12 July, 2012
By William H. Coles
Jonathan Dee is a professor and novelist who teaches at Columbia University, the New School, and Queens College in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was formerly an associate editor of the Paris Review and a personal assistant to George Plimpton. His most recent novel, The Privileges
William H. Coles
What are the essences of story that you conceptualize as you write?
Johnathan Dee
I begin with a premise that I can’t necessarily work too quickly. One of my favorite anecdotes is from William Maxwell, who used to say that when he had an idea for a story or a novel, he would sit at his desk and put his feet up and think about it for the morning. And if, in the course of that morning, he could think of the ending, he wouldn’t write the story. He would take that as a sign that the idea was not a fruitful one because there was nothing in it that wasn’t easily discovered. So, when I think about a story, I think about a credible psychological character arc over the long term, and I think about the principles of drama, of conflict, and tension between opposites. I wish that I could boast that I could see everything entirely when I begin a book, but I never can. It works itself out.
William H. Coles
There was an interesting idea about form and content that came from one of your students when he joined you leading a seminar the other day. He made the point that there’s always a controversy about form and content, and he implied that there really is no difference between them. Do you agree? Or do you think in terms of form time when you’re sitting back with your feet on the desk, even though you may not think of an end, and do you think in terms of emotional arcs and beginnings, middles, and ends? Would you ever create form from content?
Johnathan Dee
As a writer, I wouldn’t say that form and content are indistinguishable, but I will say that I can’t go forward past a certain point until I feel like I’ve solved the story’s formal problem . . . until I’ve come up with a kind of idiosyncratic form that meets the needs of the story. And it’s not because I tend not to write very heavily plotted novels. I never have a sense of one size fits all or of having a template that any story will adapt to. It’s the other way around. I need to find the shape of the story, and until I find that, which involves obviously a lot of trial and error, I tend to get up to the, you know, the thirty- or forty- or fifty-page mark and then just go back and start again and again and again until the answer presents itself.
William H. Coles
How do you deal with timelines in stories? Do you think of timelines at the beginning? Or do they just sort of come to you as you go along? And if that’s true, at what point do you usually begin to think in terms of story . . . something that happens over a time period?
Johnathan Dee
When you say timeline, do you mean the span of time that the story will cover?
William H. Coles
Well, yes, all of that in fact. But if indeed a story is a number of sequential interrelated scenes, do you think of those scenes in terms of the relation to the timeline? For scene length, scene interactions, scene positions in the story, and for dramatic effects — that sort of thing?
Johnathan Dee
I do, yes. Particularly if you’re writing a novel that contains multiple perspectives or points of view, you have to be keenly aware of the clock running at all times. In my case of not going backward any more than absolutely necessary, it’s a constant balancing act, and it definitely determines things like length of scene. When you know that you have, along the same timeline, to switch to another perspective, you don’t want to go past the point where you’re going to pick up that perspective.
William H. Coles
The other day, you said that people are no longer reading novels. Why not?
Johnathan Dee
Did I say that? I sure hope people are still reading novels.
William H. Coles
I’m quoting you exactly. [laughs]
Johnathan Dee
People are reading fewer novels that are printed on paper, that’s for sure. I know that the number of men reading novels, for whatever reason, is going down.
William H. Coles
Most male college graduates don’t read a novel after school.
Johnathan Dee
Yes. I’m reminded constantly by my publisher that women buy most of the novels. And I think that novels themselves are getting shorter, and that’s probably more than anything in response to technology. But if I said that, perhaps I was just getting carried away because it’s overstating the case to say people don’t read them anymore.
William H. Coles
But do you think that there’s a gender influence on both the selection of novels that are published as well as the type of the novel written? Just to carry the thought a little further, is gender bias affecting the popularity or the enjoyment traditionally gleaned from novel reading?
