Critique Magazine :: On Writing II

Wong: Why do you write?
Wright: I write for the same reason I keep Maine coon cats—I have always done it. I literally can't remember a time in my life when I wasn't writing. But that begs the question, doesn't it? Why do I write? We get into habits for a reason. I believe I started telling stories on paper because it freed me, momentarily, from the hell that was Life with Father. I won't go into that. It's a cliche. But the cliche started me writing, and I've been writing ever since. I enjoyed being in the worlds I created, with people I (believed then, at any rate) could control. I still enjoy it, though I've come to learn, of course, we have minimal control of our characters, at best.
Writing really is a way of being. I won't go into that, either. It's personally scary. But I think it's all right to be all that we can be (as people who are writers) when we're writing.

Wong: What do you mean by this—“the quest for exactly the right word or phrase can hobble any writer”?
Wright: Like most writers, I’ve spent literally hours searching for what I felt was exactly the right word, mostly for my fiction, sometimes for my poetry. I’ve worked and reworked phrases, paragraphs, chapters—in the endless quest for exactly the right word—until the sense of the phrase, the paragraph, the chapter has been all-but lost. Until the phrase, paragraph, chapter is really just a shadow of what it once was (when it first flew from my fingers and onto the page). Sure, that first incarnation may have been imperfect. Perhaps vastly imperfect. But it may have carried in it the sense of the story, the soul of the story, until the editor got hold of it and took its life away. Unless we’re writing the instructions for putting a swing set together, the search for exactly the right word can easily cause us to lose sight of story. Writing is, indeed, rewriting, but not rewriting to the point of killing story. Imperfection is everywhere. Perfection doesn’t exist (at least in my universe). I believe we can reasonably seek only the near-perfect, and then only if we keep one eye on story.

Wong: Why do you publish?
Wright: I began to publish for two reasons: So people everywhere would be able to read what I wrote and see I was a talented and worthy guy. And because I needed the money. I still need the money. The judgments of people who read what I publish has, however, become scary. You really don't know how anyone (even people close to you) is going to react to something you've published. You've got to have brass balls to publish anything, anywhere.

Wong: Who are your favorite ghost story or 'quiet horror' writers? How did they influence you?
Wright: Presently, I have none. "Horror," as a genre, has become saturated with the overwrought, the grotesque for its own sake, writers who don’t really care much about writing. Stephen King and I started publishing at approximately the same time, so he was not an influence: I think his writing, per se, is often second rate, though his story telling can be absorbing, especially in his earlier books, Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Stand.
My early influences, from more than a few decades ago, were Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, C.S. Lewis (his space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength), Isaac Asimov, Kurt Vonnegut, and, a bit later, Harlan Ellison (I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream: A Boy and His Dog). These are writers of great imagination and even greater story-telling abilities. Almost all of them, except, perhaps, for Isaac Asimov, were wonderful writers, too. They took much care when they merged the art of writing with the craft of story-telling, and I saw great magic in that, for my personal life—my ability to cope—and for my life as a writer.

Wong: Why is Asimov not a wonderful writer in your opinion? He says, "I do all my own typing, my own research, answer my own mail. I don't even have a literary agent. This way there are no arguments, no instructions, no misunderstandings. I work every day. Sunday is my best day: no mail, no telephones. Writing is my only interest. Even speaking is an interruption."
Wright: Isaac Asimov was a wonderful storyteller. Like Stephen King. But neither could be called a marvelous stylist; Asimov eschewed style, for its own sake, in favor of story. It has been many years since I read Asimov, but I do remember that his writing was crisp, often terse, minimalist when that term wasn’t in vogue, and, therefore, quite readable. But he wasn’t into verbal pyrotechnics. He was into story. His characters were interesting, too, though not as fully fleshed as, for instance, Robert Heinlein’s, or Harlan Ellison’s. Asimov’s characters often served merely as pawns of the plot. And when I was reading Asimov, that was just fine with me. I’d say it still is.

