Author Questions
Katherine R: Who
or what inspires you as an author?
Matthew Pitt: There’s
two ways to look at that. Do you mean other writers that inspire me? Or…
KR: Have there been any
writers that inspire you?
MP: Sure. Yeah. I’m
constantly inspired by new writing. Or at least writing that is new to me.
KR: What kind of
writing?
MP: It can be a
combination. Sometimes it’s a writer who’s a friend of mine, so I might get to
see the work in progress. So I get to see what they’re doing and watch them
come up with drafts and be really talking with them as they’re going through
the problems. And that can be inspiring. You can also look at work that is new
to the world and you don’t know the writer, but you’re really blown away by
something and you feel like it’s speaking to what you’re doing or it’s
suggesting a question that maybe it doesn’t answer and you feel like you want
to start asking that question in your own work. And then sometimes it’s writers
that have been around or been gone from this world for a hundred years. I just
read—I think I mentioned this in class—but I’ve read Sonny’s
Blues by James Baldwin for the first time. It wasn’t that I was
putting it off purposefully, I just put it on the stack, and everyone I had
respected and admired read it and said, “You have to read this, you have to
read this.” And when I did it opened up the world to me in a new way that it
hadn’t been before. And I think that’s what the best writing does. So even
though that story is known by many, many people, it becomes personal. It
becomes your experience because you have it in your house or in your room or in
your desk for that one moment.
Megan Doyle: So I’d also
like to ask what motivates you to write as an author?
MP: you know, the short
answer is curiosity for the world and the world that you see in front of you
and the world that exists in other people’s minds that can’t be fully known by
you and yet you want to try. And so you look for voices that maybe express
things that you don’t understand or you see a different way. And I think that
that can be the big impetus for writing is the other: what’s beyond your own
world and your own walls. And weirdly enough, if you try to understand those
other voices you often see that you are a lot closer to them than you thought.
KR: what author
influenced you as an author the most?
MP: Boy, that’s… I don’t
know I could give you just one. That changes as you read more, so you come to know
different writers as they come to you in your life and become important to you
for different reasons.
MD: What have you
recently been most influenced by?
MP: Recently, I couldn’t
put down a book by Jennifer Egan that came out a couple years ago called Visit From the Good Squad. She tells it from
many different points of view and many characters. And these characters all
have associations with each other, but once one person tells a chapter you
never see them again. You never see them fully again. But you might hear from
them through others. And she also tells a story—about the last 70 or 80 pages
of the book are through power point. And so she actually has a power point
presentation in the book, which doesn’t make any sense if I’m just telling you about
it now. But when you read the book and you get to that part of the book, you
understand why it has to be that way and how it works. So it’s just really
inventive, the form of it, and it’s really playful, and it kind of touches on
modern concerns. That interests me a lot more than books that are, say,
historical fiction. So I’m interested in them as a reader, but I’m not as
interested in those as a writer. I don’t like to write straight history in my
fiction.
MD: Okay, so much like
Jennifer Egan’s power point, has new and developing technology influenced the
way you write?
MP: Yeah, I think it’s
doing it, and I think it’s going to keep doing it more and more. So I wrote a
story while I was moving to Fort Worth, and the story hinges on a text that’s
sent to the wrong person. And so it ruins a relationship, but it doesn’t ruin
the relationship because it’s revealing that one person is having an affair or
one person hates the other secretly and is going to break up with the person.
It ruins it because it turns out that the guy in the relationship has been
secretly going out with his buddies twice a year and have meat smorgasbords,
and pretending to be a vegetarian with his girlfriend who’s incredibly devout
to this. But it comes through a text, and I’m interested in that because it
seems like a new and faster way to have some of the issues that came up in
novels of letters. There are famous books that are based on letters, and people
back and forth replying to one another. And I’m kind of interested in how that’s
accelerated in our age, and how we can hit “reply all” instead of “reply” and
destroy a reputation. How we can have one picture that gets around, and goes
through the entire Web in minutes. So I’m interested in that part of
technology.
KR: Do consider yourself
as an experimental author?
MP: Yeah, yeah, I do.
Sometimes I think I write traditional stories. The content or conflict might be
traditional, then it’s told in an untraditional way. So I’m much more
interested in stories that defy rules or play with rules or they wink at the
outside world a little bit. So I like that style a lot more when I’m writing.
