I recently found this example of tough love on a pipe support at a locality in New Mexico.

• Publishers Weekly has the first review of The Reconstructionist, and it’s terrific: “The novel is suffused with sharp turns and minute, telling details that add up to a riveting consideration of risk and responsibility.” Read the whole review here.
• Thanks to the Midwestern folks at Midwestern Gothic for nominating my short story, “The Beauty Engine,” for a Pushcart Prize. You can read my story alongside a lot other good work for the low price of just three dollars here.
• I’m excited to be a part of the Publishing Institute program at the University of Denver this summer — details here.

This monkey is writing, but in his day job he is an engineer.

So! Interview:

• When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

I’ve always loved to read novels and stories, since I was little. And if for anyone who reads a lot, it’s natural to think about what you would do if you were creating your own stories. The question is whether or not you take the next step and actually try to put those ideas down on paper. Me, I was bored one summer in high school, so I sat down and wrote out a couple of stories. Never looked back.

• How long does it take you to write a novel? Short story? (Do you outline?)

When I’m writing, my concern is with getting it right – the sentences, the characters, the plot, and everything else. It’s my opportunity to be a total control freak. I don’t worry too much about speed or quantity, and as a result it takes a long time. I have a novel, The Reconstructionist, coming out next March, and I spent about six years writing it. My previous novel, Articles of War, took about three years. A short story might take two or three months to get to a point where I think it’s halfway decent, but then over the next few years I will pull it out again to tweak it or rewrite it. I recently published a short story in a literary magazine, and it’s a story I worked on now and again over the last six or seven years. (The story is called “Location,” and it’s about Denver real estate, which is my wife’s field. It’s in a magazine named The Normal School.)

I don’t outline, because when I tried it in the past, but I didn’t find it very helpful. I needed to know where the story was going in my head, and it didn’t seem to make much of a difference whether or not I wrote it down on a piece of paper. But I may try it again the next time I start a novel, because even by my own standards The Reconstructionist seemed to take an awfully long time to write, and I wrote an awful lot of pages for it that didn’t end up in the book. It’d be nice to be a tad more efficient.

• Where do you get your ideas and inspiration for your stories?

Here and there, this and that – things I’ve read, conversations, stories people tell me. Life.

Often I start with an unusual situation that seems interesting to me, and I wonder about how people could have gotten themselves into that situation. From there I begin adding things on, trying different styles and voices, characters and settings and events, until it all starts to groove.

• When/where were you first published? How did that feel?

In 1999, I published a short story in a literary journal published by the University of Alabama, The Black Warrior Review. It felt fantastic. I still have it on my shelf, if you want to read it.

It’s still that way. I mean, I’m rarely asked to write anything on commission, so I just write things, and then I start sending the stuff around, hoping that someone will like it enough to publish it. There’s always a lot of suspense and doubt. (I mean, a lot of doubt. Like, I’m not sure if it’s any good. I’m not sure if anyone will like it. I feel bad for even asking anyone to read it since it’s probably such a ridiculous piece of garbage…) So it’s always a thrill when it works out, and always a thrill to see my name in print.

• Are you a reader? Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction? Favorite titles/authors?

I read a lot, mostly fiction. Let me recommend a couple of engineers who turned to writing fiction: Stewart O’Nan, a former aerospace engineer who has written a stack of excellent novels on all sorts of themes; and George Saunders, who studied at the Colorado School of Mines and is now possibly the most interesting and funniest writer of short fiction in America.

• Why did you choose mechanical engineering?

When I started college, I was on a knife’s edge between choosing an engineering or an English major. But eventually I realized that only the reason I was interested in English was that I wanted to write fiction, and I didn’t need a degree to do that. On the other hand, I was also very interested in engineering, but to pursue that I did need the degree. At that point, the choice became easy.

As a writer, by the way, I’m very glad to have a foot in engineering, because it gives me material and a perspective that are relatively unusual.

• Unusual (I think) for an engineer to excel in writing. You must be “whole-brained” as opposed to dominant right- or left-brained? (Thoughts?)

