Original Essays
by Jess Walter, October 28, 2020 11:01 AM
Editor's note: Catch Jess Walter's event at the Portland Book Festival on Thursday, November 5, at 6 p.m. Buy the preorder and event ticket here.
A novelist should never say never.
As soon as you make a hard-and-fast rule about writing (for instance, never use the second person) you quickly find yourself longing to break that rule.
I remember once chiding a college class over their love of zombie stories, only to get so worked up, I started writing one that very night.
I think writers are prone to making these empty aesthetic pronouncements and arbitrary rules because we don’t like to admit there might not be any rules. It’s terrifying, staring at a blank page with nothing but disorder and insecurity to rein us in. So we cling to genre and to various schools and styles. We herd ourselves into meaningless pens: I’m a realist, a modernist, a minimalist; I write speculative fiction, crime fiction, autofiction...
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Guests
by Jess Walter, December 11, 2013 2:03 PM
In this special series, we asked writers we admire to share a book they're giving to their friends and family this holiday season. Check back daily to see the books your favorite authors are gifting.÷ ÷ ÷ I'll be giving my brother a book of short stories, Jim Gavin's Middle Men (unless my brother reads this blog post; then he's getting what I usually get him: a $7 gift certificate at the Booze Barn). These funny, naturalistic stories are about the kinds of people we grew up with (or maybe the kind of people we grew up to be) — characters a less nuanced writer might depict as life's losers. But Gavin writes with such ease and generosity that a genuine poignancy bubbles up. There is a terrific basketball story in this collection called "Play the Man" with a coach who seems dreamed up by a low-rent Wodehouse, and a perfect one-word description of the high-desert town of Victorville, California —
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Guests
by Jess Walter, September 29, 2006 10:06 AM
I'm waiting to hear back from Hollywood. This is a position many authors find themselves in, waiting to hear if their books are going to be made into movies. My last novel, Citizen Vince, was optioned by HBO Films (the theatrical division of HBO) and the great Richard Russo (who discovered the book when it was in galley) wrote a killer script based on the novel. So now... I wait. During all of this, the author is not really in the loop (honestly, you don't want to be) but I do catch whiffs of various casting ideas (is Charles Nelson Reilly even alive?) and hear about directors and agents who love it. It's all fine as long as you don't take it too seriously or spend the imaginary money. A few years back, I wrote a couple of screenplays myself and "took meetings" with various producers and studio people. I understand how cynical the whole process can make writers (I'm finally reading Day of the Locust... any other Hollywood recommendations out there?) but I thought it was great fun. They tell you how smart you are, pay you a little bit, and don't humiliate you by actually making your movie. What's not to like? I even had an agent in Hollywood for a while, a nice guy who, upon having me in his office the third time, said it was great to finally meet me. I told him it was the third time I'd met him. He said, "I mean it's great to finally meet you in person." I told him I thought I was in person the first two times. When I finally fired him I had to leave a phone message because he hadn't returned my calls in weeks ? which begs the question, can you actually fire someone who won't call you back? It all makes me wish that I had Ari Gold as my Hollywood agent. Ari is the best character on my favorite television show, the HBO series Entourage, a profanity-ranting ball of fire played by Jeremy Piven. After a meeting, his assistant Lloyd asks how it went. Ari fires back: "How did the f***in' Bay of Pigs go,
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Guests
by Jess Walter, September 28, 2006 10:51 AM
I love book festivals. Today I'm off to the Montana Festival of the Book, in Missoula, where I'll be reading with the short story writer and essayist Charles D'Ambrosio and the novelist David Long and sitting on a panel to talk about fiction writing. In November I'll read at the Miami Book Fair International. Last week I read at Thin Air, the Winnipeg, Manitoba book festival, where one of the Canadian authors told me that almost all of the Canadian readings are done at book festivals ? each city has a book fair and authors just make the rounds. It certainly sounds more civilized than sitting in a Barnes and Noble in some suburban mall, hoping a few shoppers from The Gap happen to stumble in while you try to read over the sound of the Orange Julius machine. Festivals are a great chance to see several authors at once. I