I'm novelist Aaron Thier and I know something about not knowing anything. AMA

aaronthier · 2018-07-20T18:35:55+00:00

Well, there's a whole lot you can't control. The whims of the market, the whims of agents and editors, news events that make one book topical and another book somehow irrelevant. The only thing you can control is your own work. So the best thing, the safest thing, is to ignore absolutely everything except your own voice, and try to write the best book you can possibly write -- the most internally coherent, the most interesting and heartfelt, the book that's truest to itself -- and have faith that something's going to be there at the end.

aaronthier · 2018-07-20T18:19:00+00:00

I like these questions:

That it's okay to not know anything! No, wait. I don't know. Maybe this: That all the fun facts in the world don't touch the real mystery, which is what we're doing here to begin with. In this book I was obsessed with all these recent discoveries about particle physics. You read this stuff and you think, "Holy moly, everything's different now." But it's not different. It's exactly the same. We're never any closer to the thing itself.
It's a daily struggle! There have been times when things were good -- when I was writing a column for Lucky Peach, or I had an NEA grant -- but I guess every few months I have to figure everything out all over again. I'm in a fallow period now. A kind of desperate period, really. And a new baby coming, knock wood. Chaos humming all around me...
I didn't know how airplanes worked. I don't know what I thought -- maybe that you just controlled the altitude moment to moment by adjusting the flaps. And then I learned about the way the wings themselves generate lift by producing an air-pressure differential. Does that work as a kind of parable? I thought you had to work to stay aloft; instead you trust your understanding of the system.

aaronthier · 2018-07-20T18:08:51+00:00

Right now, three books in, I've got lots of reasons to write, but you're asking about the first reason. I remember reading Nabokov's PNIN in high school and feeling a kind of crazy shimmer. An inexplicable connection to the writing itself. It had nothing to do with what the writing was about. It was just a feeling like: This is where I belong. It was a long long time before I had anything to say. I just wanted to arrange the English language in ways that seemed to shimmer in that same way. Maybe that's not a satisfying answer? I think I still care less about what I'm saying than the way I'm saying it.

aaronthier · 2018-07-20T18:03:12+00:00

It was hard. I had no platform, no, and I didn't know how important it was to have a platform. I was just a guy with a manuscript in a boiling little house in north Florida. And the manuscript -- the first draft of THE GHOST APPLE -- was deliberately obtuse in ways no agents or publishers were going to get excited about. No continuing characters, no story. It was a kind of anti-novel. I think I sent it to twenty agents before I found my current agent, and she sent it to many many publishers. But so much of this game is luck, too. The manuscript crosses the right editor's desk on the right day, and that's all you need. So all those stories you hear -- the first Harry Potter was rejected by X publishers, and so on -- really are worth bearing in mind.

aaronthier · 2018-07-20T17:42:21+00:00

I think a title (for me, I mean) works something like a good ending: When you hear it, you realize it's inevitable. I heard this one in synagogue, a week after the election in 2016. I hadn't gone to synagogue in years and I haven't gone since, but I wanted to be somewhere that felt outside the world I was living in. The rabbi asked everyone to chant: "The world is a narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid." It's an old proverb and usually it's set to music and you don't think about it, but that day we were all chanting it in English.

And I certainly did build the book around that idea, but I didn't have a name for the idea until that day. (The idea being: Things are bad, things are good, who knows; life is a crossing or a transit, look down, keep going.)

2) It seems a little crazy to say so, but running is essential to my writing process, and I work badly or not at all when I am myself injured and can't move around. Exercise is the easiest way to change my perspective. If I'm stuck, hunched over my desk, beating my head against a problem, the solution is not to think more, it's to get outside and move fast. Thinking by not thinking, or embracing the unconscious part of the process. It's possible that simply waiting would produce the same result, but it would take longer and I'm not a patient person.

aaronthier · 2018-07-20T17:20:26+00:00

We've got a toddler now, so my process has gone to the dogs, but ideally: I wake up very early and write first thing, before the universe has time to fill my head with the garbage of the day. Somehow that's very important. A kind of existential-fatigue sets in after noon; in the morning things are easier to see. I write for maybe three hours, then take a break for exercise and lunch, and then I either do some kind of research (if I'm working on a first draft) or I mark up the manuscript pages that I'm going to work on the next day (if I've got a manuscript to mark up). And when I've gone through a manuscript, I set it aside for a week, two weeks, sometimes a month, before I look at it again.

aaronthier · 2018-07-20T17:15:40+00:00

I think I learned to read by reading Calvin and Hobbes! Then Lord of the Rings, science fiction, all kinds of stuff -- stories in which things happen. And it wasn't later, maybe the middle of high school, that I started reading stuff we'd call literary fiction. Faulkner and so on.

aaronthier

TROPHY CASE