Matthew Specktor
/How did you become a writer?
Probably the way that almost everybody else does: by beginning as an obsessive and passionate reader. There are people who come at it otherwise, of course, but almost every writer I know has a similar origin story: books they read as a child, or as a teenager, obsessed them. In my case it was The Wizard of Oz (and all the subsequent books, like Ozma of Oz or Rinkitink in Oz), D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, and Tom Sawyer, all books I read when I was very young. And then, when I was a teenager, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Barth's The End of the Road, and--perhaps strangely--Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. From there the die was essentially cast. The rest of it was just the effort of writing itself, and an extremely high tolerance for failure. (I started writing seriously--by which I mean regularly, almost every day--in my early twenties. I didn't publish until I was forty.)
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.).
I went to a strong MFA program, and my undergraduate school had some extraordinary professors of creative writing, so I was lucky to study with some amazing teachers, among them James Baldwin, Joseph Brodsky, Charles D'Ambrosio, Victor LaValle, David Shields. I've been lucky, too, to have exceptional writers as my friends and colleagues--Jonathan Lethem, say, or Renata Adler. But in the end my strongest influences--which are ongoing; one should never be "finished," in this respect, or outside the range of being influenced--are books. Far too many to mention in the end, but some that were particularly vital to me at crucial junctures were Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, Graham Swift's Waterland, James Salter's Light Years, Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, Shirley Hazzard's The Transit of Venus, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and The Ambassadors, and Baldwin's Another Country.
When and where do you write?
In the mornings, in my office--or wherever I happen to be--every day. I try to get to it as early as possible, so I don't get distracted, and so anxiety or uncertainty doesn't get the better of me first. And I go until I get tired, until--midsentence, always--intuition tells me to stop.
What are you working on now?
A chaotic memoir, that's also a social history of the movie business. I can't say much more about it than that, although I will say that these definitions--"memoir," "social history," "novel," "literary fiction"--feel more and more like marketing brackets, and less like useful aesthetic distinctions, to me. I write longform imaginative prose, underpinned frequently by research, interrupted now and again by flights of criticism, or personal, confessional narrative. (I suppose, too, on the evidence of three books running, that I have a subject, or subjects, that obsess me: Los Angeles, art and capitalism, the movies, etc.) But . . . my approach is a novelist's approach, and it will always be a novelist's approach. I don't really think it's possible to apprehend anything without the imagination interceding to interpret. So this is a book about my family and myself. But it's also a work of wild speculation. I wish I could be more succinct about it, but today of all days, I cannot.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block?
Yes, of course. More so when I was younger, but--there were times (there are times) when I'm between projects, or when I'm stuck in the middle of one, and can't figure out what to do. That's "block." But I've stopped thinking of it as block, which helps. In the end, I think, there are two kinds of crises for a writer: crises of information (in which case, research or an intelligent edit/re-think can lead you back to a place where you're ready to succeed), and crises of confidence. It's the latter that leads to block, and while there's no known cure for that except time and good luck, I experience that one less--and less terminally, when I do--as I get older. One begins to recognize that periods of drift or confusion are an inevitable part of the process.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received?
Years ago, when I couldn't sell my second novel, I opened my ears to all sorts of advice ("Fire your agent!" "Cut 200 pages!" "Don't cut anything, just retitle it and submit it again!") until someone said to me, "That's the trouble with writing advice. Eventually it all blends into a kind of white noise." I'd like to say that that's the best advice I've ever received, right there, but in reality it's probably this: there's the book a writer needs to write, and there's the book that other people need to read. Very rarely are they the exact same book. Which is a longform way of saying Listen to your editor, but I've found it useful to codify it as such, and to remember when I'm writing that certain things that feel absolutely essential are essential to the writing but might not necessarily remain so to the finished book.
What’s your advice to new writers?
Don't rush. Everybody worries about publishing, everybody's anxious to do it, and your first book is inevitably so hard to write (at least for most people it is) that we're inevitably deeply invested in publishing it. But . . . your first book is probably not your best book (unless you're really unlucky), and it's probably not as good as you think it is. I spent seven years writing mine, and when it didn't sell I was so deeply disconsolate I thought not just that my "career" was over, but that my life might as well be too. These years later, I am elated it wasn't. "Patience" is a hard thing to counsel, since writers are often impatient creatures by nature, but . . . insofar as it's possible: be patient.
Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, and of the memoir-in-criticism Always Crashing in the Same Car. He is a founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