Wong: What has changed in your work between Sleepeasy, a ghost story or quiet horror story, and Cold House, the mainstream novel, you are currently writing? Why the change from the ghost story/quiet horror genre to mainstream? Why the interest, too, in poetry?
Wright: Sleepeasy carries with it a deadly burden, especially for a novel marketed, unfortunately, as "horror": It’s very heavy on characterization and philosophy. Several of the favorable reviews have pointed this out, but the book hasn’t been leaping off the shelves at Amazon.com, Borders, or WaldenBooks. Of course, all of my books are heavier on characterization than on plot, and they usually leave the reader dangling at the end. I have no apologies for that. I know it’s much wiser to bring a novel to a satisfying conclusion than to say, as I do at the end of A Manhattan Ghost Story, "Stick around. I’ll let you know." But horror readers in general tend to view such things as simply not enough. They want plot, not philosophy, and evil (as a genuine force in the universe), not the fuzzy complexities of characterization. The "evil" forces in Sleepeasy are entirely the subconscious constructions of the human characters. In Cold House there are no apparently evil forces, only two people who may or may not be alive, and who, in their strange and separate ways, are running from the reality of what passes, for them, as "existence." I’d say that all of my novels have dealt with these themes, but that, until Cold House, I saw the necessity, marketing wise, of throwing in a supernatural element or two. Whether those supernatural elements exist in Cold House will be left entirely up to the reader’s imagination.
For any writer, poetry’s a real challenge. To distill a great lump of emotion and experience into a few “perfect” lines that leave the reader with something satisfying to his own soul is quite a daunting task. I think a lot of would-be poets, and I include myself in that group, make the same mistake a lot of would-be fiction writers make: they personalize their work without knowing it, or wanting to, find it satisfying (because, of course, it has to be), and send it around as something a world full of readers will identify with and be awed by. I learned early on (though I haven’t always, if ever, put it into practice) that great poetry moves beyond the claustrophobically, cloyingly personal and into the universal without fuss, or seams. Because, of course, everything’s personal. We all share the same wants and needs, only the petty details differ. When a poet throws in those petty details and assumes they are what’s actually universal, he has probably done irreparable damage to his poem.
I think we often use the writing of poetry as if it can be a pill for what ails us—existential angst, worries about love, the death of someone dear, the inevitability of aging. However, we read not only the poetry that seems to share our worries, but poetry which has an undercurrent of joy and celebration of life, not just human life, but life itself, the life of a pond, a water lily, a memory. I like to tell my students all fiction is about people. Animal Farm was about people, Watership Down was about people. Perhaps the same can be said of poetry, but with a different slant, that as people who write poetry, we can see and celebrate the life which courses through everything that lives and dies, from memories, to toadstools, to ideas, to beloved pets, to a ‘58 Buick.

Wong: But the personal is the universal. As John Gardner said, "The importance of physical detail is that it creates for the reader a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind...it's physical detail that pulls the reader into the writing..."
Wright: I think the petty details are what make us "unique," one from another. I don't really believe any of us is actually "unique," though—as I understand the word. Well, it gets into a lot of things, doesn't it? Why do we take the paths we take in life? Why do some of us become soldiers, marry once, and forever, and why do some of us (one of us, anyway) write "Howl"? Damned if I know. Maybe we see "reality" in different ways (even though it's the same reality), and so we deal with it in different ways. But it's all just a matter of coping. Of staying alive, even if we're not breathing. Of avoiding insecurity, angst, and loneliness.
In a poem, the petty details should be seen (I believe humbly) only as window dressing. That, often, the petty details amount to rose-colored glasses through which reality becomes something nice. Or the petty details can grab us by the cajones and keep us rooted to our easy chair. Maybe, as long as we see the petty details as, indeed, petty we are better off as writers and poets and (a revelation) people.

Wong: Then what is the difference between the petty detail and the telling detail?
Wright: The petty detail does not take us, the readers, beyond itself and into the realm of its real importance in the life of the writer. The writer will keep its importance to herself, usually without intending to, because she knows the importance of the petty detail and, so, her internal editor and mentor will not prompt her for amplification. Something like, I keep one flower on my windowsill/It’s red, without amplification of any kind. We’re left wondering why she keeps one red flower on her windowsill, certainly, but without any clues, a linking metaphor, something, our curiosity will soon fade and we’ll feel no sense of identity with the writer, and no sense of fulfillment or revelation.

