Anthony Doerr is the author of three books, The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons
in Rome. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and
has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. He has won
the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New
York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, and the Ohioana Book Award twice. His books have
been a New York Times Notable Book, an American Library Asso-
ciation Book of the Year, a ‘Book of the Year’ in the Washington Post, and a finalist for the PEN USA fiction
award. In 2007, the British literary magazine Granta placed Doerr on its list
of 21 Best Young American novelists. He also writes a regular column on
science books for the Boston Globe. Mr. Doerr generously agreed to an interview with editor Kendall Sand, and even said she could call him Tony.
Kendall Sand: Tony, your characters are marine biologists, hydrologists, volleyball players, fossil hunters and war refugees. They live in places like Tanzania, Maine, the Carribean, and Kenya. Another writer might hesitate to write about characters and settings so distinct from her own experience. It makes me think of that faulty adage that a writer ought to “write what you know”. What do you think a writer has to “know” in order to write
meaningfully?
Anthony Doerr: I’d argue we write to learn what we don’t know; we write toward the mysteries, the things we can’t articulate but believe are there, feel are there. Maybe we start with what we know, but then we work in the op- posite direction, away from the things that are comfortable, familiar known.
Otherwise we’re not learning, and if we’re not learning, why bother?
The truth is that a good writer who is willing to work hard enough can set a great story in Nebraska or hell or Neptune or at the bottom of a swimming pool. If you do enough research, and spend enough time thoroughly imagining your fictional world, you can write a story about Finnish washerwomen
in 1604, or about a restauranteur in Alabama in 2341. Why couldn’t you?
How history operates in a story is up to the writer, and it’s always paramount
(i.e., I think a writer should spend the bulk of her time and sentences) to make that world as convincing and seamless as possible. Common wisdom always has relevance somewhere, and in this case I
think “write what you know” does remain useful on a couple levels. First
it’s relevant in that if you know something, you probably care about it, and “write what you care about” is probably good advice.
For example: If you are a violin maker and you know a lot about violinmaking, you know its language and can speak clearly about scrolls and F holes and fingerboards and bridges and tailpieces. But if you know a lot about violin making and you care about violin making, too—it turns you on,
it puts you in touch with something big, it charges you up, it floods you with
feeling and memory—then eventually you can teach yourself to employ the poetry of violin-making (or horse-racing or tree-pruning or windsurfing or Bolivian aquaculture or whatever) in your fiction.
Authority can be simulated. Passion can’t be. Enthusiasm for a subject,
if the fiction is written well, will flow through some mysterious system of
subcurrents through the language into the reader and engage her. An engaged,
skilled writer should be able to produce an engaged reader. So if you’re passionate about fly-tying or tidal movement or old Corvettes, if you have fun writing about those things, if you’re getting some essential thrill out of putting a character in a kite factory, having him fall in love with a kite-designer,
then you should be able to involve your reader in the poetry of kites. Then you’re writing about what you care about and doing it well.
Secondly (though it’s not really second, since it’s all braided together, each part of story-making seems to touch on all the others) we’re always writing about a human’s experience in the world, the experience of getting lost, loving our mothers, eating or not eating, falling in love with someone, seeing new
places, getting our hopes crushed, feeling the rain on our shoulders— these are things we know if we’ve lived and breathed for a couple dozen years. In that sense, ultimately, you can’t escape writing about what you know. So if it’s understood in that sense, “write what you know” is good advice. It’s also
inevitable, so it’s redundant. Did that take me long enough to answer? Good grief.
KS: Often, your work features natural phenomena or wonders of science.
How do you balance your research into or knowledge of the natural world, with the human characters and relationships that are at the heart of any powerful story? Take, for instance, “The Shell Collector.” Which came first:
research about the deadly cone snail, or the character of the blind collector?
How did the two find each other?
AD: During a visit to Ohio I found an old steel tennis ball can in a closet at my parents’ house, and when I pulled off the cap, this strange, crazily familiar smell rose: the smell of dead snails. Inside the can were tons of shells that I had collected on trips to Florida with my parents. Finding them started fir- ing all these large-scale emotions & memories—stuff I hadn’t thought about in a long time.
When I was trying to figure out how to write “The Shell Collector,” I’d sit at my desk and make notes and finger those old shells and look through my journals from when I was in Lamu and read things like papers about cone venom. So the cone snail came first, but with it came lots of memories
about travel and littoral zones and moonrises and getting stung by jellyfish
and seeing a big, orange moonrise from a treeless island in the Indian Ocean. And the more I read about shells and the formation of them, the more I think the character of the shell collector coalesced as an amalgam of memory and research and imagination, with the tactile pleasure of holding shells
and the associations they fired in me. Then I read about Geerat Vermeij, a real-life sightless malacologist who has made all sorts of contributions to his field. And learning about Geerat gave me permission, I think, to make my character sightless. Research as it’s understood in other disciplines—looking for information— isn’t quite what I do. I’m looking for interesting things, sure, but I’m really looking for subjects, ideas I can fall in love with, scraps of people I can build into made-up people, the way palm trees shine in the wind, etc. When I’m working well, when I’m spending hours a day writing something, during much of the rest of the day my subconscious is engaged in it also, and everything
I see—a man eating toast in a Honda at a stoplight, a woman wiping out on
the ice outside Macy’s—becomes research, becomes material.
