On Writing No. 2
Novelist Jim Shepard
Originally printed in Vol. 1 No. 2, The Dumb Phone. Print subscriptions are available on our website. Digital subscriptions (both free and paid) are available via Substack. If you purchased a physical copy, send us a DM and we’ll comp your Substack subscription:
I first came across Jim Shepard’s work in County Highway last year, a story titled “The Sons of Liberty.” I’ve never gone in for historical fiction, but I was enjoying it too much, too immediately, to remember to think of genre. After I finished, for a long time, I lay in the emotion, staring up at the ceiling on a Sunday afternoon, during what must have been the summer. When I finally got up I was late to meet Brandon Westlake. I ran the print copy over to him and waved it around in the wind. “You’ve gotta read this guy,” I said, though to Canadian ears I must’ve been yelling. “This guy is writing better than anyone out there.”
The story was, in a sense, one of those before and after moments you wait for. I felt that I’d misappraised an entire genre; I started to fear that I was missing out on quite a lot. My entry point into this world was Shepard’s work. His story collection Like You’d Understand, Anyway ----- a finalist for the National Book Award and a Story Prize winner ----- spanned more space, time, and mind than anything I’d previously read. Next I picked up Project X, a harrowing journey into the minds of isolated adolescent boys, which has only become more relevant with the years. Finally, I read The Book of Aron, one of the greatest Holocaust stories I’ve come across in any form (and the winner of too many awards to list here). Each night for two weeks I cried myself to sleep reading that book. It was the first time I did anything like that since college, right after Samantha left me.
But let’s not go there. Let’s instead go to February, a two-foot snowstorm on the horizon, a rental car, a drive to Williams College. Shepard is waiting for me outside of his wife’s office. He stands 6’2” (maybe 6’3”) and is built, as Hemingway referred to himself, like a natural heavyweight. We go into the office, we’re surrounded by books, and we have fallen into conversation right away. I take out the Sony voice recorder I’d purchased the night before. I hit the red button.
Non Grata
I have a few questions about your writing.
Jim Shepard
I’m ready.
NG
How do you make it so propulsive?
JS
When a reader is sitting down and going, “why am I reading this?” some of it might be the subject, some of it might be the beautiful language, but part of it is that something compelling is going on.
I talk to my students a lot about what I call rate of revelation : Are you always feeling like you’re learning something? What slows stuff down is when you feel the writer is either wallowing in one thing or indulging themselves in another, and you’re feeling like, I already know this, but you’re just giving me more of it.
As I’m writing and revising I’m thinking, what am I learning here? What am I getting here that I didn’t get before? Is everything justifying itself? And that means if it’s doing work similar to work that’s done elsewhere, I got to get rid of it.
That’s a version of Hemingway’s “shoot your darlings.” But it’s very hard because you did all that work to come up with this great shit, and it’s very hard to not say, well, throw it in, right? What a great detail. People will remember that detail. But for me, every one of these details has to emotionally justify itself, both in terms of the characters and the narrative. If it’s not, it has to go.
In the case of a story like “Sons of Liberty,” I might have five or six details that I really want to get in about how the tea looks when it hits the harbor water: vivid, wonderful images of what a shit-ton of tea in shallow water looks like. But you don’t get to do five of them. You only get to do one. And you only get to do it at the right spot because you’re trying to move the narrative forward. You’re moving everything forward with as much economy and drive as you can come up with. The metaphor you’re operating with is much more like a guerrilla action than a mass invasion.
NG
Did you consciously feel like you were developing a style as you started writing?
JS
For most writers, except for a certain kind of self-important horse’s ass, style operates the way George Saunders articulated it. You figure out what sort of things you can’t do, or don’t like to do, and what sort of things you do like to do, and that starts to become your style.
Saunders tells the story of being the one person in the Syracuse MFA program who everybody agreed was a very sweet guy, but was never going to make it. Every one of his stories was a disaster. He was good friends with one of the teachers, Toby Wolff , who really liked him. He’d be over there having meals, but even Wolff would be like, George… these stories… they’re just not very good. And he was in despair, was about to give up, and then thought, well, if I’m going to go down, I might as well do what I want to do. As he put it, if I’m going to go down, I might as well go down making some fart jokes. And so he started doing the kind of stories George Saunders writes.
