Spotlight On…

Today Shya Scanlon talks to us about his forthcoming novel Forecast, how denial can become electricity, and what it was like to serialize his book across forty-two Web sites.

Tell us about the first story you remember writing.

I remember writing bits of stories in college — though at the time I still wrote quite a bit more poetry — but I don’t really remember much about the stories. One was about a guy who develops a crush on a male friend of his, and it kind of looked at the protagonist’s confusion about these feelings. I showed it to a friend and got the perplexed response that “nothing happened” in the story. I remember not knowing what he meant, exactly. Emotions happened! This was before I’d read much of anything within the great American tradition of fiction-where-nothing-happens.

The first story I remember clearly was written after I quit my post-college job to “pursue writing more seriously.” This must have been around 2001. I wrote about an event from my past: a bicycle accident I’d had at 15 that had quite dramatically changed my life. I used turgid language, and was concerned with the sounds of words more than their meaning. In retrospect, I think it helped that I’d chosen an event from my life, because it meant I had a clear picture of what I was trying to write about. Still, many readers didn’t quite understand, if I recall correctly, what was actually going on in certain key passages. I left a lot of the “thingly” parts out, as I might do in a poem, writing around the subject and event, rather than treating it head on. Leaving things unstated and under the surface. This has always been my impulse, really — something I’ve had to train myself away from in the attempt to tell a story. Of course, I don’t want to get too far away from it. But at it’s root it was a kind of childlike refusal to acknowledge that other people don’t already know what I’m trying to say.

This first story was published by Pindeldyboz soon after I wrote it, which really gave me the wrong idea about the relationship between writing and publishing. I wish I’d waited longer before trying to publish. Funny thing for someone who has three unpublished novels sitting in his drawer, perhaps, but after that piece was published, I got into the habit of finding places to send my stories before I was even done with them, which is a fucked up way of writing.

In your forthcoming novel, Forecast, electricity has been replaced by Emotional Transfer technology. Tell us about that and how its presence in the book allowed you to alter traditional narrative.

Whoa! Alter traditional narrative? That’s a pretty loaded statement. I don’t know that I altered traditional narrative. When I hear the word narrative, I think of narrative structure. I’m certain the way the book is structured isn’t anything groundbreaking. There are two parallel narratives that alternate, the chronologically earlier one ending with information about the chronologically later one, and then there’s a third narrative that develops over the course of the book — that of the narrator himself, who becomes wrapped up in the lives and events he’s describing. The one less-traditional narrative device I used was actually weeded out over the course of several rounds of edits. Basically because it proved too jarring for most readers. In the first draft, the narrator didn’t actually use the first person at all until maybe 50 pages into the book, and then only sparingly, here and there reminding the reader that this was being described by someone. It threw the reader, however, and resulted in a far less sympathetic characters once he finally emerged. Since the emotional climax of the book is centered on this narrator, I needed to have people feel like they knew him more than I was letting people. So you see, just as with the story I was describing above, this was really a matter of assuming too much, of failing to acknowledge that the reader who doesn’t have this key piece of information — namely that the narrator is so close to the text — won’t react in the same way I was reacting as the First Reader (i.e. writer).

None of this, of course, really addresses the first part of your question, which is about Emotional Transfer Technology. The most direct effect this technology has on the book is probably on the reliability of the narrator. (To bring readers up to speed, ET is fueled by negative human emotion.) There are certainly other ways this could have gone (anger?), but in Forecast, this leads pretty directly to denial. Denial is the thing most characters speak about using to create electricity, and though Max, the narrator, is largely silent on the matter, his silence itself is curious. I’d expect readers to try to determine whether Max is lying, or is even denying his culpability to himself, and there are no easy answer to this in the book. But it was his position with regard to this sticky issue of reliability that brought him into the story as a central character, that forced him into the action, as it were. In a way this is really due to my interest, during high school, in writers like Borges and Auster, whose explorations into recursive narrative I really got off on in my acid days. So I’m not sure I answered your question directly. I was certainly not interested in telling a “straight story” if there is such a thing, but I also wouldn’t claim to have averted/dodged tradition.

