I got one more week of Les Edgerton in store for you, folks! I wasn't lying when I said this interview was epic. Today, Les discusses fiction with darker themes and his take on writing advice, as a creative writing teacher. Don't forget to snag his latest gem THE RAPIST. If you aren't convinced about its quality, read my review of it. Once again, Les answered my long string of questions with honesty, generosity and candor.
So if I understand well, you chose writing and constant seeking of new experience, but the fact you ended up in legal trouble, would it be fair to say crime fiction chose you? How have you ended up wanting to write about violence and the darker side of the human condition? Was there a triggering event?
I had to laugh, Benoit. “Legal trouble?” That sounds like I was sued for not cutting my grass often enough by the neighborhood association... I was a felon, pure and simple. And a convict and then, an ex-con. The “legal trouble” came from committing burglaries, armed- and strong-armed robberies, selling drugs, etc. Cracking a dude over the head with a crowbar. Stuff like that.
And, yes, there was a triggering event, sort of. I had always written about the darker side of life, mostly because that was what I’ve always seen and been exposed in my existence.
But, for a long, long time, I hid my past from everyone. And never wrote about the truly dark stuff. At the time, I just assumed it would hurt me, especially in publishing. I had no idea for the longest time that editors and publishers actually like real-life criminals as their authors! Half my agents never knew I did time or had held people up or outran the cops in high speed car chases or been in prison. Which meant that my stories, while dark, didn’t go into the really dark stuff I’d experienced.
Even in my first novel, THE DEATH OF TARPONS, which is about an abusive father and that boy’s struggle to find himself, was presented as fiction, even though it was about 85% true and from my own boyhood. And “cleaned up,” quite a bit from much of the horror that was my childhood. In fact, I had a publisher who offered me a $10,000 advance back in the mid-eighties for it, with the proviso I would allow him to put it out as memoir. I told him I couldn’t because it was only 85% factual. He was okay with that and still wanted it presented as memoir, and the reason I eventually did pull it from him was that he wanted to take out some parts that would “offend some readers.” In particular, a scene where the boy’s father beats him with a live king snake. In his words, it “might offend the snake lovers.” This was in the days before we even had the term “politically correct” and this asshole was way ahead of the times, I guess. Offend the snake lovers? That’s gotta be what? Five or six people? Like, who gives a shit about some frickin’ snake lovers? Plus, it was a true event and it was integral to the story so I told him, thanks, but no thanks, and pulled it. When I could have used ten dollars, much less ten thousand. But, what price is one’s integrity?
Anyway, I held back in that book, simply because I thought it would hurt my chances at publication if I exposed too dark of an environment, especially if it was factual.
Keep in mind, this was the eighties and an entirely different climate than today. Today, I know a whole lot more about what publishers want than I did then.
What changed everything for me was first reading Charles Bukowski and realizing for the first time that what I really wanted to write about could be publishable.
The second event occurred in talking to Diane Lefer whom I chose for my adviser twice for my MFA at Vermont College. I ended up trusting her enough that I revealed my background to her. To my shock she told me that my past was a decided plus in publishing. Knocked my socks off when I heard that. And, that’s when I began going to the really cool events in my life.
Diane opened my eyes to a lot of things. Once, she asked me what I thought about a writer whom I won’t name, but who is renowned for writing dark and even criminal stories. This guy’s won about everything out there and kind of acts the tough guy. I told her that my impression of him from his writing—I’d never met him in person—was that he was a phony… and a bit of a poser and a pussy. That he tried to exude this persona of a bad ass or even a criminal, but that his writing gave him away to one who’d actually done time… i.e., moi. I told her he sounded like a guy who drew mostly from the experience of maybe doing a few days in the city jail for drunk and disorderly, but he’d never been close to the inside of a real prison. That his idea of being bad, came mostly from hanging out maybe at titty bars and the like. She said she was glad to hear that, because even though she didn’t have experience herself with the criminal life, his books had always struck that same chord in her.
But, he enjoys this “persona” of being the “real deal,” and he isn’t even remotely close. I’ve run into writers like him since. A lot of them, actually. Whose idea of a criminal is the little drug dealers in their neighborhoods, most of whom are little suburbanite punks trying to supplement their allowances from Mommy and Daddy. Or from hanging out at stripclubs, maybe, thinking that the guys who frequent those places are some kind of real criminal element. Usually, the kind of guy who hangs out in those places is a loser of the nth degree and real criminals mostly laugh at them. Not saying that some of these guys don’t do criminal acts—some do—but really aren’t the kind of truly scary dudes you’re going to be celling with.
