Recently in Ask the Writer Category

Pamela Smith Hill is the award-winning author of Ghost Horses, The Last Grail Keeper, and Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life. She lives in Portland, Oregon, although she grew up in the Missouri Ozarks 'on a steady diet of Bible stories and old TV westerns.' Last Fall, I was fortunate enough to have her come and speak with my class of creative writing students at the university.

If you're interested in Pamela's writing, you can find out about her latest projects, workshops, and more at http://www.pamelasmithhill.com/.

Q: Who is your favorite author and why?

A: I don't have a favorite author, but there are several that I reread periodically:  Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Barbara Pym, Charles Dickens, Laura Ingalls Wilder, T.H. White, and E.B. White. I find inspiration, artistry, and the pure joy of reading in their books.

Q: You mentioned you started your career in newspaper journalism. What do you see as the future of print news? How is the newspaper industry connected (if at all) to reading, fiction, and entertainment? 

A: Unfortunately, traditional newspaper journalism seems to be a dying profession.  Younger readers prefer to get their news online-- it's faster, more timely, and delivers fast-breaking stories better than television.  I'm not sure, however, that online news is as reliable or thorough.  And will it support the dying art of investigative reporting?  Ultimately, I worry that the American public will be satisfied with superficial reporting, that major stories will go under- or unreported, something we've already seen during the last eight years.   
 
As a writer, my background in print journalism strengthened my career as a writer of fiction and biography.  The skills and techniques I used to research newspaper assignments and conduct interviews prepared me for the exhaustive research needed for historical fiction and biography.  I also believe that interviewing strengthened my ability, years later, to write good dialogue.  So for me personally, my training as a newspaper staff writer related directly to my later career as a novelist and biographer.
 
 
Q: 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, and questions, at its deepest level, whether there is in fact any hope for the young 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?

A: I write in Word Perfect (I despise Microsoft Word) at my computer.  Other than to jot down notes to myself or random insights about a work-in-progress, I rarely write with a pen or pencil, perhaps because of my reporting background, where I wrote all my stories on an IBM Selectric typewriter.  Reporters didn't have time to write their stories in longhand.  That said, I always carry a pen and/or pencil and paper with me; I keep yet another set of writing supplies by my bed.  You never know when you'll need them.
 
And I think that, in itself, is hopeful.  Be prepared for the unexpected because the best ideas usually arrive unannounced.
 
My advice to student writers is to continue to write, to perfect your craft, and to read as if your life depended on it.  Because as a writer, it does.

Q: You recently published a biography titled Laura Ingalls Wilder: A Writer's Life. What drew you to the author of the Little House on the Prairie books? Is there a specific reason you chose to tell Wilder's story? 

A: I was commissioned to write the Wilder biography.  Frankly, if I hadn't been asked, I probably wouldn't have had the courage to take on a subject like Wilder.  What could I possibly say that hadn't been said before?  But once I began to research Wilder's writing life, I discovered that I had plenty to say.
 
Wilder's career as a professional writer and then later as a successful novelist was far more complicated and extensive than most of her readers recognize.  She struggled to find her voice, her subject, her genre, and even her publisher.  This intrigued me-- along with the sheer beauty and simplicity of her prose.  Furthermore, the tension between the facts of her life and the fiction of her "Little House" books reveals Wilder to be a far more interesting and masterful novelist than the literary legend she's become.

Q: If you could tell an aspiring writer one thing, one piece of advice, what would it be and why? 

A: Have faith in your own work and your belief in yourself as a writer.  As novelist Eloise Jarvis McGraw once said, "Nobody but you really cares whether you write or not.  Never mind that, keep at it."

Brian Kiteley is the author of The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough, books on writing fiction, and the novel I Know Many Songs, But I Cannot Sing. His newest book, The River Gods, is forthcoming in September 2009. He is also a professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Denver, in Colorado. You can find his books in the Amazon Store by clicking the links above; in addition, you can visit Brian Kiteley's homepage for more interviews, essays, and writing by clicking here.