Johnathan Dee
I’m sure it’s true. I mean, I only see the inner workings of the publishing industry in regard to my own books. But my impression is that of course publishers respond, like any business, to the market. And in this case, it’s a market that . . . if it isn’t contracting, it’s not greatly expanding. I do know that they would never tell me what to do. They would never advise me to create a novel along a certain line because it would be more commercial. However, you can see the excitement level uptick when, for instance as in my forthcoming book, the protagonist is a woman in her forties. You can see their eyes light up over that.
William H. Coles
What’s the title of that book?
Johnathan Dee
It’s called A Thousand Pardons.
William H. Coles
From your days of reading for the Paris Review, and your multiple readings of contemporary literature, is the state of literary fiction changing? I want to say degrading or degenerating, but that’s not quite fair. Has literary fiction changed over the years?
Johnathan Dee
The artistic state of fiction you mean?
William H. Coles
Yes, exactly. And the purpose for writing.
Johnathan Dee
I think there are still just as many essential writers now as there used to be. I think any literature is generational, and writers are always acting in response to changes. I think right now, there’s a bit of a reaction to the big fat American novel, the idea of the ambitious, socially panoramic novel as practiced by Johnathan Franzen, or earlier by Tom Wolfe, or more traditionally by Norman Mailer. That’s less in vogue than it used to be. I’ve lived and written long enough to know that if something goes away, it will come back again. The important part is to have something to rebel against when you define yourself as a writer.
William H. Coles
What do you see as the differences between literary fiction, memoir, essay, and creative nonfiction?
Johnathan Dee
I tend to be more dogmatic about that than most writers, even of my generation. I think that the line is pretty bright, and I like it when writers try to keep the line as bright as possible in terms of what is acceptable to fudge or correct, and what is not.
William H. Coles
You mean in terms of credibility and truth and veracity?
Johnathan Dee
Yes. I’m incensed, for instance, when people try to defend something like, let’s say, a little piece of the James Frey book, and say, well, the response to the revelation that what was purported to be truth is in fact made up. Truth, fiction. What’s the difference? There’s a kind of faux sophistication to that that I really find enraging. My very valued and great former teacher, John Hersey, wrote a great essay, a beautiful essay, I think in the 1970s, called “The Legend on the License.”He was writing in that case mostly about Truman Capote. But it’s amazing how much he saw coming in that respect, and how much he was already trying to put a sort of conservative stop to notions that he could see taking hold that early, even though In Cold Blood and books like that are, in most respects, wonderful books.
William H. Coles
Do you see a difference in the readers among those different disciplines, and the effects on those readers?
Johnathan Dee
I doubt if I can answer in terms of the effects on readers. I’d be interested to know if the contemporary readership of novels skews more toward women, and if there’s a similar tilt in terms of nonfiction. Maybe there is. My own experience with my own students is pretty uniform. I don’t get the sense that men like memoir better or anything like that.
William H. Coles
I’ve come to believe that well-written fiction, in the classical sense, has an interesting potential for a certain reader, a reader who likes character-based plots, meaning, and enjoys thinking about metaphysical questions as opposed to the reader who really enjoys the sort of voyeuristic sensibilities of memoir and creative nonfiction. The rewards are different and techniques of developing those rewards are different.
Johnathan Dee
The participation is different, too. We’ve talked about this in class, that when you’re in a novel, the sense that you’re trying to create in the reader is a sort of experimental self, a blended identity. And this is particularly true when the main character in a novel happens to be not a wonderful person, or even just someone whose experience is very far removed from yours. You want to make the reader share that self for a while. Raymond Carver once said that good fiction is always a bringing of the news from one culture to another. And in memoir, you don’t get that because you never lose the sense that what you’re reading about is not even hypothetical. Your own experience is the experience of a genuine other.
William H. Coles
Has there been a tendency, in your experience as a teacher, for students to conceptualize fiction as embellished memoir? In the sense you must reach deep into yourself, bring yourself to the writing, bring your family, bring your experiences in the world, and then when it gets finally into the grist mill, it comes out creative nonfiction and loses the creativity and the inventiveness of creating a fictional story? Do you see that trend at all?
