This month, it's George Singleton, whose work I first read in Half Mammals of Dixie. He has published seven other books, including his latest, Stray Decorum, and a craft book to end all craft books, Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. His fiction has the sublime knack of hitting that pinpoint intersection of madness, heartbreak, goofiness, and poetry. Sometimes writers you admire on the page, are a let-down in person. Not so, George. Talking to him is exhilarating, hilarious, and a little scary. Just like reading him. He teaches at the Governors School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina. They are fortunate children. They are probably also a little shell-shocked. Here's George.
So I spent
the years 1979 until 1986 writing novels.
Big bad fat novels. The first one
ran 450 pages. The next--which I used
for an MFA thesis--hit 250 pages, and then I wrote another while still at
UNC-Greensboro that ended up 300 pages.
I need to mention that somewhere along the line I had a professor or two
tell me that it would take 1000 pages of writing before I was ready. Being the smart-ass punk malcontent that I
was--and still am--I thought, “Fool--it ain’t going to take me 1000 pages
before I’m ready.”
450 + 250 + 300 = 1000.
So I started writing short stories
in 1986. Boom! The first one I wrote got accepted at Sou’wester.
Within twelve months I had stories come out in the Crescent Review, the Georgia Review, the Quarterly, Fiction International, and so on. Hot damn, I thought. This is so much easier spending a couple
weeks to a month on a short story, sending it off, and getting it published in
nine months, when compared to grinding on a bad novel for a year or three, then
knowing that the thing was so bad that I had no other choice but to shelve
it. Plus, I didn’t actually know how to
send out a novel. No one told me how to
write a query letter. No one told me the
importance of agents.
Here comes agent Nat Sobel, grand
reader of places like the Crescent
Review, the Georgia
Review, the Quarterly, and Fiction International.
He’d noticed my name, he asked if I had a collection, he asked if I had
a novel. I said, of course, “No, I’ve
written three big bad fat novels, but I don’t think they’re publishable.”
He wrote back--this was 1988 or
thereabouts, pre-email--“Write another novel.”
I did. He hired a Lear jet to
send it back to me on the same day. He
wrote, rightly, “This one is no good.
Write another.”
I have this terrible genetic
condition wherein I don’t like people telling me what to do. It’s bad.
If I were to be thrown into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and someone
said, “Swim, swim, swim!” I’d choose to dive deep and dig, or flap my arms
trying to fly, et cetera.
Anyway, after “Write another,” I
chose to write short stories only. And I
did so for the next dozen or so years.
Now.
I don’t know how many agents and editors since this time have said to
me, “Write a novel.” I’ve published
two. They’ve sold a grand total of about
pi copies. Meanwhile, I’ve published
five collections of stories that have sold okay. It doesn’t seem to matter. A few years ago, after the Kindle fiasco, I
had a story collection that got sent around to a number of big NYC Houses. Most of the editors responded with
“Okay. If he promises to write a
novel...”
WTF?--as the kids might say
today. WTGDF?
In keeping with Man’s rules of What
I Wish I Knew Then, let me say this: I wish that I’d’ve known that some people
in publishing might not know when disposable diapers sell better than the cloth
variety. Would I have never ventured off
into the Land of Short Stories? Would I
have settled on a less-hair-tearing vocation, something like Day Trading? Would I have ever come to realize that it’s better
to plain write, and not worry about what wet finger publishers raise into the
air, looking for wind direction?