The Art of Fiction No. 177

“In that sense, I’m a native. When you say I don’t appear paranoiac to you, I figure you mean I don’t traffic in the thin membrane of social paranoia. Why bother? We live in a fallen universe. We can at least be kind to one another and not jump on one another’s slightest errors or moods. In a desperate situation, pick your battles.”

“I’d be the American Calvino, but nourished by scruffy genre roots.”

“Sure. Gun, with Occasional Music is a piece of carpentry. I wanted to locate the exact midpoint between Dick and Chandler. William Gibson had published Neuromancer and people called it “hard-boiled science fiction.” I was like, Dude, that’s just well-written science fiction. It’s not hard-boiled. Those saying it had never read Pynchon, who Gibson was really doing. It’s Pynchon in spades, very nicely done. I thought,“You want hard-boiled? The California tradition is quite exacting. I’ve actually read those books. Let me show you. And I fused the Chandler/Ross MacDonald voice with those rote dystopia moves that I knew backwards and forwards from my study of Ballard, Dick, Orwell, Huxley, and the Brothers Strugatsky.”

“Pulp SF of the 1930s magazine type is folk art. Then Dick comes along and isolates those tropes that connect it to literature, surrealism, film, comic books, rock and roll. He’s George Herriman, he’s Buster Keaton, he’s Bob Dylan. Dick discards the uninteresting stuff, the pedantic explanations, and preserves precisely the dreamlike, surrealist, evocative, paranoiac reverberations that were all I ever cared for, when I found them scattered elsewhere.”

“I glanced at the early stories and they were all the same tissue-thin material, more alike than dissimilar. Wish-fulfillment over-running the insights. The limit you often run into reading Dick, or for that matter William Burroughs or Vollmann or any number of other nightmarish social satirists, is that you feel that their own fantasies intervene just at the moment where they’re about to say something.”

“Those backwards trails of discovery created in me a rage for authenticity and origins, which perhaps cuts against the postmodern grain of my category-autism. I’m fascinated by influence, which is why I discuss it so much, perhaps awkwardly much.”

“You’re not playing against the other people on the course. You’re playing against yourself. The question is, What’s in you that you can free up? How to say everything you know? Then there’s nothing to envy. The reason Tiger Woods has that eerie calm, the reason he drives everyone insane, is his implacable sense that his game has nothing to do with the others on the course. The others all talk about what Tiger is up to. Tiger only says, I had a pretty good day, I did what I wanted to do. Or, I could have a better day tomorrow. He never misunderstands. The game is against yourself. That same thousand-yard Tiger Woods stare is what makes someone like Murakami or Roth or DeLillo or Thomas Berger so eerie and inspiring. They’ve grasped that there’s nothing to one side of you. Just you and the course.”

“From that perspective, the fact of others carrying on the struggle beside you is no more threatening than the fact that libraries are full of great books. It makes the context for what you do. You’d never want to be the only writer, would you? How meaningless.”

“We’re all injustice collectors.”

“Most recently I’ve let go of a certain kind of lean efficiency, a devotion to structure. To plot. The fact is, almost every writer I ultimately find most important to me is hugely digressive, and largely uninterested in any plot that can be admired for its exoskeletal integrity. Yet I thought I had to provide one each time out.”

“the milieu of an SF convention was an unmistakable opportunity. Had I ever seen any more impacted site of human yearning, expressed through culture-making—and wasn’t that the subject of my book? For an SF convention is a terribly complicated space, where people try to collectively resolve an enormous number of incompatible needs.”

“My process is dull. It’s as plodding and pedantic as Abraham’s film, painted one frame at a time. I’m a tortoise, waking each day to plod out my page or two. I try never to miss a morning, when I’m working on a novel. There are no other rules, no word counts or pencil sharpenings or candlelit pentagrams on the floor. Growing up with my father’s art-making in the house, the creative act was demystified, usefully. As a result, I see writing as an inevitable and ordinary way to spend one’s hours.”

“I’m gregarious with writers and never with manuscripts. I’m a very private writer, actually. I don’t like to emerge from my room with anything short of a polished book. To create the illusion of seamless perfection, so I alone know the flawed and homely process along the way. I try never to show my editor, the generous and hugely patient Bill Thomas, chapters or halves. Instead I do my best to deliver a completed book, a tour de fait accompli.”

“I never print anything out, only endlessly manipulate the words on the screen, carving fiction in ether. I enjoy keeping the book amorphous and fluid until the last possible moment. There’s no paper trail, I destroy the traces of revision by overwriting the same disk every day when I back up my work. In that sense, it occurs to me now, I’m more like the painter I trained to be—my early sketching is buried beneath the finished layer of oil and varnish.”