Marisa Silver is the author of the story collections Babe in Paradise, a New York Times Notable Book, and the novels No Direction Home and The God of War, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fiction has won the O. Henry Prize and has been included in numerous anthologies. Her short story “Leap” was featured in Ecotone’s “Fifth Anniversary” issue and is included in her most recent collection, Alone with You, published April 13, 2010, by Simon and Schuster. Ecotone’s managing editor, Joanna Mulder, had the following conversation with Ms. Silver over e-mail, discussing the two-sided nature of intimacy, the difference between fiction writing and screenwriting, and the need for a writer to be nonjudgmental in order to truly inhabit her character.
While reading your new collection, Alone with You, I began to have the feeling that although I was reading about moments in the lives of many different characters, they each informed the others’. Vivian’s self-consciousness in “Temporary” colors Martha’s free spirit in “Pond.” How in your mind are these stories connected; how did they become a collection?
I didn’t set out to write a collection of traditionally linked stories—in fact, I tried pretty hard to make sure there was variety in the stories so that the collection would feel sort of like a landscape of experience. I never write with themes in mind—I think if I do, the work becomes leaden and forced—but I think that the fiction I write during any given period of time necessarily touches on whatever it is that’s brewing underneath the surface of my thinking. And I don’t even realize what that is until I read the whole of the work. So, in a way, even though I don’t write autobiographical fiction, you could say that the stories reflect what compels me. The stories in Alone with You all seem to revolve around ideas of distance and intimacy. They are about how difficult it is to make connections with the people who are the closest to you, how sometimes recognizing the love you feel for someone throws you back on your own weaknesses and desires and makes you paradoxically more separate and alone. I think a lot of the characters in the book are struggling with the ephemeral nature of intimacy, how it can be there at one moment and then gone, and how hard-won that single moment of connection can be.
How do you know when you’ve got the germ for a story? Does it begin with a character, an idea, a relationship? What about your story “Leap,” featured in Ecotone’s “Fifth-Anniversary” issue? Did it begin with a predator at the lemonade stand, the notion of animal suicide, a relationship altered by infidelity?
This is the question I never have a good answer for! I don’t know how stories come to me. They certainly don’t come to me as fully formed narratives—that much I know. What I have noticed about my process is that I work more like a collagist might work. Small, seemingly disparate ideas come to me at around the same time and I try to figure out how they are connected. I maintain a certain kind of faith that if these ideas are in my brain at the same time, and if they move me in an emotional way, and if they take up residence and won’t leave, then there must be some underlying way in which they are in dialogue with one another. My job, I guess, is to figure out what this dialogue might be, how these ideas relate to one another, and what story can be told that makes sense of them.
I started “Leap” with a collection of random thoughts: a dog that leaps off a cliff, a scar from heart surgery, and the ease of mistaking danger for love. I don’t know how the lemonade guy came to start the story off. Only when I wrote that scene, I found the voice of my character and her particular point of view on desire and danger. This moment at the lemonade stand seemed to crystallize something she would be struggling with during her adulthood. And so then I gave her a husband, and that dog, and that scar, and tried to figure out why I did that.
When I write, I am generally in a very associative place in my mind where I let notions and images swim in and out of my thinking. Stuff comes, like the lemonade guy, and then I keep writing until I figure out why he is there, which in the case of this story didn’t happen until the very end, when the main character’s husband is carrying wrinkled brown grocery bags, which I then associated back to the lemonade-stand guy and his wrinkled bag full or not full of clothing . . . and then I made the connection between those bags and danger, and between danger and love . . . so you see it’s a pretty vague and un-willed process, hard to explain, harder to do!
Do you remember the first short story you ever wrote?
The first story I remember was written when I was in the fourth grade. We were told to find an image and write a story about it. I found a photograph of a painting of an old man sitting on a park bench. I don’t remember much about that painting except that the old man was very alone, and he had a bowler hat and a cane and he was dressed very properly. I then wrote a story about a man who works for the obit page of the newspaper and then ends up killing himself. A cheery, hopeful story for a nine-year-old to write! I always wondered if my teacher had any concerns about my mental well-being after reading it. These days, you’d probably be whisked off for a round of tests after handing in a story like that.
You made an early career as a film director and screenwriter. Some of your credits include Old Enough, a film that you wrote and directed which went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1984; Permanent Record, with Keanu Reeves; and He Said, She Said, starring Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins. What motivated you to step away from the world of film and dedicate yourself to the writing life? Do you ever miss your Hollywood career?
The more I made films, the more I realized that the kinds of stories I wanted to tell were not, generally, the kinds of stories people who financed films wanted to tell. I realized the things I cared about—the nuance of character, the small adjustments in relationships, stories that simply got at something existential, effervescent—were not really the stuff of film, or at least not the stuff of the Hollywood film. I guess another way to put it is that I was beginning to discover my own voice as a storyteller, and once I did, I realized that I was not working in the medium that best supported that voice. You know, I made all my films in my twenties. Sometimes I think that period in a person’s life is one of following any path that opens up, because all choices seem full of potential. The future seems vast and unknown and available for the taking. But then you make some choices, you get older, and you realize you are heading toward what will be your life. I wasn’t sure the life I was heading toward was the one I wanted. Actually, I was certain it wasn’t. So I made what might have amounted to the first really conscious choice of my life. I stopped making films and I began to write.
How is screenwriting different from writing short stories or a novel?
