SmokeLong Quarterly

Before this interview, I was trying to remember how many versions of “Talk-to-Me Tina” I’ve read. Two? Three? But re-reading the story this morning, I was surprised again by the details, the strangeness, and the, I think the best way to describe this is the affable meanness in this story’s core. I know it’s been a while, but can you talk more about your process of writing this story?

“Tina” started with the idea of a doll growing up, a what if I wanted to explore further. The details and the story’s vignette structure came easily, but developing character took a lot of work. Tina, the talking doll, came to life quickly, but I couldn’t crack the unnamed protagonist. You’re right—he is very mean! And though it feels essential to me, the second-person point of view adds distance and makes him even harder to stomach. This protagonist—so unapologetically predatory—is allergic to introspection, so the challenge was figuring out how I could let the reader into his head enough so that they might consider him a character worth following. I scrapped a lot of sections that felt indulgent, passages that weren’t fueled by resonant detail. That was key—zeroing in on what the protagonist notices about Tina, making sure that these weird details revealed something about him, too. Everything else that the reader learns about the protagonist feels like a detail that’s managed to slip through the cracks—an accident, really.

Scott, you’re one of the nicest people I know, but I am suspicious it’s because you let all your meanness seep into your writing. And we’ve talked a lot about things that can be  too much in writing (too much mean, too much plot, too much purple prose, too much look at me and how smart and interesting I am) and how that can hurt the story, but sometime save the story. What are some too much elements that you think hurt stories? What are some too much elements that you think can add to an author’s voice (for this latter part of the question, feel free to also talk about a specific story and link to it if you would like) and story?

I’ve been brainstorming a list of too-much elements that can hurt stories—abstraction! lyricism!—but every time I jot another one down in my notebook, I end up crossing it out. I think all writers have superpowers (a knack for descriptive language or an ear for dialogue, maybe) that become crutches over time, so for me the line between good too-much and bad too-much is blurry. The worst too-much offenses in fiction tend to be our blind spots, those reliable thrusters that might help us zoom through first drafts but have become so second-nature that we don’t know how hard we’re stomping on the pedal. My own blind spot is a sort of mean-spirited humor that I have to edit out or at least rein in when I move to the second draft.

The too-much element that can save a story is an intangible one: danger. I like stories that take big, weird risks, stories that ought to fail disastrously but improbably pull the whole thing off.

If you were teaching someone about creating a character and could only use TV episodes, which TV episodes would you show her? Why?

A painfully smart and squirmy TV show that I’ve been obsessed with recently is Comedy Central’s Review. The premise: Andy Daly’s character Forrest McNeil is a critic who reviews life experiences. “Viewers” of his show-within-the-show write in with review requests that include addiction, being a cult leader, and murder, but no matter how depraved his assignment, Forrest remains gleefully devoted to his job. An especially revelatory episode for character is titled “Pancakes, Divorce, Pancakes.” In this episode, Forrest must review eating ten pancakes, divorcing his wife Suzanne, and eating thirty pancakes. Forrest genuinely loves Suzanne, but he’s deluded himself into believing that his job as a reviewer of life is groundbreaking and essential work. Characters are compelling when they want incompatible things. It allows them to generate their own sort of friction. This episode is a defining moment for Forrest’s ability to justify his most self-destructive impulses—and his slow descent only gets more painful to watch from here.

The other TV show that comes to mind is RuPaul’s Drag Race, which—like any good reality TV show—knows how to craft a fantastic character arc. (Let’s not pretend this wonderful show is anything other than fiction.) The Drag Race editors deserve all the awards. Even the villainous queens have their perfectly timed redemptive moments; Roxxxy Andrews, a Season 5 pageant queen who doesn’t seem to think comedy queens are doing “real drag,” reveals on the runway that she was abandoned by her mother at a bus stop when she was four years old! Just when you think you can categorize a queen as too mean or too serious or some other reductive label, bam—sad bus stop. The show (usually) provides a foothold for each of its characters, something to sympathize with, something to complicate and keep them human.

What are some of your favorite flash stories?

“Dream House” by Rachel B. Glaser. Megan, your “The New Audacious Line” at New South and “The Alive Sister” at The Offing are both great. “Fifty Ways to Eat Your Lover” by Amelia Gray. “Contention” by Karen Joy Fowler. “We Might Be in New York Already” by Maggie Su. “Where We Learn to Bang Our Heads Against a Brick Wall” by Bix Gabriel. “Driving Home, I Imagined the Man I’d Just Met, Alone in His Apartment, Washing By Hand the Glass from which I’d Drunk” by Doug Paul Case.

How should a writer end her story if she really wanted to impress you?

An impressive ending needs to do more than just land the plane. I want to read the last line breathlessly. Yesterday, because I desperately needed to remember what Tom Hardy’s weird Bane voice sounded like in The Dark Knight Rises, I got sucked into a Christopher Nolan rabbit hole and ended up watching a ton of Dark Knight clips. At one point in that movie, Heath Ledger’s Joker says something like, “You learn who a person truly is in the last few seconds before they die,” and OK, that’s a lot of setup, but I think Heath Ledger was onto something. That’s what the best endings should do—illuminate, really and truly and finally, just what the story is about.