When I was teaching I’d give students an exercise on narrative modes where you have to do a scene in one mode only. So you have to do one scene in just dialogue, one in just exposition, one in just description, one in just action. And instantly people go: I really take to action, I hate description. Instantly they figure out what they like doing.
One of the cool things about the exercise is that they have to get me the same information. So if you want to tell me that Arjun is obsessed with his mom, you have to do that in action, you have to do that in dialogue, you have to do that in exposition. Obviously for most everybody some are much easier than others.
NG
Where does the subject matter for your stories come from?
JS
I began by trying to be a naturalist writer who would write about my own little niche, which was Bridgeport, ConnecticutItalians, who I thought were kind of entertaining. And it felt like, Okay, this is all you know, this is all you can write. And a lot of people are not gonna be interested in it, and that’s fair, because who would be, right?
Going to Brown and working with John Hawkes was a huge boon for me because he didn’t tell me, “Don’t write that.” He was just clearly bored by it. What he modeled for me was not, hey, go write something else. What he modeled was, whenever I got weird at all, he would jump on that. This moment is amazing, this is so weird. And I was like, “Oh, yeah, it is kind of weird, isn’t it?” Because we’re all so certain of our own normality, right? He was very useful at reminding me to valorize the weirdness, because that was the only hope I had of being original. And I was genuinely weird enough that I could do that, which turned me towards stuff that interested me.
So I’d be like, well, I’m interested in tsunamis. How am I going to write about a tsunami? I didn’t experience a tsunami. So then you’re thinking, how do you write anything that has any kind of authenticity to it at all?
It’s two steps: One is, why don’t you learn something about fucking tsunamis? The other is, and this is the really crucial thing, why does this matter to you? If you can’t figure the latter thing out, then you might as well be writing nonfiction about tsunamis.
That was a crucial step for me. I gave myself permission to go to other worlds, but then I had to go, why would anybody, other than an obsessed ten-year-old boy, care about this world? Why is this important? Because it isn’t enough to go, well, it’s just objectively a good story, isn’t it?
In terms of that propulsiveness, I’m always thinking what can I do to make this even more streamlined. I had a story last summer in the New Yorker called the “Queen of Bad Influences.” It’s about a pair of women in 1915 who are clearly drawn to one another. They’re both lonely and they think, God I never thought anybody like you would be in the world. And they’re both so inhibited by the world they’re in that they’re like, What’s the parameters of this? I guess we can have lunch.
I was planning this whole story out where you’d watch the track of this relationship developing, and then I thought that it’s gonna end in some catastrophic way. Maybe they’d be on the Lusitania. What I’m doing at that last point is trying to engage that ten-year-old boy. I’m trying to convince myself that I’m sitting down to have fun at the desk, which is hard to do. But if I’m going, hey, you’re reading and writing about the Lusitania, cool. I want to learn more. So then I’m saying, wow, and that’s leading me to emotion as opposed to the opposite. So then I’m writing a story and I have this plan. We’re going to unfold this relationship in all of its complexity, and then we’re going to have this disaster happen.
I get about five pages in and I’m like, you know what? I’m putting her right in the water. The relationship seems to be starting to develop and bang, she’s in the water. The ship is already sinking. Suddenly you realize, if you’ve been doing it for a while, that the reader appreciates that so much. Oh my God, I thought we were going to have to do five more chapters before we got to this inevitable event, and now you’re just there. That’s such a relief.
NG
When you’re talking about the ten-year-old boy, I think of “Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay.” Just the fact that there was once a wave, 1720 feet, bigger than the Empire State Building.
JS
When I was about ten, I read that narrative, because that really happened to that father and son. For years I thought I would like to tell that story. But for me, as I said before, the question is, how is this relevant to anybody who’s not ten-year-old Jim Shepard ? How is this relevant in any way that’s not just, well, cool, that’s the biggest wave ever, right? That usually takes some teasing out.
