Chip's Writing Lessons #102

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Four Questions with Reed Karaim

Four Questions with Reed Karaim

Reed Karaim, who lives in Tucson, Arizona, is the author of the novels The Winter in Anna and If Men Were Angels, which won the Discover Great New Writers Award from Barnes and Noble. He has written for a wide range of publications, from The Washington Post to American Scholar, and has won awards for his fiction, non-fiction, journalism and poetry.

What is the most important lesson you’ve learned as a writer?

Truth is more important than perfection. My departed wife, Aurelie Sheehan, was a beautiful writer, a successful novelist and short story writer, with a wonderfully unique voice and prose style, but she was far less concerned with technique, structure or perfection than it might seem when you read her. We were always each other’s first readers, and the great gift she provided me, the thing she always brought me back to, was finding the truth in whatever I was trying to write. This might seem obvious in non-fiction, where you’re dealing with a set of facts, but it applies equally in fiction or even poetry. There is a truth you’re searching for in every scene, every character, every story you create. I don’t mean some universal truth or weighty moral lesson, I mean the truest, most honest expression of that scene, that character, that story. The truth isn’t necessarily simple; it sometimes exists in mysteriously contradictory glory or confusion, but it’s there. It can be easy to lose it if you start worrying too much about technique, about showing the reader how clever you are or how flashy the pyro-techniques of your prose or plotting can be. But it’s there. Find it, and worry less about whether the damn sentences are all shiny and perfect.

What has been the biggest surprise of your writing life?

It’s been a lesson in humility. When I was younger and trying to teach myself how to write my favorite writers were the early 20th-century modernists, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, etc., and, though they may seem to vary fairly widely in approach, their writing is undergirded by a set of shared convictions intended to strip away what they considered the affectations of 19th century, primarily Victorian prose. Those convictions, rules of a sort, really, included: show, don’t tell, action is character, avoid sentimentality at all costs, on down to smaller things like be parsimonious with adjectives, particularly when describing dialogue (“he said excitedly” being an obvious example of what was deemed juvenile writing). I think younger writers, in particular, sometimes find refuge in rules: we want the cheat code, the blueprints; we want someone to open the hood and show us how it all works. And there is a real value in craft, in learning how certain writers did it. I don’t mean to dismiss this. We all take models when we start. I believed deeply in mine. But an essential part of any writing life is continuing to read widely, and what I’ve learned is that there is no one right way to do this. There isn’t one rule that can’t be broken for the right reason. Joyce is one of the greatest writers who ever lived, and that dude loved his adjectives. Trollope is brilliant, and he spends as much time telling as he does showing. I love Renata Adler’s novel Pitch Dark, and it breaks just about every rule concerning narrative coherence that exists. Donna Tart feels as much Victorian to me as she does contemporary, and she is one of our best living writers. So one of the bigger surprises of my writing life has been learning that the choices I’ve made as a writer, are just that, choices. There are others that are equally legitimate. The value of this lesson, I think, is that it can open up your own writing, allow you to keep experimenting and growing as you continue. On the simplest level, it can keep it interesting and fun, and those remain the best reasons to keep sitting down in front of the keyboard and clattering away.

If you had to use a metaphor to describe yourself as a writer, what would it be?

I see myself as a utility infielder. For those of you who aren’t baseball fans, a utility infielder is someone on your team who can play all the infield positions. He isn’t necessarily the best player at any one position, but he can get the job done. I am not the best novelist, short story writer, journalist, radio writer or (by far) poet I know. (I wasn’t even the best at some of those in my own home.) But I’ve done them all well enough to be published or paid and I take pride in that. I dislike the way creative writing programs in the United States silo writers into specific categories – creative nonfiction, fiction, poetry, and consign journalism into a whole other noncreative category (basically dismissed as the shit-shovelers of prose). I hate the way too many critics consign books into rigid categories – popular fiction, literary fiction – and then dismiss or laud them based on what is just a lazy way to avoid thinking more openly about what you’re reading. There’s good writing everywhere; it all counts, and I think it’s broadening and healthy to try your hand at as much of it as you can.

What’s the best piece of writing advice anyone ever gave you?

When I was a young reporter/assistant editor working at the Grand Forks Herald, a small daily paper in North Dakota, there was a gifted columnist named Chuck Haga, who would go on to work for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. Chuck was this burly, bearded, blonde-headed guy who looked like he stepped out of The Lord of the Rings or a Norse legend. He started out as a reporter and had a wonderful touch when it came to capturing character. Chuck once observed, “The problem with the most reporters is they’re so busy thinking of their next question that they don’t really listen to the answer to their last one.” That advice, to really listen, to get outside your own head, and pay attention to what’s you’re hearing, what you’re seeing, has stayed with me all these years. It might not seem like it’s about writing, but of course it is. Writing starts with attention, with being acutely present. Even if you’re writing a fantasy novel set on another planet in a different galaxy in an alternate universe, you start with the raw stuff of life you have gathered, stored, mulled over and dissected, to be finally put down on the page in a new form. The best writers, from Cervantes to Didion, exist like a tuning fork, alive to every vibration and minute change of frequency in the air, taking it in, registering its significance and giving us the feeling we are in that very moment with them, living it all.