Interview with Richard Spilman, by Marianne Kunkel
Richard Spilman has published two collections of short fiction, Hot Fudge and The Estate Sale, and a collection of poetry, In the Night Speaking. His short story, “Where He Went Under,” from the winter issue of PS, won a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award.
MK: Your story “Where He Went Under” tells about the self-destructive transformation of a failed stockbroker into a successful painter, a transformation that is encouraged by the main character witnessing the drowning of another man. How did you approach describing the art of painting? Did you pull from personal experience, research, or figure out the basics of painting as you wrote?
RS: I have no personal experience of painting, though I have friends who are artists. Luckily the fellow in my story is not a good artist but one who has found, through the midwifery of the drowned man, the volcanic core inside himself that can turn even technically bad art into powerful expression.
All the technical details I researched, which means any practicing artist would probably find something to object to.
After so much suspicion against the main character’s reasons for not immediately helping the drowning man, your story ends with the main character demonstrating almost a kinship with the drowned man as he imagines himself “falling and the water swallowing me up like flames.” Was this powerful conclusion your original intended conclusion?
When I changed computers last year, I lost some of my old drafts, so I can’t tell you exactly what my first ending was, but it was pretty close to the published one. I tend to come to my endings early and then find my way to them like a hiker trying to find his way to a landmark without the help of a map.
That can lead to problems. Often my “powerful” endings are the darlings that (following Faulkner) I must kill in rewriting.
Frequently near the story’s end you expertly, even humorously, capture the outside struggles of many successful artists—hangers-on, critics, and artistic labels such as when the main character states, “This, I’m told, makes me an expressionist, and it’s nice to know, as the top of my head breaks loose from its moorings, that there is a name for the malady.” Many writers struggle with the (mis)labeling of their work, and feel outside pressure to label it themselves; what advice can you give them?
It is foolish for a writer (or any artist) to expect to be understood, and anyone who seeks to be understood will inevitably become the servant of other people’s perceptions. Given the fact that we all want to communicate, this seems wrongheaded, but it is the truth. Every reader will rewrite your story to his or her own specifications, and there is nothing you can or should do about it. Content yourself with the fact that many readers’ misunderstandings create a story better than the one you wrote.
In “Where He Went Under,” it is not until the aftermath of the man’s drowning that the main character is inspired to paint his best work. What are ways that you motivate yourself to keep writing and overcome writer’s block?
If I had to motivate myself to write, I would be in deep trouble. The only question of motivation, for me, comes when I need to re-re-re-rewrite. Five or six drafts always seem like enough and never are.
The only advice I can give for writer’s block is to allow yourself to write badly and to write piecemeal. As G.K. Chesterton noted, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” If you don’t give yourself permission to write crap, you won’t write anything worth reading.
In the first class I ever taught (Composition I) there was a woman in her twenties, a very earnest person. She got an “A-” on her first paper; the next received a “B”, the one after that a “C” and the next one a “C.” We talked for some time trying to figure out what could be the cause of her trouble. Finally, I asked her to describe her writing process. I said, “Tell me everything. If you use a pencil instead of a pen, I want to know. Everything.”
She said, “Well, first I take out all the papers I have written for you, and I look at what I have done wrong.”
I interrupted her at that point and said, “Burn them.”
She was indignant. She wanted me to take her seriously. After all, my comments must be there for a reason.
They are, I told her, but after she had paid attention to them, close attention, she needed to forget them and trust that she had internalized what was necessary for her. I had a time trying to convince her of this, but finally I said, “It’s like having your grandmother looking over your shoulder as you write.” Somehow that worked, and since then I have used that anecdote with students dealing with writer’s block because, usually, they will be able to identify some unrealistic demand that they are making on themselves—some granny looking over their shoulder.
You not only write short stories, but poems as well. In what ways is your writing process for the two genres similar? How do the commonalities between writing poetry and short stories compare to those between writing short stories and longer fiction?
There are probably more commonalities between poetry and short stories than there are between short stories and novels. You can write a short story that has no characters, no plot (William Gass’s “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”). It’s a little harder to write one with no setting because, like a poem, the short story needs those physical details to tell us what it is really about.
Of course, my poems tend to be narrative, so it may be that as a poet I am just a short story writer with pretentions to grandeur.
I do advise short story writers to try poetry. The poem won’t let you get away with a lot of blather, and it forces you, for the most part, to find drama outside of dialogue.
Amazing! The power of printing by hand! Wish I could see the show. Love random collaboration like this. Cheers to all involved.
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