Screenwriting is mainly about dialogue and action. There is no interior thought. There are no detailed descriptions of places, of rooms, of weather. Usually, time moves in only one direction—forward. Although a screenplay can be a masterful document, it is also a template. Actors will come and speak lines, bring physicality to characters. Sets will be built that might be what you had in mind, but might also change due to production costs or locations or the needs of the camera. So, in a sense, you have fewer tools to use to tell a story as a screenwriter than you do as a writer of stories or novels. In many ways, there are more similarities between the novel / short story and film directing than there are between the novel / short story and screenwriting. A director and a fiction writer are each dealing with issues of how to suggest character through behavior, of how to move a story forward in terms of scene juxtaposition, of what narrative distance to use in order to tell the story most effectively. The fiction writer might choose, say, a close third-person narrative voice. A director will use the positioning of her camera to make those same kinds of choices. Is it a close-up? A two shot? Do we see the scene from a distance that takes in a whole room? Or do we see only a corner, a suggestion of the whole.
Whose work inspires you? Who are your literary heroes?
The question that always makes my mind go completely blank! I read widely and variously when I’m writing, because I’m usually focused on how other writers handle issues of craft. But if I had to name a short-story hero, it would be the incomparable William Trevor, whose stories are, to my mind, perfect exemplars of the form. They are as subtle as a blink. Characters make the smallest of changes, they generally live in tiny Irish villages, and the stories have a sort of anachronistic feel to them. And yet each Trevor story contains the whole world of contemporary human experience. A William Trevor story explains what it feels like to be living.
Readers of your new collection will come upon unexpected moments of intimacy—between a white wealthy homeowner and a Polish construction worker, between a pianist and her page turner. Conversely, intimacy is often lacking where we expect to find it—between a husband and wife, mother and daughter, father and son. How did you consider the role of family in this collection?
Well, family is the first place where you experience love. It is also the first place where you experience hate. I’m sure, in some adolescent moment of misery, that we’ve all told a parent or a sibling that we hate them. Family is a place where we experience the most unbridled emotions and we do the least to prettify them or hide them in order to be civilized or well liked. And so, although it may appear that the family relationships in the story are somehow less intimate than others, in fact, I think they are the most intimate. It’s only that intimacy does not always manifest itself in lovely, heartwarming ways. And intimacy doesn’t always mean you are happy. Sometimes, too, characters in the stories discover their emotional capabilities in fleeting relationships with sidebar characters—in “Night Train to Frankfurt” it is through this seemingly incidental moment with the pianist, whom she never really knows, that the page turner discovers something about her ability to love her mother during the most harrowing part of her mother’s life. In the same way that as a writer I try to make everything the character does or experiences somehow enrich a reader’s understanding of who she or he is, I think that those random experiences the characters have with other, seemingly irrelevant characters reveal them to themselves. But most of the characters don’t know it. I don’t really write about moments of self-revelation. Mostly I write about people who don’t understand why they do what they do.
Nothing feels tidy or false at the end of your stories. A character’s uncertainty does not end with her story. How do you know when you’ve arrived at an ending?
I know I’ve reached the end of a story when the central action of the story is completed, and yet, at the same time, something new has just begun. The new thing that has begun has to do with the reader and his or her experience of understanding the resonance of the story, of how what happened in the story takes place not simply within the confines of the narrative, but outside it as well, in the reader’s thoughts, as he or she integrates the story with his or her own experience. For me, stories have to close down and open up at the exact same moment. Readers have to feel satisfied that a certain set of events has reached some kind of reasonable conclusion (and this does not, not, not mean resolution—no one has to learn a damn thing or grow one little bit, as far as I’m concerned!), and they also have to be catapulted into that dreamy state we all sometimes experience when closing the covers of a book we’ve been moved by, that experience of lingering not in the world of the story itself, but in the emotions that the story engenders. I don’t think stories ever really end.
You allow us to step into your characters’ most private thoughts, to experience along with them their greatest uncertainties, fears, and failures. A loving father’s temper sends his son to the emergency room; a daughter faces her mother’s frailty and impending death; a grandfather watches his daughter’s child surpass her in every conventional sense. What is your process for developing a character’s inner world?
I guess the only way I can describe it is that I become the characters I write. Once I hear their voices or have a sense of their bodies or the way they walk down a street, I inhabit them. I strip away all judgment and really try to cleave as closely to their idea of themselves as I can, so that I am not looking at them objectively. I’m not going to describe someone’s limp, I’m going to describe how it feels for him or her to walk with that limp. I’m usually not very interested in describing the way someone looks—I rarely do it in any substantive way, because the way someone looks is another’s perception of that person. The character doesn’t walk around thinking about her long black hair or her crooked nose or her raspberry-colored lips. That stuff distances me as a writer so I don’t spend a lot of time on it.
The most important way of creating character, for me, is to be as specific as possible. One person’s experience of wind on her face is different from another’s. And experience is all filtered through the specifics of situation and desire and a character’s wants. So I make sure I don’t write in any general way about a character doing even the most banal thing, because it is in the very specific and immediate sensation of doing that thing that a particular character can be revealed.
In what span of your writing life was this collection written? Did you write these stories alongside your novels?
I’m a one-idea-at-a-time kind of writer, which can be frustrating when one wants to be prolific! I wrote these stories before and after writing my last novel, The God of War. Three of them before, five of them after.
I’ve heard that an author must at once love her characters and be unafraid to hurt them. Do you find that to be true in your experience? Which of your characters do you have the most sympathy for?
That’s like asking a mother which of her children she likes the best! Here’s the truth. As I said earlier, I set aside judgment when I write, so I don’t condemn my characters for their actions. I’m more interested in exploring behavior than moralizing about it. People do all sorts of things that others think are wrong, or horrible, but they do these things because they are driven by their needs and desires and their wants. So I try to understand what drives my characters to do what they do. I’m interested in all the mistakes we make on our way to trying to get what it is we think we want. I’m interested in the ways we deceive ourselves and in the mythologies we create about ourselves and our lives that help us to explain our actions to ourselves. I am sympathetic to humans in general. It’s hard to live.
Photo: Bader Howar
