Paris Review: In the process of creating "Lying in the Dark", did you feel that the problem of the advancement of time seemed particularly acute? Stellen: At the beginning of the novel, there is a scene of the man named Loftis waiting at the station with a coffin waiting for his daughter's body to be transported back from the north, and I want to present his past tragedies intensively but completely. So, the problem is to both delve into the past and the man's tragedy without interrupting the course of the story. I've been bothered by this for a whole year. Later, I finally came up with the idea of dividing time into separate segments, cutting out four or five longer dramatic scenes around the different stages of my daughter Payton's life.
It seems to me that the question of the passage of time seems to be the most difficult thing for a novelist to deal with. Paris Review: Have you been mulling this novel for a long time? How prepared were you when you started writing? Stellen: Very little. I knew a little bit about Loftis and all his family troubles. I also knew to write about funerals. I already had the image of this girl in my head, knowing that she was going to kill herself in Harlem. I also thought I knew why she had committed suicide. But that's all I know. Paris Review: Did you start by focusing your writing on characters or stories? Stellen: That's the character, of course. My understanding of the character is to portray a round living person, not a comic-like image. E.M Foster once divided the characters into "flat" and "round", and I tried to make all my characters round. This requires extroverts like Dickens to breathe life into the Shapeshifters.
But today's outlaw writers are particularly dismissive of stories. The story and characters should go hand in hand. I consider myself very lucky, because in everything I actually write, I try to make these two elements develop in a balanced way. To give a certain lifelike impression, these two elements must grow in symbiosis, because everyone's life is a story, if you are willing to forgive this cliché. I often deliberated for a long time on the order of words, trying to write beautiful paragraphs. I still believe in the value of beautiful language styles. I appreciate the kind of agility that can generate good vinciful twists, like Scott Fitzgerald.
However, I am no longer interested in creating something specious and impressionistic—you might as well call it a Southern character: full of painterly language, abominable baby-like whispers of the Southern states, and so on. I think I'm getting more and more interested in people. And of course the story. Paris Review: Do your characters come from real life or from imagination? Stellen: I don't know if that question can be answered. Frankly, I think that the vast majority of my characters come from pure imagination rather than from other sources. Maybe it's because they all end up looking more like me than the people I've observed in real life. Sometimes I feel like the characters I create are just a reflection of some aspect of myself. I believe that many fictional characters are created in this way.
Paris Review: How far away do you have to stay from the subject you are describing? Stellen: Far away. I think it's hard for a writer to write right away and write about an emotionally close experience. For example, I felt that I could not write about my experience in Europe, and I had to return to the United States to write about it. Paris Review: Do you think you are in competition with other writers? Stellen: No. "Some of my best friends are writers." There seems to be a bias in the United States that writing is a huge cat-dog battle between practitioners of different crafts. Everyone wants to be king in this forest. I'm a farmer, I know very few writers, and I hate writers.
That's it. I think, as in other professions, writers collude with flattery, gang up, and end up getting nervous, even perverted, poking each other in the spine. Once, in London, I attended a party, and all the people who came were literary celebrities, relatives and friends, and if this place was suddenly blown up, it would definitely give the essence of the literati of the British Empire to a pot. I think American writers might as well maintain the posture of the last century's popular French. Flaubert, Maupassant, Victor Hugo, Musse, they don't suffer because they know each other. Turgenev knew Gogol. Chekhov knew Tolstoy and Andreyev, and Gorky knew all three of them. I remember Henry James saying of Hawthorne that if he had even occasionally communicated with other colleagues, he would have written better than he does now. This philosophy of solitude in the United States can be said to be a boring gesture.
I'm not advocating the creation of a writer's dinner club in Waverley Square, which serves all close friends or alliances in the industry. But I don't think American writers benefit from this gesture: Hell, we're together because of a common hobby, not, my buddies are all bartenders on Third Avenue. Actually, I have a good friend who works as a host at a bar on Third Avenue, but he writes part-time in his spare time.