Johnathan Dee
I would say it a little differently, in that that’s always been the default option, or at least the common option, for young would-be novelists — to draw at first on their own experience because that’s all they have to draw on. The autobiographical first novel is not a recent invention. But one thing that is different nowadays is that more young writers will consider writing their first book as a memoir. The first time I can think of that being done was Frank Conroy’s book Stop Time
William H. Coles
Is the concept of character-based fiction something that you teach specifically?
Johnathan Dee
As a writing teacher, I try very hard — and it is very hard, because I believe in certain things passionately — to do things the way I do them for a reason. However, I don’t think you’re doing anyone a lot of favors as a teacher if you try to move them away from their own expression and write more like you. Unfortunately, I know a number of teachers who do that. I do my best to be as completely empathetic as possible in the classroom. Even if someone is writing the sort of book that I personally would never write or perhaps would never even read, I don’t feel it’s my job to pass judgment in that way.
William H. Coles
You had an interesting comment in class about morality in fiction. In good fiction, is morality suspended?
Johnathan Dee
Yes, moral judgment.
William H. Coles
There is always some moral cobweb in good fiction . . .
Johnathan Dee
Absolutely.
William H. Coles
. . . that is defined by the author, and the characters work under it, this moral umbrella with defined moral thinking and actions. That’s where the judgment comes in, but the judgment is on the reader’s side, judging the characters. I wanted to be sure that I had it right from your point of view.
Johnathan Dee
Yes. When I’m writing a novel, the primary objective is just to write a good novel. I think that novels that are too explicit about the judgment to which they want to lead you are not interesting to read, even if you agree with the judgment. You see what I mean?
William H. Coles
Sure.
Johnathan Dee
An author’s moral point or moral stance may be completely unimpeachable, but if the characters turn into essentially moral archetypes or figures in a parable so that you can see developments coming before they happen, then that to me is not a novel worth reading, no matter how correct it is. So, a moral judgment is not banished, or considered invalid or irrelevant, but it’s suspended. It’s held aloft. It’s delayed at least until the book is closed. At that point, you can make up your mind about it. But if you feel that your mind is definitely made up about the characters and about the proceedings in the middle of the book, then the rest of the book is really just like watching a sentence carried out. And a sentence carried out against fictional figures of your own invention seems to me like shooting fish in a barrel.
William H. Coles
We write novels and critique them in class, and there seem to be two things that fight against each other: plot progression and character development. Is there a difference in your mind between genre fiction as related to plot — how it’s written, and how it’s received and how it’s enjoyed — and how literary fiction is perceived, enjoyed, and related to character development and character change? When you read words in a novel for the first time, do you sense if they are plot oriented or character oriented?
Johnathan Dee
Well, yes, I do, of course. And I think a writer who’s very good on this subject is E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel
William H. Coles
Characters have flaws and strengths that contribute to the plot, to change the action of the plot. As we writers work to help the reader enjoy a change in thinking about the characters and the story world, is it helpful to construct stories more as literary writers, not as genre fiction writers? Do you find the union between the strength and flaw helpful in teaching to emphasize the character aspects for literary fiction?
Johnathan Dee
Yes. And I think from a writer’s perspective, the essential thing about what you call a character flaw, and I do see this a lot in student work sometimes, is that a character will be drawn to such an extreme that the problem is not credibility; the problem is that there’s only one direction in which that character can develop. Either way, if somebody is too villainous or too virtuous, it only gives you one direction in which the book can go, and the reader picks that up very quickly.
William H. Coles
Literary fiction always seems to me to shine a little bit more if it deals in some way with a metaphysical question. What is beauty? What is love? Who are we? Why are we here? Do you feel that too?
Johnathan Dee
It’s a good question. In my case the answer is yes, I do think about those things. But when I think about them, I try very hard to forget them. Because I feel like if you let any answer or commentary to a question like that into your own work, it has to be generated by the work and you have to keep your focus very narrow. You have to keep your nose close to the ground, by which I mean you have to attend to the characters and their story and let thematic or symbolic concerns emerge from that.
