STEPHEN DIXON
by Christopher Sorrentino and Alexander Laurence
Stephen Dixon is the author of several books of fiction,
short stories, plays. His latest book is called INTERSTATE (Henry Holt). He
lives in Baltimore.
Sorrentino: (1) I've heard you mention that when you sit
down to write a short story, you'll enter into the process without any idea as
to where you're going--that is, you'll just sit down at the typewriter and
begin by writing whatever comes into your head.
If I haven't completely misrepresented what you meant, does the process
extend to novel-length projects?
INTERSTATE has a precise and defined formal structure, it is clearly not
extemporaneous. Was the structure
applied to it after the book was begun?
I'm particularly curious since the first section is so self-sufficient;
was it written first?
Stephen Dixon: That is how I write a short story about 95%
of the time. First draft in about an hour or if it’s a longer first draft, two
hours; then spending about a month or three on the final draft. The way I wrote
Interstate was like this: I wrote the first Interstate; it turned out complete
and self-sufficient by the nature of its story. Then I thought I’d continue the
novel from where I left off, but that turned out to be too traditional an approach
for me and the language was wooden if not dead. Then it came to me how to do
it: I wanted the subsequent Interstates to extrapolate on what I wrote in the
first Interstate, and to unearth the things between and in the lines; I wanted
an extension, tightening, focusing, reimagining of the events, a zeroing in on
certain choice events, and a chance to broaden the emotional content of the
first part by elaborating or changing. I also saw it as a new kind of road
novel, where the characters get closer to their destination in each Interstate
(chapter) till a final chapter, which is both ambiguous and a wrapping up, and
where they’ve arrived safely home.
Sorrentino: (2) Could you discuss the recurring concern in
your work with the idea of varied and conflicting results occurring from an
initial set of circumstances? What seems
to separate your work from the usual use of this RASHOMON-like technique is
that frequently the divergent stories are attributed to one narrator. INTERSTATE is like that, though it slips from
first to second to third person, and I'm also thinking of stories like
"Goodbye to Goodbye."
SD: It is Rashomon-like except, as you say, the narrator
stays the same. What's different is that my different persons telling the story
are first, second, and third persons; I also wanted to tell it in the major
tenses, far as I'm concerned: past, present, future, conditional. In other
words, I wanted the same or somewhat changed event told from every person and
perspective and tense device. A modern Rashomon, though I wasn't thinking of
Rashomon when I wrote it.
Sorrentino: (3) You
have published nearly twenty books in twenty years, yet your work is much less
well-known than that of many of your contemporaries, perhaps in part because
until recently you were published by such houses as Street Fiction Press, Johns
Hopkins, and British American Publishing.
Also, you've said that you decline to write reviews or essays of any
kind. Have you turned to small presses
and rejected "commercial" assignments because of the compromises
trade houses and such assignments demand that you make? You seem to have found a home with Henry Holt
for the time being, and INTERSTATE seems
to have been positioned as the book with which you might gain exposure to a
wider audience. Are you gratified that
your work is finally beginning to receive widespread attention?
SD: I could care less how my work is received. Long ago I
decided that worrying about getting published and getting reviewed and about
the qualities published and the places where one's reviewed and what page the
review is on, etc., was a waste of time and would take time away from what I
liked doing most in life and that's writing. I don't write for an audience or
to be published and certainly not to get attention or reviews or fellowships or
prizes. None of that means anything to me. I write because it's what I like to
do, and that Holt is doing my work now is fine if Holt does a good job of it,
which is printing it so normal eyes can read it and putting a cover on a book
that doesn't repulse me and mislead the reader. I haven't abandoned the
publishing world that nourished me for so long: small presses. Hijinx Press, a
small publisher in Davis, CA, will be publishing a book of mine in Spring 96
called MAN ON STAGE: Play Stories, four pieces of fiction written for the stage
or four one-act plays written for book form. I'm excited about that book as I
am about anything I've done. I don't write for money, have never cared for
money, realize the necessity of SOME money, but have never written a word or
directed a work of mine to any place for money. Worrying about dough is another
thing that'll stop the flow.
Laurence: (4) Why do
you think that you wrote a book dealing with such an intense emotional
situation?
SD: To me, the best fiction is about emotion. And I wanted
to write the most emotional book I could. There's no emotional occurrence
greater than the love of a parent for a child and the possible or actual loss
of that child, which is why I used that theme for my novel. Why not write about
intense situations? It's probably more challenging to a writer to make banal
events interesting, but it's never been rewarding to me. The mundane should
only be written in fiction as a reward for the emotional intensity that
preceded it.