A lot of literature is interested in that giant gap that exists between who we are at our best and who we are most of the time. A lot of my stories are about using moments like Lituya Bay or the sinking of the Lusitania to put as much light on that gap as I can. And also to suggest that we often think that we’ll be in control of the amount of time we have to shrink that gap. So maybe I feel like there’s all sorts of ways in which I’ve let Arjun down, but he’s young, I’m not that old, we’ll figure something out, right? Catastrophe has a way of going, You’re out of time. You didn’t move quickly enough. It has a way of reminding us that the world is not on our schedule, that the world is on its own schedule, that, as one writer memorably put it, history is about to be let off the leash and you’re in the way.
NG
Do you ever feel like historical fiction doesn’t get enough respect in literature?
JS
Historical fiction was a non-literary ghetto, like horror. But one of the good things about the diversifying of our tastes is that all of those genres can now be literary. So you have Kelly Link and Karen Russell can do Vampires in the Lemon Grove.
Literary historical fiction is fiction, not history, not nonfiction. Implicitly or explicitly, it is trying to answer the question you have when you’re reading a story about Gettysburg: Why should I give a shit about this right now? What does this have to do with anything that I should care about now? So if you read “The Sons of Liberty” and said, well, I just thought it was a really good evocation of what it was like to be in Boston at that time, I’m like, great. If you said, that’s all it was, I’d be a little disappointed.
There are moments in there that are a little more explicit than others. When you have a character in 1774 say that one half of the country can’t talk to the other half anymore, you think, oh, okay, so there’s a reason this is sticking in your head now. There’s a reason you wanted to write about this moment, as opposed to the French and Indian War, right? That helps address the issue I’m trying never to lose sight of: Why is this interesting to anyone other than nerds who are devoted to this subject? Because I’ll hear from them. You know, they’ll be like, actually it was an earlier day, blah, blah, blah.
NG
What do you think about auto-fiction?
JS
A lot of literary readers valorize it because there’s a sense that it’s getting really close to the bone, and that’s what literature should do, right? You have a certain kind of reader that thinks it’s more literary than “The Sons of Liberty” because, in “The Sons of Liberty,” the guy is clearly using his imagination. Auto-fiction is bulletins from the front. This is the real shit.
When I was at Bread Loaf, the writers’ conference, with Tim O’Brien, he was debuting The Things They Carried. It was blowing people away, partially because it seemed so terrifyingly honest. The last story in that collection is called “How to Tell a True War Story.” It’s this agonizing story about a little daughter grilling her dad about the awful things he did in Vietnam. After the reading, people would come up to Tim with tears in their eyes, and they would go, what do you say to your daughter now? And Tim would go, I don’t have a daughter. And he would get kudos coming and going, because before they asked him, they thought he was so brave to put down what really happened to him. And after, they were like, Wow, he persuaded me so fully. He’s such a good fiction writer that I was completely convinced. He is a really good fiction writer, but part of what he’s done is mobilize this fallacy, this tendency, that people have to think, if the story seems to align with what they know or suspect of an author’s biography: I bet that really happened. So if I set a story in Bridgeport about Italians, people are like, well, this is probably exactly what happened. And if I set a story in Lituya Bay, I could have something that literally happened to me and put it in there and they’re like, oh, good imagination. So you have those options.
In global terms, people are being wildly celebrated for flamboyantly not going beyond their experience. People like Knausgaard will intricately and eloquently explicate, here’s how I shaved, here’s how I went downstairs, here’s what I thought about my morning. It has to be artful, obviously, or people will be bored out of their skulls. But part of the authority is people going, Wow, this is so vulnerable, this is so honest, right? But it’s artifice, it’s construction.
The writing advice I got that was better than write what you know was a version of write what you didn’t know you didn’t know. Teach yourself something as you’re going along. When I started out at first I thought we were supposed to aspire to write what you know, here’s a story we can learn from, that sort of thing. But that has the sense that I already understand where I’m going before I get there. And that’s always a fatal problem in fiction.
NG
Do you outline?
JS
Always for novels and for the research-heavy stories. I have to do that in order to organize the information I have. But it only works because I register how contingent and how fraudulent it is. I put that map in front of me so that I can tell myself I know what I’m doing. But if I go far enough into that map and I haven’t changed anything important, then I know something’s very, very wrong.