KS: You recently wrote an essay that you described as an “appreciation” for
Alice Munro, and in it, you propose that “a good story becomes part of who we are, perhaps as significant a part of us as our memories.” How, as a writer, do you handle your awareness of a story’s potential power? What does a writer do with the knowledge that what he writes has the potential to become as real to his readers as their own memories?
AD: I’m only happy if I’m living in three parallel worlds: living my life,
and writing something that seems like it might go somewhere, and reading
a book that I like. That way, during the course of any day, I am myself, a character of my own invention, and a character of someone else’s invention. And I do believe the stories we read—the powerful ones—get built into us, become part of our memories, part of our experiences. That’s why we read:
for empathy, for the chance to transform ourselves, however temporarily, into someone else.
The truth is, I never think anything I’m writing has much potential power. I never think about my own writing in grand terms. I’m just trying to make something seamless and interesting and all of my energy is involved in that.
I work almost entirely by instinct and doubt. I doubt my work all the way
until it’s published and after it’s published I doubt it even more. It’s only years later, when I come back to something, and it’s in print—all the paint in it is completely dry, and I have no more urges to amend anything or cut anything or add anything, and it feels as if someone else has made
it—that I’m able to come at something I’ve written as a reader would come at it. And that’s usually when I’m asked to give a reading, and when I read it aloud, to an audience, usually then all I can see are its miserable flaws.
KS: Munro is obviously an important writer for you, and it must have been a
real pleasure (maybe also sort of paralyzing?) to articulate what she has meant
to you. Who are other writers that you’d write an “appreciation” for, if the
opportunity presented itself?
AD: Italo Calvino. Shirley Hazzard. Tolstoy. Cormac McCarthy. W.G. Sebald.
Eleanor Clark. I think Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle is riveting. Moby Dick is an
incredibly good book. But I don’t necessarily feel the need to push writers or individual books on people; books are out there for readers to find on their own. Each one leads a reader to the next, like cairns along a foggy trail.
I merely wanted to write that essay on Alice because I feel like she is so
often characterized as traditional and grown-up, and I think the argument can be made that she’s sort of wild and experimental. She has no problem
leapfrogging decades in a sentence: who does that? Maybe Trevor. Maybe Tolstoy.
KS: What does “experimental” mean to you in terms of fiction? It’s a tricky
word.
AD: Maybe there’s Good Experimental and Bad Experimental. Bad Experimental is lazy. Rather than gut through the writing of a complete narrative, rather than try to build characters and send them into conflict, a writer
decides to, say, have magic ninjas smash through the window and kill the protagonist. Or compose the last 15 paragraphs of a story in only numbers. It’s easy to hide behind something half-formed by saying it’s experimental.
Good Experimental suggests a writer who is willing to take risks, then bear down and get the fiction to work around the risk. Good Experimental suggests a writer who has done enough reading to understand what it is he
or she is experimenting against. There’s also an element of failure built into experimentation: a writer
who is successful at experimenting is a writer who is willing to fail. And being
willing to fail is vital, I think. There are future-project-nourishing vitamins
in even the worst failures. You know that Kay Ryan poem, “Failure 2”? It starts…
There could be nutrients
in failure—
deep amendments
to the shallow soil
of wishes.
Of course, isn’t all writing failure in a sense? There’s always a gap between what we want to express and what we’re able to express. We’re trying to rep-
resent huge, barely comprehensible things with the absolutely inadequate, barely capable invention of language. Flaubert put it so beautifully in Bovary:
“human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for
bears to dance to, while we long to make music that melts the stars.”
KS: In Four Seasons in Rome, you say that habit is necessary, but also dangerous because when we are familiar with something, “[T]he act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic.” But seeing must be one of the
most crucial things a writer does. So, what do you do to really focus on seeing the world around you?
AD: Travel. Try to put myself in fairly difficult situations. There’s no better
way to appreciate how nice home is until you go away somewhere for a week
and eat unfamiliar food and sleep on a crappy bed. Or no bed.