One of the things that impressed me about Forecast is how it incorporates various aspects of genre fiction (detective, noir, love story… etc.) into a cohesive tale that manages to retain the deep reach of literary fiction. Tell us about walking along that edge. Do you think there’s any fundamental difference between literary and genre fiction? If so, what makes them differ?

I’m not calling you out or anything — I’ve certainly spoken about this in the same way — but I think a lot of the issues arise from how people pose the questions. Obviously, there is no real “edge” separating different kinds of books. It’s just a handy metaphor. But it’s also indicative of a way of thinking about genre that presupposes orderly division and clean lines. I think it would be more productive, really, to talk about different kinds of readers and writers, rather than different kinds of texts. Perhaps even different kinds of intentions. Most writers and readers go to fiction for a wide variety of reasons. I’ve seen very few shelves with books for only one kind of literary need, for lack of a better term. I read different books in bed than I do on the train, than I do after work, than I do on the weekends. I read different kinds of books depending on my mood, on my mental state. Similarly, I write different kinds of books. Many writers do. Some are focused on language, some on plot, some on character, some on none of the above. Some are just waking dreams. In Forecast, I was doing a number of different things, and I made a point of allowing a lot of different things into the story. It’s not like the book of poetry I published earlier this year, and it’s not like the semi-autobiographical novel-in-stories I finished last year. As a reader, sometimes you want your head filled with strange, nearly impenetrable language. Sometimes you just want to see pictures. Sometimes you want those pictures to include a spaceship or two. Or maybe not. Actually, I still haven’t written about a spaceship. It’s not that I don’t like spaceships. Honest. I love spaceships. In fact, I am a spaceship. Maybe that’s why it’s been so hard; I hate writing about myself.

Forecast was serialized across 42 different online venues before being picked up by Flatmancrooked. What prompted that project and what did you learn from it? Were people receptive? Churlish? How well did it work in establishing a readership for the book?

In early 2009, I’d been out of grad school for nearly a year, had written other books since finishing Forecast, and was basically faced with the fact that, unless I did something dramatic with it, Forecast would soon be relegated to “the drawer.” I was still kind of in love with it, though, and wanted to share that love. So I decided to post the book on my blog, and in order to drive some traffic there, publish excerpts around the web that could be linked back to the full text. A few very kind and supportive editors agreed to this plan, but I soon realized that this was not an ideal reader experience — reading some bit from, say, Chapter 24, and then coming to start from the beginning. I spoke to a few people about this issue, including Steven Sieghman of Monkeybicycle, and my fiancé Erin Flaherty, and somewhere along the way, the idea of serializing the book surfaced. I started reaching out, and the result you can see for yourself.

What I learned from it, primarily, is that the community of online readers, writers, and editors is a strong and supportive one — less the petty inter-blog squabbles that perhaps inevitably result when loosely affiliated, highly ambitious artists gather and start talking. The editors I spoke to were incredibly supportive, and though it required quite a bit of tactical decision making and follow-through, it was a very clean process met with few major obstacles.

Similarly, readers were very supportive, and I got several nice notes from people who ran across the project somewhere along the way.

That said, there were detractors. There were people who publicly decried the effort, calling it a failure. And to a large extent, I have to agree. Now, this doesn’t mean that nothing good came of it: I believe the book gained quite a bit of good publicity, I found a publisher through it, and I discovered some new readers — which was the ultimate goal (it did not cross my mind that the book would be picked up and published). But I don’t think many people read it through. I think the scope of the project was simply too great for most people to swallow. Of the notes I mentioned above, many were from readers impressed with the writing, but who admitted that the cross-blog reading experience was difficult, and that they were going to wait until the book came out in print.

I’m of course hoping that they do indeed follow through with this stated interest…

In the end, I have to say I’m very happy with how it turned out. How could I be otherwise? But before doing it again, or as advice to other novelists/editors interested in doing something similar, I’d have to revisit the model and see what I could do to improve it. One thing I thought of early on was designing the actual page with each chapter, and getting sites to host and link to it, rather than posting the chapters in whatever format they use for other things. That would contribute some consistency to the reading experience. But it would also be problematic, brand-wise, for the journals/blogs in question. Anyway, it’s an interesting issue. There were a couple of people who took up the cause in different ways. J.A. Tyler serialized his novel The Zoo, a Going, on his blog (later picked up by Dzanc, I believe). I’m currently toward the end of a year-long serialization of J.E. Fishman’s novel Cadaver Blues over at The Nervous Breakdown. These projects are both really ambitious and it’s great to see others find ways of making online serialization a viable form.

