by Jenan Jacobson (’18)
A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with the author Benjamin Percy to ask him some questions in preparation for his talk at Carleton. The talk, titled “Thrill Me,” will be happening this Wednesday, October 25th at 6:00 pm in the Gould Library Athenaeum. Benjamin Percy, though he has worked as a professor at various universities in the past, is currently a full-time author, publishing novels, essay collections, and comic books. His works include the novels The Dark Net and Red Moon, and the collection of essays Thrill Me. I met up with him at Goodbye Blue Monday and he told me about his work and his approach to the genre fiction/literary fiction debate. Read the interview below and definitely turn up to hear his talk this week!
So you’re going to be doing a reading from your collection of essays, Thrill Me, that aims to close the gulf many assume separates literary and genre fiction. In fact, in a previous interview you said this book was “a call-to-arms that slays literary snobbishness and charges the gates of genre fiction.” Can you tell me a little bit about what this means for you, why this is important to you, and how this topic came to your attention?
I grew up on genre fiction. I grew up on Westerns by Zane Gray and mysteries by Agatha Christie. I grew up on spy thrillers and fantasy novels and horror novels. And that’s what I wanted to write. When I walked into that first creative writing workshop, I fully expected to be telling stories populated by orcs or robots with laser eyes. And I was promptly told that I could not do that. There was no genre allowed. I very earnestly asked the professor what else is there. And thereafter I discovered literary fiction and fell in love with literary fiction. I had never heard of Raymond Carver or Flannery O’Connor or Alice Munro. And I fell in love with their work, but I never fell out of love with genre fiction.
I read a book in grad school called Thrilling Tales, and it was a collection of stories edited by Michael Chabon. He had assigned to every author the kind of story they would have loved growing up. And that really resonated with me because I’d lost touch with that. Sherman Alexie wrote a story about zombie Indians rising up against a red-necked sheriff. Jim Shepard wrote a story about a giant shark. Rick Moody had a story in there about a dystopian future, during which you can relive your greatest memories through a drug. And I asked myself, what if Michael Chabon had requested a submission from me, what would I have written? The introduction to that book resonated as well, because in it Michael Chabon talked about the walls that exist between literary fiction and genre fiction—the walls that I had encountered already in academia—and how irrelevant they really were. That somewhere along the way during the rise of the MFA program and the wide-spread academization of literature, it was determined that realism was the norm. When really, if you look at the long, hoof-marked trail of literature, literary realism is the trend. And when I look at the writers that I love the most, writers like Margaret Atwood or Kate Atkinson or Kelly Link, they have both genre conventions and are artfully told. So this obsession with labeling, with taxonomy, these are phantom barricades. I became a writer who was neither fish nor fowl. Both literary and genre. And recognized that I had lost touch with the most essential question, which is: “what happens next?” That’s why people read. But in a lot of the craft books that I was picking up, there was no acknowledgment of structure. There was no comprehension of a story’s design. And so I set off to write this book, to fill a gap. This is a book that argues you can write a story that is both artfully told and compulsively readable.
You’ve talked about workshops you attended as a student that left gaps in your education as a creative writer, and how this book is meant to “fill a vacuum.” You’ve also taught at Iowa Writers’ Workshop. What makes for a good workshopping process? Is there a wrong way to workshop?
The great thing about workshop is you have fourteen people in a room who are like-minded in that they believe that these twenty six letters at our disposal are the most important invention in the world. They care about story, they care about writing. In a way that the rest of the world doesn’t. The rest of the world doesn’t care if you want to be a writer. Your colleagues don’t care. Your roommate doesn’t care if you want to be a writer. Maybe your mom cares. But there’s something infectious about being in that atmosphere. And something instructive about having a professor and all these people taking your story apart. Strenuously. Trying to make it better.
The problem you run into is that you’re going to have fourteen people in that class, which means you’re going to have fourteen opposing views. Not everyone is going to agree. And some of the advice is going to be very bad. But what I’ve discovered is that if you survive the workshop experience, you’ll carry those readers that you trust the most with you for the rest of your life. They’re like ghosts on your shoulder whispering in your ear. You come to anticipate what they would say. The edits they would advise. And you don’t always listen to them, but you have a gallery of editors at your disposal for the rest of your days.
