Author Q&A

Author Q&A: Stephen Hunter

By Callie Rucker Oettinger, WIW Web Site Managing Editor

In an interview I read, you said you thought it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that the mark of a great mind is that you can embrace two opposing philosophies. How do you apply that to your writing? How do you approach the different types of writing you do as they all have, if you will, different philosophies behind them?

That's a very good question. The answer, I'm afraid, will be somewhat disappointing. I try not to be that reflective. In other words, I don't become a formally different person when I'm writing fiction, when I'm writing criticisms, and now when I'm writing nonfiction. I'm just one of those people who—actually I think I've said this before, too. I sort of believe in shallowness. In other words, the less I know about myself, and the more instinctively I operate, the better off I seem to be. I'm not one for focusing intensely on my inner demons and my inner processes. In fact, a guy I vaguely knew from the past somewhere—he just published a book called Novel Writing for Dummies. And, it—somehow it just scared me. The only thing I can say is that I just looked at it and it was like a—it was like some sort of, I don't know, presence. It was like some sort of other. And I just knew that a mistake would be made by me if I even opened it because I didn't want to know techniques. I didn't want to know skills. I didn't want professional tips. Because all of that had the impact of making me conscious and aware of what I was doing and I'd prefer not to be aware of what I'm doing and just do it. There is more to be gained by doing things than there is thinking about doing things. And, that's become my operating philosophy. So, no, I don't, in fact become consciously separate people depending on which of the areas that I'm working in. I'm assuming for better or for worse, that my subconscious is making those decisions without a great deal of interference from the conscious self.

Some authors outline and some let it go as it unfolds in their head. That sounds like what you do.

You know what? That sounds exactly like what I do except that is exactly what I don't do. I am paradoxically—and I am going to contradict myself—I am a great believer in outlines. I've written books without outlines and I've written books with outlines. Working with outlines is better. I don't move now without an outline. The one place I don't want to be is sitting up at four in the morning trying to figure out what the hell happens next. I mean I take great strength from the outline. Even with this nonfiction book that I'm working on now I outlined it to the nth degree and we did the outline over and over again and did not proceed until I felt I had the outline down solidly. Now, there's two things here. The first thing is, you've got to be also, at the same time, willing to abandon the outline. Because as I say, your mind works subconsciously and it's always working even when you're not. In fact, it's usually working when you're not. You can't order it to work, but it now and then comes up with really good ideas and you'd be an idiot to avoid them. So, you've got to be flexible. You can't be utterly tied to the outline. And, the second point is, for my film reviews that I write for the Post, I will say those are more spontaneous blasts from the unconscious. I don't outline them. I sometimes don't know what I'm going to say. I sit down and just sort of start typing and somehow the typing—you know, the action of the fingers, liberates whatever part of my brain has to function in order to write something that can go in the paper. So, in that sense there is—I had not thought about this until that second—but in that sense there is a formal difference in technique.

What about the difference between fiction and nonfiction? You have to do a lot of research on both ends. How detailed do you get? Obviously with the fiction, you're relying a lot more on your imagination than you are with the nonfiction.

That's true and what I have tried to do in this case is to make the nonfiction process as similar to the fiction process as possible. The ideal is still to write like a piece of fiction. That is to write from an outline and let the subconscious play. One of the things at this point that I think is good about it—it is still early in the process. It is a very strong narrative. I've been looking for a number of years for something with a very strong narrative an event with a beginning, middle and an end. And the end would be spectacular and when it was over, everybody was different—finding a structure similar to the kind of novels I write. And, I found something like this and so I'm trying to write it and I think it's a much more—in some sense it is a nonfiction novel in the sense that it is structured like, it drives like, you read it like, you experience it like a novel, although obviously things have to be put in context. Facts have to be observed. Realities have to be observed. Backstory or exposition has to be integrated. But, I still think that in some sense it's ideal is the novel and it is closer in technique to a novel and to a nonfiction book.

Are you talking about the subject? Have you shared that with anybody?

I'll tell you off the record. ( Interviewer's note: Wish I could share, but you are just going to have to buy the book!)

You have the character Swagger. When you first started writing, did you imagine that you would have this character that would appear in more than one book? Or, when you first started, did you imagine he'd appear in one book and that's it?

No, I had no idea that this would become a series or a gestalt. I wrote the first book and it—I really enjoyed it. It was a tough book to write because I made a lot of mistakes. And it took a very long time. It took almost four years and when I was done with it, one of the things I had done was I had created his father. I always wanted to give characters real lives as opposed to resumes and I wanted some real psychological dynamics in there. And, when I was finally done with that book, and I was exhausted, I realized that what the one thing I really liked about it was the father character and somehow thinking about the father and the son and projecting them into this kind of mythical—this little chunk of Arkansas, about which I then, as now, know absolutely nothing—it was very satisfying to me. And, I just didn't want to let him go and somehow one thing just turned into another and it wasn't planned—at least not consciously. Though, as I was writing the books one after the other over a period of about a decade, I was astounded by how well they seemed to automatically fit together and people will come up to me and say:" Did you know all this? It is so well plotted out." And the answer is it was well plotted out, but I didn't do the plotting. I don't know who did the plotting. Whoever he was, was really smart. This is just stuff that I discovered as I went along.

Writers aren't the characters that they write about. But, given the amount of time you've spent with different characters, and the fact that you have to have an interest in them to spend so much time with them, and on the whole book in general, do you find yourself writing in bits of yourself or people you know?