And meth and crack dealers? Gimme a break. These are just the bottom of the criminal barrel. Why would anyone think they’re remotely interesting unless their own lives are utterly boring? They’re the far-fringe, unsuccessful moonshine dealers of yesteryear. Hillbilly wannabes who think that because they own a gun and have shot someone that they’re the baddest thing on the planet. Nothing bad ass about most of them at all. Dumb as a box of hammers is the image that springs up in my mind. Pretty easy to figure out, as a rule. They don’t scare anybody except for those who grew up in suburbia. I guess they seem exotic to ‘em… Must be because that seems to be the audience for these kinds of fiction. About all that happens in a lot of those books is a lot of gratuitous violence that seems to be there mostly for the shock value.
Back to your question. I write about violence and the darker side of humanity because that’s what I’m most familiar with. I grew up with it and I chose that life when I came of age and had a choice and could have gone the safe and secure route. It’s never dull. And, I hate boring. Now, of course, I’m paying for it and I was pretty sure at the time that some day I would. I didn’t work for a corporation or a bureaucracy and so I have no pension. No savings, no money in savings, no pension. Nada. And, that’s fine. I had a really cool life and did more in just about any given week than some of these folks have done in their entire existences. And lived that kind of life year after year after year. I just never wanted to be that guy whose biggest deal in life was the two or four years they spent in the service, or the same amount of time spent in college, or the one time they went to Europe and backpacked for the summer. That’s it? That’s sad. As far as I know, you only get to go around once, so why on earth would an intelligent person spend most of their life doing boring-ass shit? Here’s a for-instance. There’ve been several times when I was homeless. I was homeless in Costa Mesa, one of the richest towns on earth, and I was sleeping on the concrete floor of a garage and eating out of the dumpster of the Bob’s Big Boy next door for my meals. Was in pure agony from a severely pinched nerve to where I had to be up three days in a row to be able to go to sleep for an hour. No health insurance or money for a doctor and that was fine. Was right on PCH and from the front door of the garage could look out at the QEII, anchored there. Never for one second did I feel sorry for myself. Why? I was living life and it was never boring, not for a second. I remember looking out at the QEII and thinking about some rich dude out there, and feeling sorry for the guy. I imagined he kind of at least suspected inside that probably the only reason the babe on his arm was there was because of his bank account. I was living in that garage with a gorgeous redhead who had convinced me to come out to California from where we’d been living in New Orleans, and I was pretty sure the guy on that boat would have loved to have a girl like that on his arm, knowing she was there because of him and not because of the checks he could write. That kind of shit is priceless and I’ve always been aware that it was, even in the worst of times. It’s those times that let you know you’re alive.
I feel like I’ve lived the Frank Sinatra version of life. I did it my way. I was getting laid every night by a girl who screwed me because she liked the way I screwed, not because I could give her a charge card. How do you put a price on that? The guy at the cocktail party on the QEII was the unlucky one. I’m pretty sure your body feels pretty much the same way in jeans as it does in an Armani suit. It’s your weak-assed mind that tells you it feels better, mostly because some dickhead you don’t even like pretends to your face that you’ve accomplished something by wearing it. Your skin doesn’t know. Trust your skin.
But, I owe a debt to both Bukowski and to Lefer. They showed me what was possible.
You're a creative writing teacher and you have written writing advice books. What's your take on the current writing advice market and how do you think young writers should use such a tool?
The writing advice market is bigger than it’s ever been and in many ways, better. In other ways, not better. Looking back to when I began writing many decades ago, there were very few such books available. Writers learned primarily from… reading novels and trying to figure out what worked and then adopting that for their own work. Today, there are so many books out there that the learning curve can be tremendously shortened. Although, like anything, there’s a downside to the flood of advice. Like anything else, there’s a lot of good… and there’s a lot of slag and dross.
There are expectation problems among many writers. The expectation that there are going to be “secrets” revealed in these books that are somehow going to catapult them onto the bestseller lists if they only unearth and use these secrets. I hate to be the one who tells folks that there really are no such secrets to becoming a good writer. All of the secrets in writing are right there in the open. They’re in the pages of novels you have open before you. When you see something that affects you emotionally in the novel you’re reading, stop and go back and figure out what that writer did that worked and how he or she accomplished that.
