Jonathan Franzen is one of the most influential novelists alive today. He sees fiction as the most fundamental human art, and in this conversation he explains how he actually makes it: the discipline, the daily grind, and the psychological spelunking required to write characters who feel startlingly alive.
Franzen has always had an outsider’s eye. He questioned the hype of the Internet long before it was fashionable, and he’s been ruthless in diagnosing the spiritual emptiness of modern consumer life. Practically, more than anything else, this episode is about how he develops rich characters. For Franzen, the people are the story. When they’re real and true, fiction has a way of getting to the core of the human experience in a way that gives people a visceral experience, as if they’ve lived the story firsthand.
Transcript
David:
So when you’re writing and you’re working on a novel, what is it that you’re doing to build relationships with your characters, get to know them?
Jonathan:
I have become, probably always was meant to be, a novelist of character. All of my novels have principal characters, and those are the ones who get the most attention from me. Secondary characters tend to be easy. They have a limited role. You just need a couple of things and you can make them work. Typically, their role will be defined by their dramatic function.
The main characters are a whole different thing. This is an exaggeration, but it could be reduced to this: I am looking for a sentence that describes a problem for the character. Ideally, when you read that sentence, you’re smiling, ready to laugh.
So I’m looking for a comic problem. It doesn’t have to be a big problem. It doesn’t have to be “the nuclear launch codes have been stolen and only you can get it back.” If you’re writing a certain kind of novel, that is the problem you want. But for mine, it can be really, really trivial problems. In some ways, the smaller the problem, the funnier it is. Because if it really matters to the character and it’s also really small, that in itself is funny. You’re worried about that. But if the character really wants it, that’s enough because that will then set in motion everything else.
Once you have something that a character wants, you present some obstacles. That puts you into scenes with those other characters. Scenes which check the important dramatic box of having characters want different things. One character wants you to get on a plane. The other character really has no intention of getting on a plane. That’s drama.
Basically, I’m not talking about understanding the history of a character. I’m not talking about what they look like or where they went to school. It’s always going for the story essence of what the character is. The rest can be filled in as you go.
David:
So basically, you’re trying to get a funny, that funny one sentence. But why do you use the word funny? Why is that so important?
Jonathan:
Because I’m fundamentally a comic novelist, I think. Not everyone gets the humor. It’s remarkable.
In every audience, there are people who don’t understand that you are allowed to laugh when a character ends up with a filet of salmon in his underwear because they’ve been told, “Well, he’s a serious novelist.”
David:
I present myself as a serious novelist.
Jonathan:
I’m wearing the glasses of a serious novelist and the watch of a serious novelist.
Jonathan:
The watch—it’s my Shinola.
I think there’s this unthinking prejudice that if you’re serious, you can’t be funny. But if you look at the great novelists and the great playwrights over the ages, the vast majority are funny at least some of the time.
I don’t want to be the writer who is tremblingly serious and earnest, talking about people in terrible pain, terrible injustice, to this moral vision of serious people encountering serious things in the world. I don’t want to be that guy because I don’t trust that guy if I read his book, because it will usually say to me, that person hasn’t really gotten the right distance on this.
Distance is really critical, and one of the best indicators of distance on a main character—a protagonist—is if the author is able to laugh at that person.
I will pick a single contrast to that. You will have writers who themselves feel victimized in some way, and they’ll decide to write a novel about a character who’s been victimized.
If you stick close to a character who the author is convinced is a victim—a good person that bad people have done bad things to—and all the more so if the character himself or herself feels, “I’m a good person who bad people have done bad things to,” you’re in trouble on page one because you will appeal to people who feel victimized in the same way, and that’s the end of your appeal.
The kind of books I like to read and the kind of books I try to write take a somewhat more nuanced view of who’s good and who’s bad, and in fact, work from the premise that no one is all good, no one is all bad.
And again, if you’re laughing at the character on page three, you can just relax and say, “Good, I’m not going to be asked to sign on with someone’s victimology.”
Part of the work of preparation for writing a book is a deep examination of oneself. It’s a mistake young writers make. They think they know who’s right and who’s wrong, and they think they’re among the right ones. It takes a lot of time, life experience, and self-examination to get over that idea and open yourself up to the way things really are.
David:
Explain this to me. Why is it so important to investigate yourself if you’re writing fictional stories that are not about you, at least on the surface?
Jonathan:
Well, for me, the goal is to create a character who’s so completely not me that I can pour all of myself into that person.
It’s easier with female characters because I’m pretty heterosexual, pretty securely defined as a male in my imagination. And so if I make a character female, then I don’t have to think, well, that’s me because it’s clearly not me. That’s a woman. I’m a man.
And so I can get to the point of infusing my own experience, my own subjectivity into that character more easily than if it’s a man who superficially looks like me.
One of the reasons you might have to stop and do some self investigation is when you are encountering high levels of shame.
You feel the story wants you to go in a certain direction, but you’re ashamed to go in that direction. And every time you try to go in that direction, the pages have been going along great, and then you got into this shameful stuff and suddenly you hate the pages.
They’re bad, and they’ve lost all their humor. They’ve become kind of like, I feel bad about myself. I feel ashamed of that. And one of the reflexes then is to just kind of pile on the ugliness, pile on all of, basically, to objectify the shame you’re feeling writing about that and make things even more depraved than they need to be and more disgusting and more self interested than they need to be. Because you are feeling such high levels of shame and you’re disliking yourself so much that it becomes the writing becomes depressed in that way.
There’s no technical solution to shame levels in a writer. You have to go into the shame and figure out, why am I so ashamed?
That will then offer various solutions. One might be, you know what? This is just not the book where I’m going to get into that. And I know it seemed I felt I needed to write about that, but I’m not going to, full stop.
Or you may, as I did when I was encountering high shame levels at one point in the corrections, do a deep dive into self analysis and flounder for six months and finally have an idea for how to make what you thought was shameful ridiculous.
David:
Is that that separation that you’re talking about?
Jonathan:
Exactly, when once you start laughing, once you can laugh, he can still be feeling shame himself. But if you are liberated from shame, then you can see it objectively. It’s a tragic distance, it’s a comic distance. It is some kind of distance where you can where you are no longer personally implicated in that character. You see all, you see what’s wrong with them, you feel for them, and you may be amused by them.
That kind of almost celestial distance from the character is what you’re you’re looking for.
And it’s hard because the job is to try to put as much of your own self and much of your own subjectivity as you can into all of these characters, which means that there’s a constant kind of psychological process whereby you are coming to terms with parts of yourself that have been unearthed by the process of trying to write the damn novel.
David:
Okay, let me show you this new tool that I’ve been using to write called Sublime. And they’re the sponsor of this episode. I’m going to show you how I use Sublime to write this post on X, which got almost a million impressions.
So it started off with the basic note taking stuff. I was just throwing notes in, but it’s the stuff that came after that was really unique. That’s what makes Sublime special. You’ll see here that I had this mind map, and that allowed me to begin to see connections that weren’t even there. I was blown away by this.
Then it didn’t just end there. Sublime has the save one discover 100 feature where you can just put in a piece of information and all of a sudden it just starts recommending things. It’s like having a research assistant that actually has good taste, and these are put in there by actual human beings.
So now I had the mind map, I had all the related ideas, and I really started to think about how I’m actually going to structure this piece. And Sublime helped me see parts of my structure that I didn’t even realize were there, to see how ideas were actually connected. See, Sublime is built by people who care about creativity and beauty, and not just productivity and efficiency. And you can feel that as you use the app.
So if you want to use Sublime in your own writing, you can go to sublime.app and use the promo code Purell, and they’ll give you 20% off. All right, let’s get to the episode. How do you think about the difference between... Do you know what trauma dumping is?
Jonathan:
I can guess.
David:
You know, it’s basically saying, okay, these are all the difficult things that are happening in my life. I’m just going to pour it all out on the page. How do you think about the difference between that and what it is that I hear you saying, which is you’re going to do this investigation, you’re going to unearth things, those things will then make it into the novel. How do you think about the difference between those?
Jonathan:
If you’re experiencing various kinds of trauma or suffering from the aftermath of various kinds of trauma, and you dump that out there, people who have been in that position or who are in that position may feel comforted by it. They may feel like, “I’ve got company.”
The basic mode of that is it’s very much focused on the self, and it tends to have a flavor of complaint and an implication of some injustice that I should—I, important I—should be feeling so bad and to have had these terrible things happen to me. All of that is really incompatible with forging the kind of bond I want to forge with the reader where there’s me, there’s the reader, and then there are these characters we’re going to meet on the ground of those characters. I want you to know my loyalties are actually just as much to you reader, probably more than they are with the characters.
I was reading this Halle Butler novel a year ago. It’s the best novel I read last year, best new novel I read last year. It’s called Banal Nightmare. It’s also one of the funniest novels maybe I’ve ever read, and it’s full of people who feel so sorry for themselves and are so angry and so full of complaint, and everything’s going shittily for them.
Part of the genius of the book is, well, it’s not just one. There are like eight of them, and each one of them is convinced of the unique terribleness of the situation they’re in. It’s a joy for the reader because I’m not thinking, “Oh, well, the author is just dumping this on me.” No, I’ve got a whole smorgasbord of suffering to choose from and to laugh at. Because one person venting like that, complaining like that, suffering like that, well, that’s a tragedy, but eight of them, that’s a comedy.
I just felt so grateful to Butler, and so I just relaxed so quickly as soon as I started laughing. It’s like, this is going to be fun, and that, of course, is what the point of writing and reading novels is.
David:
Well, it’s funny because we’re talking, making jokes about, oh, serious Mr. Franzen over there. But then on the other side, you talk about writing being fun and pleasurable and all of that. That’s sort of your overt and explicit goal in the books that you work on.
Jonathan:
I’ve had a lot of time to think about how to justify writing novels, what the point might be. Of course, when I was young, I thought it was to change the world, to expose injustice, to help people look more critically at social structures.
Then there was sort of a middle period where I thought it was, well, you know, we’re all existentially lonely. I have found that when I’m reading a book, I feel connected with another consciousness in a way I don’t feel, even with my best friends. I don’t feel as intimately connected as I do with the author of a book that was written 100 years ago who’s long dead. There’s still something to that.
I’m not going to take away from either concept, the socially useful concept or the existential loneliness novel as the best ever art form for the connection of one consciousness with another, which I do think it is. There is none superior.
But in old age, it really doesn’t. The only thing that makes sense is I write for pleasure and I write to provide pleasure.
Paradoxically, 40 years after my young political self was looking for a political justification for spending all day making up stories about characters telling lies—as my mother put it, “I’m lying. I’m a professional liar.” I know, like, seven days a week, there I am writing down things that never happened.
David:
My young boy, he had so much potential, and he became a professional liar.
Jonathan:
I’m a professional liar, exactly. At this point, to make a claim that something being fun is justification enough takes on, especially if you’re in politically fraught times and everyone is demanding that you take a stand, that you’re either with us or against us. Well, no, I’m just over here trying to give pleasure. That takes on a weird political valence, and I think it’s a useful valence. It’s useful to be reminded.
Once you get all those other ideas out of your head, then the task when you’re trying to write a novel is, how can I make this really fun? There are two damning things I’ll say when I’m working on something and it’s not working. One is, I don’t see the humor in it. The other is, this isn’t fun enough.
I define fun rather broadly. Even now, I have fun using words that you don’t encounter very much or writing sentences whose structures are a little unfamiliar. I have fun deploying those words. I have fun developing those interestingly structured sentences. That’s within a larger context of telling fun stories about characters you care about.
For some readers, I know they’re going to really enjoy learning that word, or they’re going to appreciate, “Oh, that’s a kind of a cool thing they’re doing.” That writer is doing with how he’s exploiting the ability in English to put an adjective after the noun it’s modifying. So you can say, “He had different capabilities,” but you can also say, “He had capabilities different from his brothers.” I felt like here was a less utilized and therefore extremely pleasurable way of putting a sentence together.
David:
It’s funny to hear you use the words fun and pleasure. The one word that I would add based on what you’re saying is play. Think about that, what you’re saying here. It seems like writing these books has been grueling for you at times, so how do you square those things?
Jonathan:
So many metaphors are available. You have a desperate desire for such and such person, and you’re rejected, rejected, and rejected.
There’s a bird I really, really want to see. I’m in a new place, and there are some specific birds I would like to see here. Yeah, it’s going to be like a four-hour walk in very humid forest before I get to see it, and even then there’s going to be some bushwhacking, and I’m going to get stuck with things and bitten by insects. Yet it’s not something I would go out and do unless I had a goal.
But by the time you actually see the bird you’re looking for, the whole thing becomes fun. It was like, “Yeah. Oh my God. We were out on that trail for hours. We’d given up.” So it said, “Great story.” But also, it’s like all the suffering was kind of meaningless. You were suffering at the time, but you’re no longer suffering.
It was kind of unreal in a way, and it gets subsumed into the larger pleasure of the pursuit, the capture, and the telling of the story.
David:
The biggest lie that writers will tell themselves is, “Ah, I’ll remember that later.” No, there are so many times when I’m listening to a podcast, and I want to save something, and I just never end up saving it because typing it into the phone is just too much work. Well, I found a great solution to that problem.
It’s called Podcast Magic, and they’re the sponsor of this episode. So what you do is super easy. Say you’re listening on Apple or on Spotify, if you find a bit in this conversation that you really like, just take a screenshot of it and then email it to podcastmagic@sublime.app.
If you email it, like a minute later, you’ll get an email back with the transcript, the context, all the information that you need, and then that way, you don’t need to write down all the information. So if you find something in the conversation that you really like, check out Podcast Magic. All right, let’s get to the interview.
When you were talking earlier about writing in different people’s characters, say that you’re writing from the character of a teenage girl, how do you add texture to that character that would be so far away from you? Do you read books from the voice of teenage girls? Do you watch movies? What are you trying to do? Or do you just have this bank of experiences from your life that now you can draw from and pull from?
Jonathan:
At this point in my life, I would not attempt to write certainly from the perspective of a teenager of any gender identification because I feel as if the world teenagers live in is so distant from the one I inhabit.
David:
Yeah, this is from the one I have it.
Jonathan:
I’m 30. Exactly. So I wouldn’t do it. Here’s another thing to keep in mind, you don’t need that many details.
David:
Explain that.
Jonathan:
Even a long book is only 500 pages, and it’s probably a total of less than one page devoted to describing the weather in that book. And yet you feel well apprised because that’s going to be 20 different points at which the weather was described. The reader will finish the book having said, wow, he’s so good at describing the weather. I felt like I was in; I knew what the weather was like in each of those scenes because all it takes really is one sentence.
For a minor character, a minor character might be a total of six pages in a novel, and two sentences are really all you need to establish what you need for a minor character. It really doesn’t take much. They have to be the right things, of course.
You might write down 50 things and then whittle it down to the two that really work. My advice for less experienced writers is to really, really work on the pages. Look at every sentence. You have to ask the question, do I need this?
Then you look at the sentence itself. Is there a way to say this in fewer words? Because when you’re starting out, you’re learning to write what you’re picturing. What you’re picturing is walking across the room, turning the doorknob, opening the door.