Q: You write in The 3 A.M. Epiphany that "the American workshop is a lazy construction."  You go on to explain your reasoning, which I agree with.  Could you briefly tell me a few things you do differently in your classes at the University of Denver?  How do you teach enthusiasm for stories, and why is it that so many people believe writing can't be taught?

A: I promote useful accident-production in my fiction workshops.  I convince students to generate a lot of fragments about a coherent set of problems and characters, so that they may find, in this mess of fragments, a couple of possible stories or even an idea for a novel.  In my intermediate workshops for undergraduates, students write any four exercises from my book The 3 A.M. Epiphany (or its follow-up, The 4 A.M. Breakthrough), and then they write another four exercises.  I never tell them which exercises to write until they've finished a draft of a story, when I might suggest a couple of exercises to open up or helpfully derange the story.  We look among these eight exercises and make suggestions to the students about stories that lurk in the bits and pieces.  Before my students write their exercises, I tell them not to write a story--that they try not to finish anything but only produce questions and possibilities.

Here's one example of an exercise, from The 4 A.M. Breakthrough: Take a bunch of tag lines from cartoons, say, from the New Yorker, such as: "It has great refracted light."  "Beverly, brief me on my 11:15 duel."  "Are you even listening to me?"  "And then he turned the tranquilizer gun on himself."  "Look, making you happy is out of the question, but I can give you a compelling narrative for your misery."  "That was one strange and confusing competition."  Put them together.  Type up 10 or 15 tag lines and study them for a long while until they no longer seem connected to the comic strips they originally came from.  Rearrange their order a few times until you can see a possible story between the tag lines.  Write some kind of narrative to link together these fragments of talk or description.  500 words.  The word-limits on these exercises, by the way, are crucial.  I prefer to have small pieces of prose to wrap our minds around as we discuss the larger problems of potential stories or novels.

The last question you ask--why so many people believe writing can't be taught--has frustrated me over the years.  I had great teachers--Donald Barthelme, Grace Paley, Wayne Carver, Fred Tuten, and Mark Mirsky, and they all taught me and my fellow students how to write.  Their approach to the workshop was to ask us to bring full drafts of stories to class without any guidelines or suggestions for how to write those full drafts.  A few of them offered exercises.  Mark Mirsky asked me questions about myself and my family, outside of class, and he guided me toward a different subject matter for my fiction than I was exploring at the time, and this was a very good thing.

Genius can't be taught, but what can be taught is ambition, craft, subject matter, an understanding of the vocabulary of an art form, and a readiness to experiment with your own skills and limitations.  Enthusiasm can be provoked.  In my workshops, I've found a system that spurs undergraduates to poke around in their conscious and unconscious minds and create very different voices and methods than they would have created if they'd simply been told, "Write a story and bring it to class."  I am fond of asking questions like "What do you write about?"  "Why do you write about what you write about?"  Or simply, "Who are you and how should that affect the fiction you write?"

Q: Following up on the previous question, how do your lives as professor and writer coexist?  Is it sometimes difficult to find time to write?

A: I find being a writer and being a teacher of writing fairly similar activities.  It has taken me a while to learn how to integrate the two professions, but I began to realize a long time ago that teaching was also effectively a process of writing, and I could use that process to propel my fiction writing and essay writing.  I tell my graduate students to save everything they write for teaching, to rewrite syllabi, course notes, and handouts, and to take these pieces of writing out of the context of the classroom and turn them into other forms of writing.  I've also assigned so many of these exercises over the years that I was bound to do some of them myself, often in the classroom with the students, and occasionally outside of class to provide samples of my own flailing away at the same edicts and commands.

