Scott Driscoll, an award-winning writing instructor at UW,
Continuing and Professional Education, took several years to finish Better You Go Home (October 2013,
Coffeetown Press), a novel that grew out of the exploration of the Czech side
of his family in the 1990s after Eastern Europe was liberated. Driscoll keeps
busy freelancing stories to airline magazines.
What are some of
the things that have influenced/inspired
your writing?
When I was 21 and taking a break
from college to travel, I was sitting on the floor in an American library on an
army base in Augsburg Germany (eating a lunch of peanuts in the shell on my
break from the nearby American Express bank where I had taken a job so I could
afford to stay in Europe) pulling books off the shelf to read when I came
across Samuel Beckett’s trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, and the Unnamable. The
writing shocked me. Was it possible to
write in this way? (The words bore
directly through to my inner being and I felt unprotected.) I slapped the book
down on the tile floor. But then I
picked it up again and each lunch hour hurried across the Kaserne to continue
my reading and became so absorbed I began to catch myself muttering in a voice
that sounded like Beckett’s narrator. To see my writing today you’d never know
that this was the beginning; what endures from that experience is the
challenge. I had to find out how he
dared do that, and how he did it.
Can you share some writing
experiences with us?
When my
daughter was young (in the tough years shortly after grad school) one morning I
just couldn’t get out of bed. Rather, I
crawled under the bed (it was a bed from a French hotel and rested on skinny
cast-iron legs) and then couldn’t come out. Nothing was going well. I wasn’t getting the teaching jobs I
wanted. My writing was being rejected
(the nonfiction story I was sending around, which eventually was published in
the Seattle Review and won mention in that year’s Best American Essays). My
ex-wife was using my daughter to make my life difficult. My paying employment—condominium complex
caretaker—was the only part of my life that wasn’t screwing me to the floor
that day. Sometime in the late afternoon it occurred to me that this was a
wasted opportunity. I crawled out to fetch my clipboard. Record this, I told myself. It occurred to
me it would be easier to jot notes sitting at my writing table. Writing pulled
me out of a deep deep hole.
Tell us
briefly about your recently published book and what you feel is the most
important topic/sub-message you share.
Better You Go Home took a long time
to finish. First I fell in love with my research, then I stopped and started
over several times. I wanted this to be a great feast. A compendium of all things connected to the
pressure cooker that at one time had been home to one side of my family. What I really wanted to write about was what
it was like to be the adult progeny of émigrés who’d survived near catastrophe
in Eastern Europe. You cannot say that
the boy who grows up playing sports in a sunny Colorado suburban town with wide
streets and no traffic jams, originally built as a retirement community, has
much in common with the daughter of Latvian escapees who barely spoke English
when she was a kid. I grew up dismayed by the unbreachable superficiality of my
familiar world. It was a formless
malaise, until I first traveled to Eastern Europe (mid to late 70s) and saw
oppression and desperation first hand and felt, perhaps for the first time in
my life, oddly at home.
Like all
authors, you have had your fair share of rejection letters. You obviously did
not let the letters deter you. How did you keep your determination without
getting discouraged?
By the time I finished this novel, I had enjoyed enough letters of
rejection for short stories that I knew the routine well. Still, I was loathe
to send out my baby to be mistreated and misunderstood by total strangers. I
only contacted a couple of agents and a couple of editors, and those were
selected only because I knew people who knew them. That’s how over-protective I
was. Coffeetown Press was no exception.
I knew one of the editors. She had
been tremendously helpful in developmental stages. When she was hired at Coffeetown I thought
I’d give them a try (this happily coincided with the press taking an interest
in literary fiction). No promises, she
warned. At best she could make sure my
novel got read. That was all I could ask for. I sent the manuscript via email.
I waited. Meanwhile, I feverishly rewrote the final chapters. When after a
month I hadn’t heard, I contacted them to ask if I could send the revision?
Luckily, they had been busy with other projects and mine had been on a back
burner. The new arrival of my manuscript into their in-boxes prompted a read.
Ten days later I got a phone call and a contract offer.
It has been
my experience, some things come quite easily (like creating the setting) and
other things aren’t so easy (like deciding on a title). What comes easily to
you and what do you find more difficult?
Physical descriptions of people and places come
easily and I enjoy doing them. Dense
sequel. Ramblings in a character’s free indirect discourse. Love doing it. I
was told by my writing critique group to tone it down, cut that stuff I enjoyed
doing by about a third. It was killing the pace. It’s the scenes that trouble
me. It is in these action/reaction dramatic episodes that I feel I have the least
narrative control. Precisely when the characters must show who they really are
under pressure, I get bogged down. Here is where I am most prone to suspecting that
this is pure artifice, and not real writing at all. This is probably a ghost of Beckett’s
influence. Of course, in the end, these segments are the more enjoyable to read
precisely because the characters are livelier.
Please describe to us your relationship
between you and your editor. What makes an author/editor relationship a
success?
I
have had a very good relationship with the editor in chief at Coffeetown
Press. Catherine Treadgold understood my
story, made only very small changes in my prose, but was careful, careful to a
fault to make sure that everything said and portrayed was as accurate as it
could be. Also, she shortened some of my most obtuse sentences. What makes it
work? Trust and respect. She respected
my work and I respected hers. Once I learned that I could trust her with my
baby, I enjoyed our repartee.