Wong: What poems give you a magical feeling when you read them?
Wright: Many of Galway Kinnell’s poems (for instance, After Making Love, We Hear Footsteps ("this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making") and Poem of Night ("I move my hand over/Slopes, falls, lumps of sight,/Lashes barely able to be touched,/Lips that give way so easily/Its a shock to feel under them/The hard smile of bones.")), and Weldon Kees’s Aspects of Robinson ("Robinson at cards at the Algonquin; a thin/Blue light comes down once more outside the blinds./Gray men in overcoats are ghosts blown past the door./The taxis streak the avenues with yellow, orange, and red./This is Grand Central, Mr. Robinson."), and many of Mary Oliver’s poems (which are so close to the earth, so true and genuine, they’re almost a distinct life-form), and T.S. Eliot ("Let us go then, you and I"), and some of the anguished poetry of Sylvia Plath ("Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm through!") and also Denise Levertov, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, and Sharon Olds.
"Magical feeling" for me, of course, may mean something entirely different than it does for someone else. I can’t say exactly why Galway Kinnell’s poetry gets under my skin and raises goose bumps, but it often does, or why Aspects of Robinson is such an aptly drawn, stunning characterization of a pathetic man it leaves me in awe, or why Donald Justice’s, The Tourist from Syracuse ("Shall I confess who I am?/My name is all names and none./I am the used-car salesman,/The tourist from Syracuse") gives me a feeling of exquisite loneliness and separation that I actually like. Perhaps my feeling for poetry is parallel to my taste in music. I love Randy Newman, for instance, and John Prine, people who have no affectations, no pretense. They do their bit and you may like it or not, it makes no difference to them (or, if it does, they don’t show it). They open their souls to the rest of us, not in exhibitionism, but because they’re artists, and artists need to open their souls. I think magical poetry, for me, is poetry that illuminates and sings at the same time; it can be mannered, or playfully anarchic ( and genuineness as its reason for being, it may very well give me a "magical feeling."

Wong: Who are some up-and-coming writers and poets who interest you?
Wright: Three writers come to mind, though none are "up and coming," they haven't yet reached stellar heights, either, as far as I know. One is Daniel Anderson, whose poem “A Possum's Tale” is one of those poems that gives me a "magical feeling"—

A fine, fine portrait of a little-understood creature of the night; Anderson gets into the possum's strange head and makes us understand it (at least in a human way). I love poetry that shows me the natural world in this way, with respect and reverence--Galway Kinnell and Mary Oliver are wonderful at this sort of thing, and when I read Possum's Tale, I put Daniel Anderson in the same league (though that may have been presumptuous).
Brigit Pegeen Kelly is one of those poets whose poems often give me a "magical feeling. For instance, her poem “The Orchard”:

Marvelous rhythm and pacing, very dreamlike. Pulled me right in to a world with which I was not unfamiliar, having grown up more as a country dweller than a city dweller. Her account of a dog eating the carcass of a doe is riveting, almost holy. I have her second book, Song, published by BOA Editions in 1995.
As far as novelists are concerned, I highly recommend Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine. It was her first novel, and it was published some time ago; she published another, set in the same gritty universe as Beans, but I haven't heard much from her since. A pity. She handled multple first-person points of view (in different chapters) better than I've ever seen it done before, or since. And her people, as gritty as they were, and as unpleasant as they sometimes could be, were interesting, because they were real.

Wong: You were the editor of Writer Online when it was called, by Writer's Digest, the number two place (out of thousands) to be published on the web. Now that literary magazines are on-line, do you feel this has weakened print magazines?
Wright: Good Lord, I hope not, but I think it has. I know of several magazines that have gone from print to cyberspace—cheaper to produce, potentially larger audience. The phenomenon of E-publishing isn’t, of course, all that its exponents claim it is: anyone can post anything on line somewhere and say they’ve been published.

Wong: What is somewhere? Anyone’s homepage?
Wright: Essentially, yes, though there are more than a few corporate websites that publish anything, as long as there’s a potential buck or two in it for the website owners. One is a very well-known poetry website; it offers your poem printed on coffee mugs, mouse pads and T-shirts, and will tell you that your poem—whether sublime or simply bad—is a work of “true artistry” because they hope you’ll buy the latest edition of their truck-sized poetry anthology (with titles like, but not the same as, Whispers of Eternity, or Leaves of the Muse) with your poem in it. There are many such sites, publishing fiction and poetry, and, of course, some of eBook publishing (with a few notable exceptions) is the old “vanity press” for the computer age.

Wong: Editors look for originality, something new. What did you look for, in terms of substance and style, when you were editor of Writer Online?
Wright: I needed to see originality, at least in theme, and, in conjunction with that, a basic awareness of the rules of good writing, poetry or prose or essay or book review, et cetera. I also needed to see the writer had actually taken the time to read Writer Online and knew the kinds of stories we published. I used to receive up to 600 submissions a month, fully 95% of them not worth a second glance. If I could be convinced, by the writing itself, that the writer took the time to be certain his words did not get in the way of what he was trying to say, then I was pleased and often gave the writer encouragement, or bought the piece outright.
In the poetry I bought, I looked for genuineness, lack of cliches, avoidance of the maudlin, and the overwrought, and I steered clear of poetry that was all emotion, or all intellect (a melding of the two is preferable).