Often, writers read as… readers. Not as writers. They’re reading books on a very superficial level. For entertainment. That’s fine for nonwriters, but for a writer that’s foolish. To be blunt, it’s kind of stupid. It’s passing up the single best way to learn to write available.
I had a student ask me one time that if he tried to analyze every novel as a student and not just to be entertained, wouldn’t he lose the “magic” of the work? As it happened, this guy was a musician. Well, I said to him. Do you understand how to play an instrument? I won’t give his responses to the questions that follow because his answer to each was “yes.” Do you know how to play several instruments? Do you know how to write lyrics? Do you know how a symphony works—how all the parts go together to form a whole? Do you know how to create and build emotion within the listener with progressions? I asked a bunch more questions in this vein and then I asked him: “Does your knowledge affect your enjoyment?” Sheepishly, he answered that it didn’t. It added to it, he said, because he knew better than most the skill and craft and art the performer brought to the work. It only heightened his enjoyment.
Another time, I had a college basketball player ask me what was basically the same question. Well, I said, do you understand how a man-to-man defense works? Do you know how zone defenses work? Do you know the differences between a one-three-one and a two-three and a three-two? Well, sure he said. Of course. Do you know how a pick-and-roll works, I asked? Do you know that to be a good shooter you aim for the back of the hoop and never the front? Again, he answered in the affirmative. Then, I asked the clincher. Does that take away from your enjoyment in watching a game? Do you think the guy sitting next to you in the stands who knows nothing about the intricacies of the game enjoys it more? I trust you can guess his answer.
The same things could be asked of a chef. Because of a chef’s knowledge of spices and foodstuffs and combinations of foods, does he enjoy eating a meal less? It’s a question that can be asked of any art form. The answer is always going to be that the more the participant knows about the art and craft of anything, the higher the level of enjoyment is going to be, even though part of his focus is always going to be on how the art was created.
This sounds like a no-brainer and a waste of space to even point this out, but you’d be surprised at how many would-be writers have this attitude. Personally, I wish more of them had it. We’ve got enough competition as it is…
All of this is to say that there are too many writers who don’t do the work themselves while reading and expect to pick up the latest and greatest craft book as a kind of shortcut to find this stuff out. It can’t work like that and it doesn’t.
Does that mean that craft books are useless? Not at all. The only thing I’d suggest is that they’re not relied on at the exclusion of the writer doing his own work to learn.
Also, the writer needs to realize that craft books are these days often seen as cash cows by some publishers. There is more pressure than ever to convince a bestselling author to write one. They bring an enormous audience with them and that means, sales and money, boobie. Several of these aren’t delivering much in the way of scholarship or new material, but are mostly regurgitating things most writers already know or have already been promulgated in earlier books. The bestselling author often likes to write them as well, as it’s attractive in that very often it has the effect of making them look smart and even somewhat “academic.” I imagine if Stephanie Meyer and James Patterson come out with a craft book, the publisher is going to be rubbing his hands together in glee at the thought of all the large Christmas bonus checks he’s going to be able to write out to his employees.
Those are some of the negative things about craft books. The positives, however, mostly far outweigh the negatives. One very substantial benefit to a writer to read them is that very often seeing a particular bit of advice on the page validates something his instincts have told him is something he should be doing but he erroneously thought he shouldn’t. I had that very experience happen to me. Like most of us, I suffered through periods where I didn’t trust my instincts in writing. I had read book after book, sat through workshop after workshop and lecture after lecture, where the advice had invariably been to “just get it down, lickety-split, and then go back and ‘fix it’ through rewrites.” Apply that “work while the ‘muse descends’ white-hot fever of creation” and then go back and rewrite it. Well, my instincts always told me not to do that. What I wanted to do was make sure every sentence, every paragraph was perfect before I went on. But, who was I? I was this little nobody and all of these published, successful writers were continually telling me that my instincts were wrong and that I should just write as fast as I could. So I did what they said.
