Canteen: The State of Creation

“I’m pretty sure novels of this size are to the publishing world what a big old box of garlic is to the vampire world.”

Garth Risk Hallberg is the author of A Field Guide to the North American Family and was selected by Richard Bausch as one of 2008’s Best New American Voices. He blogs for the Millions and teaches at Fordham University, and New York magazine called him “one of the smartest literary-critical writers writing anywhere.” He lives in Brooklyn.

Stephen Pierson: As you know, Canteen’s schtick is about how and why people create. And you are in the semifinal stages of finishing a very large novel. How’s that going?
Garth: I’m horribly superstitious about talking about anything until it’s done…but I guess I won’t be inviting the wrath of the writing gods if I tell you that I’m done with a draft, which is less a first draft than a sort of a Frankenstein’s monster draft. That is, it’s stitched together out of parts that have been through two or three drafts, and parts that have been through five or six or ten or…well, it’s hard to count drafts.

[Portrait by Jordan Alport]

How many pages or words so far?
Um…maybe a little over 400,000 words? And it wants to be a svelte 350,000 words, or maybe 320,000. So I need to cut 15 percent to get it where it wants to be. I’m aware this sounds insane.

And you’d prefer to rely on your own cutting and editing instincts, rather than send it out now and have your agent and editor direct that process?
Well, agents and editors will direct changes no matter what. That’s their job. But my job, as I construe it, is to not send anything outside of my own private workshop till all the holes I can recognize on my own have been patched. Though at this point, it’s not so much holes to be patched as limbs to be lopped off.

It seems painful to spend so much time editing this yourself, only to then have agents and editors direct more cuts and changes.
If writing’s not painful, you’re doing it wrong. That said, it’s better to have too much and to have to cut back than to have to make additions. My crap-to-gold ratio very much skews toward crap—hence the number of drafts. But I relish the paring-down process; it’s much less fraught than creating from a blank page. And then I’m happy to have someone else point out the additional 10 percent of something I think is finished that’s actually crap and should be chopped. Because I know it’s there, but sometimes I can’t identify it. A manuscript of this length actually welcomes editing. It’s like a giant game of Memory, and my memory isn’t that good. So, for example, I’ve just finished eight months of work on the ending and turned back to reread the beginning. As much as the ending requires me to keep certain aspects of the beginning in mind, many parts of the beginning I didn’t remember at all, and I can now see the beginning much more clearly from an editorial standpoint because I’m almost encountering it as a stranger.

So you’re not working on this in a strictly linear way?
The novel is structured in seven parts, each of which is the length of maybe a short novel, and I’ve been working on each part individually, drafting and then revising and revising it. So I’ve been focusing on one part at a time, not necessarily in order. To just have to march straight through it in a line prior to a third or fourth draft would be too terrifying.

How are the seven sections connected?
It’s the same set of characters. The odd-numbered sections follow a set of actions that take place roughly between the bicentennial and the 1977 blackout. The even sections delve into that past’s past in ways that gradually reveal themselves to be connected.

Are they meant to be read consecutively or are you inviting the reader to hopscotch, as you did in your Cortazar-inspired Field Guide?
…which I’m contractually obligated to mention is out in a handsome paperback edition at the end of this month. No, this one is very much to be read straight through. I was watching The Wire a lot when I started, and thinking about Bleak House.

Do you have a publisher in mind?
Not even remotely thinking about that yet.

Do you have any fears about how the publishing world might position or market the book?
Frankly, I’m pretty sure novels of this size are to the publishing world what a big old box of garlic is to the vampire world, so those fears would probably be not just premature but purely hypothetical. I’ve arrived at a certain peace of mind about this in recent years. I live in New York, and there’s a caricature here of the “Young Man in a Hurry.” And it’s definitely possible to get somewhere being the Young Man in a Hurry; there are certain Chutes and Ladders expedients you can take. But then you still have to wake up the morning after the circus folds its tents and leaves town and figure out, What the hell am I doing with my life? What am I working on now? And often the work you’ve made if you hurry—I speak from experience here—doesn’t wind up being the work that anyone will read in 10 years. Wanting to produce something that your children will want to read when they’re your age: That’s a worthy goal. No disrespect to the fine people in the publishing world—they’re all very bright and good-looking and well intentioned—but they’re not the ideal audience to have in mind when writing, I don’t think.

So you don’t care if it’s marketed explicitly to the literary crowd or given a broader, Freedom-esque cultural shove?
I’m simply not thinking about that now. I’ve walled myself off from that world, which is the only way I know how to write. Again, I’m not at all sure it will be marketed, period. I should have such problems!

Let’s talk about your writing habits, and how you manage to balance writing with teaching, child rearing, husbanding, etc.
Life has obviously changed a lot since my son was born a year ago. I used to be able to write about four hours per day when I was teaching, and a bit more on nonteaching days. 32 hours per week is about my max, which I can reach after a few weeks of training, like a half-marathon. But now it’s all about a morning regimen: I work from 5:30 a.m. till 8:30 a.m., six days a week. Reading happens after 9 p.m. or on the subway. Grading papers happens on the subway. Writing nonfiction happens on weekend afternoons, I think. It’s a blur.