That map is just there to reassure me that I’m not entirely lost. If I don’t start varying it pretty quickly, that means I’m not learning anything, and that means I’m just declaiming. I’m just going: Here’s my design. And the best and most intricate design I’ve ever come up with wasn’t nearly intricate enough. It always had to be just a starting point.
The designs that I’ve come up with, the designs that I’m able to look back on now, once I’ve finished up, are wonderfully complicated sometimes, and they were not what I started with at all. When I taught literature I wouldn’t teach something like “The Dead” or Lolita right away, because if you think that’s what you have to produce in terms of design in order to get going, you’ll shoot yourself in the head, right? Because you can’t do that.
It’s hard to remember that Joyce and Nabokov are doing that not with their initial designs but with ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty revisions as they’re starting to pick up the pattern. They’re going, Oh, this will be even more spectacularly intricate if I move this over here and get rid of that. Because now I’m starting to see what I’ve been doing. And now I can rearrange it more. But you have to start with something.
NG
Why do many of your stories focus on alienated adolescents?
JS
I don’t think we get very far from our obsessions and our sense of, as I was saying before, that gap between who we are at our best and who we are at our worst. In those adolescents are versions of me in all sorts of both real and imagined situations. There’s a million things that you are concerned with in theory, but there’s probably five or six that you keep coming back to in practice.
That’s an interest that you should register because it’s obsessive, and it means you haven’t figured it out yet. You’re still working on it. That dynamism is part of what animates fiction, as opposed to, I have wisdom and I’m going to pass it on to you: Don’t be isolated as an adolescent. I do tend to write about isolated and frustrated figures, and I also tend to write about relationships. My sense is that isolation can be compromised in all sorts of wonderful ways, and it’s problematized in all sorts of wonderful ways as well. I do write a lot about women protagonists as well, but some of the obsessions stay the same.
NG
Does it feel harder to write about female protagonists?
JS
Well, all of it is hubristic. One of the things that was true for a while with writers, and now not so much, is writers used to be superstitious about authority. Especially at the height of the wokeness stuff, it was like, you don’t get to write about anybody who’s not exactly you. I had no patience for that, as you might guess. You have a huge responsibility if you’re writing about someone who’s not you, especially if you’re representing a different group, but that’s a responsibility. You’re either going to live up to it or you’re not.
But when someone in a workshop would go, I’m a little troubled by the idea that he feels he could write about a New Yorker when he’s from the Midwest, I would say:
“Where are you from?”
“Brooklyn.”
“Where in Brooklyn?”
“Prospect Park.”
“Well, where do you get off writing about somebody in Williamsburg? Have you been to Williamsburg? Yeah, but how long?”
I mean, you can do that forever. You need to register that this whole project is hubristic in fundamental ways. Where do you get off writing about your best friend? Where do you get off writing about your mother? Where do you get off writing about yourself from twenty-five years ago? Do you really have that authority unless you claim it? So part of what you’re always trying to do is register with some humility, Hey, what I’m seeking to do here is difficult.
But if all of literature is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination, as soon as we announce that we can’t write about other people, we might as well just shut the whole project down.
The other thing that was problematic about the woke stuff was something that I think Roxanne Gaye said, she just said the quiet part out loud. At one point she said to white writers, you need to stay in your lane. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s not the way literature works. We don’t need lanes. Because that is identity politics, not literature: I get my little turf and you get your little turf and we don’t try to understand each other.
NG
Do you have a strong moral sensibility when it comes to art?
JS
To some extent I recognize the limitations of the Matthew Arnold art is good for you model, and I certainly don’t think that part of what I’m trying to do is make everybody a better human being. But I also think that artistic works carry inherent values with them. And if, as I said before, literature is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination, part of what I’m applying is that’s a good thing to have exercised. It’s hard for me to imagine the works that I admire most having made anybody a worse human being. If those people, if those ideas were engaged, you’re a little better off for having read them. I guess it is a little bit like art is good for you.
