Patrick Nathan
/How did you become a writer?
Throughout my childhood and adolescence I always had the idea that, as some kind of side project, I would eventually write books. Since grade school, I'd often started and abandoned them – usually novels. But I wasn't supposed to be a writer, or only a writer. That fell to me as a sort of reduction or elimination; my talents, or lack thereof, guided me toward it. My last creative endeavor, prior to accepting myself as a writer, was to be another version of Trent Reznor – someone who recorded and performed entire albums, alone, in a synth-pop industrial style, with plenty of noise. After writing and recording two of these albums – which no one, I assure you, will hear – I accepted the fact that I couldn't sing, that I didn't have a voice. My lyrics re-alchemized into poetry, which provided the foundation for my fiction.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
Given my answer to the previous question, I feel like I can finally name Trent Reznor – particularly The Fragile – among my primary influences as a writer. In general, the albums I listened to in the '90s and '00s show up, structurally, in my fiction, particularly when I write novels. When I think of a shape, in fiction, it's almost always musical or symphonic. But film, too, has been an outsized influence, particularly w/r/t pacing, movement, velocity, and a resistance to epiphany or explanation, a willingness to allow the image to carry the weight.
I didn't really read as a child or a teenager, not much. Storytelling for me was movies and television, so as far as writers go, they're much harder to identify. Anne Carson shows up in my fiction, especially when someone has to want something. Louise Glück, certainly, and Elizabeth Bishop. The Bell Jar. Denis Johnson. Elizabeth Hardwick. Mathias Énard. Rachel Kushner. Louise Erdrich. Cheever's journals are the standard in noticing weather, water, leaves. For essays, Teju Cole and Susan Sontag set the standard in rigor and juxtaposition, Hannah Arendt and James Baldwin in moral clarity, and Renata Adler in overall impeccability.
All that aside: Oddly enough, in the very beginning, it wasn't even a real person who made me believe I could be a writer. J.T. LeRoy – whose work was introduced to me by way of Marilyn Manson, who I learned was to appear in Asia Argento's adaptation of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things – never existed. But he was real enough for me.
When and where do you write?
I have a schedule – every weekday from around 9:00 to 4:00. I don't follow it at all, and mostly feel terrible about it. I write at home, at coffee shops, and at occasionally at bars. A hotel bar, when away at a conference or festival, is one of my favorite places to write. A rare treat.
What are you working on now?
I'm between the third and fourth drafts on a new novel, a big one. I'm also cutting apart a lot of the essays I've published over the last two years, and am restructuring and rewriting them for inclusion in a collection organized around specific themes.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
I wouldn't say I've suffered from writer's block so much as given in, quite regularly, to the temptations of distraction, especially social media. I always forget, or allow myself to forget, how much space in my life fiction seems to require. If anything – for me – writer's block is giving that space away to validation and entertainment.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Several years ago, Marlon James said that gaps create energy – between chapters, between paragraphs, between sentences, or even between words. The prose has something to leap over, no matter the context. Instead of "omit needless words" (which always seemed ridiculous to me when no words are needed, when no one, really, is going to miss any of the words we might write if we don't write them), I take this as, "Don't forget the needed silences."
What’s your advice to new writers?
What I've found most valuable, especially after my first novel came out, is to be aware of the distinction between "writer" and "author." The author is who you are in public and online. The author is the person who has written. It's fine to be an author now and then. It can even be a way to celebrate. But the author isn't going to get much writing done, especially not writing of any value. To be a writer, I find it necessary to lock the author out of my mind, to remember that writing is a private endeavor. No one has to see what the writer is writing, or even know that the writer is writing. Obviously there's something to be said for accountability, for telling your friends, in the early days, that you're writing a novel, that you have work to do and that you're doing it. But once you move on from those early days, once you know that it's possible to sit in a chair and put a hundred thousand words on paper, there's no longer a reason, I don't think, to share that. There is no more "#amwriting" except as distraction, as a way for someone to "rescue" you from the difficulty of writing, which is ultimately the difficulty of being alone. In the end, nobody cares if you write or not, except you. Nobody but you knows what will be missing if you don't give what you're going to give to the world. Which is fine: you are all you need. Your desire will be enough. The rest falls into place.
Patrick Nathan's first novel, Some Hell, was published by Graywolf Press in 2018. His essays and short fiction have appeared in Boulevard, Gulf Coast, Pacific Standard, the Paris Review Daily, TriQuarterly, Longreads, and elsewhere.