Another answer to the question is to say that there’s a tension. I think probably every good writer is aware of the difference between discussing the questions you’re talking about, like what William Faulkner used to call the eternal verities, and also addressing the question of whether or not writing a novel is a matter of leaving a record of what life was like in your own time. What the answers to these questions were in your own time. So, there’s a balance between wanting the book to connect to something eternal, so that at least in theory someone could pick it up in another culture, in another society, in another century, and still find something to connect to, and wanting it to speak to your contemporary audience and to address the way things are now, and thus differentiate it from novels that are about the way things used to be.
William H. Coles
In some ways this seems like an attitude adjustment for authors. You’ve got to go out and kill a whale, or work in a diamond mine. But I’m wondering also, would you recommend thinking about these metaphysical questions, and humanity, in a way that it prepares you in your writing to begin to deal with depth of characterization in different ways?
Johnathan Dee
I’m not sure. I’m not sure I’m grasping the question.
William H. Coles
The whole idea is about people who might dwell on these questions. I mean, some of these metaphysical questions are religious in a way. Some are philosophical. Some are political. When students are advised to go out to climb a mountain or work on a cruise liner and think about their experiences in an objective way, not so much a subjective way, it helps them prepare for writing literature. And what about existence? I mean, are we here just to survive and procreate? Or is there something else? What did the ancient Greeks feel about that existential part of existence? Is there something about the mysteries of life that can help a writer develop an attitude about how to create characters, and how we develop stories with meaning?
Johnathan Dee
It definitely helps to think about humanity. It’s one of your duties as a fiction writer to read about those questions and what other thinkers have said about them . . . and to think about your own answers as well. It’s also true, though — it’s in the nature of every writer I’ve ever known, and I’m sure it’s true for you too — that you don’t really know what you think until you write it. You know what I mean? I know many writers, including myself, have had the sensation of thinking of a story idea and then writing it, even if that takes place over several years. The writing itself is a kind of answer to the question of why you found it interesting in the first place. You can begin with questions about broader philosophical matters, or questions about existence, but I feel like often the story itself is the answer. It’s the coming up with a way of thinking. Writing a novel is itself a way of thinking; it’s not just a way of expressing thoughts you’ve already had.
William H. Coles
In class, as manuscripts are critiqued, it seems often that students are looking for credibility of actions, ideation, opinions, and there’s a resistance to suspension of disbelief — you know, “I don’t believe that’s going to be true.” It’s a search for veracity, really, in the story itself. And yet suspension of disbelief has been a necessary tool for writers. Do students who critique want to find truth and erase suspension of disbelief to discover the overall moral or meaning of the story? Does credibility make for better literary stories? That’s the most complicated question I’ve ever asked.
Johnathan Dee
Well, we’re all in here in a workshop setting, and we’re obviously at something of a disadvantage in that we’re not reading whole books. We’re reading small excerpts from books. Any good book will establish the terms of its relation to the real. And any good book (obviously I’m far from the first to say this) teaches you how to read it as you read it. And since we don’t get that experience, since we’re sometimes reading nothing but chapter 15, our default setting as readers is the real. That’s where we begin.
So yes, you’re right, we hear that question a lot in class. But students are not given enough to work with on the page in order to start thinking about things in a different way. That’s just the nature of workshops. One of my all-time favorite examples of that idea of a book teaching you how to read it, or at least showing you right away that you are on some plane other than the real, is the novel Waiting for the Barbarians
William H. Coles
Right, and a valuable technique used, probably not consciously. It demonstrates the need to see the novel in its entirety. I didn’t mean to imply that reading portions of a novel was unique to your class. It’s a widespread practice. I was looking for ways to avoid crimping the overall critiquing setting. And you’ve answered it. The most accurate, and fair, critique probably comes only after reading a whole novel.
Johnathan Dee
Yes, ideally that’s what we would say. The class I teach normally at Columbia now is an all-novel workshop, and there are a small number of students who submit repeatedly, and you actually can, if they’re productive enough over the course of a semester, read the whole novel. That makes a big difference in understanding and critiquing.