A lot of times writers will say that they’re not about morality or ethics, and what they mean is they’re not didactic. Nabokov has a lot of famous rants where he says, there are no morals to be learned with these works. These works are perfectly amoral. You can’t possibly read Lolita and think it’s amoral. Lolita has, at its climax, the narrator saying, if it is proven to me that my predation on this little girl doesn’t matter at all, then nothing means anything anymore. It’s all about ethics in some ways.
I think what Nabokov was responding to was a pinheaded model of reviewing that he had to deal with in America, in which everybody read everything as to what’s the moral, what’s the bottom line. And he was so sick of that, that he was like, there is no bottom line, there is no moral. He would much rather have a reader say, Lolita is perfectly without ethics than have a reader go, well, here’s the moral of Lolita. He didn’t want to hear that shit. But there’s no way on earth he would say there’s no ethics to that book, or there’s no morality to that book. There’s no way on earth he would say that.
NG
Do you have a hard stop at any point?
JS
We probably should break around 1.30.
NG
What time is it now?
JS
1.30.
NG
Oh shit.
JS
You need to get back to before you get buried in the snow.
NG
Let’s ask a few more questions.
JS
Sure, sure.
NG
Your writing process: Handwriting, typewriting, computer?
JS
I went to word processing fairly early because it’s much simpler. But there’s never been a stage that didn’t involve longhand. When I went to word processing, there would always be a moment when I would print out whatever I’ve done and go over that in longhand. I’ve found that anything that is a different mode is a really good way of trying to get new eyes on the prose, or new eyes on the idea.
When I’m going over stuff, I may print out what’s on the screen and go over it with handwritten notes. However many ways I can get myself to revise. It’s a way of reminding yourself that, as a writer, you always want to prematurely say that it’s finished, and you’re always wrong.
NG
Hours? Routine?
JS
When I’m working on a new thing, it’s usually eight a.m. to twelve or one p.m. The whole morning usually. That’s a lot of wandering around and bothering the dogs, too. I’m not writing the whole time. During the last stages of a work, I might go longer if I’m getting real momentum. If things are going poorly, I might go shorter. I might go eight to ten and then quit in despair.
NG
Do you try to hit a word count each day or no?
JS
No.
NG
What do you think of ChatGPT?
JS
It seems pretty disastrous in terms of its homogenizing blandness. More importantly, though, it’s leading to a world where nobody needs to learn to write either. Given that writing is a version of thinking—given that writing is a way of revising the half-assed shit you first came up with—once we decide we don’t need to do that, that’s yet another way in which we’ll allow ourselves to get stupider. We’re essentially farming out what it means to be a human being.
NG
We’re calling this issue back to the dumb phone because technology and literature are at odds with each other. Modern technology is not only sapping your attention span and your imagination but it also eats into your spare time. You can read a book or you can go on TikTok.
JS
Historically the relationship between the two was likely antagonistic. Now it’s direly antagonistic. The top schools in the country are saying that they can’t get kids to read whole books. And it’s both a decay of attention span and a measure of distraction that never existed before.
I mean, I was a reader as a young person, but even I would get a book and I’m like, I’m not going to read that right now. A good family friend who knew I wanted to become a writer gave me a box set, when I was in sixth grade or so, of Salinger. I’d never heard of Salinger. I opened the box set and there were no images because Salinger had banned images on the covers of his books. So I’m like, What the hell is this? This guy usually gives me really good gifts, but he blew it this time. I just threw it in my closet.
But in those days there were three shitty television channels. You’re not tracking your friends. You don’t have a phone that’s allowing you to look at animals in Mozambique. So it starts raining. The television is shitty. I can’t reach my friend on the phone. I’m like, well, I might as well read this fucking book. And then I love it. I’m like, oh my God, what is this? Now there’s this impulse, I got to check the phone. When I check the phone, I’m going to find something.
If you imagine reading as a pyramid, with formal poetry at the very top and maybe Stop signs at the bottom, Americans are doing a poor job with the entire pyramid at this point. It’s always a little bracing and demoralizing to go to a place like Europe and to see that they’re not so far down that road yet, that they still valorize reading and they still make time for it.