It’s hard for me to tell just a straight story, and usually I’ll start off with
an idea that seems pretty accessible in my head that is something I should be
able to do in a couple of weeks. Something happens and twists it, and shapes
it, and then I want to play with it. And the more I engage with it, the
stranger it becomes. That tends to be the rule of thumb. And I’ve learned to
just accept it. It’s probably not going to change. If I could tell a story in a
simple way, I probably would try, but I keep trying and I keep failing, so…
KR: Hey, that’s the best
way.
MP: Yeah.
MD: So when you write,
who do you consider your intended audience to be?
MP: When I’m actually
writing the first draft, I am forgetting that there might be people who will
ever read this. I don’t know that you can say there is any one way of thinking
about audiences. But if I were to think of an audience, it would be clear that
I was editing myself or being self-conscious, and that is probably not useful
for the story. So I’m not thinking about anyone in the first draft. By the time
I get to the last draft, or what I hope is the last draft, I’m writing for an
audience that is only going to give me a page of their time, and then they’re
going to shut the door in my face. So I have to figure out how to connect with
them, and hopefully I’ve already done that. But a lot of times you haven’t done
it as well as you need to, so I have to think about it in more of a ruthless
way, and alter the work accordingly. It’s still as mine, but it’s recognizing
that other people may not have that same impulse to tell a story about that
subject or follow that character that I do, so how do I make it interesting to
them.
KR: How is the current
technological revolution changing your audience?
MP: I don’t know. I
haven’t given that a whole lot of thought, but at the same time I know that I
had a story that came out last year on a website, and, you know, got retweeted
instantly, and people were commenting on it instantly, and I’d receive emails
about it from friends or, in a couple of cases, from people I didn’t know. And
that rapid reaction is probably one way that it changes. And this was a story I
had written only a few months before, haven it actually been published, versus
old school publication where maybe it takes years and years for it to see print
in a journal. And then after that it might take another several years for it to
be in a book of its own, and then maybe it takes time for the reviews to come
out, so there is a lot less lag time. That can be interesting, and it can also
be challenging because you’ve got some writers who are telling stories in
tweets now. And that could be an interesting form. It could definitely be an
interesting form. It could also be a very shallow form. So you have to balance
the idea of “well here’s a new way to reach an audience” with “are we
respecting the audience.” Are we actually giving something that will nourish
the mind or challenge you as a reader or is it just about the flash? I don’t
know that that’s going to be something easy to answer. It’ll play itself out
the way it’s going to, and you can have your own projects and ideas, but
sometimes just the technology drives the content.
MD: How did you
initially find a publisher for your book? And how long did that whole process
take? You mentioned years…
MP: Yeah. So I started…
When I was writing in grad school, there was one story in grad school that
was—actually in my first year of grad school—that was in the collection. And,
from the time of that first year in grad school to book actually coming out on
shelves was almost ten years. Now, there were a lot of other stories I was
writing, and I published some of them, but some at certain point I felt they
were no longer part of the book. So you have to make these choices that they’re
important to you, but they don’t represent the best of what you do anymore. So
the collection—it’s a little different with a novel, but not entirely—but with
a collection you’re always rethinking what’s in there. And you’re always
thinking about how they order and how they match up and what overall story
they’re telling, things like that. So the collection that I first had is
probably about half the stories that are still in and half the stories are new
in the collection as it wound up being published. I sent it out to different contests,
so different publishers have prizes, and a friend of mine calls it “the
literary lotto.” You have hundreds of people in a lot of cases, and in some
cases a thousand people sending in books, and one of them gets in. One of them
wins. Like a lot of writers who go that route, it means a lot of rejection.
It’s tough, and you don’t know if that’s a reflection of your work sometimes,
or if it’s just the cold, hard fact that you have a one in a thousand chance.
What luckily happened for me is, pretty soon after I sent it out to those types
of contests—those types of publishers—I started getting in finalist or
runner-up positions. And that was really exciting. It’s got enough of a
presence that people were paying attention to it. The problem is you get a couple
of those, and you feel like the eternal bridesmaid then. It’s difficult then
because you’re thinking, “what if there’s just one thing I need to do here, and
alter it.” That can be really frustrating to tell yourself to just trust that
it will happen. It happens in stages. None of them happen the way you expected
them to.