William H. Coles
I’m not surprised. In workshops, what do student critiquers do that is most valuable to you as a teacher?
Johnathan Dee
It’s people who internalize the idea. It’s very easy for me now because I’ve been doing this for decades. But for people who are new to this setting, it’s hard to realize that you have to learn to read a different way. Normally, when we read, we read reactively, as I do when I go home and pick up a book. I’m not engaged in reading that book in such a way that I would be thinking about different ways to write it. I would just be reacting to the way in which it has been done. But the ideal student or critiquer in a classroom is someone who is constructive and always operating from the presumption that what’s in front of him or her is not fixed, it’s temporary. They should read it not in terms of their own goals as a writer, but in terms of — insofar as you can pick them up — the author’s goals and try to figure out alternative strategies, alternative techniques, for getting closer to the author’s goals.
William H. Coles
You talk of suspense and drama often in your classes. To achieve suspense in genre fiction, information is withheld or manipulated, then finally revealed. Whereas in suspense for literary fiction, a character is created for the reader so that the reader is invested in that character and then the story makes the reader worry that something is going to happen to that character they care about. All information essential for the story is presented up front, or at least when needed for the story, without withholding it or manipulating it. I’ve heard you discuss this in different ways, and I wonder if you could expand on it now.
Johnathan Dee
As you know, the word “suspense” unfortunately has a sort of genre connotation itself. I mean, sometimes it’s something much simpler, more on the order of uncertainty. But to try to answer the question, I’ll offer an anecdote from Alfred Hitchcock. Maybe you’ve heard this before, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic definition of suspense versus surprise. Imagine that you’re filming two men sitting at a table having a cup of coffee, and after five minutes a bomb goes off underneath the table and they’re both killed. That’s shocking. Now imagine that same scenario, but in addition to the two men sitting at the table drinking coffee, you also show the bomb. Then those same five minutes, which are filled with the most banal conversation, people asking for more sugar or whatever, become unbearable because you’re in possession of more information than the characters have. Suspense via withholding information, I think, is so simple that ultimately a good writer will decide that it’s not worth doing. There’s suspense generated that way, and then there’s suspense that’s generated by a profusion of information, by your having everything that you need to make sense of the scenario, and especially if the characters are in possession of some of that. I’m always in favor of profusion of detail rather than the kind of artificial withholding of detail as a way of generating uncertainty, of generating a sense of irresolution or waiting for something to happen.
William H. Coles
It’s difficult, and it varies with every story, doesn’t it?
Johnathan Dee
Definitely. I do feel I have a stronger sense now of how hard it is to be original.
William H. Coles
I was surprised in one of the seminars you said that you never think about readers when you’re writing.
Johnathan Dee
I don’t; it’s just a fact. It’s not a conscious decision, and as I said, that’s not to say that I don’t care about readers. I mean, from the moment something is done, if I print it out and hand it to you, then I’m in agony over what you think of it. But when I’m actually engaged with the page, I’m engaged with the sentence. I’m only thinking about how to make it good enough for me. I don’t know why that’s true, but it’s true.
William H. Coles
What are the things you want a reader to get from reading your work?
Johnathan Dee
I’d like a book of mine to be morally provocative in a way that other forms of entertainment or other forms of information aren’t. But that’s a really good question. I think the reason I became a writer, the same reason probably most writers become writers, is that there was just nothing else, even as a young person, in the world that gave me a particular pleasure than reading a good story. And so I guess the primary answer would be that I want what I do to be good enough and well-crafted enough and ingenious enough to give others that same pleasure. Beyond that, as I get older, my goals get a little loftier, and I do feel I have a stronger sense now of how hard it is to be original. I would like readers to think, when they finish a book of mine, that it’s not like anything they’ve read before. And I’d like it to be morally provocative in a way that other forms of entertainment, or other forms of information, aren’t. A record of what it’s like to be alive and conscious now.
William H. Coles
You’d like them to remember it. You’d like them to be engaged in it so that they can get involved in the action as well as the characterization.
Johnathan Dee
Definitely.