I worry about this “unconscious and automatic” thing especially now
that I have children and a house and cable television. I worry that, if I get too
comfortable, I’ll start taking the grandeur of the world for granted. I don’t
know about other folks, but I think for art to have any merit at all, it should
remind the viewer/reader of the grandeur out there. Because it’s out there,
all day long! The beauty of milk, of ants, of clouds, of a fifth-grader pushing
his bike along the sidewalk beneath the leaves. Melville saw it, Tolstoy saw
it. Rembrandt saw it. Vermeer saw it. John Muir saw it—that beauty of ordi-
nary things. Hairbrushes and leaves and frost on windows. A couple holding
hands, a 3-cent stamp, an ant crawling up a tree. I think you have to cultivate
a way of seeing, you have to continually remind yourself of these blessings,
of the unimaginable miracle—the breathtaking fortune!—of living in such an
interesting universe. I mean, there are somewhere around 400 billion stars
in the Milky Way. And there are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in the Milky Way. So let’s say there are, what, 1023 stars? And how many of those other trillions of suns have their own planetary systems? And
is there no life exactly like yours, Kendall, on any of those planets?
This is overwhelmingly amazing, isn’t it? The miracle of the everyday is something we Americans, we earthlings, have to remember, I think, when we’re eating Twix bars and driving our Nissans and thinking about making
out with our girlfriends. And that’s the role of art, to link us up with the
largeness and strangeness and uniqueness of lived experience.
KS: This wonder you feel about “the miracle of the everyday” absolutely gets
translated into your work. But, you’re so much better at seeing the miracles then, say, me. Is it a gift you’ve had your entire life? Do you think it is your sense of wonder that lead you to writing? If not, then what did?
AD: Yes, I do think I’ve always been interested in wonder and language.
Hopefully everyone is? I remember reading C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia
as a kid, probably eight or nine years old, and falling in love with it, with
the idea of transporting—that simple black markings on a white page could
transport me to such an amazing and rich environment—that’s probably where
the initial impulse to be a writer came from, from the magic of trying to cre-
ate lush, intricate experiences out of words on a page. That’s one thing that
led me to writing. Another was a high school English teacher, Mr. Kay, who had all of us high school juniors read a book called Be True to Your School, by Bob Greene, which was Greene’s high school diary from the year 1964.
Then he made all of us keep a journal for the rest of that school year, and
I got very involved in it, scribbling in a notebook every day, trying to learn
how to translate experience into words. As for the “miracle of the everyday,” I’m not sure I see the miracles better
or more clearly than you do! Or than anyone else. It’s just the sort of thing I try to cultivate, and that I’ve been cultivating for twenty-some years now by keeping a daily journal. Every day I’m thinking: What’s out there today
that’s worth writing down?
I write for the addictive pleasure of tinkering with language, moving
words here and there, trying different combinations; there is a deep sense of
freedom in this job for me. And I write for the pleasure of being an alchemist,
of mixing things together to see what will come of it. I write for that same joy
that I got from reading C.S. Lewis as a boy, the magic of trying to conjure
a place, an entire landscape, with nothing more complicated or expensive
than letters on a page.
KS: When you’re teaching you focus a lot on defamiliarization. I wonder if
you could explain what defamiliarization means in terms of being a writer, and how you use the concept in your own work.
AD: I’m fascinated by the dynamism of language: how it changes, how it
evolves, how it’s prostituted. I argue to my students that (in most cases) verbal
repetition has a blunting, even soporific effect. When a writer writes that, say, a character has her “heart in her mouth” or “a surge of adrenaline” or her “eyes sparkle,” then a reader, seeing combinations of words he has seen thousands of times before, glosses over the phrase, rather than seeing a vivid image. Over
time a reader gets “habituated” to commonly-seen combinations of words like
sidelong glances, and glinting eyes, and “a chill ran up my spine.” This is true of phrases, and it’s true of narrative structures, too. Popular narrative structures which have been repeated often enough to be familiar
can also have the same blunting, sleepy, familiar effect. How many evil villains
are physically scarred? How many films end in a kiss? How many protagonists
have a wise old grandfather? And this is fine! I’m not suggesting that this isn’t perfectly acceptable.
I’ll go see the new Spiderman movie, or the new James Bond; I’ll tolerate the
newest pop song, even though I know the narrative structure by heart; even though I know exactly what I’m going to get all the way through. In most Hollywood stories, everything is cause and effect; each element of a narrative
obviously follows the last. There are no contradictions, no misfits, no real
instability, no real formal tensions. A lot of care is taken so that the viewer does not get shaken up in any significant way. So familiar sentence constructions and familiar stories offer something
safe and comfortable and sometimes our brains crave safe and comfortable.
But I do think that the role of art is to show us the familiar world in an unfamiliar way—to shake us up. The guy I always quote when I get asked about this stuff is an old Russian commisar named Victor Shklovsky, in an essay
he wrote called “Art as Technique”. “Art exists,” Shklovsky says, “that one
may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make
the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as
they are perceived and not as they are known.”
Writers like us—writers trying (and usually failing) to make art—are trying
to use words, maybe the most used and familiar elements of daily life, and
we’re trying to combine them to create transcendent aesthetic structures.
