NORTHWEST CORNER is your fifth novel. Can you tell us a little bit about your writing process? Does it differ from novel to novel or from novel to screenwriting?
My writing process remains much the same from novel to novel. It’s not pretty. During the several years it takes me to write a book, I tend to throw out many hundreds of pages. Since I’m not what you might call a “maximalist” writer to begin with – not one of finished books has weighed in at more than 400 pages – this leaves me, every time, with a discouraging ratio of failure to success. Serious novels are by nature massive excavations, even when the story appears to be highly localized; they burrow deep, and find all sorts of surprising detritus (and, if you’re lucky, gold) along the way.
Writing screenplays, on the other hand, is quite a different process. Fundamentally, screenplays are about structure much more than they’re about language. They’re a form of problem-solving. The actual writing moves much faster than with novels; it has to (there are a lot of meetings). You expect to throw out scenes like so much excess packaging; it’s never pleasant, but it doesn’t feel like your liver’s being ripped out, as it does with novels.
When I’m into a novel, I write in the mornings, usually six days a week. If my schedule allows, I extend into the afternoon. (If you see me writing at night, you can be pretty sure that I’m feeling desperate.) I begin the day working longhand on the print-outs of whatever I’ve done recently; often by the time I make it over to my computer, there’s hardly anything left of the last day’s work. Yet hope occasionally springs up at these moments: out of the act of erasure, some strange and buoyant (and no doubt fictional) sense of momentum takes hold. Go figure!
Why, after a dozen years, did you go back to write about Dwight, Ruth and Sam? Was it always your intention to do a sequel to Reservation Road?
I never intended to re-visit any of my characters from any of my books. Honestly, it simply hadn’t occurred to me. But after finishing The Commoner I was eager to return to an American environment, some less inhibited place in which the characters related to each other viscerally, unrestricted by any external code of behavior. Slowly, I found myself thinking of Dwight and Sam and Ruth; there was something in the friction with which they interacted with each other and their own pasts that I found interesting and worthy of further investigation. I’d been writing Northwest Corner for about a year and a half before I began to understand why and how it was it’s own story, separate from (though of course related to) the earlier novel. That was the breakthrough.
The Red Sox and an almost desperate connection to the team and sports, in general, feature prominently in NORTHWEST CORNER. What inspired this? Does this stem from your own fandom or observations of other sports fanatics?
Actually, I’m a Mets fan. There, I’ve said it. Well, we are what we’re born to, I suppose, and my Dad grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan. After the Dodgers abandoned Brooklyn for L.A., and the newly created Mets came to Queens, the hapless Metropolitans became the obvious emotional carry-over, painful as that relationship would eventually prove to be for their fans. Let me put it this way: if you grew up a Mets fan, as I did, then at some innate level you had empathy for Red Sox fans (I’m talking here about the Red Sox as they used to be, not about the killer Red Sox of the last 7 years), and even for old Billy Buckner too. Above all that, I have Dwight and Sam love the Red Sox because, being from the Northwest Corner, if they’d tilted in the other geographical direction as fans it would’ve been toward the Yankees, and that just didn’t feel right. They are a family whose losses loom larger than their victories, and that is just not the Yankee way.
I was very into sports growing up, and I still am. Like a lot of boys and men, my father, my older brother and I related a good deal, for better and for worse, through the playing and watching of various sports. We competed, we fought, we cheered. It is a kind of language of its own, and a ritual into which personal histories are embedded, sometimes deeply. (See Frederick Exley’s wonderful novel, A Fan’s Notes.)
What is your next project? Can readers expect a screen adaptation of NORTHWEST CORNER?
I’ve been reading obsessively about Japan after the earthquake/tsunami/nuclear disaster. As an area, a human-historical space, it seems to be calling me. Some ideas are brewing, thoughts about characters. So it seems quite possible to say at this point that my next novel may well take place in that somewhat post-apocalyptic environment, even though I don’t yet know what that novel will be exactly.
Meanwhile, I’m in the process of creating two television series, quite different from each other. We’re in the golden age of cable television, I think, and the best of the shows to be found there – Mad Men is just the most obvious example at the moment – are far and away the most novelistic form of dramatic writing of our time. This is pretty appealing to a novelist, naturally, so I’m throwing my hat in the ring. We’ll see where the hat falls – or if someone decides to throw it back at me.
What are you reading now?
The last two books I’ve read were both remarkable, in very different ways: David Grossman’s novel, To the End of the Land; and Dave Eggers’ non-fiction account of a Muslim family in post-Katrina New Orleans, Zeitoun. I am filled with admiration and respect for these books and their authors. They are both extremely talented writers, of course; but it’s their deep empathetic conviction that forms the bedrock of their achievements, and that’s what the reader can’t forget.
Tags: author interviews, interview with John Burnham Schwartz, John Burnham Schwartz interview, Northwest Corner interview John Burnham Schwartz