William H. Coles
You would like them to have some changed perception of the world and humanity, or is that going too far?
Johnathan Dee
I’m thinking of the classic definition of poetry — that it makes the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Yes, ideally, if you do all those other jobs effectively and correctly, then when the book is closed it will make the reader see at least some aspects of the world around him or her in a fresh way. That’s one reason why I don’t write historical novels. It’s not that I hold it against other people when they do it, but I don’t understand what would draw readers to it when there are already a lot of good novels about, say, the eighteenth century. I don’t see why you’d go back and write another one. A novel should be a kind of artistic, moral, and philosophical engagement with what’s around you. But that’s just me. Other writers will have a different way of looking at things.
William H. Coles
This is a touchy one, and I say that because in other interviews I’ve had a lot of different reactions to this. But do you want readers to be entertained?
Johnathan Dee
Yes, I do. Obviously there are different scales of entertainment. You know, seeing a thirty-second cat video on YouTube is entertaining. It’s a different grade of entertainment than the entertainment I feel when I’m reading Leo Tolstoy. Yet Tolstoy is hugely entertaining. Entertainment is not the only thing I want to do, but yes. I can keenly remember the disappointment of reading certain books that you know are good, and you have been told are good, and you know, in some sense, they’re good for you. But they just aren’t entertaining when you’re reading them. They feel like medicine. I felt that way about Gertrude Stein, just for one example.
William H. Coles
I agree. I’ve had people say that if your purpose as an author is to entertain, you cannot write literary fiction as an art form. Does that ring true to you?
Johnathan Dee
I would insert the word “only” there. If your only purpose is to entertain, then that might make more sense. But even that’s still a pretty broad generalization. I’m sure Jonathan Franzen wants to entertain the bejesus out of his audience.
William H. Coles
The last thing I wanted to talk to you about in this very interesting and stimulating discussion is authorial presence in fiction. When you analyze classical fiction, the greats rarely have an authorial presence in the narrative, although the author might directly address the reader at times. I mean the authors were obviously there, but their authorial presence wasn’t directly in the voice or the narrative telling. Examples might be the Brontës, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and even Anton Chekhov. The author is present as the creator, but there is not an authorial presence in voice or point of view. Whereas today, in contemporary fiction, the author is almost always there. The author is really giving his or her identity through the characters, with the characterization, through the dialogue, through almost every voice within that story setting. Would you agree?
Johnathan Dee
I see what you mean. I think that the movement would be more from the idea of authorial omissions to the idea of authorial subjectivity. That’s an idea that’s sixty or seventy years old, but the notion that what makes the only validity in fiction is to see as one person sees . . . and that there is something presumptuous, and godlike. And by virtue of being godlike, outdated in terms of writing, even if you don’t have the presence in the prose that you’re talking about of writing from a position of divine authority. You know, I mentioned in class the other day, this quote from Flaubert: “An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.” That was a great idea then. You don’t see it much in practice now. Now, there’s one sensibility that’s front and center: that there should be a more divine sensibility than there is in the prose. That is, I think, now considered presumptuous.
William H. Coles
To regain the enjoyment of reading classical literature, should we bring back the concept of a narrator telling stories, characters acting out in the stories, and authors creating stories — but that the author does not become the narrator in a fusion sense? Do you think we could create as authors today that really objective sense of wonder plus subjectivity that the classic people created?
Johnathan Dee
Sure. I’d love to see it. I mean, it’s a little bit different than the problem I was talking about before, of generations reacting against each other and trends going away and coming back. Because this is really, I think, the whole question of point of view in fiction that is related to a more oceanic, philosophical change in the way we live and think. And even in the role of religion in our lives. But that said, I’d love to see it, and there’s no reason why it couldn’t be done. Who knows, maybe that’s the next frontier.
William H. Coles
This has been great. You’re a great person, and great to talk to about literature. It’s been very enjoyable. I appreciate your willingness to talk to www.storyinliteraryfiction.com
Johnathan Dee
My pleasure. Thank you for asking.