There’s a moment in the short story “No Cops” where the heroine of the story Leslie is hanging with her closest friend as she closes up a patron-less bookstore in Missoula, Montana. Leslie holds a “waifish” book of contemporary poetry as she spaces out and contemplates the merits of intention and laziness, of love and location. Then she suddenly wants to email an ex-boyfriend who is passing through town and asks her friend if she can use the bookstore computer. Her friend says, “Let me just close out for the day. Unless you’re buying that,” indicating the book of poems. Leslie says, “Right, like I’m going to just buy a book. Oh, look at me, I’m contributing to the local economy by purchasing important literature.” And then her friend says, “It does sound pretty dumb when you say it in that voice. Computer’s yours.”
I probably think about that exchange at least once a week. Maybe not quite that much, but a lot.
Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work (2018) and the short story collection Cool for America (2020). As assistant editor of the Brooklyn Review this year, I got to have a ranging conversation with Andrew about how his first story was published, the early drafts of his first novel, and the general complexity of revising fiction, both older and newer. He’s currently at work on his second novel, which we also got into a bit.
Dan Trefethen: To start, I’m curious how “Cool for America,” your very first story published, came to be initially drafted and then how it arrived at The Paris Review?
Andrew Martin: I wrote it in a workshop originally. It was my second year of two at the University of Montana’s MFA, in William Kittredge’s workshop. I really wanted to impress him, and it became a breakthrough story for me. It was the first time I allowed myself to write about something closer to my life and my milieu, and being a little bit less worried about how close it was to my community. I think before that, I was like, I’m not gonna write about Montana and Missoula, or, like, the people I knew. But this time, I said fuck it. It was well received enough in class, but I didn’t think of it as the story I was most excited about. David Gates, who was my thesis advisor, really liked it, which was funny because I’d written it, at least in part, as an homage to David’s style. So of course, he liked it. He really encouraged me to fix it up and work on it more.
There was a stroke of fate element to it getting published. Sadie Stein, who was at the time the deputy editor of the Paris Review, came out to Montana. It was extraordinarily rare for that program to do a publishing-focused conference for the students. I got to talking with Sadie and she said at the end of the conversation, “well send me a story,” which I try to say with writers I meet now, because why not? To my shock, she said she thought it was pretty good and that she’d send it to the then editor-in-chief, Lorin Stein. In the draft he read, the main character was a writer and Lorin sent me an email that said something like, “I’m so sorry, we can’t take any more stories about writers, but maybe if he became, like, an IT specialist or something dot, dot, dot.” And I wrote back saying, “Oh, are you joking?” And he said, “Well, let’s see what you come back with.” So the protagonist became a photographer with some other changes, and they eventually took it.
The story was published in the fall of 2013, just after I graduated from my MFA. I felt like really hot shit. But then I couldn’t get another story published for like two years. It made me kind of expect overnight success. When I went to the launch party for the issue, I was going in as if I would be greeted with applause, and of course no one knew who I was. The famous people were famous, and I was still just some guy at a party.
DT: Okay, I have to read this. In Matthew Schneir’s NY times review for Cool for America, he starts with: “It’s a charming gambit, and a clever one, to call your first novel ‘Early Work.’ It’s sly and knowing.” And there’s this description from the Paris Review: “ironic detachment, while also being aware of and a little ashamed of that ironic detachment.” They’re fascinating descriptions for me on tone or even “vibe” which is a component of prose and fiction I truly love, but often find it difficult to define and discuss. I think it’s close, but not quite the same thing as voice. I’m wondering if you have any reflections on both the way people discuss the tone in your work, and how intent you are about establishing tone in drafting?
AM: I mean, it is a thing I value in my own work and work that I admire. It is hard to define. And it’s funny, the ironic detachment thing, because I think of Early Work and the stories as fairly warm. I don’t think they’re detached. They aren’t very nice sometimes, the characters. But I hope that they’re generous towards them. And so I think that’s the balance that can be hard. When I read work that feels like it dislikes its characters, or dislikes its reader, or is somehow trying to punish either the characters or the reader, I’m usually turned off. Beckett is one of my favorite writers, but I don’t think he really does that. I think at the end of the day, he’s in sympathy with his characters and with his reader. And I try to believe that I am, too.
