Real Cities with Imaginary Prose About Them: An Interview with Thomas E. Kennedy - Interview

Literary Review, Summer, 1999 by Susan Tekulve

Where do your stories come from?

Stories come from all sorts of places and are sparked off by any number of details--the look in someone's eye, an unexpected tone of voice, a glimpse through a door that closes in your face. This is one of the exciting things about writing exercises. I was in a workshop as a student once where the instructor said, "I want you all to write for the next ten minutes a scene in which there is a boy and a fish. Begin." I wrote a sentence that wouldn't stop and grew into a story that was one of my earliest published works. The image unleashed something, opened a door. On another occasion, I was at a museum of mechanical instruments listening to a lecture on the history of automated music. During the lecture we were served iced glasses of geneveer (this was in Utrecht), so my mind was pretty relaxed, and at one point I leaned on a street organ that was on display, and a voice started in my mind: "My name is Vincente Gasparini. I was born in sin, died in shame. I gave to life my art. My father was Arturo Gasparini, watchmaker, fitter of jewels, springs, gems, and catches into intricate mechanisms to measure the rhythmic tick of that tedious gravity which melts the faces of beautiful women." Now you might ask, where in the world did that come from? But the question is worthless. The only thing to do in such a case is pull our your notebook and pencil and start writing as long as the voice goes on. As Henry Miller said, "When the muse sings, if you don't listen, you get excommunicated."

Do you write about things you know or about things you want to know?

The old saw is write what you know, and there is something to that of course, but what DO we know? What do we know about even those people who are closest to us? Each of us is sealed off into the envelope of our own skin, live in the cage of our skulls, and every act of communication is an act of imagination. Of blind people in the dark imagining their way toward one another.

So definitely, for' me, writing is an act of discovery. It was very difficult for me to come to understand that and, until I came to understand that I was unable to write a successful fiction, was unable to activate my imagination. I think it was Updike who compared the process to driving at night: you can't see beyond your headlights, but if you keep going, keep following the light, you will get where you are going--or somewhere! Wright Morris said, "How do I know what I want to say until I've said it?"

In your "Self-editing a Fiction Manuscript" essay, in the section on linearity, you say that it is the fiction writer's job to sit and wait to catch the policemen of his mind asleep. "Beware the linear. Go roaming. "Are you suggesting that it's okay to write a story completely on the associative level, without logical transitions?

Whenever I utter something as though it were fiat, a flood of exceptions always deluges my mind. That is why in my self-editing essay (and the talk I give, which is considerably longer), I caution against a number of things and then give a bunch of examples of exceptions that work.