Laurence: (5) Could
you tell us a little about your meticulous writing habits?
SD: I write whenever I can and I do all my other nonwriting
work to make room for my fiction writing. All the other work is an interference
to my writing but, contradictorily and ironically and painfully, that
nonwriting work is necessary to my writing because it gives me a little income
to have a family and lead a fairly normal life and have a modest home to write
in. I get all the nonwriting things out of the way before I write. That way
I've cleared time for myself to write. And then I just write, soon as I can in
the morning (I teach in the afternoons) and with as few distractions as I can
manage. I don't gripe about my nonwriting work because that would be futile.
And if I let the nonwriting work build up, I'd have to face it some day so best
to get it out of the way now. I write on a manual typewriter, nonelectronic and
certainly not a word processor. The WP gives writers the illusion there work is
better because it looks better on the monitor and printout. I write a first
draft quickly, let it just pour from my head, since I believe that my
imagination will furnish me material forever and furnish me ways to write that
material forever too. I rely on my imagination and it's never failed me. I've
never had a writer's block in 35 years of writing and I've probably written
every day in 35 years but about 50 of them (time off for getting from NYC to
Maine; sickness, funerals, hangovers, day I got married and my two-day
honeymoon, the rest...)
My first
drafts are written in hour to two-hour spurts, as I mentioned. The novel
chapters are usually written in similar spurts. First drafts of ten pages have
turned into 5-page stories and 200 page novels. Things take off sometimes, and
sometimes they really take off and I have to run behind with a whip trying to
stop them, and sometimes things need to be reduced, like a 10-page story to
five pages. I never know what I'm going to write about, unless it's a novel.
Then the ideas come in relation to what was written before it. And style
follows the story; I don't know what the style will be till it's there on the
page, though I hate repeating styles and repeating stories, unless the repeat
is a variation of what came before it. I write hard and I type fast and I redo
a page from twenty to forty times and sometimes sixty times till I'm satisfied
but completely satisfied with it. And yes, I drink a couple of cups of coffee
while I write. Coffee to me--this isn't a plug, you know--keeps my mind alert
and doesn't stuff me and make me tired and gives me something to do if I need a
break. But the writing ... I write page one of the first draft of page one
twenty to sixty times till I'm satisfied and then I go to page two of the first
draft, and that's how I write, slowly building up pages, sticking with the same
story or novel till I'm finished with it, and then starting a new novel or
story or playstory the following day. For I try to write every day.
Laurence: (6) What
sort of writers of the past do you think are important influences for you?
SD: Many important influences and the most important of them
I had to stop reading because they were being too influential. I never wanted
to sound like any other writer but I certainly wanted to be as good a writer as
the writers I liked to read. I never read drecht; I don't read genre fiction. I
read seriously and for an intense reading experience. Thus, there are very few
writers that come up to my standards of reading and very few very good writers
who have sustained the quality of their fiction in book after book or story
after story. But I don't see why a writer can't do that, always be good and
always grow from his or her earlier works. If a work is lousy, one shouldn't be
reluctant to abandon and destroy it. Each year I throw out works I wrote first
drafts of but which stunk, which is why I never went back to them. And I have
four apprentice novels, though at the time I didn't think they were apprentice
works, which I have given in their unpublished versions (manuscripts) to the
John Hopkins Library, which has my papers. I'll never go back to them and
anybody can look at them as works where I practiced how to write but not works
that I now want to see in print. The writers I've loved: Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol, Babel, Hemingway, Bellow, Malamud, Richard
Wright, Kafka, Beckett, Joyce, Mann, Camus, Tanizaki, Sartre, T. S. Eliot,
Böll, Conrad, Doris Lessing, F. W. Dixon, James Robert Dixon, a story by Landolfi,
a play by this guy, a poem by that woman, some children's literature: Milne,
Carroll, and so on... The list is endless and I am always reading.
Laurence: (7) You
seem to have an amazing energy when it comes to writing fiction. Where do you
think this comes from? And what sort of fiction do you see yourself engaging
with in the future?