KR: How much did your manuscript
change? Well you did mention that actually, you mentioned that one.
MP: Yeah.
KR: So, do you have a definite
specific organization or structure in mind when you begin writing?
MP: Like organization for a whole
book?
KR: Do you start an outline or…?
MP: For an individual story?
KR: Yeah, for an individual story.
MP: No, I try to keep myself as
surprised by what I’m putting out there as possible, and if it’s pretty soon in
the process then I know what’s going to happen. It’s probably not going to be a
good story. There have been a couple of occasions where I’ve scrapped a story
and it’s always been because of that, because I’ve seen where it’s ending.
KR: So you like not knowing where
it’s going to end?
MP: Yeah.
KR: Even though you’re almost there
you want to be surprised all the way?
MP: There gets a point where you
start to figure it out. But it should be something like you’re in a haunted house
or in a hall of mirrors and you start to see the exit but you’re not entirely
sure, you’re not entirely sure what step you’re supposed to take, but you feel
like you see it. And even then you feel a little uncertain, but that means you
can separate yourself from the work when it’s done and say: ‘Was that really
the right ending or if that ending was the easiest route to take and keep
asking yourself those questions.
MD: So, how would you describe your
writing process?
KR: Do you do something specific or
ritualistic?
MP: Um, I, sort of. I do in that I use some of the same notebooks
and same pens and a lot of other writers get asked those in readings and, as
though that is the answer, that all you have to have is the right pen or the
right notebook.
KR: Yeah.
MP: It’s not, but sometimes it’s
helpful to trick your mind into going into the places it needs to go. So that’s
useful. But the main thing is to look to write, I look to write something that
maybe excites me and scares me a little. Something I don’t know if I’m going to
be able to pull it off. That’s fun because when you know that you can write
your own life and you know exactly what happened some people feel that some
parts of their life or some episodes are incredibly boring to do, because
you’ve lived it, you already know the end. And so when it’s something you don’t
know the ending to or something that you shouldn’t even be beginning…it’s kind
of, a little bit kind of an imagination amphetamine, that’s good.
KR: Would you call it writer’s
high?
MP: Yeah! Yeah, it is. Because it’s
the high of saying, you know, it’s new material to me, it’s interesting to me
and also the high of saying that ‘What if I fall back on my chair and hit my
head and this is what people see?’ I’d be mortified. So that can be exciting
too. So yeah, I think the writing process has to be…I think that you need to go
back to it every day. You need to take all of your excuses to procrastinate and
put them in a firing squad and shoot them down and you just need to do some
work. It doesn’t matter if it winds up
being one-hundred words or a thousand words.
You just need to go back to it every day and find your way back into the
material.
MD: Do you specifically have any
time of day or place that you prefer to write?
MP: If I had my druthers I would
probably work from sometime around 10:30 PM to about 3 in the morning. I am
really more of a night person. But I don’t, I have a job and I have children
and that has all changed, but the nice thing is having the children you realize
it doesn’t really matter. The main thing is to find the time. When you’re
pushed into a corner you say ‘I only have thirty minutes.’ When you just have
ten minutes you let it all hang out and just let it fly. I’m gonna have a page,
I’m going to have a couple of pages and that’s the route you have to take. Now,
I still will be up at 3:30 working on something and that makes up for a long
day the next day.
KR: And a lot of coffee.
MP; Yeah, a lot of coffee, exactly.
KR: Do you write in multiple
genres.
MP: Hm, this is a good question for
right now. After I finish up with you I am going to speak to our research
librarian, I put her on the trail of a court case that really interested me,
but usually something announces itself to me in the form of a story or an
essay. This announced itself as a play and it’s been a while since I wrote a
play. So I think they’re kind of different muscles. It’ll be fun to try to get
into it and I’m getting into it through this research instead of the way that I
usually do with storage, which is maybe image or character or a voice. So I’m
thinking more in terms of history and material and trying to view it through
that lens. I don’t know exactly why yet, but that feels yet. So yeah, I work in
fiction the most, but I’ve done a lot of non-fiction and I seem to be doing
more of it too. It’s shoving its way into the picture. There’s some plays,
there’s some journalism, there’s some food reviews. Then there’s a little bit
of poetry. Maybe someday I’ll write the poem that’ll give me a source of
publication, but for now it’s more for pleasure.