I have learned to be patient about writing long projects.  The difference between me as a writer now and when I was 28, say, is that I can see beyond the frustration of composition to the possibility of success.  I know that what looks bad several days after the moments of inspiration may look a lot better in six months.  I put things away, and I work on many different layers of a book, without the restlessness I used to feel when I was young.  Then I wanted to be finished with a chapter or a novel much sooner than it was ready to be finished.  I've always been a slow writer.  Before I began teaching full-time, my first novel took five years to finish.  My third novel, The River Gods, seems to have taken 11 years, but I also wrote two other books in the mean time (The 3 A.M. Epiphany and The 4 A.M. Breakthrough) and part of a book of travel memories, as well as a memoir about my brother that I never finished.  Patience is crucial for any writer, but particularly for a teacher.  I have learned how to wait for the writing to make sense to me, which I didn't always do in my 20s.  I have also learned how to write when I have only 15 minutes here or there.  Writing all the time (intermittently), as if it were a normal part of your waking life, is very important for staying in the mind of any writing project.

Q: Your new novel The River Gods is written as a series of short, first-person narratives (for example, one bit is told from the point of view of William Carlos Williams).  Each story deals with a particular time and place around Northampton, Massachusetts.  Can you tell me a little about the book?  Is there any reason you chose to form the book this particular way?

A: Traditionally, historical fiction writers use research to flesh out the story, to add colorful detail, and to achieve verisimilitude.  Research is what's done early in the process of writing most historical fiction.  My approach in The River Gods was to use the research to trigger the narratives at any time in the process--I continued to do research until the last few months I was working on the book.  I was interested in accuracy, but the historical fiction I wrote was more concerned with the mood and experience of the past.  When writing about the distant past, one is essentially translating from another language, losing great chunks of idiosyncratic detail and idioms of the moment.  But something can also be gained in this translation of the past: prose styles erupting out of close readings of primary and secondary texts, and a healthy rethinking of the relationship between the past and the present.  When a writer rewrites history, by taking over other texts and elaborating on them, the result is history reread and revised.  Much contemporary innovative historical fiction takes a simple idea--of reading the past--and complicates the process in surprising and imaginative ways.

The form of the book grew out of the research.  It also grew out of a sense of the function of the storytelling I wanted to employ.  I did not want to write a sweeping historical drama of the town.  Nor did I want to use a frame device--a contemporary or historical figure--to anchor the book in a narrative structure.  I wanted the history of the town to spill out and over the usual boundaries of a "novel."  I believe history is writing--what is written, not just by one author on paper, but by many voices and other forms of "writing," like architecture, town planning, or civil engineering.  This is a book of fragments of history.  The only narrative frame I've constructed is the one the reader brings to organizing the vignettes and storylets in his or her memory.  I tried several different orders of the 75 or so short pieces that make up the book.  First I put them in chronological order, beginning with the earliest human (or European) encounters with the place, Vikings, around 1000 A.C.E.  That didn't work.  It seemed arbitrary, and it privileged my own family stories, which came at what would have been the end of the book.  Then I tried a reverse chronological order, going backward in time.  This version of the book began with my brother's death in 1993.  It was fun to work backwards this way, but it also felt, finally, constructed.  The last version I came up with was to tell my family story more or less in chronological order and intersperse the family tales with other historical tales, echoing something in the family story.  But I do not begin the book with a story about "Brian Kiteley" or anyone else in my family.

Q:  I found a lot of wisdom in John Berger's Ways of Seeing, a book of art criticism that deals with oil painting in particular.  Although I often thought of it, I had not heard anyone mention the book in connection with writing (until I read The 3 A.M. Epiphany).  You even title one of your chapters "Characters and Ways of Seeing."  What is it about Berger's essays that you find important or relevant?  How does that relate to your own writing?

A: John Berger is a novelist and a very good commentator on art and art history.  This in itself is unusual.  I do not know another fiction writer who writes books about painting, off hand.  Berger's essay on Cubism in The Sense of Sight is a wonderful history of that moment in time, and I've found it a useful model for thinking of twentieth century fiction as well.  Perhaps because I am married to a painter, Cynthia Coburn, and many of my good friends in my late twenties were visual artists, I have sought out parallels between the arts.  I can see more clearly what I want to do with fiction through theories and descriptions of the act of making visual art.  I lived among painters and sculptors in 1984 and 1985, when I was at the Fine Arts Work Center, in Provincetown, Massachusetts (an artist colony for twenty young writers and visual artists).  The art that impressed me was new to me at the time--the paintings I watched come together on canvases.  I was unable to witness the other writers' work and revision as satisfyingly as I was able to witness (and learn from) painters' revisions and, heartbreakingly, erasures.