SD: No matter how many drafts of a page I write, I always
want it to have the spontaneity and freshness of the first draft. Some writers
take the juice out of a work by rewriting or overwriting it. I try to always
make those lines and characters and dialog and situations bounce around on the
page and keep bouncing. The energy in my writing might come about from my love
of the act of writing and rewriting. I don't think exciting or even interesting
work comes from a writer who doesn't like the act of writing. I write with this
premise in mine: that nobody asked me to write; I'm writing because I love to
write. What sort of writing in the future? I don't know, and I love not
knowing. I am always in a rush to work on and finish a new work so I can see
what'll come out of my head with the next work. But I never finish a work till
I am entirely satisfied with it. So as excited as I am when I write a piece
now, I look excitedly forward to what I'll write in the future. What I do now
lays the groundwork for what I do in the future. There's a certain irony in
wanting to advance to the next work while tying yourself down with your current
work till it is in your mind perfect, or till you can't do anything more with
it. Anyway, let's just say writing is an exciting process and maybe that's why
my writing comes out energetically.
Laurence: (8) A
certain amount of writers have lived like professors: dealing with a dead
culture in an often predictable way, a culture which only produced cultivated
entertainments. Do you think that since you have worked in an assortment of
jobs and have lived an unwriterly life, that has helped you keep your interest
and language alive?
SD: Having lots of jobs certainly gave me material to write
about. There's just about nothing to write about in academia which is why I've
written so little about it. The language around campus is usually stiff and
careful, while the characters I like to write about have language that's lively
and ungrammatical and careless. Now, I don't need the jobs for material,
though, since my writing for the last ten years has been so interior and
getting more interior all the time. That doesn't come about because I'm working
in rather dry academia; it's because I'm exploring themes and material and
subject matter in myself that I've never before approached, dug at and
unearthed.
Laurence: (9) How
do you see future of magazines and publishers? And good advice for today's
young writers?
SD: There'll always be lots of magazines but only a few
that'll publish fiction or just literature of quality. That's because there
aren't enough readers to support magazines that publish stuff like that, and
because serious literature doesn't service commercial magazines. As for
publishing: if I can be published, can't anyone? My books never made money yet
publishers have backed them, though sometimes it's taken forty publishers to
look at my work before one took it. I don't care who publishes me as long as
that publisher publishes me well. I know there's a lot of talk about how
publishers are part of conglomerates and good work is having more difficulty
finding a publisher, but maybe good writers haven't tried as hard as I have to
get the work published, or have been willing to just have a one-man operation
(Garbage, by Cane Hill Press), (FRIENDS, by Asylum Press), or a two-man
operation (WORK and NO RELIEF: Street Fiction Press) publish their work.
Good advice
for writers: Write very hard, keep the prose lively and original, never sell
out, never overexcuse yourself why you're not writing, never let a word of
yours be edited unless you think the editing is helping that work, never
despair about not being published, not being recognized, not getting that
grant, not getting reviewed or the attention you think you deserve. In fact,
never think you deserve anything. Be thankful you are able to write and enjoy
writing. What I also wouldn't do is show my unpublished work to my friends. Let
agents and editors see it--people who can get you published--and maybe your
best friend or spouse, if not letting them see it causes friction in your
relationship. To just write and not worry too much about the perfect phrase and
the right grammar unless the wrong grammar confuses the line, and to become the
characters, and to live through, on the page, the experiences you're writing
about. To involve yourself totally with your characters and situations and
never be afraid of writing about anything. To never resort to cheap tricks,
silly lines that you know are silly--pat endings, words, phrases, situations,
and to turn the TV off and keep it off except if it's showing something as good
as a good Ingmar Bergman movie. To keep reading, only the best works, carry a
book with you everywhere, even in your car in case you get caught in some
hours-long gridlock. To be totally honest about yourself in your writing and
never take the shortest, fastest, easiest way out. To give up writing when it's
given to you, or just rest when it dictates a need for resting; though to
continue writing is you're still excited by writing. To be as generous as your
time permits to young writers who have gone through the same thing as you (that
is, once you become as old as I am now). To not write because you want to be an
artist or to say you're a writer. And to be honest about the good stuff that
other writers, old and your contemporaries, do too. And not to think that any
stimulant stronger than a coupla cups of coffee will help your writing. Sleep
helps it, keeping in shape, but little else, along those lines. And not to
listen to God himself if he tells you that you aren't a writer and will never
be one, if you still think you are a writer or can become a good one, or if you
get a kick out of writing. There are a lot of writers my age out there who
can't stand young writers because they're young and full of potential and
because they have a clean slate and nowhere to go but up and who are still
exciting about the act of writing.
September 1995
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