he was always encouraging and generous with his time in taking emails and talking with someone who had graduated years earlier. I don’t know Stephen King, but I gather Lee had sent him an early version. And, of course, I was thrilled with his reaction.

How has the selection by Oprah’s book club affected you?

It hasn’t changed my day-to-day life. It’s great for the book, but my daily routine hasn’t been affected. They are a very efficient and very professional organization and the way they operate their book club is very impressive.

Has the success of the book made you feel part of the community of writers?

The truth is I have a writing group I meet with here. That includes Kimberly McClintock and Nancy Sullivan. We don’t critique each other’s work, but we read our work aloud to one another. I’m not involved in the academic writing community. I have a divided allegiance. So much of what I’ve learned about how to make things has come from the worlds of software and photography and I’m not eager to leave those worlds. I love making software. It’s enormously creative; the people are joy to work with. The really creative people are every bit as creative as anyone working in any other medium. I’m an amateur photographer and those are the places I draw inspiration from. The academic writing world doesn’t need someone else in it. If I don’t need to do that I shouldn’t do it, only people drawn to teaching should do that. It’s not what I have to contribute. Right now I’m writing fiction full-time, but I have my book on the ruby software programming language right here and I’m looking at it. The way it works for me is that I have these three creative outlets—writing, photography and software and there’s always one on the back burner, one on the front burner and one I’m switching off with when I get tired. So right now it’s writing and photography and software’s on the back burner, but there are still things I want to do software. I feel like it's really important to me to do all three.