The critic Christian Lorentzen wrote something somewhere where he was kind of doing his rundown of contemporary fiction. He’d put me into a funny category with Sally Rooney as people who aren’t ironic, who have a sort of a sincere relationship to their material. And at first I was annoyed—who are you calling sincere, buddy?—but I’ll happily take that over being seen as overly detached.
DT: Yeah, I think that’s true. I think that the characters genuinely are trying to cope with the reality of their lives, even if they aren’t always doing a great job of it. They do care about the things that they care about.
AM: And I do think that my fundamental tone is ironized. One shouldn’t take anything I’ve written at face value. Because it’s always through the filter of a characters’ voice or thoughts. There’s a line in Early Work where someone says, “maybe Cormac McCarthy is really bad.” And a friend of mine asked me if I really thought that. And I was like, “I don’t know! I like some of his stuff. Some, I don’t. I thought it was a funny thing for that character to say.”
DT: I’ve read in other interviews that earlier drafts of Early Work were written less tightly, or maybe simpler language or less theatrical dialogue, if I’m understanding it correctly. I’m wondering about how you decided on the direction it ultimately took, versus a looser, maybe verité style?
AM: At the time, a book that my agent and I talked about a lot was How Should a Person Be, which I really admire, but is way more trying to capture, like, total reality. But during the editing process, I realized that I didn’t want this to be a 400 page book. So the options become cut within scenes and try to make them pop more, or cut whole sections and storylines. I ended up doing both.
Lorin Stein was the main editor on the book at FSG before he resigned. He acquired it and was, for all of his other sins, a very good editor. He pushed me to think about how to get the book into its best state and get it to a place where there was a concentration of its best qualities. An all killer, no filler mindset. And his method was pretty simple but very useful to me as a writer. It was, “This part is boring. This part isn’t interesting, either cut it or make it better. This part is slow, it’s got to go faster.” There was also some line editing, but it was much more like, “I don’t like this part, do something with it.”
At FSG, there were some early negotiations on the novel’s length. Their message to me was, “We want this, but it has to be shorter. And that’s going to be in the contract.” So I sold it at something like 90,000 words, and the contract said it had to be 75,000 or less. It was hard to suddenly be on the spot, “Okay, you can be with the publisher you want, an editor who you want to be with, but you’re gonna have to fundamentally change the book.” Ultimately, I do think they were right.
DT: I was wondering about your drafting and revision approach in general. I have read somewhere that the draft of the Leslie story, “A Dog Named Jesus,” was once around 60 pages.
AM: That’s probably an exaggeration.
DT: From a drafting stand point, do you just start off with something like “Leslie and Montana at a wedding and a mystery guy,” and start writing conversations and actions for as long as it takes to figure out what the story is?
AM: Essentially, yeah. It’s extremely inefficient. I was talking to a friend about this. I was like, “Yeah, I just sort of work like jamming in a band. I’ll just sort of vamp for a while and write these long conversations and have people go here and there.” And then I said, “Do you do that?” And he’s like, “No, that sounds like a lot of work.” It is that sense of just trying to feel around, and I really want the voices to sound like real people and to have the quality of speech. So the first drafts always include way more dialogue, but also way more “likes” and “you knows.” I cut a lot of it out, but I keep some to maintain the sound I like.
When I teach classes, I sometimes use an early draft of the bar scene in Early Work where Peter and Leslie meet up for the first time. I show how their conversation went on for 10 pages. And then I show the class the published version where it goes on for five pages. It’s this trying to create a sense of langour or a sense of wandering, a sense of randomness without fully emulating reality.
I do feel a strong pushback to the typical MFA-craft stuff where everything in a story has to have a reason. There always has to be a purpose.There’s no reason to have a scene that doesn’t tell you something. But as long as a scene or description is engaging and tells you something as a writer or reader, I think you can get away with it.
With “A Dog Named Jesus,” I wrote the first chunk of it as something else. I thought it was going to be a novel or a novella. Then it just sat around for a long time, which is pretty typical for me. When I found it, I really liked the voice, I liked the character, and I wrote the rest of it. Stuff like that happens all the time. I’m working on a new book, and there are pieces of it that go back to the era of some of the Cool for America stories. I’ve started repurposing them or trying to find the good little bits that I like and use them. There’s a story in Cool for America called “Deep Cut,” about kids going to a punk show. That was originally part of a novel that predates Early Work. I finally fully tore it down and revised it.