Wong: When you read for your own pleasure, do you read poetry or prose? And what do you read?
Wright: Mostly, I read poetry. I try to sample the work of someone new (to me), every day. There are a number of sites on the Net that make this possible. Poetry Daily is one (I search its archives), and there are a number of others that offer searchable databases covering many periods and forms. It was while searching the Net a while back that I discovered such poets as Kim Addonizzio and Louise Gluck. I also have a fairly large collection of books put out by BOA Editions, based in Rochester, New York, just a stone’s throw from where I live.

Wong: What are some of your daily writing habits?
Wright: When I’m working under contract on a new novel, I’m up at 6:00 with my orange juice, Mocha Frappucino, Shredded Wheat (no sugar), all of which I balance precariously in various places around my computer while I take a look at the previous day’s output. When I’m going strong on a novel, it’s very difficult to step away from it and force myself to walk the dog, sweep the floor, use the bathroom, call my mother, mow the lawn. But I really do understand the need to step away every now and then. It conserves energy and keeps me from becoming longwinded. It gives me a break from being possessed by characters. It prevents Olive, the pug, from making a mess of the house.
      I don’t think anyone can write for more than three or four hours a day, except the late queen of romance, Barbara Cartland (who wrote, or rewrote, 10,000 words a day) and the also late, Isaac Asimov (whose lifetime publishing credits equal or exceed the lifetime publishing credits of forty or fifty merely human authors). Beyond three or four hours, I think the mind gets filled with the gunk of the day and new creative output becomes more drudgery than inspiration. So, after three or four hours, I either edit what I’ve written or I simply set it aside for tomorrow.
      Curiously, when I was working on the first draft of Cold House (which I started a year ago and finished three months later), I worked throughout the day and into the night. That book was not then, and is not now under contract, and is undergoing continuous, savage revision. Perhaps the difference between Cold House and books I’ve written under contract is that Cold House was a real labor of love which, I knew, had to become a work for hire, as well. The books I’ve written under contract started out as works for hire then became labors of love (as I approached completion of the first drafts of those books, my writing hours per day increased).
      Money doesn’t merely talk, it coerces. As editors do. My under-contract novels (all 23 of them) might have been different had they started merely as labors of love. I’ll never know

Wong: I understand you paint? Why? Does this help you see your writing?
Wright: Painting requires a slightly different focus than the writing of fiction. It’s a less intellectual focus, but it also taps into the creative force that’s behind the creation of fiction, the force that needs to interpret the world around us, the people who inhabit it, their humanness and humanity. Doing a nude on canvas, for instance, and describing a nude in fiction may have approximately the same goal—to humanize the nude, not objectify her (or him), to show her as a whole being who, at that moment, happens to be nude, perhaps titillating, but still a creature of depth. And if I’m painting a fine old Victorian house, my approach would be approximately the same as if I were describing the same house in fiction, to give the reader some idea of what kind of people live in it.
For me, painting is closer to meditation than writing. Probably because writing involves more of the thinking processes. It’s relaxing, even when you know a painting is going nowhere. And writers really need to tear themselves away from their writing, occasionally, and relax. Then they can tackle with energy the daunting task of stringing words together in a form understandable to their readers.

Wong: What's in the future for T.M. Wright?
Wright: A continuing search for his true voice, which he hears every once in a while, sometimes in his poetry, often in his new novel, and now and again in recent novels awaiting publication. And I wonder, too, if one's "true voice" can change over time, certainly as one ages, certainly as living itself shows an artist that there are no answers, simply endless questions. I suppose that as an artist tries to interpret reality, and as reality gets more and more difficult to define, the artist ends up defining reality as ... anarchy.
It's what I've portrayed in my "horror" novels these past 25 years, and it's what I find myself portraying in my first "mainstream" novel—anarchy and loss redeemed, to some unknowable extent, by love. And don't sell love short. It equals security, at least in the short run. And in a world where "reality" is as hard to grab hold of as a puff of smoke, security, even short-lived, is as important as oxygen.

Wong: Would you like to close with a few lines from one of your own poems?
Wright: From “Hummingbird,” written this year: