Adam’s Comments (group member since Jan 24, 2011)

Adam’s comments from the Q&A with Adam Haslett group.

To answer Katie's question first, the relationship between invention and research isn't so much a balance--it's all invention in fiction--but a question of how granular you chose to make the details you offer of the world you're evoking. When it came to finance, I had to assume the readers would be as curious as I myself was about this world. That's the only honest guide any writer has. We don't poll the audience (thank god). In short, don't write what you know; write what interests you. For a time, finance interested me and so I wrote about it. In a sense, I quenched my intellectual thirst for knowledge of that domain and so can move on to other things now. The amount of research reflected my own curiosity, and I didn't go far beyond that.

And as for John's question about writing schedule, it's usually nine in the morning until three in the afternoon, though that's not a schedule I keep every week of the year. It depends where one is with a project.

As to "Beginnings of Grief" the only semi-conscious process was taking interior psychic states and dramatizing them in an entirely exterior way. Physical action replaces thought. Rather than trying to speak the unspeakable--death, profound loss, murderous violence--the two boys enact it. Once I began writing the story maintaining the rigor of that inner/outer distinction wasn't hard because it was contained in the voice of the piece.

When it came to Union Atlantic, there wasn't any one dynamic that I maintained with anything like that consistency because there were four main characters all with their own differing worlds, interior and exterior. There are plenty of novels that do keep up a single tension--The Good Solider by Ford Maddox Ford comes to mind--but they're almost always told from one point of view.

For Obama in "Night Walk" my way in was the cigarette (I was interested to see yesterday that Michelle announced he hadn't smoked in a year). The cigarette represented to me the flaw in an otherwise nearly perfect public self; it attached him back to what I called his "counter-lives", all the paths he didn't take in life. Once I had that, I had the tension between past and present that I needed.

As for my favorite character on the "Wire" is there any choice? Omar, Omar, Omar.

More power to you, JW. Much of this, I think, comes down to the right sort of internalization. All rules, in whatever system, can be more or less consciously applied. Mathematicians don't pause over arithmetic on the way to higher formula; it runs beneath conscious thought. The same applies to grammar. No competent writer "reminds" themselves to include a verb in a sentence. The verb is coterminus with the thought. At the next level up, composition begins to operate in the same way. The superfluous thats, verys, and almosts don't have to be cut because they aren't placed on the page in the first place. And a step beyond that we get to literary style where the choices are no longer about "correctness" but about aesthetic effect regardless of rules. It's at this last level that a prejudice in favor of shorn prose can emerge. My argument is simply that we shouldn't let that, too, become unconscious. To use the philosophers' lingo, I'm talking about a second order problem. Not competent exposition, but imaginative reach.

My pleasure. I'm honored that you'd go back to my stories over and over. That's the wonderful thing about fiction. It works with the physical author so entirely absent, it's own little word machine.

It's a good question. I was dyslexic as a child and learned to read later than most and in a deliberately phonetic manner. I believe this is one of the reasons I've always been drawn to individual sentences as much as I have been to entire stories or books (that's some of what my recent article on the art of the sentence was about). As a result, I'm always highly aware of the language, prose rhythm, and music or lack of music in fiction. I'm not sure I'd say it was a distraction; it's simply how I read. But it does mean that if a book doesn't excite me from one paragraph to the next I'm liable to put it down sooner rather than later. I suppose you could say I'm a sentence hedonist in this way. I want to be sung to. Within limits of course. Any piece of writing can be too rich, and ornateness and complexity aren't the only forms of stimulation. But to answer your question, I don't think I've ever read much beyond the newspaper without noticing the syntax.

My interest in Mather and Malcolm X began with the simple fact that they're both great wordsmiths, in entirely different ways of course. They are passionate writers and speakers who exhort their audiences in the strongest terms, as if their words were physical objects. So they were exciting to read.

Add to this that my character Charlotte Graves was an old-school liberal who's mind was going and it struck me that these two figures could be seen as two poles of the liberal imaginary--the voice of religious castigation and the invocation of guilt over the original sin of American slavery. But I should be clear that this only came after my affection for the two, my reading of Mather and Malcolm X, put their voices in my own head, much as they are in Charlotte's (though I don't own dogs). When you write something as long as a novel it becomes a compendium of your interests over the course of a number of years, and these two rhetoricians were among those I was reading.