I’m asked about this often, and I don’t have much insight. It just feels natural to me. I tend to think that there are more parallels between the two types of work than most people realize. I think engineers get sold short creatively; to be a really good engineer requires a lot of lateral thinking and even metaphorical thinking. And to write a novel and make all the pieces of it mesh and flow across hundreds of pages requires tremendous attention to detail, analytical thinking, and problem solving.

• How would you describe your fiction genre?

I’ve written historical stuff and contemporary stories and fantastical stories and in the back of my mind now is a sci fi novel. Basically, I write about whatever is interesting to me, and, as I said, I try hard to make the writing as good as I possibly can.

• Your new novel, The Reconstructionist, will be released in 2012. What’s it about?

In a previous job I worked in forensic engineering, reconstructing car accidents. The Reconstructionist is about a young man who stumbles into doing that kind of work, and it’s about the limits of analysis to explain matters of the heart, the gravitational pull of past events and their meaning to our present day decisions and relationships, and how in an instant car accidents irrevocably change lives, including those on the periphery. It also involves an illicit love affair, Legos, a zombie pig, and a lot of car crashes.

You can preorder now!

But, but…

But the researchers are careful to note that they do not have a new recipe for writers to follow. After all, spoilers helped only when presented in advance, outside of the piece. When the researchers inserted a spoiler directly into a story, it didn’t go over quite as well.

Isn’t that odd? I’m curious how exactly the spoilers were inserted into the stories. Did the readers sense that the altered stories were betraying themselves? I dug out one of the stories the researchers used, “The Bet,” by Chekhov (not one of his best, by the way), and it wasn’t clear to me how a spoiler could be inserted into the text without disrupting the rhythm of the piece. Maybe a skilled writer could give away the ending in a story in a way that gets the benefit without losing the reader. But, taking the study’s result at face value, apparently the lesson for writers is that they should never try insert spoilers into their stories; instead they should send spoiler e-mails to their readers before the readers have had a chance to read.

In America, to say that you could see the ending coming from a hundred pages away is a pretty terrible insult to a book. (This notion has been codified in Flannery O’Connor’s often repeated construction, that a story’s ending should seem “surprising yet inevitable.”) But this is not necessarily a universal principle. I’m not as widely read in internation literature as I would like to be, but a friend who does literary translations from French once told me that the notion that endings must be surprising seems to be an idiosyncrasy of contemporary English literature. The rest of the world doesn’t necessarily care so much if you can see the ending as it approaches. C’est la vie. Oui? And now the science seems to say maybe they’re onto something.

(Cross-posted.)

A handful of stories from the Hint Fiction anthology, including my own “Knock Knock Joke,” have been selected as the basis for a film contest associated with the 2012 Vail Film Festival. The challenge is to convert 25 words into a one minute film — check it out here.

(The book cover image above was created by Oscar E. Armstrong IV.)

• I have a new short story, titled “Location,” out in the new issue of The Normal School. It’s a terrific literary magazine. Subscribe. You won’t regret it.
• Matt Bell has posted a (long!) review of my recent story, “The Beauty Engine,” and it’s a great review. Check it out here at his blog.

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.

Quantitative analysis is, to my mind, an intriguing and under-utilized lens for examining literature. It’s not hard to see why; most literature grad students would probably rather claw their eyeballs out than try to solve a partial-differential equation. Luckily, here comes Franco Moretti to bring the data. And it turns out, the math is easy!

Here's a random monkey picture, because monkeys are funny.

• Back in December, I did an introduction for an reading/interview featuring the matchless Cortright McMeel and his excellent first novel, Short. The whole event is available as a podcast. Check it out.
• My novel The Reconstructionist was published in the UK last year, but meanwhile I’ve been working with the US editor at Harper Perennial on a series of extensive revisions. I’m happy to say we’ve wrapped those up now, and the book is headed toward copyediting, cover design, and publication. It will be in Harper Perennial’s winter catalog, which means publication sometime in the Jan-Apr timeframe of 2012. Compared with the UK version, the US edition will be heavily revised and expanded, about 100 pages longer altogether. I’m very excited about the changes, and looking forward to getting it out into readers’ hands.

“The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination. The actuality is continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist.”

– Philip Roth