We’re trying to employ language in ways that helps a reader see life in some
“defamiliarized” way.
Always, for me, art is slightly strange. Strangeness is what helps us crack
apart our old eyes and see the world in a slightly new way. This is about
empathy: strangeness helps us step outside of ourselves and into a stranger.
It’s like Flannery O’Connor said, “A certain distortion is used to get at the
truth.”
KS: Thus far in your career, you’ve written a collection of short-stories, a novel, and a memoir. Had you always intended to write in these forms? Why do you think you were drawn to each of them when you were?
AD: The answer to the first question is: Nope. I did always intend to be a
writer, in a fearful, self-doubting, never-say-it-out-loud sort of way, and starting in high school I more formally intended to write novels, even writing some lousy, unfinished ones into the back of a spiral notebook. But that was
because I had only read novels to that point.
It wasn’t until I lived in New Zealand and started seriously reading
short stories, reading the whole Norton anthology and also Ann Charters’ thousand-page Story and Its Writer that I began to get a sense of the range
of possibilities presented by short fiction, of what writers all over the world
had done with language and limited space. After that I desperately wanted
to write short stories. So that’s what I did. The memoir came out of my journal, something I’ve always tried to keep
as a way to keep in practice. I kept an especially detailed journal while we were
in Italy and when editors asked me if I had considered making a book out of
our experience there, I realized I had all this raw material and wondered if I could translate it into something more finished and satisfying, something intended for a stranger to read.
Lately I’ve been writing lots of essays. Essays are a wonderful way to engage with language and with the things you’re reading and seeing and thinking about. But mostly I think I like writing short stories. Or it’s prob-
ably more accurate to say I experience the least amount of terror when I’m
writing short stories.
KS: Terror? I guess I’d hoped to hear that terror went away. Do you feel it as
acutely now as you did when you were first starting out? More acutely? And maybe most importantly, what do you do with that terror?
AD: If I’ve got something to the point where I’m showing it to an editor, I’m
mostly ecstatic. Or altogether ecstatic. I’m not overly terrified anymore about
how my work will be received, at least not until a book is out and the reviews
are coming in. I like editing; I like getting help with my work. What terrifies me much more deeply are the 3,000 roadblocks I’m going to run into while I try to create something that feels complete. It’s waking up every morning
and thinking: This goddamn thing will never get done, will it?
Writing fiction is a brutal exercise in trial and error, and often, espe-
cially with novels, and especially after I’ve invested, say, 2 or 3 years into a manuscript, I get very afraid when I hit a dead-end. Which I do every week. I start thinking: Shit, this whole thing is doomed, it’s too ambitious,
too complicated, I have to cut the grandmother, I have to move the whole thing to 1930, or to Nigeria, and who am I to be writing about war/shells/predestination/marriage/ Alzheimer’s anyway? In short stories the terror is
mediated because the investment is smaller. If a dead end turns out to be insurmountable, if the first half of the project has to be erased, or—worse— if a whole piece turns out to be doomed, in a short story I’ve only spent 3
months on it. In a novel, if I realize I need to excise fifty pages, I might be cutting 8 months of work.
What do I do with the terror? I let it grow and fester and then I literally grind my knuckles into my forehead and get grouchy and tell my children they are being too loud.
KS: You’ve talked a few times now about keeping a journal. I have a hard
time keeping one because I’m petrified that I’d leave it somewhere and a
stranger would see it. What would a stranger see if they found your journal
on a park bench?
AD: After decades of training, I’ve developed my handwriting into a secret, millimeter-high code decipherable to only me.
KS: We talked earlier about the danger of habit and how it can keep us from
seeing the world. You’ve been writing now for many years. Are you conscious of continuing to push yourself to grow as a writer? Do you feel like you’re still learning about the craft of writing?
AD: I feel as though I know very little about writing. Every time I sit down to fight through a new dead end, I have to learn how to do it all over again. It’s by talking to friends and reading other writers, somebody like Aimee
Bender who was here last night and who never stops daring herself to be silly or wild, or Jim Shepard who has no problem setting a story on a blimp or in Antarctica, or A.S. Byatt who will take wild risks, even into her 70s, or Nadine Gordimer: these writers are examples to me in keeping themselves alive and
challenged, who are always driving themselves to write fiction from the edges
of the culture, rather than from the center. So yes: I try all the time to push myself, to never try to repeat myself. Who knows if I’m succeeding or not. Maybe the important thing is to remember that making up stories with
words will always be primarily mystery, and that eventually, with time, almost
every dead end is eventually surmountable.
KS: If not a writer, what do you think you might like to be?
AD: I’d captain my own submarine, have lots of hair, possess a vast library,
have my same wife and kids, access to amazing goat cheese, and a regularly
scheduled three-month geologic expedition.
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