MD: Beside teaching, and authorship
in writing. Have you dipped your hand into any other aspect of writing?
MP: I’ve done a lot of work for
magazines. It’s not straight journalism, it tends to be feature or memoirish in
its journalism or reviews. I did a lot of food reviews when I was in
Mississippi and I kind of fell into that totally by accident. I started getting
into it and I started really appreciating how the dishes had been constructed.
It became more and more fun so I did food writing for a food network or hung
out with some of the Iron Chefs.
KR: I also saw you also dipped your
hand in Sitcoms?
MD: Oh yeah, I did. My first job
was to work on a Sitcom. I was going to be and unpaid intern and then I had a
conversation with a line producer and I didn’t know enough about TV to know
that meant the money person. But she and I really hit it off so suddenly she
found enough money in the budget to make me a paid intern. Then a week later I
was actually asked to be staff. It was weird because now that I had the job, it
went from getting to lobe off to becoming a person who on the one hand when it
came to be taping day and the joke bomb someone would turn to me and say ‘Give
me three jokes to replace it now’ Then on the other hand they’d turn cue and
point a finger at you and say ‘ Get us 8 lattes and 2 Moccachinos’ I liked the
energy going on and I liked the collaboration, I had a theatre background. But
when it started getting serious and when they started talking about real
writing work and real positions I started getting nervous because I thought it
was so formulaic and I thought it was 3 jokes to a page. There were things in
regards to a Sitcom that were terrifying to someone who wanted to write with
broader or deeper strokes. I thought that if I really entered into that world,
I would never really get back to this writing world, probably.
KR: What do you think reading and
authorship will look like 50 years from now?
MP: Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know
the answer to that one. Sometimes it feels like there may be amazing
possibilities to more access and more people getting access to books and then
sometimes it feels like it could be a very bleak time. So, I don’t know. I
don’t pretend to know the answer to that one. I hope that the people still
reading books and hope there’s still room for physical books and stories in the
traditional sense and hope there are things happening that are interesting, not
just that surface flash. I hope there are still libraries. The brick and mortar
store is going and the library is changing and books as the physical object of
holding a book is changing. But I do hope that there is room for both in the
world ahead. So, we’ll see.
MD: What was your first
publication?
MP: The first, I did a story that
won a prize when I was an undergraduate. It wasn’t a college prize, it was a
national prize. It was $100 and you know, I wanted to frame that check.
Actually I did make a copy of that check. So it was published in a magazine and
it was called ‘Fisherman at Night’ and it was kind of close to my own life in a
couple of ways and very far away from it in others. I still remember writing it
and I could tell it was something more than the stories I’d written before, but
I couldn’t put my finger on why. And I remember turning it in to the workshop.
It was definitely during the time when I was doing a lot of experimentation,
but I was getting some blowback from some of my professors at that point and
thought it was interesting in one hand but they wanted me to go deeper. I had
one teacher who I really respected and admired a lot and she said ‘I don’t know
if it’s because it’s a fish story, but this one reeled you in, this one
grounded you in a way you haven’t had in a while and you should pay attention
to it.’ So that meant a lot to me. I thought about it and wrote the next one.
She said ‘It’s hard to see exactly when it happens, but in this story you
re-map the sky.’ And I thought: ‘That’s exactly what I want to do. She’s got
it, that’s…that’s exactly what I want to do.’ So, I never forgot that line and
hopefully never forget that lesson.
MD: Have you tried to revisit that
story recently? How do you feel about it now?
MP: Like if I write it now?
MD: Yeah.
MP: I haven’t read it read it. I’ve
read it when I came across it, I read a few lines and I liked it. It’s going to
be different from the artist you are, changes just like the person you are
changes and you have to be accepting of that and you have to understand that
what might embarrass you to see now is still who you came from, it’s still what
you came from and you need to appreciate that. You wouldn’t be writing work
that you really loved at this moment if you hadn’t had the moment that you
loved years before that.
KR: Like, don’t forget your roots.
MP: Yeah, yeah, it’s going to
instruct you. It’s going to help you if you write something good at that moment
it’s going to make you stretch and it’s going to prepare you for the better
story, for the next one whenever it is.
KR: Thank you very much!
MD: Yes!
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