Has the quality of your writing or editing changed postchild?
I feel like I’m dumber, slower, and tireder. And I think that it shows in my writing. But it’s hard to say, because the process of writing at the end of a book also changes: You’re no longer in the world of limitless possibilities—all of the forking paths are narrowing. So writing and thought tend to become more linear in a way that I don’t always aspire to.

I think one of the reasons that you’re able to be so productive is that you tend to disconnect yourself from technology. You’re certainly not a Luddite—you do blog for the Millions—but you don’t tweet or IM or use Facebook, you only sporadically check email, and you don’t even have a web browser on your computer.
I mostly chalk up my productivity, such as it is, to massive amounts of coffee. But perhaps the things you mention are also reasons why I don’t have a bigger readership [laughs]. I just wrote an essay about why I don’t engage terribly much with the Internet. There’s a part of my brain that responds to it in a way that negatively impacts my writing; I can’t quite explain it, but when I get online there’s this cycle of anxiety and narcissism that takes over, which is the part of me that I like the least. And I find myself unable to disappear into my work. The Internet, for me, becomes an extended incorporeal version of high school. So by getting rid of the browser, about six years ago, I got rid of a lot of problems. To further distance myself from those problems, I also wrote the entire first draft of this book longhand.

Wow. How many pages in longhand?
About 700, I guess. In gridded notebooks, in my tiny, illegible handwriting.

And you eventually typed up all of those?
Much of it. But I treated the longhand as a semithrowaway draft. Though I’m not pretending to be D.H. Lawrence, who famously claimed to start one of his books with a first draft that he instantly threw away and never looked at again. Which is, of course, patent bullshit—but bullshit of the best Lawrence variety.

Back to your Internet detachment, which really fascinates me. You said in another interview that “narrowing the mental gap between writing and the marketplace has disastrous implications for the ability to take risks.” Can you elaborate on that?
I don’t want to paint myself as some kind of Luddite. And I’ve also considered the possibility that if I were more continuously online I might not have this kind of complex about it, and it would just fade into the background as a small part of my life. That has to be true of other people, right? There’s no way for other people both to share my severe allergy/addiction to it and to be online and also not be raving psychotics—is there?

But does this detachment put you in a position where you can’t write persuasively about contemporary culture in a way that maybe a Tao Lin can?
I think there’s an embedded assumption there about the place of imagination in writing that I don’t happen to share. I mean, this book is set a year before I was born, but I can’t believe that means that I can’t write it persuasively. There’s a sort of imagination-observation-empathy combination that you can apply to the small amounts of things that you do know or can learn in order to make them very persuasive to the reader in meaningful ways. I want my next book to focus on a character who cannot complete a linear thought. He will have the same innate failings as me, but will constantly be at the anxiety machine. Like, “I’m in the middle of this thought about my mother, but oh, wait a minute, what just happened in Japan?” And I think it’s a misapprehension of Tao Lin to say that the value of what he’s doing—which I won’t pass judgment on either way—has to do with his commentary on the culture rather than something about his personal consciousness, something independent from the culture.

But Tao is someone who goes to great lengths to eliminate that gap. He blogs, tweets, engages with Gawker, and writes about exactly those things. Is he not somehow engaging in literary risk taking by doing these things so bluntly?
Well, the question of to what degree he’s actually taking risks is probably identical to the question of to what degree he’s writing something that will be of value to our children when they’re our age. I thought the piece he wrote for Canteen’s last issue [Issue Six] took some risks.

So what’s the timing on bringing your book to market?
To market, to market, to buy a fat pig. Isn’t that from a children’s rhyme? I’m more comfortable thinking about what the timing is when I’ll feel like the private part of the work will be done. I used to have a very good sense for how long things take. But postchild, it’s much harder for me to measure these things. I’m hoping to finish by November, but it could be as late as August 2012. Or, really, who knows? I’m no longer the Young Man in a Hurry, I just want to work hard and take my time and make something that has lasting value. On the time horizon of the Internet, August 2012 seems a very long ways away. But it’s not. We’ll still have troops in Iraq, Guantanamo will still be open, we’ll still be in the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections. Nothing real will have changed—it’s not that big a deal in the scheme of things if that’s how long it takes.

But you do want it to be finished, yes? You’re not addicted to the writing and editing process?
Oh god, no! I can’t wait to be finished with this. I’ll be glad for every moment I’ve put into this book. But I can’t wait to be done, so long as it results in a product that I can stand behind.

One final question, for the aspiring writers reading this. You teach undergraduate fiction classes. What’s the wisest advice you’ve given your students?
Every wise piece of advice I’ve given, and it probably hasn’t been a lot, has been stolen from the mouth of someone else. I’ve told this one to a lot of a people and no one gets especially excited about it, but I think it’s great advice: You can always be doing much more of something or much less of something. Meaning that if there’s a problem in your writing, the solution often is to do a lot more of what created the problem, or not to do it at all.

And who did you steal that from?
That’s Breyten Breytenbach’s. He’s a sage.

Read an excerpt from Garth’s work in progress.