NG
What’s behind that?
JS
Part of it is that America is one of the only advanced countries I can think of where, baked into its culture is a proud anti-intellectualism. I don’t want to get too egg-heady about this, right? It’s not only okay to not read a lot of books, but it’s actually more aligned with the American figures you’re taught to want to be like. Our President is proud that he doesn’t read a lot of books. Did John Wayne read a lot of books? It’s hard not to feel like we’re turning into Sparta, where what you want to do is show up on a date and talk about what your workout program is. Or talk about what your plan for your body over the next twenty years is.
NG
Have you noticed a drop off in reading ability?
JS
Reading ability, but mostly reading appetite. You used to expose people in a workshop to fifteen or twenty different short story writers, and they’d be like, Oh my God, who is this Joy Williams? What else can I read of hers? Now it’s, I really loved that story by Joy Williams, and they don’t ask for anything more.
There’s no longer a cultural repository what we all can draw on, either, which means everybody’s reinventing the wheel. That’s made it harder and harder to have discussions that are based on the idea that literature is part of a process. It’s part of a tradition. So you have students who want to be rebellious, and you’re like, what are you rebelling against? You don’t even know, right? And they’re going, yeah, but I want to be able to do what I want to do. And you go, who’s stopping you? And it turns out what you want to do somebody did in 1781. And you don’t know it.
NG
How valuable do you think it is to read the classics like Plato, Homer, Virgil?
JS
Years ago, I was talking to John Irving, and I always had a sense that if you start a book, and it’s a good book, you should finish it, right? And John was liberating because he said that he just stopped if he wasn’t enjoying a book. And I thought, that’s not the worst advice to give people. I’ll say to my students, if you’re really not engaging this and it’s not assigned, move on, go to something you want to read. You want to be engaging passionately rather than just saying you’ve read something.
That being said, there are some books that are still forming the basis of our world culture. I would put the Odyssey in there and probably not Plato. A lot of those philosophical tenets—what does it mean to be a Hegelian? what does it mean to be a Nietzschean?—have been leached out into other works. They’re in the world in other forms. But the Odyssey is on my list of something everybody should know maybe because there are certain narratives that have been pillaged in so many different ways, they’ve been so influential. Not only have they changed the way we think about things, but they’ve been a wellspring of so many other originalities that it’s probably useful for you to know.
NG
Given the present state of reading and literature, do you throw your hands up? Are you distraught about it every day?
JS
It’s hard not to be dispirited, at the very least. American literary culture is pretty close to a state of collapse. When I don’t despair, I think, well, that’s America. It’s not the case in France, or Sweden, or lots of other places.
Some arts are more vital in America than others in terms of having a passionate following across a wide range of Americans. Film is still a little better off than... I mean, film is in much more trouble than I would have thought. Some of that is because it’s being undermined by shit stuff—like this Clavicular guy you told me about, or TikTok—but also, happily, by the healthiness of television.
Music may never be in deep trouble in America because music is more passive. It doesn’t take the kind of commitment on most people’s part that the other arts take. It allows Americans to multi-task, which doesn’t work with literature. I know so many people who go on the treadmill and read the latest novel. You’re not doing too good a job of reading a novel if you’re on the treadmill. But they can listen to music all day doing that, right? So some of the arts, I think, will stay very healthy. I don’t have a lot of optimism about literary arts in America, but I also don’t think that’s the end of literature in the world by any means.
NG
What would need to change for a renaissance?
JS
I could imagine that happening if a component of the culture, what was always called something like the elite—the people who go to college or the people who read literature or the people who want to talk about movies rather than just consume them—they rebel at the dumbing down. The dumbing down gets to such an extent that they say, this is unacceptable.
I don’t see how that would work for the whole culture because the whole culture is bifurcating so dramatically. We’re about to have a UFC fight on the White House lawn. I don’t think the people showing up for that are going to be salvageable in terms of asking them to do more reading.
But I could imagine a renaissance where that split becomes even more dramatic and there’s a component of the culture that is rededicated to those values, that says, If they’re going to go even farther in that direction, we’re going to go even farther in this direction. That I can imagine.