Ask the Writer with Kevin Brockmeier

Kevin Brockmeier is the bestselling author of the novels The Brief History of the Dead and The Truth About Celia. He is also the author of the story collections Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and The Best American Short Stories anthologies, to name a few. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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BP: Your novel The Brief History of the Dead is fairly compact (something like 252 pages). Leo Tolstoy's War & Peace, by contrast, is 1,465 pages in the 2006 paperback. Lately I noticed novels are trending shorter. So I wondered: Are there any benefits to writing a compressed story or novel? What -- if anything -- would those advantages be?

KB: I suppose that the shorter forms permit a clarity of line and allow for a more singular emotional effect than the longer ones do. As a reader, I find that there's a big difference between the books I'm capable of finishing in a single sitting, or at least a single day (although I actually did read Anna Karenina in one single marathon session when I was in grad school), and the books I have to absorb piece by piece over many days or weeks. And I have to say that many of the great big books that everyone celebrates as the crowning achievements of modern literature strike me as tedious and bloated and ultimately exhaust my patience.

Look, I love War and Peace and Anna Karenina and The Magic Mountain, and more recently I loved Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, and The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, and Cryptonomicon, all gigantic ambitious novels that venture widely across time and space. But the novels I love the most, the ones that best live up to my vision of what a novel ought to be, are all relatively short books, between 200 and 300 pages, that bring such compassion and sharpness of vision to the world and to the creatures that inhabit it that every single aspect of experience seems to blossom open between their pages and I feel this almost holy awareness of the wealth and sadness and beauty of existence coming at me in a single powerfully contained burst---novels such as James Agee's A Death in the Family, Walter Tevis's The Man Who Fell to Earth, Chris Fuhrman's The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, John Williams's Stoner, and Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England, to name a few.

I think that in my own books what I'm struggling to do is replicate that experience; though I may not succeed, that's my aim.

BP: I read in your biography that you taught for a while at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. What was that like? What are your thoughts on writing workshops in general? Do they offer aspiring writers much-needed community? Or are they, as some critics have charged, cookie-cutter writer factories?

KB: I'm not going to say that it never happens that workshops frighten writers out of their best qualities. When I was in grad school, I had one classmate who came into the program writing what I thought were deeply interesting, idiosyncratic stories marked indelibly by her own individual way of perceiving the world and left it writing dull, careful stories in the sub-Raymond-Carver minimalist mode. (That was my take on the situation; I suspect she would say that she matured and grew into her own voice.) But I think that far more often writers walk out of a workshop (a good one, at least) with a richer notion of what they're capable of achieving, and also a helpful sense of what it's like to write to a specific, highly responsive audience.

I don't know that any workshop can magically transform you into a better writer---that's slow work, and it has to be done on your own, mainly through lots of writing and lots of reading---but I think it can and should turn you into a better editor.

As for what it was like to teach at Iowa, I'll say that it was intimidating. It was the first time I had taught at the graduate level---the first time I had taught at all in several years---and initially I wasn't quite sure what my role in class ought to be. The students there are all such talented critics, and I knew I was never the sole authority on whatever topic we happened to be discussing. I found my footing after a while, though, and I did my best to respond honestly to every story we discussed on its own terms. I'll add that one thing my semester there reminded me of was that I'm capable of using language extemporaneously, something that it's easy to forget when you spend every day alone in front of a computer, slowly attempting to polish a handful of sentences.

In any case, I'll be returning there to teach again next spring, and I plan to offer the same classes I offered in 2005: the standard graduate fiction workshop and a separate workshop for students writing children's or young adult fiction.

BP: Most authors read an eclectic range of books. Many even draw inspiration for their own writing from the writings of others. I noticed in The Brief History of the Dead that the epigraph, taken from James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, is central in the plot of the novel. What is the book you find yourself returning to again and again for inspiration? Put another way: What's your favorite story, or the one you enjoy the most, and why?

KB: I have a long list of favorite novels, and another long list of favorite short stories---and I mean that quite literally. I keep an ongoing list of both my fifty favorite novels and my fifty favorite stories, in alphabetical order by the author's last name, and with asterisks beside my current top ten, all of which I'm constantly updating and reconsidering. This is just one of the ways I waste time when I really ought to be writing.

I suppose, though, that if I were to name my single favorite novel, it would be The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino. And if I were to name my single favorite short story, it would be "The Thistles in Sweden" by William Maxwell. Both strike me as ideal pieces of fiction: wholly absorbing, flawlessly crafted, with a tone that's slightly fantastic and tender and even joyful without ever losing sight of the pain and melancholy in the world.

BP: Your story "The Year of Silence" appeared this year in Best American Short Stories 2008 (edited by Salman Rushdie). What inspired you to include a secret message to readers in Morse code as part of the story's deeper structure? And what, in general, does this story mean to you as you re-read it now?

KB: It was the Morse Code bit that gave birth to the story, actually. I had this notion of ending a story with  the words dot and dash repeating in a long sequence. It was the verbal effect that appealed to me---a string of abrupt one-syllable words, meaningless on the surface, or rather with all the meaning wrapped up in the simple sound of the letters; words that were almost confrontational, but that contained a little Easter egg message inside them if you bothered to crack them open. The sound of the words still seems more significant to me, though, more to-the-point, than the message itself. The idea lingered with me for a while before I found a story that I thought would suit it: a story in which a city achieves and later dismantles a system of perfect silence.

Of course, I'm thrilled that Mr. Rushdie selected the story for Best American, and earlier this month he even hosted a reading of it at Symphony Space in New York City. That said, I'm not sure that "The Year of Silence" is one of the strongest pieces in my new collection. My own favorites are "The View from the Seventh Layer" (which is the title story), "Andrea Is Changing Her Name," and "A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets."

BP: I ask this question often: John Gardner once wrote that the question he was most asked was, "Do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what?" He said he thought this question delved into the mystical aspect of writing, brought up the "kinds of things compulsive gamblers are said to worry about," and questions, at its deepest level, whether there is in fact any hope for success in the world of a writer. So I have to ask, do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what? Is there any hope, and, if there is, what is your best advice to students and aspiring authors?

KB: I write using a word processing program (WordPerfect Version 12, for what it's worth). Then, when I've finished a story, I print it out and revise it with an ink pen (a Cross ball-point with a fine black tip, again for what it's worth) before I type in my corrections. I'm a typist of little technique---I still get by using just two fingers---but I write so slowly that it's never been a problem.

The two pieces of advice that every working writer would offer every aspiring writer are to read as much as you can and to write as diligently as you are able. Those are recommendations that I think nobody would question. Aside from that, I think it's useful to discover whether you're the kind of writer who moves a story forward sentence by sentence or paragraph by paragraph; they're two different ways of conveying meaning, and knowing which one suits you can help you find your voice. I find it useful to remember that the best writing usually has a kind of music behind it, flowing along underneath the prose, and it's good to allow your sentences to find their own particular rhythm and adapt yourself to it. But then, too, there is this piece of advice I read recently from Antoine de Saint-Exupery: "If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."