Sunday, June 5, 2011

An Interview with Tom Williams











What inspired you to write your first book?

It's hard to pin it down to one particular inspiration. The main components behind it are my fascination with performers, comedians especially, and mimicry in particular.

As a writer, it's hard to not be something of a mimic--one's early efforts often sound like whom you are reading at the time. But is there a point at which mimicry becomes art? Tha

t's the question that I had in mind for quite a while. I had written about a young kid who has a talent very much like Douglas Myles's, but it was really when I had that first line, "In the halcyon days of professional mimics," I knew that I had something much more, and potentially a very cool thing to try and pull off. (And a side note would be that The Mimic's Own Voice is the first book I wrote that was published. There were two prior to it.)


Is there any special method to your writing?

When I wrote this book (and I started it in 2002) I wrote a version entirely by hand, with a great fountain pen. Then I typed it into my computer. I don't do that so much any more, because it's really time consuming, though there's something to be said about a good ink pen.


But no matter what the tools I'm using, I typically try to write every day, about two to three pages, stopping when I'm in the middle of a scene, paragraph, or sentence and know what will happen next. And I generally don't begin, especially with a longer work--but often with stories or essays--until I have some pretty well sketched out idea in my mind. I don't write to discover, so much as I write to get on paper what I've already envisioned.


Are experiences based on someone you know, or events in your own life?

I used to do impressions, a lot, and still can, on occasion, and Douglas has the same ethnicity as I do, and grew up in essentially the same place; but his rise and fall is almost 100 percent fiction. There are some other characters based on comedians from the last fifty or so years, loosely most of the time.


Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

Wow, that's a question that I'm almost fearful to answer: for one reason, I like to believe the reader collaborates with the author on meaning, and I'm hopeful every reader finds enough in the book from what I've written; for another reason, I'd hate for a reader to have an exceedingly meaningful understanding of the book wrecked by my pedestrian answer; but here goes: What I come away with from The Mimic's Own Voice is something about the problems of art, namely that art never does quite for the artist--and I do think Douglas is an artist--what he wants. For instance, in his most private an intimate show (spoiler alert), he can only bring the voices of his dead relatives back, he can't bring the family members back. And it's his worst received show, which effectively ends his career.


What are your current projects?

Other than trying to move from Texas to Kentucky, where I'll start chairing an English Department at Morehead State, and raising a seventeen month old son, Finn, with Carmen, my wife, I'm not doing a whole lot of writing. My friend, the fantastic novelist Josh Russell, says new parents who are writers should concentrate on what he calls "head work," until the child's about two. I'm all for that. Plus, I'm someone who usually works when I've got things pretty well figured out. In the meantime, I'm assembling the stories for a collection I'm about to submit, titled Among the Wild Mulattos.


What books have most influenced your life?

My life? Hmm. The truth is, the book that most influenced me to arrive where I am now is Jack Kerouac's On the Road. I read it in college when I was figuring out that I wouldn't be playing professional basketball after I graduated. But that book really exposed to me a life that I hadn't thought of previously. And it's not that I spent a life like those characters, but to see musicians and artists and writers championed in the way that Kerouac does it (and Kerouac was an ex football player, by the way): it made me consider and make a commitment to writing.


As for books that I consider to be the ones that made me the writer I am today (On the Road wasn't so much an aesthetic influence), I'd include John Gardner's The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Charles Johnson's The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Lorrie Moore's Self Help, Jay Mc Inerney's Bright Lights, Big City. To name several.


If you could have been the author of any novel, which title would it be and why?

This is the best in a series of great questions. The smart ass in me wants to list a title by Danielle Steele, because I want an apartment in Manhattan and a vacation home in Mazatlan. But to pay honor to aesthetics, and not to repeat myself, I'll choose Paul Auster's City of Glass. I read it about every year and each time I'm amazed when I put it down. It's complex, human, smart as it can be, and doesn't have a dull page. Plus it's both easily read as a mystery or a piece of more literary fiction. And I think it's funny. Auster doesn't have a reputation for humor, but I think you can find it in City of Glass. Essentially, it's the one book that has never, ever bored me. I like to think my fiction might do that.


What advice would you give anyone who wants to become a published author?

Stay off Facebook.

In part that's a joke, but it points to a larger truth. You have to make a commitment to writing, and I think you do that by learning patience, diligence and discipline. I went to the University of Houston's creative writing program in the early 90s, a pretty good school, and had classmates who were much smarter and more talented than I. But along the way, for many, they either met disappointment (we all get rejected) or relied too heavily on inspiration (and one day woke up without it and with no idea how to get it back) or just spent too many days away from the desk. In the end, talent plays a part--but don't all professions have individuals with a seeming genetic disposition toward, say, practicing law, business, or medicine well? But everyone comes to a point where you'll need more than just either, in writing, a verbal acuity or strong storytelling ability.


Here's my illustration. I mentioned above that The Mimic's Own Voice is the third book I wrote. Obviously, two haven't been published. And I started this novella in 2002, finished it in 2003, and submitted it as part of a collection. That publisher turned it down. So did the screeners at two different novella contests, and the editors at an online journal that specialized in longer works of fiction. This book is in print only because my publisher, Scott Douglass, asked me last year if I had a novella, since Main Street Rag Publishing Company was going to have a novella series. He got that book out of my floppy disk (further evidence how old it is). There were many times I could have stopped writing, but either through sheer dopiness or will, I kept on. And I like to think this is, truly, just another beginning of my writing career.