Chapter Seventy-Three
Garth Stein
Illuminated
Garth Stein has never been a stranger to small audiences. He’s stage-managed “theater at sea” on cruise ships. He’s written stage plays produced by community theaters. He’s made documentary films. He’s written well-reviewed novels published by independent presses. Put it all together, and he’s done the very thing so many people aspire to do but so few accomplish: simply make a living by making art.
And then, he did what some might imagine to be the equivalent of literary suicide: He wrote a book from the point of view of a dog.
It was called The Art of Racing in the Rain. And the unique perspective of its canine narrator, Enzo, who longs to be a human race car driver, had so much heart that its 2008 release did find a slightly bigger audience—to the tune of more than 4 million copies sold and over three years on The New York Times bestsellers list.
Where do you go from there?
Well, if you’re Garth Stein, you buckle in for the ride of your life. You go on tour. You sell movie rights. You create a special edition for teen readers (Racing in the Rain: My Life as a Dog) and a picture book adaptation (Enzo Races in the Rain!). You pay it forward, joining forces with other published writers to create a successful and growing nonprofit, Seattle7Writers. (“We should be marshaling our energy for the greater good,” Stein told me, describing the organization as a “win-win-win” for author-members, local bookstores and libraries, and the reading and writing public.)
And eventually, of course, you write something new.
A Sudden Light, centered on the descendants of lumber barons and the fate of their crumbling mansion, is part coming-of-age story, part ghost story, part reminder of the price nature has paid for man-made fortunes. In October 2014, a few weeks after its hardcover release, it made a brief appearance on The New York Times bestsellers list. And then …
Well, the next chapter has yet to be written. Can lightning strike twice for the same author? Stein spoke with us about what it takes to write a book you truly believe in.
If The Art of Racing in the Rain had been narrated by any other character, it would have been a very different book. And while A Sudden Light evolved from your play “Brother Jones,” that title character is not the narrator of the novel. So how do you choose a narrator?
Well, with The Art of Racing in the Rain, I knew from the very beginning the only way that story could be told was from the dog’s point of view. Otherwise it would just be a family drama that’s been done before. [But] with A Sudden Light, it took me a long time to find the narrative voice because it was a much larger novel in terms of spanning multiple generations, and I like having a first-person [POV].
I spent quite a long time—years—writing five generations of the Riddell family history. I thought that was my novel. I wrote 100,000 words of the family from 1890 through 1990, and I thought it was good, but then I stepped back and looked at it and said, “Oh, this isn’t my novel. This is research I’ve been doing in preparation to write my novel.”
So then it became: I wanted to write the present-day story of the family, and the idea of redemption and how this family resolves its issues over generations, but do it from the contemporary vantage point. Who can narrate this novel?
Like you said, Brother Jones was the protagonist—and I have to say, that’s one of the flaws of the play. He’s too—well, his son calls him a “waffle.” He’s a little too waffle-y. To be a good protagonist you have to have a clear and substantial goal. Whether or not you achieve that or that’s really what you want, it gives momentum to propel the story forward.
So that’s where Trevor [Jones’s son, and the narrator of the novel] came from. Jones did not have a son in the play. And so I brought the son in because he is untainted by the dark history of the Riddell family. He knows nothing about it, in fact—his father has never spoken about it. So [when his parents separate and his father takes him to the Riddell house], he comes in completely clean and has a simple, clean, objective goal, which is, I want my parents to stay together. How am I going to achieve that? Now, the path of that goes many directions, and as The Rolling Stones say, you can’t always get what you want, but if you try, you’ll get what you need—and I think that’s a good protagonist, right?
Then there came this problem with having Trevor as the protagonist: He would have to learn everything [about the family’s history] through discovery, and that becomes very awkward. That’s when I put the lens in of the story being told by thirty-eight-year-old Trevor to his children and his wife, who he’s returned to the estate with, to tell them what happened to him when he was fourteen years old.
That lens gives perspective from a more mature voice as someone who has been able to process everything that’s gone on and so can add some clarity to what happened. It [also] allowed me to set it in 1990, a really innocent time, pre-digital. I wanted young Trevor to be isolated in a strange world. He leaves The North Estate [only] twice in the book—I wanted him to have that sense of isolation. His mother, who he loves and is depending on, is some distant voice [on the phone from her own family’s house in] England; his father is reticent at best; his grandfather may or may not have dementia; and his aunt is always playing a game—he can’t get a straight answer out of her. The only person he can come to depend on is the ghost of Benjamin Riddell. So that’s how the whole scheme came together.
As you alluded to, you’re not afraid to end a story in a way where readers don’t get everything they’ve been hoping for. Do you know the end before you start? I suppose not, if you threw out 100,000 words. …
That was just my self-deception. You know, when you work on something like that, you’re not going to sit down and say, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to sit down and spend two-and-a-half years writing character sketches!” That would be demoralizing. You just wouldn’t do it. So you say, “Oh no, my book isn’t this now; there’s going to be a Part One and a Part Two”—that’s how I convinced myself. The Part One is the history, and the Part Two is the contemporary story. You know, that’s just self-delusion. We have to do that as writers, though. We’re building mountains, not molehills, and it takes a long time to do it, and I find that most writers—when I teach a writing workshop—think their book is done, and it’s just not. You’ve got to get it [written], and then have smart people give you feedback, and then spend another year or so working on it, and then you’ve gotta do that again. And again. And it’s just not done yet. But we want it to be done so badly, we convince ourselves it must be.
I do know an ending, always. I feel you have to write to something—you have to aim for something or you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re just going to be wandering around the countryside. The ending, though, has to be true to the drama, and so therefore the ending may change. You may have an ending, but it’s not the right ending.
