After the MFA

I was lucky enough to have an informative and rewarding telephone conversation with the award-winning author Edward P. Jones. This is the final portion of that interview.

In the first part of our conversation we learned about Jones’s life following his MFA and talked about his two short story collections, “Lost in the City” and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” as well as his phenomenal novel, “The Known World.” In this section, we get into the challenges of storytelling, books, a couple of interesting tidbits about movies and graphic novels, and whether or not there’s magic in writing…

When did books and writing become important to you?
The writing thing came late in college. Like I said, I’ve never been one to sit down and write every day. But books became important in my early teens, but I had been reading comic books before that. I would say reading has been important since I started learning how to read, really. But the writing thing came later.

I mean, I didn’t grow up thinking that I would be a writer — that’s not the kind of environment I came from. You grew up to get a solid job, so that you won’t have to pray about your rent and worry about food. And I didn’t know any people who were writers. But the reading was always important, and I suppose that there’s no better foundation in the universe, if you want to write, than loving to read.

You come across people in writing courses with poor reading — they haven’t read enough… One of the first things I noticed, before I even thought about being a writer, I think I was in junior high school, and for some reason I was in some office killing time, and there was a typewriter there. That was the first time I ever typed. I typed my name and I was fascinated by the way the black words looked on the white paper. And I discovered books when I was in my early teens, and one of the things I noted, for example, was quotations. There’s open quotations, and then there’s the comma, or the period, and then end quotation. I had this student, an intelligent woman, and one of the things she was doing was that she had no idea how the dialogue technically was supposed to be written. As if she had never read a book that had dialogue. I always liked to have conferences, whether in my office or over the phone, and I was telling her about that problem. I said, “Go to your bookshelf and take down a book.” And it was if she had never investigated how dialogue — a simple thing — how dialogue is supposed to be written… The reading thing is the best foundation.

So you’ve done two story collections now and one novel. Have you thought about or been approached about doing other types of writing, like nonfiction, or has Hollywood come knocking?
Actually, someone is writing a screenplay for “The Known World,” but I don’t know how far along they are. And I got an email from DC Comics about some ideas for graphic novels, but I have no ideas, so I don’t know where that will ever go.

That would be great —
They heard that comic books were a part of my childhood. I have never read a graphic novel…

There’s some good stuff out there.
That’s what I understand. You know, I saw “Sin City” on DVD and I liked that a whole lot. I’ve seen maybe one or two other things too. I think at first, when I thought about that, this coupling of comic book and novel, I wasn’t quite sure. But now I know that there’s some good things out there, and I’m looking forward to catching up.

As a fan, I would encourage you to go with that. A Jones graphic novel would be a great thing to see… One last question I had for, about the writing process — What’s the toughest part of writing for you?
Well, I think it’s all sort of tough… Because I’m not the kind of person to take anything from my own life. In both collections of stories, the second story in each collection deals with a little girl going off to school for the first time, and I would say that maybe 10% of each of those stories is from my own life. The rest of the stories — the second story in each volume — is all made up. And 100% of each of the other 26 stories are all made up as well. This whole thing of trying to create something out of nothing is difficult.

And also, once something comes to you, what’s a good and proper resolution? I remember when I knew there was going to be something substantial with “The Known World,” I took my mind as far ahead in the story as I could to create a resolution, create a climactic moment.

And I said before that you read some people’s novels — not necessarily the stories, because you can deal with that in a shorter period of time — but in novels, I think people sometimes they wake up with these wonderful ideas and they go ahead with them. They never think about how everything is going to resolve. So, then two-thirds tend to be wonderful because they had all this inspiration. And the latter third is rather flat because they ran out of inspiration, and because they didn’t know where it was going to end up. The resolution should always be in your mind. There are times when you just won’t have the energy, and the resolution should be like a star in the sky to guide you. You might run out of food and water but you can still keep crawling towards that star.

You just described basically what I struggle with in my own writing. That’s definitely something I am going to remember.
Yeah, I don’t have much patience — you know, people will say, “Oh, you know I just let the characters take over…” I think that’s so much junk. It comes out of your mind, it’s in your brain, whether or not you’re going to acknowledge it. And sometimes people will say, “Well, do your characters live on after you finish?” No! They don’t do or say anything I don’t tell them to do or say. You know what I mean?

People want to make it seem like there’s some sort of magic. There is no magic. It’s “once upon a time, Jack and Jill went up the hill…” And you don’t need any fancy language, you know?

——

And that’s it for the interview, sadly. I would like to thank the folks at HarperCollins, including my good friend Jeff, for helping make this happen. I was nervous about this, but it ended up being a conversation that gave me much to think about and many ideas to act upon. Can’t ask for anything more than that.

Thanks, also, to all the people who sent feedback and linked to the first part of the interview, including Maud Newton, who pointed out this great review/essay from Harper’s on Jones’s work. It’s recommended reading.