The answer is yes and no. I mean, for one sense, I think for me and I think that this is one hallmark of novelists or certain kinds of novelists. Basically, what I'm doing is I'm creating an alter ego who is much better than I am. The process is I'm imagining myself, but instead of a fat, bald, late-middle aged man, I'm imagining him as strong and lean and incredibly talented and aggressive and fearless—or not fearless, but able to work in a highly-lethal environment. So, in that sense, yes, he is sort of an idealized version. He is a me that I understand, but could never even come close to approaching. But in other ways, too, what happens is you don't know what to use. The only thing that feels real is what was in your life, and so almost without willing it, the books become a kind of therapy in which issues from your own life leak into it or dye transfer into it in some odd way—not that you're planning to do it that way. I mean, I've always taken pride in the fact that I'm not one of those authors who is obsessed with himself. There is probably a great book to be written about being a critic on the Washington Post . I couldn't write it. It just doesn't interest me. Just sort of writing a book directly from life doesn't at all interest me. What interests me and what seems to happen, I should say, unconsciously, is that sort of weird themes from my life bounce off of several mirrors in my imagination and they come out in some twisted different form in the book. And, they're not exactly or remotely near what happened to me and at some very deep level they reflect an issue of mine. And, I think that's what happens.

What would you say is your proudest moment? Pulitzer Prize?

It is hard because you don't really think like that. I don't think like that. I would recall the Pulitzer Prize as a moment when I learned I had won it as an extraordinarily profoundly powerful blast of happiness. But pride isn't—somehow that's not the right word when you look back over what you have written. I don't quite know how to make it clear—what you feel. You feel somewhat fatherly in that you've issued these creatures from your loin. You feel the same way about them. You've seen them at your worst and you've had difficulties with them and arguments with them and you've tried your hardest and there comes a time when they go out in the world and sometimes they do well and prosper and sometimes they don't do well and don't prosper and you don't know why or how what you did differently from one to another. It's always sort of an astonishment to see when one does well or when one does poorly, but you just look at them and you somehow love them. They were the best you could have done given the circumstances and you take pleasure in the fact that you did as well as you could with each one of them at the time.

Do you ever second-guess the ones that haven't done as well or do you move right on?

I move right on. It's just better.

As a critic yourself, do you find it hard at times to stomach what other critics might write about you? Or, again, do you move right on?

At a very superficial level you're irritated at bad notices and you're pleased with good notices, but the deeper fact is that none of those really in the long run play. In other words, they're not powerful in your imagination. I mean, you get a really stupid, snotty criticism—I've gotten them and I suppose I've written them—by someone who just doesn't get it. Because they so desperately don't get it, you don't take it. You're not affronted by it. You might have a little chuckle by it. The dialogue as a novelist—the dialogue with critics is extremely uninteresting. I look at criticism as a marketing tool. If I get good reviews, that will help sell the book and that has meaning to me. But as far as any deep significance of a criticism or taking value from a book because of something a critic has said, that almost never happens. In other words, what I'm doing is that from one half of my life I'm pointing out the futility and stupidity of the other half of my life. You understand what is going on, but that's just the way it is.

Worst experience as a writer?

Everyone has bad karma somewhere in his or her career. I guess the worst thing was that my third book was about the Spanish civil war and my agent at the time was very high on it. She wanted to have multiple submissions, which was a technique that they used in those days to try to get the publishers to bid against themselves. So, I had written six chapters and this chunk went out to ten or twelve publishers and the big day was June 5 and on June 5 in the afternoon, after being excited for two weeks, she called me. I was the one who was excited and I guess she was, too. And, she called me and said there had been zero—there had been no offers and that was very, very upsetting. And as I recall, I was married at that time and we happened to be having houseguests, so there was no sort of moment for me to sort of suffer and I wanted to suffer. But I had to sort of get through the day and the evening in some sort of happy, happy social circumstance, so that was very awkward. Oh, OK. Actually, I've repressed the worst moment. The worst moment—I had a book called Hot Springs a few books ago. It got probably my finest set of reviews and it went immediately to the New York Times bestseller list. And, it debuted at number 14 and then suddenly it shot up to number 11 and then it vanished. And, that moment—you see you find on Tuesday where you are on the list or if you are on the list. And they would always call me, you know the previous two Tuesdays they would call me and tell me: "Oh, congratulations, fabulous. It's even doing better this week." But the third Tuesday there was no phone call because they never call you and say: "Guess what? It's off the list." They don't do that, so you just infer. And, that was not a happy moment. That was, in fact, it was almost not worth being on the bestseller list because the pain of coming off the bestseller list was far more intense than I ever imagined it would be. But, you know, you always treat these things as growing processes and you go on. And I was very depressed for a while. But you know, I forgot about it and moved on.

Best advice you gave someone about writing?

It's baseball. It's not football. Meaning you do it every day. You try your best and what counts is working it out over the long season. Trusting that over that long season your individual talent will come to bear. It's not sort of intense dramatic bouts with demons once a week. Its going up to the plate every day—having good days and having bad days, but just trying to stay steady, even, professional and continuing to go up. You know, being aware that you are going to have slumps. Being aware that for months nothing seems to be happening. Being aware that you are going to get depressed and you are going to get bored and you are going to get tired. But somehow, always doing it. And, in the end, if you apply yourself over the long term—not intensely, but consistently—you are going to finish as oppose to fail.

What will you be speaking about at the conference?

There's some human love of story. In all forms we love stories. All cultures love stories, so I think I'm going to speculate on the origins of stories and the meanings of stories and how stories nourish us and the importance of stories. I think that's what unifies everyone in that room.