I went to film school, so I have a pretty strong background in dramatic structure. I do a whole outline, and as I work it gets progressively more detailed. But if something happens in those spontaneous moments of writing that’s different than my outline, I go with the spontaneity and change the outline to suit it.
Because the spontaneity, that’s the art. My intentions are the craft, right? That’s what I’m trying to do. But what is being done is where the magic is. I like to say that the first draft of anything I write is about me: It’s about, I have an idea and I’m trying to write a story. Every subsequent draft is all about the characters and the story, and it’s my job to shepherd the story. It’s fiction, but it has to have a dramatic truth that people will believe. So then it’s not about the writer anymore, then it’s about the work.
The writer has to step aside and acknowledge that, because otherwise that’s where the contrivance happens. Everyone’s read those books. You’re like, “I was really into it until this happened, and I just don’t buy it.” Because the writer has tried to do something that is contrary to the true nature of his story or his characters. And you cannot do that. If you want something to happen, you’ve got to set it up. If you want something to happen on page 180, you better fix it back on page 17 so that the character takes the reader where you want the reader to go.
How else does your background as a filmmaker influence the way you approach a novel?
I wanted to be a writer, but when I was going through college it was pretty irresponsible to say, “I’m going to be a novelist!” So I got my MFA in film. But I hated screenwriting, just hated it—I had kind of an allergic reaction. I was really lucky that I got the attention of a documentary filmmaker who was teaching at Columbia: Geof Bartz. He saw that I was struggling and was like, “Let’s go into the editing room,” and he showed me how to tell a story using found objects, which is what documentary filmmaking is. It’s nonfiction, but it’s still got to have a story. It’s still got to have a protagonist or an issue people care about; there has to be some obstacle involved; there has to be a crisis, a climax, a resolution; it has to follow dramatic structure. And I loved editing films. I went into making documentaries and worked for nearly ten years doing different aspects of filmmaking, making my own films as well, and that gave me a lot of time to develop as a person and as a storyteller. …
I’m a big fan of telling young writers to take all the detours they possibly can, both in life and in writing. Those detours are going to lead you to where you need to be. If someone says, “How would you like to spend two years working in the Czech Republic for the state department?,” you should do that. You can always get back to your novel. You need to have as many experiences as possible.
It’s the same in writing a book. If a new character walks in or your character does something unexpected, you have to go with that. If it’s a dead end, you can always get back to your map. But chances are it’s happening for a reason.
The craft is something we can teach. The art is the inspiration that we can’t teach. We want the art, that’s what we’re aiming for. We’re aiming to suppress our cautious editor who always tells us what to do. I think one of the big writers said, “Write drunk, edit sober.” I say: Write fat, edit lean. In that first draft, put all the extra stuff in, anything that comes into your head. What happens is we self-edit as we’re writing—Oh, that’s not going to make it in the final. Don’t worry about that. Put it in. It’s going to add flavor, and it’s going to inform the text. Once you’re done with that, then go through and put it on a diet. You know, we want a fat baby. They’ve got the chubby cheeks, the chubby arms, the chubby fingers—we love that! That’s good. When the baby grows up, then we want the lean muscle.
I’ve interviewed other authors who were releasing new books years after a mega-hit, and they all acknowledged the pressure that can come with that. How do you think that has affected you?
Uh, gray hair? My son says I have “vintage” hair. [Laughs.] It’s very difficult, because there are expectations, and there’s, What did I do, and how do I do it again?
I’ve never worked under contract before, and I don’t like it—I feel guilty, because it took me longer to write the book than I expected—but I told them right on, turning out books in a similar vein, I can’t do that. All the books I’ve written [are] similar thematically. But I invented a rule, by the Writers Guild of the Universe: One dog book per writer per lifetime, and that’s it. So I kind of had to hold firm to that.
Did you any get pushback?
I didn’t. … But in terms of the pressure, the thing is, I’m not going to put out a book until it’s the best book I possibly could’ve written. It’s just not fair to do anything other than that. So if it takes twenty years, it’s going to take twenty years.
Writers and readers have a trust. You give me your time, and I’m going to give you a really good story that’s provocative, and it’s going to make you think and it’s going to make you close the book and have that feeling of catharsis: I wish I could spend more time with these characters. And if you’re not there yet, don’t put your book out there; it’s a betrayal of the trust. So in that sense, if you adhere to that, like I’ve tried to, the pressure is in just getting the book to that level.
Sometimes, though, you do have to say, “Okay, this book isn’t going to get to that level,” and then you have to set it aside. But we can’t be depressed about that. We just have to say, “Well, I was learning about my craft and learning about myself as a writer and I was practicing—that’s good time.”
What’s it like now, being on such an extensive book tour?
I’m doing such a long tour. It’s really important that I get this book out there and stand behind the book. To me it’s important. Because everyone expects me to fail. In general, [for other recent authors who’ve had a runaway hit] the follow-up hasn’t done as well. Will I succeed? I don’t know. I’ll try it. If I have to go put the book in every person’s hand and start reading with them, like I do with my seven-year-old, then I’ll do that, because I do believe in this book.
There’s a Racing in the Rain movie in development. Are you involved with that at all?
Not at all. … You know what was great? It was done as a play by Book-It Repertory Theatre in Seattle, and there was an actor playing Enzo. I remember sitting next to this guy, and he was having none of it, and clearly his wife had cajoled him into coming. And I leaned over finally and said, “It sounds ridiculous, I know. But stick with it. Because by the end of the play, you’re going to believe that actor is the dog.” And at the end I looked over at him, and he had tears coming down his cheeks. If the film could get some of that magic, it would be amazing. So I have my fingers crossed.