Daniel Orozco on Swoony Exhilaration and the Shuddery Jangle of Expectation

In the 18th in a series of posts on 2011 short story collections entered for The Story Prize, Daniel Orozco, author of Orientation (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) discusses his efforts to avoid "research rapture"  and the experience of reading a good collection, among other topics.

What is your writing process like?

I’m very slow. I noodle and putter. I need four hours to get an hour of good work done. I’m a morning writer. When I’m working on a project I need to go to it every day for at least a few hours. I try to get started before 8 a.m., after coffee. If I don’t get started by then, then I never will and the day is usually shot. My most focused and disciplined work happens when I’m revising, when I’m working over a scene or a descriptive passage. I can do that for hours and hours. But generating material, coming up with that first draft--that is hell for me. I hate about 80% of the writing process, but 20% of it I really love, and that’s what keeps me going back.

What kind of research, if any, do you do?

For “Shakers,” by way of example, two books were invaluable: John McPhee’s Assembling California, a geologic biography of the state; and Bruce Bolt’s magisterial book on all things seismological, Earthquakes. These were foundational sources. I also had several maps of California I referred to: a map of fault lines, a road map, and a topographical map. Looking at these helped me figure out the arc of the story, the “journey” that the omniscient narrator takes all across the state. And I looked up lots of details online: the kinds of snakes in Death Valley, what geophones and seismometers actually look like, stuff like that. E.L. Doctorow has said: Do as much research to convince your reader that you know everything about the subject, then stop. (The stopping is important. There’s a phenomenon called “research rapture,” wherein one lingers in the pleasures of story research in order to put off the actual writing of the story.) This is the kind of work that has to be done for a story like “Shakers.” But I research all stories I write. Dramas must unfold in a particularized world, a world that looks/smells/feels real and true. So even the most mundane settings demand research—a brand name, a species of potted plant, a breed of dog, the right word to describe the color of the sky at a particular time of day, etc. Whatever you’re writing, and whether you’re making them up or not, you have to get the details right.

What do you think a good short story collection should deliver?

There’s a pedantic answer to this question--each story must stand alone as dramatic narrative, yet in the aggregate reveal some unified worldview via a uniquely recognizable prose style, blah blah blah--and all that gets nowhere near the experience of reading. So, I think a good collection should deliver, simultaneously, a swoony exhilaration upon finishing one story and a shuddery jangle of expectation just before beginning the next one. For me the best collections elicit emotional responses which occur not just within each story but between them, in the real-world gap between narrative worlds. That’s where the short stories become a collection.

What book or books made you want to become a writer?

Many years ago, I read a novel by T. C. Boyle called Water Music. It’s a faux-historical epic-slash-romp about an 18th century Scottish explorer, and I was completely taken with it. The level of historical detail in it was mind-boggling, and every chapter ended with a cliff-hanger, and brimmed with words I’d never heard of, like glabrous, and crepitate. And steatopygous. (I still have a handwritten sheet of all the words I looked up.) It was an audacious and thrilling read. I’ve loved and admired many books since then, but this one affected me way before the notion of becoming a writer was ever on my radar. (To want to “become a writer” seemed to me such an act of hubris. What arrogance!) I don’t believe reading Water Music instilled any conscious desire to write. But I do remember the pleasure of its creation—the fun of writing it—seeming to somehow rise off the page. I like to think that did something to me? In some kind of deep, sub-writerly way?

For Every Story Collection, A Post

I've set an ambitious goal for this blog. I hereby pledge to write a post about every single book entered for The Story Prize in 2010. The posts may be observations about the book, a focus on design, a Q&A with the author, an author essay, a book trailer--who knows.

I hope this will bring a little more attention to a lot more story collections. Last year we read 78 of them, and I expect about the same number this year. So brace yourselves.

Mix Books? Mixed Feelings

About a week ago, Ron Hogan posted in GalleyCat about a column by Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer, which took publishers to task for not offering digital distribution of individual stories in a collection. The headline of Neyfakh's story was: In Age of Shortness, Why Shouldn't Fiction Be Sold by the Piece?

Short answer: It should and it will. I'm convinced that at some point readers with digital devices will be able to buy individual stories in a collection the way you can now buy a song from iTunes. And when that does happen, I think stories, essays, and poems could gain a larger audience.

But we're not there yet. This is an idea that has been kicking around for a while. When I worked at BusinessWeek a couple of years ago, I suggested similar possibilities to a reporter who was working on a story about digital books. Unfortunately, the idea of shorter literary forms gaining in prevalence in the digital age didn't quite rise to the surface of that particular article. I did, however, put the reporter in touch with short story writer George Saunders, who is quoted in the article.

Getting back to the iTunes analogy, I was recently thinking it would be great if you could make your own anthology of your favorite stories, poems, essays, etc., and give it to friends in the form of a bound volume, the way you make a mix tape or mix CD. Call it a mix book (a term already taken). I didn't know that, again as Ron noted in GalleyCat in January, the possibility already exists. But a wider availability of stories is necessary for it to really work. I think digital distribution of short stories will truly happen when someone in a position to make it happen (e.g. Amazon, Apple, Google) embraces the idea or when an audience is so clearly clamoring to buy individual sections of books that providing this service becomes a no brainer.

Still, digital distribution of stories does have potential pitfalls. I agree to some extent with Paris Review editor Matt Weiland who's quoted in the Observer as saying that a good collection is greater than the sum of its parts. As the editor of ten anthologies, I have to say: "True dat." And piracy is one possibility authors would be wise to fear. Look what's happened with music. In the end, the deconstruction of the book, like the deconstruction of the record album, might be just another form of the creative destruction that has resulted from nearly every advance in this digital age. So, while short stories may benefit from digital distribution, short story collections may be in the crosshairs.

Good Times

This week's New York Times Book Review includes six full reviews of story collections (if you count Andre Brink's Other Lives: A Novel in Three Parts, which I do) out of a total of nine books of fiction. It sometimes seems as though story collections don't receive enough review attention, so this is encouraging.

The other five collections in the Sept. 7 issue were:
Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx
Yesterday's Weather by Anne Enright
One More Year by Sana Krasikov
The Nightingales of Troy by Alice Fulton
Walk the Blue Fields by Claire Keegan (reviewed by lit blogger Maude Newton)

I've only read one of these so far, but all six reviews made the books seem worth reading, and I'm looking forward to the other five, assuming they're entered for The Story Prize. Reviews are obviously important because they make readers aware of particular books. And for a lot of people (at least in the New York area), if it's not reviewed in the Times, it doesn't exist. So if story collections are going to hold onto and gain readers, getting this kind of attention is crucial.