Three Questions for Jeffrey Ford

Q: The name of this blog is How to Write Stories about Writers. Can you name a story about a writer that has influenced the way you work, or the way you think you ought to work?

A: The things that influenced the way I work have more been my circumstances – where I lived, what job I had, my responsibilities in raising my kids. Over the years, I developed my own way of how I work, and I don’t and never really did pay attention to what other writers are or were doing on that score. Good god, you see a lot of advice from writers on the internet to other writers about this kind of stuff. It cracks me up. Still, I can give you a title of a story about a writer that I think is good. “Guy De Maupassant” by Isaac Babel. I don’t think I’d want to used it as a model, though, for how I work.

Q: You were a student of the novelist and professor John Gardner at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Gardner’s didactic books “The Art of Fiction” and “On Becoming a Novelist” are perhaps more well known and well read than any of his novels. Do you agree with Gardner’s central thesis that fiction should be moral? Did you write fantasy or speculative fiction in his class, or did those stories come later? Do you feel you’ve fallen to the ghetto from the literary heights, or has science fiction and fantasy moved up?

A: Ask any writer who is publishing today who had Gardner as a teacher and they’ll tell you he was great at it. We didn’t bother with the Moral Fiction bullshit when he was teaching me, he was trying to show me how to edit and talking to me about irony and suspense and the things that make a good plot. I have somewhere a sheet of paper on which he wrote out for me the rules of the comma. He told me his theory of teaching writing, he said, “I can’t make you a writer, but I can show you some of the pitfalls and problems you’re going to face in writing and how to get around them. This is stuff that if you stuck with it you would probably learn, yourself, but I could save you five or ten years.” The two books you mention that are about writing, they’re definitely worth a look. The exercises in the back of The Art of Fiction are really sharp. I don’t do them, but I like to think about them. As for On Moral Fiction, I could never tell if it was merely a cunning attempt to gain notoriety or whether it was meant to be something more or both at the same time. The argument at hand never really interested me and in Gardner’s own fiction it’s pretty evident that it didn’t interest him that much either. He paid a pretty heavy price for his hubris, though. I think it got to him some after he wrote Mickelsson’s Ghosts. It’s an incredible novel – so wonderfully dark and crazy – but a lot of the reviewers ignorantly slashed it as, I believe, a kind of backlash against On Moral Fiction. As far as his writing goes, the works of his that interest me are: Grendel, The King’s Indian, Freddy’s Book, Mickelsson’s Ghosts, and “Julius Caesar and the Werewolf.”

There are no heights to fall from. All that is an illusion. If you buy into it as a writer, you’ll be driven by the belief in a legitimate hierarchy in which you’ll feel compelled to find a place, but if you ignore the illusion that struggle vanishes and what you have left is simply the writing.

Q: The world is going to hell socially and politically. To what extent do you feel pressed to be engaged by the political and social world in which you live. Is all art political?

A: I don’t feel “pressed” per say, but I am engaged by and in the political and social world. If you have kids, if you work a full-time job, if you pay taxes, have a mortgage, car payments, etc., you can’t help but be engaged by it. I look at America and see it moving with the speed of a freight train out of hell straight down the toilet. The last eight years have been a nightmare of torture, deceit, death on a grand scale, fear, and an economy run by thieves. Where’s my flag lapel pin when I need it. The grim nature of it bubbles through you and into the fiction. I’ve written a number of stories recently that I sense are colored by that nightmare – “The Drowned Life,” “The Seventh Expression of the Robot General,” “The Hag’s Peak Affair.” I do think all art is political. There is always vested interest, there is always the manipulation of power.