People send me a lot of stuff, and I probably agree to look at more things than I should, even from strangers. I have a novel, and I think, oh Jesus. But every once in a while, I will look at that work, and invariably, I know in one page whether it’s any good.
People use cliches: white as a sheet, quiet as a mouse. In my opinion, you get at most one cliche per book. People send me a galley of a book that’s coming out. I read along until I get to the second cliche, and I say, thank you. There are some award-winning literary writers whose books I have come to the third cliche in three pages on, and I thank you.
David:
Why are cliches such a sin, for lack of a better word?
Jonathan:
They tell me this is not an attentive writer. Aren’t you aware that that’s a cliche? Did it not occur to you to stop and take 20 minutes to find a better phrasing than that? It bespeaks laziness.
David:
Is it like the laziness of borrowed language?
Jonathan:
Laziness of borrowed language, but you can also have borrowed feelings, borrowed ideas, borrowed situations. Cliche is not simply these obvious little stupid similes, but also sentiment can be cliched or unearned, situations like I’ve seen this situation before, and that everyone has seen this situation before. It’s a cliche, the situation.
David:
Don’t want to meet the mother-in-law.
Jonathan:
There is no such thing as a story that hasn’t been told. So there continue to this very day to be great books written where people go to meet their mother-in-law.
It might still be true. This might be an impossible mother-in-law, but you cannot refer to it as a thing without essentially participating in a cliche.
David:
You talk about novels needing to be an experience. You want to create an experience for the reader. What is it that you’re getting at there?
Jonathan:
A lot of experimental fiction delights in breaking the fourth wall and referring to the text.
David:
Text.
Jonathan:
Referring to the artificiality of the text, introducing the author, commenting on all of this stuff, which basically, to my mind, takes you out of the experience. It becomes a different kind of experience.
So, experience is close to this notion of the kind of vivid dream, and I think it’s a worthy goal for a writer to not want to get in the way of that. You asked about cliche earlier. One of the reasons to avoid cliches is it takes you out of the vivid dream you’re having in following these characters along.
Suddenly you become aware, cliche. And you’re saying, “Really? He turned white as a sheet?”
So what you are trying to do is get people into that vivid dream as expeditiously as possible to establish your trustworthiness as a writer. You can trust me. I’m not going to play any games with you, and I’m not going to distract you with my technical insufficiency. You can trust me. And I’m not going to take it too seriously. We’re all in this together. We’re laughing sometimes, we’re crying sometimes, whatever.
Then stay in that dream, and that becomes the experience. That can become, in the right hands, in the hands of a skillful novelist, an experience you don’t want to have end. You want to stay in that experience. You know, “Honey, it’s time to turn out the light.” “Five more pages. Five more pages.” That’s what you want. It’s like, “I’m having an experience. Don’t interrupt me.”
David:
Humans are very good at retaining the essence of characters, but we don’t have the complete picture of who a character is. Is that the right way to think about it?
Jonathan:
That’s why you don’t need as much as you may think you need. Our brains are very eager to form complete wholes from little bits of information.
You could describe the writer as trying to facilitate an imaginative process in the reader. It is a very active form of entertainment in that regard.
David:
How do you feel like your noticing of the world has changed through the process of doing this craft?
Jonathan:
I’m not one of those writers who walks around with a moleskine in my back.
David:
That’s kind of what I was getting at.
Jonathan:
Do you do that? Like going down to the cafe, interesting characters, that weird guy at Starbucks?
Never been that. I used to beat myself up when I was young. It seemed like writers are supposed to be interested in absolutely everything. They’re supposed to be on the street observing and writing things down. It’s never been me.
I think what I was good at was reading people. Always. From my position in my family, I was a very late-coming child, much older brothers, much older parents. And I learned how to read what was happening between these characters really early on, and I trust my instincts about people.
My spouse, Kathy, and I will have spent an evening out. She’s a writer too, and she’ll know what I’m talking about. I’ll say, “Did it seem that she really didn’t want to talk about that one thing?” Kathy will say, “Yeah, I wondered about that.” You just notice that, and it’s something you don’t have to be a writer to notice things like that, but I think I’m particularly attuned to that kind of thing.
I’m trying to tell a story, and it was like, “Well, why wouldn’t that have been?” And then we might try to work it out, and that’s a lot of what writing is, trying to work out what might have been going on with that person. Even as a kid, the more closely you observe and the better you can tell the story of what you observe, the more chances you have of making someone laugh at the story you’re telling. One of the highest goods was getting a laugh, not in a stand-up way, but just from observing something and framing it in such a way that it reads as really hilarious.
David:
Tom Stoppard has a line. He says laughter is the sound of comprehension. And what I take from that is that there’s a truth in a laugh. You can’t fake getting a bunch of people to laugh. It’s got to hit at something core that is actually pre-intellectual.
Jonathan:
Absolutely. That’s particularly the case when you’re doing a public event. It’s like if I’m not getting the laughs, I’m in trouble. I almost panic.
The worst event I ever did was in Brazil, and I was getting laughs from the same 15 people in the audience. They were the ones who were not wearing their translation headsets. They were listening to English, and they were laughing, and that’s exactly right. I mean, basically, even though they must have been getting some Portuguese translation of what they were saying, they were not comprehending, as Stoppard would say.
