The Top-10 Highlights:
1. He was a failed poet and a failed novelist when he took to the short story with a vengeance.
2. "Stories begin when things start to go wrong. Happiness is boring; not only that, it incites envy in the reader. It's not my business to write about nice people."
3. "It's best to avoid conflict in your day-to-day life, but in fiction? Conflict has its home in fiction." Just make sure that the conflict is unexplainable/unknowable.
4. We all need an Iago (from Othello) in our stories. (He credited this comment to Vonnegut.)
5. "Don't create a narrator who has it all figured out. Don't be too clear about motives--cut the point-making and glibness, up the mystery."
6. Baxter must write (1) in front of a window, (2) without a telephone, (3) on a computer not hooked up to the Internet. Otherwise, he'll check his email every 10 minutes.
7. He's a major daydreamer. If a story has staying power, he'll start to write it down.
8. He suggested writers need to "get down to where your obsessions are" --Theodore Roethke
9. His three failed novels taught him he can't write conceptually; he has to write about folks who live in the midwest, his people.
10. The Soul Thief, from which he read a chapter, is AMAZINGLY good, and I could tell this despite very little sleep, no dinner (except more of them Bite Me crackers, which are starting to lose their allure . . . )
Okay, off to bed. Tomorrow I am stepping out and actually going to a cafe for breakfast. (I can't eat crackers for breakfast, and that's about all I have left).
P.S. Hats off to Sam Ligon for doing a superb job with the interview questions.
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2 comments:
Failed novelist? But...but...The Feast of Love? (Okay, some of the chapters are short stories -- the cement statues -- but they're not the best ones.)
And oh, your starvation sounds like us at AWP. Next time -- Laughing Cow to go with those crackers...
Clarification: he wrote three bad novels, boiled each of them into a short story, then went back to writing novels, for which we can all be grateful.
So, to be telling the world he is a failed novelist is not technically correct, but he did spend several years of his life wondering in the desert, a writer without a home.
Damn, I wish I could be half as humble.
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