As to You Are Not a Stranger Here, the question for me was never the choice of a condition. I began with people in a predicament, caught in their own minds in one way or another. The texture of their inner lives was dictated by the rhythm of the prose that came to me as I invented them, not from a prior decision to write about a clinical condition. To be certain, I've known and loved people with deeply troubled minds and spirits so I'm not a stranger to that world myself. But the task as a writer wasn't a sociological one; it was aesthetic, personal, and compelled by a need to understand and capture certain extreme interior states.

I wouldn't go that far. There's no doubt that for the purposes of basic expositional prose, most students would be better writers if they internalized Strunk & White's rules. It's always a matter of control. If you're students aren't in control of logical sentence ordering and basic argumentation, then certainly concision and pairing away unnecessary verbiage is central to getting them to write (and think) clearly. That said, if and when writers do have control of those basics (and I realize that is far, far from a given), then I think there is the question of what carry-over effects those internalized rules have on literary style and, I want to say, literary thought. Terse, declarative sentences, no matter how many of them you write, simply don't have the capacity to capture whole ranges of psychic and spiritual life. For that we need what is too often derisively described as "ornament." Which is say sentences as complicated, mobile, and capacious as the forms of consciousness they are trying to evoke, or perhaps even replicate.

First off, good for you for not buckling under the poor advice that you can't learn much from a writer you love. That's humbug. I believe close attention to the rhythm of the sentences of writers we admire most is perhaps the most helpful thing in learning to write things that don't simply fit a formula but have meaning for us. This isn't to say that abject imitation is any place to stop as a writer. It may, for some, be a place to begin. The point is that none of us would write if we hadn't, somewhere along the way, been transported by other writers' work and if we fail to notice and work with that energy we might as well become dentists.

I think you're also correct to suggest that some of the default minimalist realism I'm getting at in my article does come from the MFA world. That's a huge generalization, I know, but from experience I can say that while there are loads of wonderful exceptions, i.e. people who went through programs and never got "programmed", there remains the standing danger that art-by-committee will forever tend back towards plain statement if only because at some base level it is unimpeachable. Which is merely to say it contains no surface errors, which are the lowest hanging fruit for discussion in an MFA setting. Thus it becomes a kind of defensive writing. More ambitious work is full of problems on the surface because it's trying to get at something that isn't easy to capture.

As to whether publishers and editors are co-conspirators in these developments, I'm less sure. At this point, I think they've seen so much of that material that they're bored with it. It's hard to quantify. Certainly with the popularity of writers like Foster Wallace, Shteyngart, and other longer winded folk it wouldn't be fair to say that minimalism is any longer the dominant trend in American letters. That probably hasn't been true for twenty years. But I submit that it remains a background norm from which these authors are seen as departing. Will that change? I don't pretend to know.

I didn't know much about finance at all. A book by William Greider, The Secrets of the Temple, was the first one I read that took me fully inside that world and sparked my interest in the Federal Reserve as a place to set a character. But others in the books--Charlotte and Nate in particular--arrived independently of that interest, as it were. I think most novels, if you dig deep enough, turn out to be a history of a particular author's preoccupations over the course of the time they were writing the novel. Each character in Union Atlantic could be said to represent a different preoccupation of mine: the weight of the past on the present for Charlotte; the intermixing of anger and ambition for Doug; the link between grief, sexuality, and pain for Nate; and the passing away of an old, WASP cultural order for Henry.

When it came to deciding how much detail about the financial world to put into Union Atlantic, the criterion for me was always, How interested am I in this? How much detail would I want to have given me if I were the reader? Ultimately, that's the only guide an author has. Friends and editors help (and they did), but ultimately you write the book you want to read.

Anjali wrote: "I enjoyed your FiveBooks recommendations and was wondering if you could list your favorite books. I'm particularly interested in what classic fictional literature, recent contemporary literature, a..."

To take up the second part of your question first, I'm not actually an attorney, though I went to law school. The tax policy books are books I've assisted a legal scholar on, but not my own original work.