David:
I think it was Kafka or Proust who would sit at the keyboard, and they would laugh so loud they’d keep the neighbors alive. Do you do that? Do you find yourself laughing as you’re writing, or is it more kind of a quiet, private, internal experience?
Jonathan:
I think I laugh every once in a while. It’s not a good look to laugh at your own material.
Well, you’re sitting in a room; there’s no one else here.
I’ve occasionally cried over my own sad material.
Probably mostly smiling at what I’m writing, and really smiling with the pleasure of knowing it’s funny more than smiling at it. It’s like, that is a good line that’ll get a laugh.
David:
Most of the Internet just screams at you. There are all of these notifications and things that are trying to hijack your attention. It’s like being in a Chuck E. Cheese with the kids screaming, the parents yelling, the skeeball machine is making all sorts of weird noises. How do you write in an environment like that?
Luckily, there’s an app called Ulysses, and they said, we are going to create a calm and peaceful place for you to write. It’s like a quiet little cabin for your brain, a place where you’re not going to be distracted by the UI, the UX, and all the design. They deal with the complexity of big writing projects so that you don’t have to, so that you can just focus on the writing.
Now, you’re going to have to go somewhere else for your Chuck E. Cheese coupon, but Ulysses did say, hey, I think How I Write listeners are going to love our product. We’re going to give anyone 50% off of the first year of an annual subscription, half off just for you guys. So if that’s what you’re going for, go to Ulis.app/Howiwrite. All right, back to the episode.
How much of the process of writing these books is a process of unfolding versus planning?
Jonathan:
This is by no means the first time I’ve said this, but I think a book that was too fully planned is likely to read like a book that was too fully planned.
David:
Like sterile.
Jonathan:
Yeah, not exciting. It’s really, really subtle stuff, but I can tell there are several British novelists, but also some American novelists. You can really feel, God, this was written from an outline. It’s perfect, but it’s also written from an outline.
That is the last impression you want to give. And if you can outline it, then my feeling is, what’s the point in writing it, if that makes any sense? I could get a machine to do that. Literally, nowadays, I could get a machine to do that.
There’s just no fun in slavishly following an outline. Nevertheless, you have to have some idea of where you’re going. And the best case is when you know I’ve got to get there, but I have no idea how I’m going to get there. So it’s the adventure of trying to make an unlikely sequence of events seem inevitable.
David:
The word organic is coming to mind for me that maybe there’s something organic and the truth in that organic nature of something that isn’t outlined, where you’re kind of rolling with the story.
Oh, wow. All these surprises, like if there’s a surprise for the writer, there will be a surprise for the reader, kind of organic, you know.
Jonathan:
Yeah, I’m not, I do not belong to the school of the writers take over and tell me what to do. The characters surprise me.
I don’t let my characters push me around. I push them around. I am their boss. They do what I say.
Nevertheless, if something isn’t working, you have to be open to the possibility that what you thought the character was going to do is not really going to be available because it bores you to try to do it, or because the more you think about it, the less likely it seems that the character would do that. And so you are forced to think about other possibilities.
That’s why you need to be attentive to your sentences because sometimes when a paragraph is like, well, that’s all messed up. What’s wrong with that? You bear down on the paragraph and you realize, oh, well, there’s this whole other thing that I could be doing instead. It’s a matter of, as Flannery O’Connor said, of doing whatever you can get away with.
David:
What does that mean?
Jonathan:
Well, the full quote is, the writer does whatever he can get away with, and nobody ever got away with much.
David:
Oh, that completely changes the quote.
Jonathan:
Which is to say you’re always pushing yourself, like, how can I make this more extreme? How can I make this more original? How can I sell something even more unlikely?
Well, as Flannery said, nobody ever got away with much. But in that quote is, you always should be pushing it. Four times out of five you say, that would never work. But one out of five times it’s like, whoa, that would be cool.
David:
Well, tell me about this word extreme, because we were talking earlier about the stories that you pick. They don’t always need to be “nuclear weapon is gonna go off in 34 seconds, we need Jack Bauer to save the day here.” It can sometimes be much more mundane, but then the stakes are big or there’s a sense of desire that the character has.
Now you’re using the word extreme. Talk to me about that word and why it’s so important.
Jonathan:
I am a middle class novelist who mostly writes about middle class characters, and middle class people tend to lead pretty well regulated lives.
I do have a taste for characters who are mentally unwell in some way or another, whether merely obsessive or full on psychotic in a few cases. Because that’s a way to, within this well ordered bourgeois world, which is for better or worse, the world I have to work with, it is a way to find more extreme emotional states and also get a more vivid kind of writing.
Because if you hook into somebody who’s literally going crazy, like in Crossroads, you can suddenly do all this fun stuff. You’re no longer doing this well controlled storyteller. It becomes much more brittle and bright and fragmented and extreme, but it’s in the context of this ridiculous tiny little thing.
It’s a middle class suburb, and this is a typical problem people have. They’re attracted to people they shouldn’t be attracted to. There’s nothing extreme, nothing outside the course of normal life in that it’s how you approach it. How can I not let this resolve quickly? How can I drive it to ever more unbearable lengths?