DT: With that chapter in Early Work, Peter and Leslie are at a few bars. It’s a wonderful chapter. It has a very specific hangout feel, but it doesn’t lack momentum. Is it a similar approach with that chapter as for short stories—just writing a scene for as long as it takes and then revising for tightness?
AM: I wrote the heart of Early Work at a writing residency in Wyoming. I would get slightly stoned every morning and drink some coffee and write and get into this deep groove. It was just trying to stay in this pocket with a story or a scene, somehow make it feel lived in like a good pair of jeans. I don’t really smoke much weed, but that was really helpful at that moment in my life for getting into a rhythm and not worrying about whether you’re choosing amazing words or perfect turns of phrase. For dialogue that helps a lot, because you want people to say unexpected things. But often that means you have to just write a lot of dialogue. And then find the weird thing they said.
Like an example of that is in “Cool for America,” I remember I was trying to rip off some Deborah Eisenberg story, I don’t remember which one. The woman in my story, Chloe, tells a random anecdote about twins she knows who are dental hygienists. And I don’t know where that came from. But it was in the woodshedding of dialogue. And I was like, that’s good. I don’t know what it means. But I’m keeping it.
DT: My favorite chapter in Early Work is the first third-person chapter focused on Leslie.
AM: Mine too.
DT: I think it’s an amazing chapter. Specifically, how it could function as its own short story, like “No Cops.” First, I’m wondering if that was initially a short story that you thought could fit in the novel. And if not, I’m wondering about how you were thinking of that moment in Leslie’s life to go back to, her New York days.
AM: I didn’t write it separately, no. It was always part of the novel. I guess it’s a good example of how form can be organic. At some point when I was writing I got really sick of Peter’s [the first-person narrator] voice, just like hearing it in my head all the time. I decided to write about Leslie for a while. I just wanted a break. And I couldn’t figure out how it was going to work formally. I finally just had the courage to be like, “people will figure it out, or they won’t.” At this point in drafting, there was a whole almost second half where they go to Montana. So originally, the structure I decided on was that those chapters would be as if Leslie was telling her story to Peter, while they’re driving across the country, or something. But then, fiction is always a conceit and I realized it wasn’t necessary.
I did want that image of her as a reckless younger person, and the sense of her coming into her own, because the book ultimately is a sort of shadow Bildungsroman of Lesley. Peter is the opening narrator, but it’s really the story of Leslie becoming an artist. So I liked showing those times in her life that contributed to her becoming an artist, even though they are mostly messy, weird times. I didn’t want it to be explicit. It isn’t the same as “No Cops,” that eureka moment at the end. I didn’t want that to be in the novel, because it felt too on the nose. But, it was an organic process. Maybe I just tricked myself into thinking it worked. It was probably a quarter of the way through writing Early Work that I was like, “Oh, this woman is Leslie from those stories I wrote.” So it was less trying to create a multiverse or something and more like, “I know who this is. This is interesting.”
But I am kind of doing that now with the novel I’m working on. Maybe I’m losing my mind. I’m writing this multi-thread, episodic novel where I’m trying to connect several different threads, and there are some tiny cameos from past work.
But back to the Leslie chapter, there are so many books where you have a flashback that gives you this big character-specific trauma that explains who they are now, and I really refused to do that. I don’t believe in it. I don’t think it’s how people work. So these are episodes from her life, but you’re not supposed to draw like a one to one connection.
DT: On a craft level, what I love about that chapter, and I think about it all the time when I’m starting to work on something, is how it starts very quickly with this big gin-guzzling, glass throwing event that feels almost like the climax of a story and then continues with this slower fizzle of a new relationship. So I’m wondering how you think about story climax or climatic moments?
AM: I really am interested in formal questions. I definitely like to go mostly on feel when writing, but I sometimes outline in the sense that I will write almost like a treatment of what I think should happen in the story or the novel. I try to follow it until it doesn’t work. Then I just go off in my own direction. I do think that stories generally end up following some kind of rising action and denouement pattern, but I like the idea that it’s not overly literal, certainly not an “act” structure, and doesn’t have to be like an event, but more the feelings have to take that arc. So that you feel like a character has gone, if not from A to B, then from A to like a second point, to A to A to C or something, or even backwards. I like writers who do “stasis” well. And there are a few episodes in the new book that are more about stasis. But even within that, where a character is just like basically doing nothing, I think their inner life has to do something. Or something tries to punctuate the stasis.