remember at the L.A. Times Book Festival one year having to decide whether to go see Francine Prose or George Plimpton, Ray Bradbury or Dave Eggers. (One thing that wasn't fun at the L.A. festival was signing books at the same time as Bradbury. My table was set up next to his. His line went halfway around the UCLA campus. My line, if you can call six people a line, was just a bit smaller.) My hometown, Spokane, has a great festival called Get Lit, where any given year you might hear David Sedaris, Kurt Vonnegut, or Marilynne Robinson, along with dozens of other regional and national authors. Portland's Wordstock is another great festival, which used to be held in the spring and now ? I understand ? is moving to late fall. Not every author can stand up and read his or her work and have it be as powerful as encountering it on the page. And usually, authors have to do more than just read. I was excited one year to hear the great Russell Banks read at Wordstock but that's pretty much all he did ? read for almost an hour in a hot ballroom ? while heads bobbed and people snored. With that in mind, here are the best festival readings I've ever seen (and heard): 3. Joyce Carol Oates (L.A. Times Book Festival). Here's this tiny, bookish woman reading from her novel, Blonde, and straining to answer questions, and it was enthralling. Everyone knows how prolific Oates is ? she even gets knocked for it ? but to see someone so committed to her craft that she can't stop writing was inspiring. 2. Marilynne Robinson (Get Lit, Spokane). Her reading style fits her prose ? a quiet, powerful perfectionism that has you leaning forward in your seat. As she read from a scene from Gilead (in which a horse falls into a tunnel used to smuggle runaway slaves), she burst into laughter and said, backing away from the microphone, "I still can't believe I made this up." 1. Salman Rushdie (Get Lit, Spokane). Like his best fiction, he was funny and smart and challenging. He fielded questions, read nonfiction and fiction (including a riotous sex scene that consisted mostly of unfinished thoughts), and completely commanded the stage. I arrived thinking he might be dry and left thinking: Oh, right.
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Guests
by Jess Walter, September 27, 2006 9:23 AM
So I'm at work this morning, torturing the home keys, and listening to an old Tom Waits album ( Rain Dogs). There's almost always music playing when I'm writing. I recently wrote a short story for an anthology called The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth. The book is the brainchild of a talented and tireless British writer and editor named Peter Wild, whose website Bookmunch is one of my favorite stops for book reviews. Peter gathered an impressive group of authors (myself excluded) to write short stories that share titles with songs by Sonic Youth, the landmark alt-rock band. I chose a later song, "Rain on Tin," from the album Murray Street. Like the others, my story has nothing to do with the song except that it shares the same title. The Sonic Youth book is one of a series that Peter is editing for a British press. The first book, Perverted by Language, features stories inspired by the English post-punk band The Fall (the only band I know named after an Albert Camus novel). He's also doing collections of stories inspired by The Smiths, The Ramones, Joy Division and The Velvet Underground. Peter's spot-on taste in music and literature got me to thinking about which bands and musicians this kind of anthology would work for and which it wouldn't. For instance, at first glance, you'd think an intellectually-charged band like Radiohead would be perfect, but when you look at their song titles, there really aren't that many great story titles ("Paranoid Android"? "We Suck Young Blood"?). Tom Waits doesn't work for an entirely different reason ? so many of his songs are stories themselves. (Would you really want to try to improve the beginning of "Frank's Wild Years": Frank settled down in the Valley and he hung his wild years on a nail that he drove through his wife's forehead.) The exercise also got me to thinking about some anthologies that will likely never see the light of day (please, feel free to suggest your own): Ridin' the Storm Out: Fiction inspired by REO Speedwagon. Good Vibrations: Fiction inspired by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. Flirtin' with Disaster: Fiction inspired by Molly
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Guests
by Jess Walter, September 26, 2006 9:23 AM
