Noppeid intervjuust Stephen Graham Jonesiga
When I’m at the keyboard, though, I always think Hey, all right, let’s do something muted and insightful, something Chekhov would have been jealous of. But then, bam, I’ve got some guy sitting by a fire in his living room, thinking boring thoughts about the difficulties of his day or whatever. I don’t know—really, no clue how to make these interesting. And he’s so boring that I start to look everywhere else in that room, and soon enough notice this carving on an umbrella handle, realize that symbol’s a carryover from some epoch of humanity nobody knows about anymore, and that tonight’s the last possible night, star-wise, for that symbol to reactivate, let something ancient and devious rise from the ashes of that soon-to-be burned-out fire, and there I am, here we are, in a story that actually’s got potential, something I can run with. And I don’t think that’s a failure of my imagination, either.
*
But, really, I mean, yeah, seven books the last eight or nine years, that’s not even half of what I’ve written. Maybe a third? Maybe not. What I really wonder is how everybody else doesn’t kick out books like that. It just makes sense to me to start a novel, write it as fast as I can, then move on to the next one. As for why I burn through them at that rate, though—[Philip K. Dick]’s my idol, sure—it’s that whatever membrane it is in my head that’s supposed to keep the fiction separated from the more-waking world, it’s just especially, to use a [David Foster Wallace] word, permeable. Which is to say that the novels, these stories I step into, they just always kind of inhabit me, take over, so that I’m dreaming them, I’m living them, I can’t tell what’s what, if I’m the butterfly or the man, and so I dog-paddle as fast as I can for the surface again, please. The best times for me, they’re not when I’m writing. When I can walk through a grocery store and not have a very real sense that a character, or worse, from something I’m writing’s about to round the corner from the freezer section, dragging his finger along all the Lucky Charms. I hate living like that. Very unpleasant. Makes conversations so fake, because I’m always a remove away, wondering if I’m writing this, maybe, or if I should be, for later. I get physically sick when writing too, if it’s some violent stuff, and, I don’t know, it should probably all be really embarrassing, I guess.
*
I’m still so completely in love with [Bird is Gone]. Maybe because it’s a textual record of my brain melting, sure. But the way it melted onto the page, it’s as clean as anything I’ve attempted. Can’t imagine I’ll ever do anything like that again.
*
So many books win awards, it seems, when all they are is written well. But so often there’s nothing underneath those sentences. They’re not written in blood, I mean. These aren’t words the writer wrote in order to make the world make sense, they aren’t words the writer wrote because they were coming out one orifice or another, so, might as well be those gaps between the lines of the fingerprints. And, to derail a moment, this is why PKD’s my once and forever idol: all his books matter. Even the early-early ones, even then there’s a very palpable sincerity there, an extreme need for this to all work, as if his life depends on getting it right this time, or this time, or saying it better and better now, so that somebody else can finally acknowledge it, make it real, not just a product of whatever was happening in his head. I cue into that so well. Which is to say I miss it in so much of what I read.
*
If there is anything that elevates me, I hope, anyway, that it’s that I invest dangerous amounts of myself into the story each time I put figurative pen to figurative paper. Or, ‘dangerous’ is that romantic thing again. How about ‘stupid,’ then? Probably more accurate anyway.
*
That’s exactly what I’m always and forever after: wonder. I want to make my reader ten-years-old again, to have him or her look at the sky a little differently now. To make the world a place filled with possibility. Which is to say, I’m always, very consciously, writing against cynicism. I think cynicism’s the most poisonous thing there is. I far prefer my own gullibility, I mean. All the infomercial numbers I’m always carrying around. How, when somebody’s late, my knee-jerk thought isn’t that he or she got hung up cleaning a spill or taking a call, but that, if the road they took from there to here was empty enough—even if it wasn’t—then maybe aliens nabbed them, yeah? Seriously, that’s my first suspicion. Or that some closet they were walking by, it suddenly opened, sucked them in. And that, in a few minutes, none of us will even remember that he or she was supposed to have been here in the first place. That reality just branched again. And that, if I write fast enough, maybe, just maybe, I can document some of that. Make a map I can follow back someday.