David:
Well, one of the things that I’m intuiting here is that a lot of human life is kind of…
Jonathan:
It’s boring.
David:
It’s boring, it’s familiar and it’s cookie cutter familiar. People can kind of hide their psyche.
But then if there’s something really extreme going on, like “man, I really want to sleep with the girl next door,” it’s been four or five months, this isn’t working, and now my sex drive is just killing me. And I really want that to happen. Now the mask can no longer be there.
Whatever was holding that back, whatever dam there was, the water’s just going to shatter through it and something will be revealed. Is that right?
Jonathan:
Yeah.
David:
Okay.
Jonathan:
Even before digital technology, most people led lives of quiet desperation, to quote Thoreau. That was an age that was really well suited to the short story because a person might have a whole life of quiet desperation, and there would be this one moment when things could have been different.
And the story writer will say, “Pick that little moment, please, and I’ll make a story out of it.”
David:
Sure.
Jonathan:
The great ones can do that again and again and again. It’s just a little moment of a no-account person’s life. Yet for them, that was the most important moment in their life, and you’ve left the reader feeling like you know everything you need to know about that character in the space of 20 pages. You know what the rest of their life is going to look like because that was the moment things could have gone one way or another.
But now we have digital technology, and you can be completely distracted 100% of your waking hours.
David:
Some of us are.
Jonathan:
Some of us are, and some others of us go to great lengths to avoid spending our lives that way. One of the things that increased my interest in writing about families is that even if your life is almost 100% mediated, you cannot avoid a certain amount of real-time, real interaction with people in your family.
David:
Those are high stakes.
Jonathan:
They’re high stakes, no matter who you are. You can count on every reader having some experience of family, even if it wasn’t a biological family, even if they had a very irregular childhood. Everyone knows what it’s like to be in a fraternal or filial or parental relationship with someone.
Although people can and do write interesting work about people whose entire lives are spent online, I’m not the person who can do that. I think it’s a rather limited array of options you have for that because it’s essentially virtual. Maybe it’s just a matter of taste. My job, not spending so much time online, is to try to put characters in precisely the kind of situation that they have dedicated their lives to avoiding.
David:
What allowed you to be so.
Jonathan:
Early.
David:
To seeing the problems that were going to merge with technology? It seems like you were 15 and 20 years ahead on that, like you were writing about this in the 90s.
Jonathan:
That is a good question, and no one has asked me that. So thank you, I appreciate it for the implicit compliment. So I don’t have to sit here and say, “I told you so.” You know what? I was talking about this stuff years ago, which is a very unattractive position for a writer.
David:
Was being I was right about was these problems right now.
Jonathan:
Exactly. I think I was well-positioned for a couple of reasons. I was very political back then, and I had a deep distrust, a nameable and often-named distrust, of consumer capitalism and the large corporate interests that profited from it. I also was in a field that pretty early on felt threatened by the digital world.
David:
Oh, okay.
Jonathan:
Writing fiction.
David:
Okay.
Jonathan:
Shocker. Well, and books generally.
So, the specter already in the ‘90s was no one will read anymore. We could survive one screen, we could survive two screens, but the third screen, which was the computer screen, which came to be synonymous with the smartphone screen, reading survived movies, survived TV, but it’s not going to survive the third screen.
We were wrong about that, as it turned out. But it did incline me to look critically at the promises.
Frankly, I don’t even feel like I can take credit for pointing out the ridiculousness of, “We’re making the world a better place.” Once we can screen each other’s minds on the Internet, there will be no more war, and there’ll be more. People were literally saying this. They were saying this will usher in an unprecedented era of prosperity, equality, and democracy will flourish because everyone will be able to have their voice heard. It was just so patently idiotically wrong.
Because of my deep suspicion of large corporations with a consumerist model, it was not hard to make the connection between to essentially say, this is not just stupid; this is evil shilling for something with monopolistic designs, and it’s profoundly anti-humanist. So it was like the combination of the total flagrant stupidity of it all with the sense that people were lying for a reason, and it was not a very pretty reason.
That was succeeded by the whole “making the world a better place” era. It also helped that I had had this early involvement with the Viennese satirist, Karl Krauss.
David:
Yeah, tell me about him.
Jonathan:
I was accidentally a German major because I thought I needed it to be a scientist, but I wasn’t a scientist, so whatever. Among the writers who I got to know well as a German literature major was this guy, Carl Krauss, a Vietnamese satirist who lived at the, was active in the first third of the 20th century.
He had a very fervent following, and he was this absolutely hardcore, acid-etched satirist.
He was known as the great hater. He was very smart, he was very funny, and he could just reduce any object of his satire to mincemeat. He was so good.
As a very angry and rather bright young man, I thought he was kind of a hero to me.
His big thing was that there is an evil troika of powers: media, money, and technology. He had an extremely sophisticated critique of all of that. He was, for example, looking at the role of Viennese newspapers in promoting war interests, in prolonging the First World War. He was ruthlessly exposing the phony language, all of the lies basically, these kind of beautiful lies that were being told to the public in order to support the profiteering war effort and to prolong a moribund empire and so forth.