When they
write your obituary, what do you hope they will say about your books and
writing? What do you hope they will say about you?
I hope they will say that I wrote
about things that mattered, even if they were sometimes gritty or dark. I hope
they will say that I was a helpful teacher. I am an enabler. I want people with the inclination, to embark
on this journey of writing. Recently on
NPR I heard part of an interview with a semi-well known writer teaching at NYU
who said essentially he doesn’t teach.
He tells his students to go out and eat pizza and come back and write
about it. If I were paying tuition at
that school I’d want my money back. So not every aspiring writer will win a
Nobel Prize. If they are earnest, and
respect the process, they deserve any guidance they can get. I’ve learned a few
tricks. Why not pass them on.
Is there any
particular book when you read it, you thought, "I wish I had written
that!"?
Oh, yes. Most recently, Mark Slouka’s The Visible
World. Such command of telling detail.
Such lovely prose. Such necessary
subject matter. Yes.
Have you ever
suffered from writer’s block? If yes, how did you ‘cure’ it?
Not really. But, now, about to get
busy with the next novel, knowing what will inevitably go wrong, I find myself
crouching psychically with dread. But, I
also know that as soon as I get busy with the text, that dread will evaporate
and in its place will materialize exultation.
What type of books do you mostly write?
What is
known as literary fiction. Or, just
fiction. No special genre. I would write
erotica for money if I thought I had a knack for it.
Who or what inspires your characters and/or plots?
I believe
in grabbing things as they appear. Any story I commit to writing is going to be
inspired by something I read or saw or experienced personally. But once a story
idea is planted, much time (without doing any actual writing) is devoted to
mulling over just who the characters are.
While in this mode, I might read about someone who seems to fit the
profile. I will steal that real world character profile as much as possible. I
see this as directed chance. For
example, I am immersing myself into the world of a Latvian composer. The one I have in mind loved to use folk
music as the basis for his own compositions. While working on a dossier for
this character, I happened to read about the Hungarian composer, Bartok, going
out of his way to record songs straight from the lips of peasants who’ve always
sung their songs and never thought twice about it. Chances are my character,
the Latvian composer, will develop an interest in Bartok. Yes, it will be
backstory, but it will be imbedded in my understanding of his personal history.
Tell us about your writing space.
Basement
office in a windowless corner, concrete walls on two sides, open on two sides
to the Rec space and the laundry space. There are three basement windows that
do bring in an indirect natural light but I have to work with lamps on
perpetually. I do interviews and rough draft writing at a writing desk overly
crowded with the detritus of abandoned and on-going projects. I then turn to my
PC computer desk with the sizeable screen.
No cell phone. A land line on the
rough writing desk. Shelves lined with books, stacks of books on three sides.
It’s a cluttered cobwebby space, but it’s mine and no one else wants to go
here.
Is there anything you'd go back
and do differently now that you have been published, in regards to your writing
career?
I
should have gotten more serious about writing a novel using everything I’d
learned from writing short stories about ten or twelve years ago. I now have a
much more real-world view of what will be tolerated. If I had had that practical know-how then I’d
probably have spent less time playing around with unusable material. On the other hand, who knows. Maybe I needed this tortured path.
How do you see the future of book publishing, both
traditional, electronic and print on demand?
I know
people who have E-readers and who will down load books for easy travel, but who
also want to buy and read hard copy books when not traveling. I do believe there is something about
cracking open a book and holding it in your hand and twisting it this way and
that and leafing through (and jotting notes) that is a tactile experience that
cannot be reproduced electronically and that is fundamentally more sensorally
engaging and therefore more desirable.
Print on demand is a good thing because it allows small presses to
compete and to produce books at much lower cost. I see it as a model that will
simply grow. Electronic and hard copy
books will co-exist. The coda that is a
book is as old as western civilization and I do not believe modern technology
will eliminate it.
Do you do a lot of
research for your book(s)?
Yes. I read books on related
topics. I interview people. I am not
averse to checking Web sites for actual photos or physical descriptions.
YouTube videos can also be useful. You need an idea of what a barn fire looks
like? You can find examples and steal the sensory information. All that is there. Why not use it?
What voice do you
find most to your liking: first person or third person?
I prefer first person, only because
it causes me to lose some of my natural narrative distance. When writing in
third person, which I have done, I tend to create a narrating persona that is
too aloof from the rough and tumble of immediate experience. The advantage of
third person is it allows you to look more critically at your narrating
character. The advantage of first person is it allows you more easily to
inhabit that character’s inner world.
Have you received
any awards?
A few. When in grad school I won the UW’s Milliman
Award for fiction. Writing magazine articles in the meantime, I have won eight
Society of Professional Journalist awards. Also, in 2006, I won a UW
Educational Outreach Teaching Excellence Award.
What advice
would you give to a new writer?
Devote as much time as possible to
writing. Don’t be afraid to imitate a writer you particularly admire (great way
to learn), take classes (it will boost your professionalism), and don’t write
entirely in a vacuum. Be aware of your
potential audience. And, by all means, be part of a writing critique group
composed of people similarly earnest and if possible including one or two
writers who’ve already had some success.
To learn more about the World of Ink Tours visit http://worldofinknetwork.com