Q: Who is your favorite author (and what is your favorite story he or she wrote)? What resonates with you in that particular story?

A: Bruno Schulz and "August" is a very important story in the history of my influences.  "August" is about that month, the heat associated with that time of year, the emptiness of time in the summer at eight years old.  In Schulz's stories, his family members, named only "Father," "Mother," "elder brother," etc., are legendary figures rather than fictional characters.  This story does not play by the rules of fiction--with characters created for the reader in a careful manner, even if we're not aware they're being created or proposed.  The family in these stories, Street of the Crocodile and Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, seem to exist before the narrative, as our own parents pre-exist us.  The stories are feverish evocations of late childhood and adolescence.  "August" is a very simple story that explores the way a child sees the world, not logically or rationally, but by means of association and mythology.  There are traces of Kafka in Schulz, who translated Kafka into Polish.  He writes as if he were inviting us into his life and world, not as if he has to explain or abstract his life and worldview.  He wrote many of these stories to one person, in a series of letters.  The philosopher in Warsaw who was his correspondent had taken a liking to his work.  She pushed Schulz to publish the stories he was sending her.  I prefer to read and write fiction that feels overheard, private, always on the verge of being embarrassing or inadvertently illuminating.  I don't enjoy fiction as much that behaves as if it were fiction.

Q:  I end all of my interviews with this question: 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 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?

A: There is hope.  Writing is an act of faith in the future (and faith that there is a past that can be examined, if not understood).

I used to write by hand with Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph pens.  These pens are used by draftsmen and sometimes by artists doing very fine drawings.  According to Koh-I-Noor's own ad copy, the pens "lay down dense, even-flowing ink lines of controlled and predetermined widths."  I used these pens because I'm left-handed, and when I wrote with a ball-point pen or even a fountain pen the fleshy part of my outer palm would smudge the writing I was doing.  Rapidograph pen lines did not smudge like this--their ink dries very quickly.  I wrote both on paper and in journals.  I can't recall the last time I wrote anything with one of these pens--perhaps six or eight years ago.  I also can't recall when I switched to composing my fiction (and every other kind of writing except postcard stories) on the computer.  I did notice the transition from type-written letters to letters composed on the computer (and later email).  Each medium changed the process completely.  When I first began writing letters to friends on computers, I realized I had begun to write in circles, rather than in a straight line.  I'd write a couple of paragraphs, and then I would go back and rewrite those paragraphs or delete one of two of them.  Sometimes I'd see a sentence that needed to be a paragraph.  These letters felt more constructed and less seat-of-the-pants recordings of my consciousness.  This is also true of composing fiction and nonfiction on the computer.  Because it is so easy to edit and revise work on the computer, I've discovered I am not nearly so concerned about the invention phase.  I write away without any editor on the shoulder.  I let loose whatever wants to come out.  That's a good thing.  The constant revision is not necessarily a good thing.  I feel I am maybe too patient now.  I have only just begun another novel, which I am writing in a beautiful Italian-bound blank book.  My rule for writing this book is to write by hand, never look back (well, not too much), and never revise.  I allow myself only to comment on what I'm doing, outside of the story, and those comments may end up in the book I finally do type up on my computer (at which point I'll probably revise and reorganize drastically).  But I do plan to write this novel in one draft, filling the 300-page book.  I've never done this before.

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.

-------------------------------------------------------------

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."

 

Dennis Lehane is the bestselling author of Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. Mr. Lehane graciously agreed to take some time and answer a few questions for "Ask the Writer," including his thoughts on the movie business, his upcoming novel The Given Day (Sept. 2009), and whether there is in fact any hope for the aspiring novelist.

