Russell Bittner, author of the collection Stores in the Key of C.  Minor. recently took some time to answer some of my questions about the art and craft of writing and about the publishing world.  In this first part, Russell describes his writing process, his thoughts on literature, and how he uses language to effectively convey his thoughts, as well as his forays into photography.  The second part of the interview will appear on Friday, while the third chapter of Something Special will be available on Thursday, August 13.

FARAWAY: Describe your writing process.  Where and when do you write best?

At night.  Because my job often requires that I rise early in the morning to answer e-mails or telephone calls (the entire world, literally, is my market for the satellite services we provide), I try to reserve my late-evening hours to my key-stroking.  By the way—and for whatever it’s worth—I rarely write long-hand any longer.

FARAWAY: Who are some of your favorite authors?  To what extent do you feel influenced by other writers?

My favorite book of all time is Call It Sleep.  However, I’m frankly less enamored of Henry Roth’s other works.

Among more contemporary writers, I suppose T. C. Boyle would have to be at the top of the list—though more for his short stories than for his novels.  Among novelists, I think William Boyd’s Any Human Heart is the best novel I’ve read in the past decade.  And, in non-fiction, I’d have to give the #1 spot to Bill Bryson.

I read as much non-fiction as fiction or poetry these days, and a lot of it is every bit as frightening as the most macabre piece of imaginative writing I’ve ever read.  Bryson’s book A Short History of Nearly Everything is the only book I will not allow my children to read.  (To put things in perspective, I gave my son the illustrated Kama Sutra when he turned sixteen.  His mother promptly took it away.  Prudery is not the issue; a desire to shield my children from the utter precariousness—not to say absurdity—of life on this planet is.)

 FARAWAY: What advice would you give to young writers about the craft of writing?

The same they give anyone trying to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.  (However, my lawyer-lover also recently educated me on what may well be a well-known fact except to me up until she explained it—viz., any schmuck can rent Carnegie Hall for a night.)

FARAWAY: You mentioned writing in multiple languages, and I’ve noticed that in the stories in this collection, you have a meticulous eye for word choice and phrasing.  How important is that–language, word choice–over and above the plot of the story?  And how has working in other languages shaped your work?

Brooklyn Bridge by Russell Bittner

You’re very kind, Daniel.  I don’t deserve your praise – not by a long shot.

My sweetie (I hesitate to call her my “fiancée,” because we’re not engaged, and I can’t exactly call her my “girlfriend,” since we’re both too old) rants at me all the time for being too “writerly.”  (She also rants at me for not writing something more commercial, but that’s quite beside the point.)  Her idea of a writer is Henry James.  My idea of a fate worse than boiling in hot oil while waiting at the check-out counter of Duane Reade or on hold with Verizon’s Customer Service is reading any further ten pages of Henry James.  I’d rather buzzards pecked my eyes out and voles gnawed my fingertips off so that I could never again be dragged into reading or feeling the prose of Henry James.

That said, I think language is everything – and I’m sure James did, too.  It’s just that we don’t speak the same language.  You’ve heard, no doubt, George Bernard Shaw’s quip about “two countries separated by a common language”?  If James and I were contemporaries and engaged in a battle of words, we’d still be firing at each other under bubbles at the bottom of the sea.

Yes, I agree with my sweetie:  namely, that everything should serve plot.  Words without plot are a bit like masturbation – whether in prose or in poetry – and better kept between the sheets or between the covers of a diary (hold the hanky).  But plot – or “action,” as I’m fond of reminding her – is not literature.  If plot/action were what defined literature, things like monologues and reveries would have no purpose and no purchase.  But they do.  Yes, by God, they do!  Hallo, Hamlet?

Now, I’m not saying that my sweetie is an action-girl only.  The action in Henry James is slower than any chess game I’ve ever played – and yet, she thinks James walks on a cushion of air two inches above the surface of the water.  But I’m rambling.  It must be the contagion of James.

Throwing myself head over heels (over a period of ten years) into other languages and cultures may or may not have influenced how I write.  I frankly have no idea. I know that when I came back to the U. S., I had to wage an uphill battle.  My spoken language was a kind of mid-Atlantic, where I should’ve better left it.  To sink.  My written language was stilted, to say the least, the result (perhaps) of having immersed myself in the minutiae of grammars, syntaxes, etymologies and sexy little accents.  It was thrilling at the time – a bit like hand-to-hand combat, no doubt – but better left behind in my very minor theater of war and not dragged back home.

I owe my present job, in part, to the fact that I can still speak some of those languages.  I use them from time to time in my writing when I think it serves a point.  I wrote a whole novella from the POV of a young Parisian girl.  Needless to say, there’s a lot of French in it.  I wrote a short story a few years back from the POV of an older woman who was something of a linguist.  She used her languages to compose scurrilous Valentine’s Day ditties to herself.  The story wound up among the “Best of the Web” for that year.  It didn’t go any further.  My novel has dialogue in eleven languages, only because the heroine is a polyglot.  My novel sits on my shelf and talks, if at all, to itself.

So there you have it.  I frequently see other people, in a piece they’ve written, using a foreign word or phrase here or there – and the word or phrase is just wrong.  I once sent a kind word to a world-class writer with whom I occasionally communicate by e-mail that his use of “¡Buena suerte!” was wrong – that the Spanish for “Good luck!” is “¡Suerte!” – nada más.  He wrote back to thank me in a tone that sounded distinctly like “Fuck off.”

Two weeks later, I’m sitting in a Spanish pizzeria (sic), and I hear behind me from a Spanish-language newscaster “¡Buena suerte!”  What can I tell you, Daniel.  I give up.

I write a lot of poetry – another no-pay sideshow.  In some of it, I use foreign words if they seem to fit, and if I don’t think I’m going to lose my reader if he or she doesn’t know the language.  But it’s always a crapshoot.

FARAWAY: You are also a photographer and a poet.  Do these different mediums inform each other and are there commonalities in what you hope to express and how you express yourself?

I really don’t think there are any commonalities – but maybe that’s just me.  For the longest time, I hated cameras and wouldn’t even think of buying one.  I had this hidebound belief that if a thing was worth capturing, it was worth capturing with the mind’s eye and with the mind’s eye only – that one had to take the time to look at something and study it.

All of that changed when my kids came along.  (No, on second thought, it actually all changed when my in-laws gave us a camera for our honeymoon.  My wife and I went to Venice, and I shot a whole roll of film – most of it of her.  One of us opened the camera at the wrong moment and exposed the film.  We lost it all.)  When my kids came along, things began to move rather quickly.  I was lucky:  I had a couple of rather photogenic kids.  They made excellent subjects, and my life at that point allowed us to include some exceptional backgrounds:  columns in Rome; towers in Paris; parks and statues in Oslo; bridges in Somerset.  I still have them all – somewhere.

Empire by Early Evening Light by Russell Bittner

We came back to New York and moved to Brooklyn.  I had Prospect Park – and my own gardens (a habit I’d discovered in England).  My kids remained good subjects throughout the years, and I’d recruit them for something that would end up on the annual family (long since dissolved) Christmas card.  This year may well be the last, as my boy goes off to college in the fall.

But the habit had taken hold.  I’d long since begun to look for things I thought might be visually interesting – at least to me.  To this day, I look.

Since I shoot only on film and can’t imagine converting to digital, I limit myself to a small periphery.  I can’t afford the costs of development or of traveling much beyond Brooklyn – or at least beyond the route of the MTA.

My photography – much like my prose – is circumscribed by circumstances.  I look for a picture (or a story) in a dewdrop, in a teardrop, in a leaky faucet.

Riverside Park by Russell Bittner