I once broke my collarbone in a golf tournament. Technically, I suppose, the injury was more of a gin-drinking accident than a golf accident, but it still says a lot about my relationship to the game that it's my fondest golf memory. I bring this up because I played in another golf tournament yesterday ? a shortened Ryder Cup style match with two teams. (My team got killed. In my defense, I'm not really much of a golfer. To me, golf is like karaoke: the only thing more pathetic than being bad at it is being good at it.) But as I was getting my clubs out yesterday, I started wondering if there was a great American golf novel out there. There's a fairly rich tradition of baseball literature (and movies) and some great writing on basketball, but for some reason golf hasn't lent itself to that kind of treatment. There are some classic short stories that feature golf, John Cheever's "The Brigadier" and "The Golf Widow," for instance, but it's not really about golf. It's about bomb shelters and infidelity. Walker Percy's novel The Second Coming begins with a nice golf scene, but again, the novel is not really about golf. In fact, when golf appears in fiction it's usually just shorthand to signal that a character has lost touch with his or her youth and has settled into a life of moneyed emptiness. There are apparently a number of British mysteries set around golf and in the United States. Roberta Isleib writes delightful mysteries about golf with cool titles (Final Fore, Fairway to Heaven) but she’s not really trying to use the game to tell us something about the human condition. Of the "great writers," John Updike probably writes about golf more than anyone. He understands "the bliss and aggravation of the game," which sounds a little like the human condition to me. And in this cool interview with the Wall Street Journal, he talks all about the game and claims that the cornerstone of any golf library are books by P.G. Wodehouse. In Updike's later Rabbit novels, golf plays a big part in Harry Angstrom’s life, but it always seems like he settled into the game, that it was a kind of compromise he made with age. I prefer to think of Rabbit the basketball player, soaring in that great scene with him playing the kids in the beginning of Rabbit, Run. When asked what connection writing has to golf, here’s what Updike said: "It's contemplative. You kind of think your way out of corners. Often you find yourself both in plotting and in golf in an awkward situation of your own making and you try to get out of it." Or you get drunk, fall down, and break your
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Guests
by Jess Walter, September 25, 2006 9:06 AM
I'm on a four-day reprieve from a very long book tour for my new novel, The Zero, and I've fielded a few questions about why I ventured away from my earlier literary crime novels to write a dark satire about America's reaction to 9/11. So I thought I'd start my blogging week there. The first half of the answer is that I was at Ground Zero in New York five days after the terrorist attacks and since that time, I've wanted some way to register my outrage over the way fear has become politicized in this country, the way patriotism and capitalism have been conflated, and the way we lurched toward a misguided war in Iraq. But that's only half the story. The other half has to do with Kurt Vonnegut. When I was young, I idolized Vonnegut. I'd first found his books when I was in my junior high school library, checking to see where my own novels would someday be filed, which was right after Vonnegut, at least in my library. So I grabbed his book, Breakfast of Champions, and was hooked. I read everything he wrote. He was my hero. That's why, twenty years ago, I got phony press credentials to interview him when he came to read at Gonzaga University, in my hometown of Spokane. He was exhausted from a plane ride and wanted a cigarette and after I stumbled through my first question ("Do you… you know… have any advice… for… you know… a young writer…") he said, "Can I ask you a question? How old are you?" "I'm… uh… twenty." "And you're working for Esquire?" "Well… not exactly." But even though I wasn't really writing a magazine article, Vonnegut politely answered my moronic questions, and after his speech that night, he even pulled me aside to ask if I'd gotten everything I needed. I said I had. A few years ago, after publishing a couple of novels myself, I wrote about my early interview with Vonnegut. Not long after that, a package arrived in the mail: a leather-bound copy of Vonnegut's Sirens of Titan, inscribed to "My fellow novelist, Jess Walter." It was like having your childhood daydream show up in the mail. When I set out to write a novel about the absurdities and corruptions in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, I thought a lot about Vonnegut, about the way he never sacrificed humanity for humor. You've probably seen those What Would Jesus Do bracelets… I felt like, as I was writing The Zero, I was wearing a What Would Vonnegut Do bracelet. When I was done, I sent him the novel and he sent me a card saying he'd really liked what he'd read. And on the other side of the card was a quote from his character, Kilgore Trout: "Life is no way to treat an
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