So workshop is great. Workshop is also dangerous. When you muscle your way through enough of them, you learn how to filter out the noise and winnow in on what works best for you. Eventually what happens is that you have your own voice, you have your own arsenal of techniques.
I know you’re currently a full-time writer, but when you used to be a professor–for a while at St. Olaf, too!–did you find yourself pursuing the same line of argument? If so, how did it translate to the classroom? How was it received by your students?
I try to be as omnivorous as I can with the reading assignments. So we’ll read James Baldwin. But we’ll also read Ursula K. Le Guin. Wizards are not illegal. I’m trying not to put a choke collar on students. I want them to go wild with their imaginations. I don’t want them to have that snobbish and limited approach to what’s considered literature.
I do [encourage them to pursue other methods in their writing as well]. In the beginning of workshop, though, they are limited to changing one thing. Fantasy novels and sci-fi novels tend to be thick for a reason. They have to spend a lot of time feeding the reader exposition about the politics of the realm or the mating habits of dragons or the revised version of quantum physics that exists in Galaxy X. And in a short story you have fifteen pages and there’s not enough space to explain, except in brief little nuggets, what’s going on. I let them change one thing. I use Karen Russell and Kevin Brockmeier as examples for this. Kevin Brockmeier will write a story that takes place in this world except there is a black monolith that is descending from the sky. Karen Russell will write a story that takes place in this world except that there is an orphanage that’s made up of teenage girls that can transform into werewolves. Change one thing. And that makes the transition into the fantastic a little easier for us all.
I read about how you’ve said that the role of fiction is to “thrill the reader.” I was wondering when you’re writing and overlooking your work, how do you know when you’ve done it? What’s your measurement for proper amount of “thrillage”?
A thrill-o-meter? That’s a good question. As it connects to plot, I hang up a scroll on my wall when I’m working on a story. And on this scroll I first sketch out character studies. Once I figure out who they are I figure out what they want. Once I figure out what they want, I’m able to set obstacles in the way of their desire, and that’s when I have the first stirrings of plot. And so, if you can imagine this scroll and the plot threads reaching across it, the next stage is going through and putting tick marks over and under these plot threads. It’s almost orchestral in what I’m trying to do in that I’m figuring out where are the moments of physical peril, of spectacle. That’s an uptick. Where are moments of emotional repose, of transformation, those are the downticks. Then I put another scroll beneath this one. And here is where I’m breaking down chapters according to that larger orchestration of suspense. What I don’t want is uptick uptick uptick. And what I don’t want is downtick downtick downtick. I want a variation. A modulation of the two that looks like a cardiogram or seismograph. It’s what I call a suspense-o-meter. So, it’s not that I want to constantly assault the senses, I don’t want people to clap their hands over their ears because the story is too top volume. When I say thrill the reader, you have to emotionally engage them, and physically engage them—viscerally engage them. And that requires that you pay equal attention to the internal world of the character and how they’re changing and the exterior world of the character and how the narrative is progressing forward. So those quiet moments can be just as important as the moment when the helicopter explodes.
As an author, you juggle quite the variety of mediums, including novels, screenplays, and comic books. How do you see the crafts overlapping? How are they different? Do you find yourself using the tools from one medium to develop your skills in another?
Yeah, this is something I’ll undoubtedly rant about during my lecture at Carleton. Comics have especially influenced me recently. They’ve taken over my life. There’s a strictness to their design. You have twenty pages and five to seven scenes. You don’t have eighteen pages and you don’t have twenty-four pages. You have twenty. Terrance Hayes, the poet, talks about free verse versus form poetry, such as a sonnet or villanelle. He says it’s cool if you can breakdance, but it’s badass if you can breakdance in a straightjacket. So, it’s kind of how I feel about comics—you’re breakdancing in a straightjacket. And I’ve learned a lot about economy from them, efficiency. This is something I know, it’s a maxim I carry with me when I’m writing a novel, but you don’t always apply it strictly. Because you have all this space. In comics you don’t. So you have to maximize your effort in every panel to do all of these things simultaneously. I could go on at length about all the things I’ve learned from comics. It’s just a micro-example of a larger truth that I don’t distinguish between high and low art, and I don’t limit myself to one medium for expression or inspiration. I’m gobbling it all up, all in an effort to try to learn how to tell the best story possible.