I write a lot of stuff that’s not fiction, and in a good essay, or even a book review, you need a sense of movement, you need a sense of watching something at work.
DT: I’ve had a workshop teacher who described short stories as two vectors that start apart and meet together, and the point of meeting is essentially the conclusive moment in the story. I was wondering if you agree with this concept of short stories? I feel like in particular you have a few that do this very well.
AM: I think that’s a model of story that I like. It’s a pretty classical model. I don’t think it’s the only one, but it’s definitely one that I am drawn to. I think what’s really hard about that model for me is that you can find yourself reaching for that conclusive sounding thing. And when you don’t get it right, it’s nonsense. And I think that’s worse than it just trailing off or being anticlimactic or something. I’m really proud when I get it right.
I’ve written a lot of stories that either didn’t get published or changed a lot from the first draft. A lot of times when I have a draft that isn’t working, it’ll be sitting there with an ending that feels portentous; it’s trying to sound like an ending, but I haven’t actually figured out what the story is about yet. Most often, I then have to write more to find out what else the story needs. The best example of that I have is the story “With the Christopher Kids.” For two years that story ended on the mother opening presents, and one of them is a rock. She says, “a rock, how thoughtful.” And I was like, that’s a perfect ending line, like, and you’re out, bam, drop the mic. But the story sat there for a couple of years, and I kept working on it because it just didn’t feel done yet. And so I wrote a sort of coda, which I think is what makes it a good story. And it just took me a while to decide that it needed this extra layer in order to be interesting.
DT: Is it long periods of time between looking at it?
AM: Usually I put it away and come back to it, and put it away and come back. I don’t really do the thing that I’ve told students to do. Stephen King says, put it in a drawer for three months. Don’t look at it. I can’t usually do that. But sometimes it just happens organically. I’m just forgetful. I’m busy. I just forget about Word documents sometimes. And then rediscover them and think, Oh, I see how to do this now. Likely, it’s not the best way to live.
DT: I’m wondering about the origin of the story “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.” Specifically how you were thinking about writing about that particular time in life. And then also a very “in the weeds” question, when you construct a line like one of the characters says, “Anyone who doesn’t not want to be in super secret book club, say nothing.” Does that come from a place of, like, boredom in the moment of writing? Or is it more in the rhythm of the characters in scene?
AM: Yeah, with something like that I’m just trying to make myself laugh. So many of the characters say stupid shit that I think is funny. And if I can get something that makes me chuckle or not feel bored with it, that’s motivating. With that story, I really was in a War and Peace book club in my early 20s, and if I had tried to write that story when I was still in my early or mid 20s, it just wouldn’t have worked. The perspective would have been all off or nonexistent. It’s a good example of a tone thing, like what we were talking about earlier, where the distance in the narration, even though it’s slightly hard to define, you can feel it.
It’s also a good example of not changing details from life that I could have. I think the younger me would have insisted it become a Moby Dick book club or something. Keeping the truthful details kind of transformed it into this formal conceit to myself. I wanted to write this milieu, a group of people, and not just one guy. There is the central narrative about a guy who’s got a crush on a cool woman. But I like the idea that it’s only part of the narrative, and the rest includes all these other people you don’t even find out much about.
DT: I had a similar question about the moment in Early Work where Leslie essentially guides Peter to jerking off in his living room, withholding her body, the mention of “it’s a koan.” It’s such an interesting pathway to confrontation, so much better than just verbally stating “I’m uncomfortable here.” It’s something I think about a lot, how to imaginatively approach confrontation in scene and narrative—is this something that’s top of mind for you in revision or in drafting?