Just what does it take to make it as a writer? What are the perks and pitfalls of a writing life? And, perhaps most importantly, does Dennis Lehane hate ballpoint pens? Read on to find out.

Q:  In your forthcoming novel, The Given Day, you vividly bring to life an expanse of Boston history, from the Spanish influenza outbreak to the Police Strike of 1919. What was it like to write such a sweeping, complicated, and intricate novel?

A:  The short answer is it sucked. I would strongly recommend nobody ever attempt a historical epic. It's for crazy people. Way too much hard work. I'm glad it's done. I hope it's good.

Q:  What is your favorite aspect of writing, or of being a writer? Can you think of a specific story to go along with that part of your writing life?

A:  Sometimes, you go to your desk first thing in the morning and there's nothing in your head but the lyrics to Viva Las Vegas. Yet, somehow by the end of the day, you've created characters from nothing but ether and had them walk around doing interesting things. That "somehow" is why I love what I do. I also like having a job that doesn't require shaving. I enjoy being able to crack a beer at work if I feel like it. If I wore pajamas, I could spend my entire work day in them; I don't wear pajamas, but the principle still applies.

 Q: Events in The Given Day sometimes eerily parallel 21st century America. As I read the book I came to understand that this is not the first time America has faced such broad insecurity. To what extent did these parallels--the immigration tensions, terrorism threats, and economic uncertainties, to name a few--inform your writing for a contemporary audience?

A:  The parallels reared their head very early. I had no hand in that; the gods wrapped me a gift. All I had to do was put it to paper; editorializing or commenting on the parallels in any fashion would have been redundant. History proves that, time and time again, fear or the perception of powerlessness produces fascist impulses in people and societies. The more afraid you are, the more vicious and infantile you usually become. I don't think I say anything revolutionary in that regard with The Given Day, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be said and said as much as possible.

Q:  Two of your previous novels--Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone--were made into major Hollywood films (to critical acclaim). How was your experience with those films, from preproduction to premier, and how do you view the relationship between film making and publishing?

A:  Film and books share a narrative identity, but that's about it. Film is passive entertainment; books are active. Film is interpretative of the book it adapts, but the book itself is procreative in a way that film can't be. Put another way, if a film is an omelet, the book is the hen. My experience with film, thus far, has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been blessed with two terrific scripts, two exceptionally talented directors (who, oddly, both came from an acting background) and their interpretations have been respectful of the source material without making the mistake of being reverential. Can't say enough about Señors Eastwood and Affleck really--both were true gentlemen in every sense of the word, both were very determined to deliver visions of my novels that were decidedly un-Hollywood, and both invited me into the process at the earliest stages and kept me involved through the premieres and, in the case of Mystic River, well into awards' season. In both cases, outstanding omelets.

Q:  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, and questions, at its deepest level, whether there is in fact any hope for the young 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?

A:  Why wouldn't there be hope? You wake up, you decided you want to tell a story, you try that thing. Right from Jump Street, you are involved in an act of creation and what's more hopeful than that? Where people make a potentially catastrophic mistake is to think they can take shortcuts. Sorry, but there aren't any. No matter what the How To Write a Bestseller books tell you (normally written by people who've never written bestsellers; interesting) or the "10 Tips to Writing the Perfect Thriller Every Time!" articles in writers magazines, the truth is that this is hard, hard work. It is not for the lazy or those who confuse wanting something with earning it. Good writing is about depth--depth of character and structure and insight and language. If you're not willing to accept that and earn your keep, well, maybe there is no hope. But if you are willing to work, then, heck, there's no reason you can't be the next Toni Morrison.

      I write with a pen and it's got to be a rollerball. I hate ballpoint like I hate cilantro. In fact, if ballpoint was all that was left in the world, I might never produce another line.

Benjamin Percy is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf in 2009), and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007), and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction appears in Esquire, Men's Journal, the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. His honors include the Plimpton Prize and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State.