And, then, one day I picked up a new craft book and this guy (wish to hell I could remember who it was to give him proper and deserved credit!) was saying just the opposite. I can still remember the day I read him. He said to not do what everybody was always advising. He said to take your time, craft each sentence perfectly before moving on. He said that when you marked things to be rewritten, or underlined a word you furnished in haste and knew there was a better word but you didn’t want to stop to figure it out, or knew you were having your character make a wrong turn, that you almost never were able to return to your frame of mind at that point and that instead of rewriting, you became a copy editor instead. He advised (this was in the typewriter days) to always use your best, most expensive paper—that 20-bond stuff with the watermark—and not the cheap stuff. He said when you came up with a word that wasn’t quite right to stop right there and find the perfect word. That you should never go onto the next page until the page you were writing was as good as you could possibly make it. He said a whole bunch of other things along these lines, and at the end, he said that you’ll still probably have to do a rewrite but he predicted you’d do far less rewrites than you had previously.
And, he was right. Before I read this guy, I rewrote every novel an average of 8-10 times. The instant I applied his advice, I went to an average of one rewrite per novel.
What had happened was that I was like most writers. I was unsure of myself and of my instincts. I needed someone in “authority” i.e., a bona fide writer, to tell me that what I wanted to do was okay. That my instincts were sound and to follow them. Bless this guy! He gave me “permission” to do something I had always known I should do, but was afraid to because it seemed to go against the overwhelming “wisdom” of the writing fraternity.
What I didn’t realize fully at the time that most of us who write do so because first we were readers. Voracious readers. That means we’ve already assimilated most of the writing techniques we’ll ever need as writers, simply by dint of our history—of reading thousands and thousands of books. That we already know by all that reading what’s good and what isn’t and how to achieve good writing. That we have good “instincts” honed by years and years of reading. In fact, I can tell very quickly the folks who join my writing class who’s going to make it and who isn’t. The person who’s been reading nonstop and voraciously since the age of five or six has a decent chance of becoming a good writer. The one who admits they’ve read very little most of their life, has very little, if any chance of success. We begin to learn to write at around that age. Not when we’re twenty. And, I know there are stories of people who’ve had success who fit that latter description. But, I’m talking about “good” writers, not necessarily published writers or even bestselling writers. Good isn’t always descriptive of those authors…
Another benefit to reading craft books is related to the above. Very often, they serve to remind us of things we already knew and that’s valuable. Or, they show us something that we kind of knew or suspected was true but we hadn’t yet articulated it to ourselves and the book made it clear the thing we were perhaps fuzzy about.
What’s important about craft books is that even the very worst will almost have at least one piece of solid information in it. If a person spends say fifteen bucks on a book and learns one tiny piece of useful information, that book has paid for itself. So, I’d suggest to buy every single one of them. The ones that are repetitive or don’t show us much of anything new are still worth the purchase because if nothing else, they’ll probably serve to remind us of something important we’ve forgotten.
The other thing is that writing changes. The public’s taste in novels changes. That means the writing advice has to also change to keep up. John Gardner, author of one of the most popular writing books in history, realized this (although some of the people promoting his books don’t), when just before he died, he had lunch with his most famous pupil, Raymond Carver. At this lunch, he told Carver to “forget everything he’d taught him in college.” That “everything in writing had changed and that his advice then no longer applied.” And, he was exactly right. It’s too bad that there are tons of writing teachers in colleges world-wide that never saw this advice he gave Carver, because they’re still recommending his books to their students. That doesn’t mean they’re useless—they’re still very valuable, but only in context to his era. That’s the part they don’t tell their students. Probably because they don’t know or realize this. Much of what Gardner had to say is extremely valuable… and much of it isn’t. If he’d lived, he would have written other books on writing that would have refuted at least some of what he said in his earlier books. But, he didn’t. He died and his words are frozen in amber while the writing world has moved on in major ways.
And, so as not to mislead—I heartily recommend Gardner’s books on writing. But, in context. That means, read his, but read everything else in craft books, especially the current ones. Even the bad ones, but hopefully more of the good ones. The more you read, the more you’ll be able to sort out what works today and what doesn’t.
By the way, the single best piece of information on writing I’m aware of can be found by studying Richard Brautigan’s brilliant short story, “1/3, 1/3, 1/3.” If you read this and understand it, and more importantly, see yourself in the story, there aren’t enough craft books in the world to help you master the craft. You’ll see why Flannery O’Connor said in response to the interviewer who asked her if writing programs discouraged writers: “Not enough of them.”
* It was the bulk of it, but it's not over. Conclusion to come next Thursday*
* It was the bulk of it, but it's not over. Conclusion to come next Thursday*