AM: That’s a great question. I think I’ve probably internalized at some point the idea or cliche that things should happen through action, if possible. Again, I am very skeptical of these kinds of craft bromides. But I do think it ends up working sometimes. There was a problem in the story “Cool for America.” I had a scene where the two characters are talking again and nothing happens, and Lorin said, “Something needs to happen here. I don’t know what. Go figure it out.” And so I brainstormed with my sister for a while, who’s also a writer, and she said, “oh, she should have to put together something for him. Because he can’t move really, she should do something he can’t do.” [Character has a broken leg]. Then I came up with: she puts together a chair he had ordered. That adjustment made something click in my mind: Find something to happen instead of just two people talking. It seems so simple, but I also have to keep relearning these lessons over and over again as a writer. Instead of just “then they have sex,” actually making the sex do something narratively. I’ve tried to be conscious of that. But sometimes you just have to write the paragraph to get to the next one. And you have to go back later and fix it.
DT: Yeah, I’ve been given advice one time when talking about confrontation in stories as “just write it cliche, get it on the page plainly if need be, even if it’s bad, and then revise and revise.”
AM: I really go back and forth on that. I worry that if you write it in this cliched way that something of it is going to, like, infect the scene or the story. A really smart, older writer I knew in Missoula, Bryan diSalvatore, after the Cool for America collection came out, he wrote me an email like “you’re doing great, but I think your premises sometimes have a, dare I say, a sitcom-like setup. They’re a little easy sometimes.” He’s maybe like one of three people in the world that could write that to me and I wouldn’t get upset. But I thought he was kind of right. There is something in the nature of short stories, to some extent, that have to hook you and be a little basic sometimes in order to work. It’s not the most sophisticated form in the world, because you just don’t have that much room. And they are historically a very commercial form. They’re like hits, like radio singles. If you want someone to buy it, like, something should probably happen. So when I do get stuck, I do try to just write the damn thing. And let it be bad. And make it better later. But it’s funny, because I am a pretty fast writer, when I’m actually in it. When I hit slowness, it’s often when I kind of know “this isn’t a good idea.” And I don’t want to waste days and weeks of my life on this thing that I know the tone isn’t right. When I push back against those instincts, that’s usually when I waste a lot of effort and time.
DT: I would love to hear more about the novel you’re currently working on.
AM: It feels like this new book is trying to bring in the lessons of both the story collection and the novel. It’s episodic and structurally it’s in narrative chunks that are short-story-like. I’m trying to write, God help me, about a period during the pandemic. I really, really don’t want it to be quote-unquote a pandemic novel, because I think people are skeptical of that. But it’s funny, when the Cool for America collection came out, it was July 2020. So I was doing interviews and doing readings and conversations virtually and a question that I had a couple times was: “How would your characters deal with the pandemic?” And I was like, “not well!” I think that got something stirring in me.
I published a story in Harper’s a couple of years ago.
DT: “January,” yeah, I love that story. I think it’s one of your best.
AM: Thank you. I like it too. That’s now an early part of the novel. And those characters return a few times and it’s almost like a cycle of characters where we see them and then we see another couple and then we see this woman and we kind of follow them through a few cycles each. So formally, I’m excited about it. It doesn’t feel like a novel in stories, exactly, but it covers about two years of time and returns to the characters at intervals. It’s very much about the period where you’re trying to decide whether to settle down, whether to get married, whether to try to have kids, what kind of job you’re going to do. A lot of the characters are struggling with alcohol, they’re struggling with their own sense of themselves and their romantic lives and their pasts as wilder people, and trying to square that with the desire for comfort and decency. There’s a lot about sexuality and gender fluidity that I’m excited about. I’ve really struggled with this book for a couple years. And I feel like I’m sort of on the downhill of it now. I also set myself a really difficult challenge, because I wrote every chapter basically as a short story. And short stories take me, on average, about as long as a novel does.
DT: So this is my last question, a soft ball. If I were to ask you what is your all time favorite short story, what comes to mind?
AM: The first one that comes to mind is “Goodbye, My Brother” by John Cheever. It’s a perfect short story, but it is canonical and extremely classic in its concerns and style. Also I cribbed it from Gates.
But, you know, whenever I try to have my students read some “cool” new story I just read in the New Yorker, they usually hate it, because they find all the problems with it. Because there are problems with everything! But then I teach “The King” by Isaac Babel, and they fucking love it because it’s endlessly rich, endlessly dense. Edward P. Jones has probably become my favorite story writer in recent years. I’ve taught “Wants” by Grace Paley so many times I’ve basically memorized it, but I might need a break. Those can be my answers.