{ in this interview, sheldon lee compton ruminates on fiction, revision, and writing as a life discipline }
when you picture someone reading your fiction, how do you see them? what do they think about, wear, and do? or, maybe a better way to say it: who do you write for? and how do you see your writing nourishing others or interacting with what you’ve made?
This is going to sound strange, but I don’t picture anyone at all when I write. I listen to the words in my head, how they knock against each other, how they dance together. I hear that and picture the scenes in my head, but no reader. Even the scenes are just these sort of washed out gray images, the same for my dreams, strangely. Sometimes after I’ve finished a book or story I might consider what the reading public will think. At these times I think mostly of other writers I know, because they’re the ones who usually tell me they’ve read something of mine. Others – family, friends, co-workers, and so forth – don’t read my work very much. I hope it brings some satisfaction to whoever does read it, though. Most of all I want people to be entertained when they read my books.
how do you use fiction as a practice for spiritual exploration, discipline, or growth? use the word spiritual in what way you understand it… can you offer any practical advice or sure-fire practices for folks interested in allowing writing to inform their spiritual discipline?
When I’m writing books I guess I do a lot of growing along the way. It’s something I’m not keenly aware of happening, but then writing, telling stories, is a spiritual act for me, always has been. Practical advice for folks maybe just starting down the path of writing every day? I’d make it more than a priority – I’d make it a habit the way praying can become a habit, without taking it for granted, understanding the power behind, the magic. Writing – hearing those words coming together inside your mind – is as much like a prayer or meditation as anything other activity. Make it a habit, one as important as prayer. Do that, and it will serve you well in return.
when you approach your desk, journal, computer—where ever it is you tend to create—what are some of the processes you use? what’s going through your mind? tell us about your habits of writing, no matter how quirky, mundane, strange, or small.
For the past year or so I’ve been going into my office at the college around 5:30 a.m. – a full three hours before my first class starts. I fire up the monitor and find my “song of the week” and get it started. For the past week it’s been Jeff Buckley’s cover of Cohen’s “Hallelujah” or random songs from his album Grace. I sip coffee and listen one time through before starting anything. Then comes the writing. Once I have a page finished, I’ve started printing it out right then and adding it the manuscript on my desk.
I wrote on a typewriter until I was 26 and this new thing of printing out page by page gives me both a nostalgic tingling and also gives me a tangible stack of pages to see my progress.
I write like this for about an hour and then break, make a breakfast sandwich in the break room and have a bite. After a bite, I return and write until my first class starts at 8:30 a.m. I don’t write on weekends. It’s reading only then, a different kind of writing work, but just as important.
when you go to revise work, how do you typically go about it? are there best practices you follow? give some wise instruction for those of us ready to get cracking on revision!
For the past fifteen years or so I’ve edited as I go. More or less this has been the case since I stopped writing on a typewriter. The computer changed a lot for me that way. I’ve taken a different approach with the novel I’m working on now. I’m writing straight through the first draft, no editing, no rereading, nothing. Just moving forward to the end. This new way has increased both output for the manuscript and given it a more immediacy. I reckon a writer has to find the way that works best for them, but I wouldn’t get too married to any one way of doing anything. Be open to change, especially in regard to revision and redrafting.
what’s the best advice you can give to a person just beginning to write, struggling to write, or feeling stuck? what’s something you wish someone had told you starting out?
This reminds me of a similar question I was once asked. Another writer interviewing about a year ago asked what mistakes I had made as a writer. My answer was that I’ve made all of them, so far. I’m sure I’ll make the rest that I’ve missed at some point. The idea is basically that if you’re not making mistakes, you’re playing it safe.
And if you’re playing it safe, the work is most likely suffering.
And whether or not a writer doing this would admit it or not, they know they’re settling for something lesser than they’re capable, at least in most instances.
would you like to share an excerpt you’re working on or have recently finished and comment on how it was written in light of the comments above?
I’m working on my fourth book, on a novel in prose poetry called Alice. I started this book in mid-October and plan to finish my first draft by the end of December. This is the work I talked about earlier that I’ve not reread or edited since beginning. However, I will share the last few paragraphs or so that I wrote yesterday:
It was a man once, maybe even a man in the same world I once lived. But then drought and then famine, yes. Surely it was famine that brought it all about. It, Robert, would spend nights clutching his knees by a spitting fire, his children, his wife, sleeping in harsh and hungry rasps feet from him. Clutching at himself in this way he fought his mind to think of ways to feed them. At first. But before long, as one night became another and another, his thoughts settled longer each time on his own hunger, his starvation.
Crops were the only thing he ever knew. Early on he had tried to hunt and failed. Tried again, and failed. Each failure brought looks into his children’s eyes, his son and daughter. Their eyes asked why, and their tears sang dirges of the same. His wife, a wonderful woman who had, before the famine, always been quick with a smile, who went about her daily work and her nightly work with an air of contentment, now walked stiffly as a dying animal around their land. Her entire body mourned, and she never touched any of them, fearing anything and everything. Fearing that somehow her deep melancholy might be transferred, she drew into herself, leaving her children to huddle close to each other in their fear.
On the last night he spent clutching his knees to his chest, he started with his wife.
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Sheldon Lee Compton is the author of the collections The Same Terrible Storm (Foxhead Books, 2012) and Where Alligators Sleep (Foxhead Books, 2014). His work has been nominated the Pushcart Prize, the Thomas and Lillian D. Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, and the Gertrude Stein Award. His novella, Brown Bottle, will be published by Artistically Declined Press in late 2015. He survives in Kentucky.