Anyway, it was all really preparation for what was coming in the ‘90s, which was this malign confluence of big money, big tech, and big media. So I was kind of ready for it. He was writing about Viennese newspapers, but what he was saying applies totally to Facebook. It already applied to AOL in the ‘90s. You could see it.
David:
So, what do you think that we’re missing about the nature of the good life? I mean, the very cynical take is none of these people believe it. It’s just good for making money. So, they come out with that narrative, and they beat their hands on the table till everybody starts believing it, almost in a propagandist way.
And then there’s another way to say it, which is that’s a very materialist worldview or something, and actually, they’re just completely missing the point about what it means to have a life well lived.
Jonathan:
In the same way that I’m glad that people are talking a little less about solving the problem of climate change, I’m glad that people like Mark Zuckerberg are talking less about what a wonderful thing they’re doing for the world.
Because what really bugged me even in the ‘90s was not the evil corporations, I mean, no friend of mine, but still, it was the lies. It was the ludicrous lies.
All I’ve ever really wanted is for people to be more honest. To some extent, like Al Gore, when he was pushing for what was then called the Infobahn, pushing to have internet service to every household in America and so forth.
I think he was a little bit more honest about the fact that this is a really good way to convey goods and services. This is really good for the economy. This is in line with the neoliberal concept of an efficient economy. There’s a lot of truth in that. It’s a great way to buy plane tickets and a great way to get stuff delivered to your door overnight and so forth. eBay.
And eBay. I do like eBay myself.
David:
EBay rocks.
Jonathan:
EBay rocks.
David:
EBay rocked 30 years ago. Still rocks now.
Jonathan:
I’m a fan of eBay. I’m a fan of Wikipedia, but there are lots of things online that I’m a fan of. People like in Washington and Wall Street saw this is actually very good. This has to happen. It’s inevitable, and let’s try to regulate it. Of course, if you’re on Wall Street, let’s try to profit from it.
There was a basically honest talk about what the Internet was. It’s for making money.
If there had been more honest talk like that, we might not have gotten all the power concentrated in five companies. Exactly.
I credit Silicon Valley, the TV show, in significant part for laughing making the world a better place out of existence. People were still literally saying that in college commencement speeches and all that up until just around the time of the second season of Silicon Valley. People don’t say that anymore.
Zuckerberg doesn’t even try to pretend to be a good guy. Musk doesn’t even try to pretend to be a good guy. These are basically bad actors.
David:
In writing, what do you make of the trope of the fiction writer who doesn’t have their life together? Everything’s in shambles, but it makes for great art versus the Gustave Flaubert quote: You must be regular and orderly in your life so you can be violent and original in your work.
Jonathan:
Yeah, I’m a little bit more of the latter camp. There are different all different kinds of writers. I mean, there’s Hemingway.
If you’d made him stay home and said, “Here you are, Oak Park. Get a job, like at the post office like Faulkner did, and maybe you can join the country club,” he would have had nothing to write about.
Whereas Faulkner, “I’m going to go get myself some experience. I’m going to be a flaneur in New Orleans.” That stuff’s crap.
He went home, stayed home, and became by far the better writer. But nonetheless, Hemingway, not inconsiderable.
There he is out in the world. He needed to have experiences. So if somebody needs to blow up their life and destroy their safe and happy life, I’m not going to argue with that. It could work.
I think more good work has been done by people who stayed home. I’m not a Burroughs fan. I’m not particularly a Bukowski fan. I’m definitely not a Kerouac fan.
I’m naming all male writers for some reason. But when you think of people deliberately destroying their lives, so many more dudes come to mind.
It’s like women have people they need to like, the dudes.
Yeah, we’re sitting in my office, which is normally dark. This is the brightest it has ever been and probably ever will be and is very quiet.
That’s how I like to work.
David:
Well, you’ve done some crazy experimentation, huh? So you’ve had the earplugs with noise-canceling headphones over them and pink noise. You’ve tried writing with an eye mask?
Jonathan:
Oh, yeah, there was a little period when I was quitting cigarettes. I was so freaking out and distracted, even just seeing anything was distracting. So I blindfolded myself. That was perhaps talked about more than it was actually done.
David:
Okay, okay.
Jonathan:
But no, I still write with earplugs. I spend most of my existence in earplugs.
David:
Oh, really?
Jonathan:
Well, you know, like six hours in the morning and then another eight hours at night.
David:
Oh, eight hours of sleep.
Jonathan:
Yeah, yeah. Sleep with earplugs. I work in earplugs.
David:
What’s your average Tuesday like?
Jonathan:
Average Tuesday? Well, there are two kinds. There’s the average Tuesday when I’m actually working. Then I will be up early. I’ll be up at 6:30, sometimes earlier.
It’s really nice to walk into the office when it’s still almost dark outside. Then lately, when I’ve been working, I will spend an hour avoiding everything. Then I’ll spend four hours rewriting 200 words from the day before, and then in a burst in the last 20 minutes, write another page and then walk away.
It’s not a very efficient way of working. I used to write five pages in a day. Sometimes I would write eight pages in a day. I don’t do that anymore.