As to the world of finance, my initial interest (as I mention in my opening comment over in the Union Atlantic thread of this Q & A) was in trying to understand and explore the human dimension of these large, and largely anonymous institutions that make decisions of such consequence for the rest of us. I love "The Wire" and also the British series "Traffik" which is the basis of the later American film "Traffic", which capture what you aptly describe as the "interlocking political/social/economic life from micro to macro." You ask a fair question regarding the political scope of Union Atlantic. It's one I wrestled with in writing it. I wanted to have sections portraying the economic devastation that occurred in Argentina after they defaulted on their bonds; I wanted to dramatize the effects of the Fed's decisions on broad swaths of working Americans. The trouble with these ambitions was how to include such material non-didactically. Novel's aren't speeches. And then there's the issue of length. Such a book has no logical limit as the economy encompasses everyone. I started this book working on characters and it's my exploration of them that guided the composition over the five years of writing. But I hear what you're saying and I understand.

As to other works that do some of what your talking about (giving macro and micro accounts) I'd suggest J. Anthony Lucas's classic "Common Ground" about desegregation in Boston. It's a masterful portrait of three families caught up in the drama of what's happening from three totally difference points of view and it reads like a novel.

Finally, as to favorites, I'm a fan of some of the usual suspects. Middlemarch, George Eliot; the ultimate micro/macro novel, War & Peace; Wharton's House of Mirth and Custom of the Country; Halldor Laxness's Independent People, which is a masterpiece and does for early 20th century Iceland what the Wire did for Baltimore but with prose more sublime. I could go on and on. Ford Maddox Ford, Gaddis, W.G. Sebald, Robert Bolano. Favorite short story writers are Joy Williams, William Trevor, Alice Munro. I'm sure I think of others over the course of the week.

Andre wrote: "I picked up Union Atlantic on a whim after hearing the NPR interview. I remember feeling so disoriented by the financial crisis and felt like the terminology in the media was meaningless. Upon he..."

Thanks for your comments. Glad to be here, and apologies for the late start. I'm in San Francisco this winter and spring and so will be responding on West Coast time all week.

And I'm glad to hear you say that the book help you make some sense of the financial world. I think there was a real hunger for that particularly right after the crash. The book is about a lot more than finance alone, but that is the setting for one major strand of it and my goal was indeed to place the reader as if they were looking over the shoulder of the some of the people who make these obscure, sometimes very technical decisions that end up having such huge impact on all our lives.

I recently wrote an article for the Financial Times about the art of sentence writing (you can find it here: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8c60799c-24...). In very brief form, it's an argument against a certain kind of American minimalism that has become a default "realism" in much contemporary fiction. In this thread, I thought we might start a conversation about sentences and literary style: favorite sentences, thoughts on contemporary style, etc. I'll drop in a few of my favorite lines along the way.

Writing is a solitary job. Which is, I think, one of the reasons people are often keen to discuss it. It can be lonely. In this thread, I'm taking any questions readers might have about the practice of writing.

I always begin writing by inventing characters. The first seeds of Union Atlantic were planted as far back at 1999, when I became interested in how much power the still poorly understood Federal Reserve held over our economy. I decided to place a character high in its chain of command, and I invented Henry Graves. I put the project aside for five years as I completed my story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and finished law school. When I came back to it, I began work on Charlotte Graves, the retired school teacher living in her family's old summer home in Massachusetts. At the time, I didn't know she'd be Henry's sister. Later, her neighbor, Doug Fanning, the young banker, emerged as a main character, along with Nate Fuller, the boy who comes to Charlotte for tutoring. For me the main challenge in writing the book was how to bring these four different people into the same world because for a long time I wrote about them apart from each other. I finished the book in 2008 just as the financial crisis hit. To me, the financial world of the book was a setting to dramatize larger cultural and personal forces. But given the timing of its release a lot of emphasis was put on the coincidence of my having written about the Fed and a failing bank just as the real world events unfolded. In any case, I'm happy to take questions in this thread on any aspect of the novel.

Welcome to the Q & A. I'm happy to be here at goodreads taking questions from readers on my books, the writing life, culture, politics, and whatever else comes up. So feel free to jump in.