Recently, writer K. C. Wilson, whose novella Doing the Dead – 1983 is being published this month by Faraway, took some time to answer some questions about his work, his writing process, and his experience in publishing. Part 2 of the interview is below. (Click here to read the first part of the interview, and here to read the second part.)
Part 3
Writing
Describe your writing process. Where and when do you write best? How often do you write, and how much do you write at a time?
I write best in the mornings. I’m a morning person, generally, but late at night, also. It all depends. Lately, I’m a weekend writer. When I’m working on something nowadays, I have to be adaptable. At any moment, my daughter might want me to watch her stand on her head or something. I try to comply. I do more rewriting than writing these days, but when I’m working on something, I’ll stay with it for hours, as long as I can.
Who are some of your favorite writers? Or who are some writers who have influenced your work? In The Route especially I’ve detected plot elements that I might call “Adult Kerouac”: the sort of vagabond existence that Kerouac writes about, except in your work it’s tied to characters who still feel strongly about being involved in society, who still feel strong emotions for their families, who still feel like they want to accomplish something other than being a vagabond, exemplified by Pete in The Route. How do you feel about this characterization?
I never think of Kerouac in relation to The Route. Although he was an early influence, as he was on most of my generation, I soon found that I couldn’t write that way: the free-flowing, headlong rush into the midnight of a thousand crazy dreams kind of a thing. Not for long, anyway. Although what you call “Adult Kerouac” might well be a reflection of the aftermath of the beat/hipster lifestyle. After the glory of youth’s debauch the piper must be paid.
I read the Beats in college and had every intention of following the same tracks, riding the rails, hitching, hoboing, writing my own vainglorious novel. I did that and it’s safely tucked away in drawer where it belongs. Along the way, I found a lot of writers I admired, but I found that I couldn’t write like most of them, either.
For The Route, I used, as a model for tone, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. That little novel, to me, is perfect. I’ve reread it a bunch of times.
First person narratives always attracted me, particularly what I call the “desperate narrative,” like James M. Cain’s Past All Dishonor, for example, in which a Confederate spy holed up in a cave hastily writes his story while the Union army closes in on him. In these stories desperation rules. The rock is rolling downhill throughout. A man will do anything for love, even murder. James M. Cain owned that genre.
I went though all the hard boiled crime novelists. I wanted to write those cheap paperbacks with bad men and sexy women on the covers. I was determined to master the first person narrative but as time went by, I did a lot more reading than writing. What I did write tended towards the personal.
The first writer who was my truest teacher of style was Andre Gide. His novels, his notebooks, everything he wrote spoke to me of a narrative ideal: a personal, intimate tone that quickly establishes a confidential bond with the reader. What he wrote about never mattered as much as the way he wrote. But I was too young then to rely on style alone. I needed a story to tell and I didn’t have one.
Current writers I greatly admire are Nick Tosches, whose In The Hand of Dante is the novel of a lifetime, James Ellroy, whose output seems to have slowed down of late, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work towers over most modern literature.
You have mentioned to me that The Route was based largely on actual events. Why is it that you have relied on autobiographical events in your writing, and how has this differed from any writing you’ve done that was entirely fictional?
Louis Ferdinand Celine bowled me over with Death on the Installment Plan and soon after, Henry Miller swept me away on the sea of his stories. I had tried to write pure fiction, but the writers I loved most were raconteurs, storytellers, personalities so strong they couldn’t be separated from their stories. In college, a friend turned me on to Diary of the Seducer by Kierkegaard, a self-contained fragment all but hidden inside the tome, Either/Or, seventy stunning pages of wickedly honest narration. I wanted to do that, write something so true you could not put it down.
I’d made up a few imaginary tales, but the stories and anecdotes I heard people tell, stories of real people’s lives were always the better stories, to me. I came to the realization that I was not the kind of writer who was inclined to conjure up stories out of nothing. Unless they were grounded in some kind of truth or reality, the stories I made up didn’t matter much to me. Once I accumulated a few interesting experiences of my own, I tried to tell them the best I could. By the time I had mentally filtered the experience, edited the dialog, changed the names, elaborated, exaggerated and introduced a point to an often pointless scenario, I felt pretty secure about calling it fiction rather than fact. I never set out to write factual stories. My view of fiction is: change the names and leave out the boring parts.
Along the way, I involved other people. The Route was based in reality, no question. The narrator, Peter Foster, was based on the actor and writer, Bruce Kerr. I could never have written from Bruce Kerr’s perspective and called my narrator Bruce Kerr. I’m not Bruce and Peter Foster is not Bruce either. Peter Foster is a pale shadow of the Bruce Kerr I knew, a fictional approximation of a great friend.
Have you had any subsequent troubles due to including reflections of real people in your stories?
Not yet. Time will tell. Many characters in my stories and novels were drawn from real people. Most of them, in fact. Maybe they value their anonymity so much that they’ll point out to people, “Hey, that’s me in that book.” No one’s ever likely to know who any of these characters are, or were based on, originally. A lot of them are already dead, and eventually, they’ll all be dead. I’m the only one who remembers them in my own particular way. It seems doubtful to me that anyone is likely to sue me over mis-characterization. Anyway, it’s a chance I’ve chosen to take.
Is there any advice you would give to young writers about the craft of writing?
Young writers are generally leery of advice, with good reason. When I was a young writer, I heard some advice from a drunk that I disregarded at the time, but I remembered it. He said, “Be aware of harder core characters than yourself.” I don’t know what that has to do with writing. Everything and nothing, but it was good advice for life. To me, it came to mean more than all the writerly dictums combined, like, “Write what you know,” “Find your own voice,” “Watch out for adverbs,” and of course, the old thorn, “Show, don’t tell.” All advice is nonsense until you think it’s not. You can go a long way thinking you know what you’re doing. Eventually, it dawns on you that the story you love so much is kind of boring to other people. That can be a shock. That’s when you begin to get outside yourself. Eventually, the things that really matter to you are the only things you keep.
Be sure to come back tomorrow to read the sixth and penultimate chapter of Doing the Dead – 1983, “Dawn of the Dead.”
