Alice McDermott
Bethesdan Alice McDermott is well-respected for her literary fiction, much of it based in the Irish-Catholic family milieu on Long Island. Charming Billy won the National Book Award in 1998; other books include At Weddings and Wakes, That Night and Child of My Heart. Her latest novel, After This, is about an American family living through the Vietnam War era.
At what point in your life did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I was a sophomore in college, in a class on the nature of nonfiction. The first assignment was to write an autobiographical story, which I made up. The professor was really tough; he said, “McDermott, I’ve got to talk to you after class.” Then he said, “I got bad news for you kid. You’re a writer and you’ll never shake it.” It was this wonderful crystallizing moment. It’s the whole reason I continue to teach, to be there for those moments.
How long did it take you to become a published writer?
I published my first short story while still in graduate school, in Ms. magazine. It was a perverse love story, with someone who had lied.
The impulse to lie is very akin to the impulse to write fiction, and to change the way things are to the way we would like them to be. There’s something noble about it. It’s an effort to remake the world.
Do you work on more than one book at a time?
I tend to have two novel projects and one tends to make it over the finish line. Sometimes the second is a helper novel; sometimes it’s a security net in case the one you’re working on dies on the vine.
Do you outline a book ahead of time?
Sometimes I draw up outlines after I’ve started writing. I think literary fiction for the writer should be the same experience for the reader—it should be a discovery. If it’s too much in control, you lose some freshness.
How often does a book change as you write it?
I don’t start out with an agenda. If I say I’m going to write a book about loss, I start out writing to find out what that means. Which was the easiest book for you to write, and the hardest?Probably the first one was easiest, just because I was so naïve. You set the bar higher each time. Faulkner said that you write your next book because of what you failed to do in your last.
How much do you write each day, and is it true that you write in longhand?
I write four days a week, from 9 to 3—school hours. For my first draft, I still like the silence of pen and paper.
Do your personality and life-style change when you are writing? I don’t think so, although I do know when I haven’t been writing. That existential dread starts to creep in, that you’re living shallowly, and then I become very impatient.
Typically, what is the interval between books?
I tend to publish every three, four or five years.
Manil Suri
Manil Suri, who lives in Silver Spring, has written two successful literary novels, The Death of Vishnu and The Age of Shiva. A third book, The Birth of Brahma, will complete the trilogy. Suri, who came to this country from Bombay at age 20, is also a tenured professor and mathematician at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County. His first book was published in 2001.
At what point in your life did you know you wanted to be a writer?
I had taken this workshop with Michael Cunningham [author of The Hours], where I had written three chapters of my [first] book. He had written in his comments, “You are a writer.” It was then that I thought, this is worth taking time off from my job…It was after I finished my novel and got an agent and the bidding started when I could say, “Now I’m a writer.”
How long did it take you to become a published writer?
I wrote about two chapters in 1995 and then I was completely blocked. It was actually published in 2001. In all, it took five years, but with gaps in between.
How many ideas do you have for books at any one time?
I do have some other ideas flitting around in the back of my mind but they wouldn’t be things I would pursue before I finished this trilogy. One is a nonfiction book related to my family [who fled Pakistan for India in 1947]. Another idea is a story about mathematicians at a conference.
Do you work on more than one book at a time?
When I finished the first one…some of the publishers were asking, “what else are you going to write?” Off the top of my head I said I could write a trilogy. Then I thought maybe that was a little too hasty. When I started the second book all I had to go on was the word “Shiva.”
Do you outline a book ahead of time?
The first one I did. I knew the structure of the book; I knew the structure of the building, with the spiritually more enlightened characters on the top floor, and I filled in the characters. I knew the beginning and I knew the end. It was a question of, step by step, tracing a trajectory that was dramatic enough and linked beginning to end.
Do you create your characters?
You see bits and pieces of the things you’ve seen and people you’ve seen, and it’s your imagination that’s the glue. It would be too boring to replicate someone.
Does a book change as you write it?
With Shiva, it was supposed to be about this Shiva-like character and it turned out to be an almost feminist book. It changed completely. When there is something very compelling, it behooves you as a writer to follow that rather than cling to your original idea.
How often do you start writing a book, and put it aside?
I’ve done that once, before The Death of Vishnu. I wrote four or five chapters and then decided I didn’t know enough about these characters.
Where and when do you write?
I don’t have any fixed good habit of writing every day. I write in the smallest bedroom in the house. I sometimes go to writing colonies for a few weeks. I feel pretty good about myself if I manage to write about 400 words a day when I’m writing, but if I only write 200, that’s OK, too.