I’m lucky to get one page out, and it’s usually at the end. It’s usually after having brought the previous day’s work up to such a polish that I feel like, “Oh, yeah, okay. I’m a writer.”
I’ve just sat with it. I’ll have brought the page up to the point where you could publish that page. It’s convincingly finished.
So I don’t have to, you know, I can then write another page knowing something really solid. There’s an iron bridge up to that point. Yes, then there’s nothing, but I kind of know what direction the bridge is pointing, and there are some girders sticking out. I can just add on to it a little bit.
So that’s what a writing day is like.
David:
So if you’re on page 267 of a novel, it sounds like the first 266 pages are pretty dialed in.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
David:
And then how far forward are you looking? Is it like a foggy California morning where you can only see 50 feet ahead of you and, oh my goodness, I gotta drive slowly, or you kind of have a sense of the terrain?
Jonathan:
I have some sense of where I’m going. I just feel it’s going to be interesting to see how I’m going to get there.
The point is just to keep making pages that I’m proud of every sentence and someone’s going to have a good time reading it and is not even going to notice those sentences because they’re having a good time.
One at a time, finding that sentence. And the sentence in each case might take six months to find, but once I get it, I got it. I got the tone. The tone is really, really, really important.
David:
Talking about tone.
Jonathan:
Well, you know, it’s like, is it ironic? Is it comic? Is it this?
David:
The tone of the book or the tone of the character?
Jonathan:
Yeah, tone of the book. Tone of the book, but also tone of the character. Are you hearing it in the sentences? Or do the sentences read straight and serious and earnest? Or is there a little spin to it? Might you be invited to laugh here?
David:
You know, I took a hip hop class in high school.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
David:
And there were a few guys who would freestyle, really good freestylers, and you would watch them just fumble and fumble and fumble. Like they’re just kind of doing a crappy job.
Jonathan:
And.
David:
And you’re like, I thought you’re supposed to be good. And all of a sudden they’d find a hook or a beat.
Jonathan:
Yeah.
David:
And they would just take off like an F18. It was just one little unlock. It’s a curious thing about the mind that sometimes it takes something very small to ignite something very large.
Jonathan:
Yeah, and I would say it’s above all, tone.
David:
Above all, it’s tone.
Jonathan:
Yeah, you’re looking for the tone.
David:
Okay, well, let’s finish here. Let’s talk about birds. You love birds and they have become a real fascination for you, and I do not have the first clue about birds. So I’m just coming here saying, hey, open my eyes to the beauty and wonders of birds.
Jonathan:
Well, really the best way to do that is to go out and look at birds. I’m on record as saying merely describing the beauty of nature will not get the job done because I find that kind of writing personally almost always tedious and boring.
Better to have interesting facts or interesting people.
The bird I prize above all others is considered by many, especially by serious birdwatchers, to be one of the ugliest birds in America. Drab, boring, dull, gray, brown, medium-sized bird. And I think it is the most beautiful bird in the world. Its name is the California towhee.
If you think that is an ugly bird, it is because you have not looked. They’re kind of friendly. They’re not too shy. They’ll skitter away. They’re always on the ground. Occasionally they’ll sing from a tree, but they’re almost always on the ground or near the ground.
You know, you step outside, they’ll kind of melt away a little bit, but they won’t disappear entirely.
Here’s the thing, if you see one, wait. You won’t have to wait long because there’ll be another one within 20 ft, only one. They mate for life. They mate for life. And those couples, if they’re 30 ft apart, they feel a little uncomfortable. They like to be close to each other all times.
All day long, if you follow them around, you’ll hear one go, “Tick.” The other one will say, “Tick.” Just saying, “You there?” “Yeah, I’m here.” “You there?” “I’m here.” They do that all day long, except when they’re actually getting ready to breed, at which point they hop up in a tree and they sing duets.
A scarlet macaw, people will think, “Well, there is a beautiful bird.”
Oh my god, have you ever heard a scarlet macaw? Makes you want to cover your ears. Oh my god, it’s so loud. It’s like some animal being slaughtered next door. It’s terrible.
Yeah, and they’re lovely, but it’s like really, are we six-year-olds where you take the red crayon and the yellow crayon and the blue crayon, and that’s beauty? Come on. No, look carefully at a towhee, and, oh, what a shape. I can see one a quarter mile away, just fly across the road. I know it immediately. It’s got a very distinctive shape. They are a big sparrow. Big, this big sparrow. And they spend their days scratching around.
They like to hop back and forth, stirring things up in the leaves on the ground. I could go on, but basically, I have a natural taste for that kind of beauty. I don’t want to read the story about the lost nuclear launch codes. I’d rather read a story about some fucked-up person going through something in some Midwestern city or something.
There are some brilliant genre writers, but generally, I like a more subtle kind of beauty. The more you look at the birds around you, the more you see these beauties of behavior, beauties of subtle plumage.
If you get good binoculars and look carefully, there’s no bird that isn’t amazing when you look carefully at it. And it’s nature there every day outside your window, saying, “Hey, we’re still here. We’re still here.”
That feels good, too.
David:
Jonathan Franzen, thank you very much.