What’s the last book that you loved?

I tend not to love books. That is, I’ll love some parts of them and not others. Or I’ll love aspects of them. Maybe that’s the assumption? I don’t know. The way people talk about some books, gush about some books, it’s as if they found not one thing worth changing. I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book like that.

One of the most recent books I read was John D’Agata’s About a Mountain, and there was a lot I loved about it. It was full of incredible information put together, connected, in fascinating, artful ways. Though few passages gripped me on a language level, I don’t think they were supposed to. Simply, the personal story fused to the broader context and characters was rather thrilling. The passages that were more stylistic were perfectly placed, tuning up the rhythm of the text or slowing it down. It felt like I was in very capable hands.

Another book that recently impressed me was The Actual Adventures of Michael Missing, by Michael Hickens. Lish published this book in 1991, I think, when he was still at Knopf, and it’s since gone out of print. (Though it’s available again, self-published by Hickens.) Again, there isn’t much verbal pyrotechnics here, just straight narrative story-telling, but the way the narrator builds his own character and that of those around him is brilliant, and you’re left with the feeling that someone has been whispering dirty secrets in your ear. It’s not entirely consistent, but it’s brimming with pathos, and the final story is brutally terrific.

Falconer, by John Cheever, is another recent find. Fuck, that guy can write. Here’s a book where nearly every sentence is a strange, beautiful thing practically vibrating off the page with passion. It’s largely internal — I mean, the narrative takes place in a prison, but most of the key passages are just thoughts and observations — and it makes you feel like you’re living half a life, like no matter what you think you’re getting from something it’s just the absolutely faintest hint of what’s there. But it kind of falls apart toward the end. I’m not sure what went wrong; I’ll need to read it again to figure that out. I think he gets too wrapped up in plot, or in a particular relationship, and it doesn’t serve the narrative well.

Those are three vastly different books, and there were things about each one of them that I loved very much, but I’m still pressed to say, directly, “I loved this book.” I always imagine those words uttered by someone giving their best friend The Secret or some shit.

Does reading online influence your writing style? How would your work change if you lost access to the Internet for a year?

Honestly, I don’t read very much online. Well, I go through phases. But I haven’t been reading much online for the last year or so. Sure, I browse blogs, but I’m assuming you mean “creative writing.” Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you mean exactly what you say (what a concept!) I actually have several windows open while I’m writing, and switch between them. It’s the computer equivalent to, say, looking out a (real) window or maniacally cleaning my desk. It just provides breaths between paragraphs or pages. It establishes a kind of rhythm. Ebb and flow, all that. I have no idea what would happen without a year of Internet access. I’d communicate less with my friends? I’d have less neck pain? I wouldn’t be able to quickly fact-check while writing, so I’d have to put certain things on hold, or perhaps I’d just write around them. Actually, in my current novel, one of the motifs is mutated half-truths, which characters get from a variety of sources, including TV. The Internet is, I believe, as much a source of mis-information as it is otherwise.

Basically, I’ll write either way. I’ll write if the days are long. I’ll write if the days are short. I’ll write in the winter, I’ll write in the spring. I’ll write with a splinter, I’ll write with bee stings. I’ll write with computers, I’ll write with a pen. I’ll write watching looters raid Starbucks again (on YouTube).

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Shya Scanlon’s work has appeared in Mississippi Review, Literary Review, New York Quarterly, Guernica Magazine, Opium Magazine, and others. His book of prose poetry, In This Alone Impulse, was published by Noemi Press in January, 2010. In 2009, his novel Forecast was serialized online across 42 journals and literary blogs as part of the Forecast 42 Project. Forecast will be launched by Flatmancrooked on November 15th, 2010. Shya received his MFA from Brown University, where he was awarded the John Hawkes Prize in Fiction.