Novelist Colson Whitehead visited SCAD Oct. 22 to talk about his latest work, “Sag Harbor.” Editor’s Note: This question-and-answer session was a collaborative effort of students in SCAD’s MFA writing program.
Colson Whitehead, the penman behind four critically acclaimed novels, stopped by SCAD recently to give a verbal dose of the humor and wit readers have come to know in his writing. His Oct. 22 visit was part of the Ivy Hall Lecture Series. But before Whitehead made his public appearance in event space 4C, he sat down with graduate writing students to discuss his work ethic, his beginnings and his latest bestselling work, “Sag Harbor.”
Q. As you reflect on your childhood, early education and college career, how did those experiences culminate in your first publication?
Well, that’s a big question. I knew I wanted to be a writer from a pretty early age. I liked Marvel Comics. I thought it would be a really easy job to write “Spider Man” or “Batman.” And then when I got to college, I got exposed to different sorts of … more so-called “higher brow” reading. I tried vainly to get into creative writing classes in college. I was always turned down. I would write these kind of crappy stories about depressed guys who walk around chain smoking. But when I got out of college, I got a job at the Village Voice in New York. And I always wanted to work there. As a teenager I was reading the culture pages. And I got a job in the books section, opening books. But once you’re in there, you know, you can meet one editor and that leads to an assignment. And if you have one assignment, that leads to other assignments. Then after a while, I was writing for the book section, TV section and the film section. So in terms of how that turned into “The Intuitionist,” eventually I was a freelancer, and eventually I became confident enough to start working on fiction on the side. I had the time to do so with a flexible schedule. So I wrote one book that was sort of reviled by every editor it went to and went unpublished. I had an agent, my agent dumped me. And I was really depressed, I sort of knew at that point that I had no other option except to start again. So I started writing “The Intuitionist” and it went better that time.
Q. What was the determining factor in your becoming a professional writer?
Not being able to do anything else. I mean, if I had been able to become a vet or something or gone to law school, I would’ve done that. There’s more stability. But really I feel most happy and alive when I’m writing. … I don’t like offices that much. I like hanging out by myself, so writing seems to be a good thing to do.
Q. What types of opportunities did the MacArthur Fellowship afford you?
Well, it gave me the time to work on different projects without having to have a day job, produce articles, teach. So I think the book that benefited most from it was “Sag Harbor.” I finished “Colossus of New York” basically the day I heard about the award. And I was halfway through “Apex,” so I wrote half a book. But really I took a long time to get into “Sag Harbor,” and it gave me the time to really sort of have that luxury of just walking around trying to formulate the story without having to make any compromises. So definitely … it’s a lot of money, but it’s also an affirmation of what I was doing. I thought I was writing these really weird books, and it was nice to have my more established peers say keep doing your weird books and we want to help you do them.
Q. What artists or other writers have inspired or influenced your writing?
Like all writers, I think you’re always taking in stuff from the world whether it’s books, music or film. And I think it all sort of goes into the stuff that feeds the work. So different books and writers are instrumental for different things I’m working on. I think for “Colossus of New York,” which is a collection of impressionistic essays, I think Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg were good for that. In terms of “John Henry Days,” which is very sprawling, it doesn’t have so much of a linear plot. It has like sort of a thematic plot, there are books … I think Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo were sort of instructive in [terms of] how do you talk about the culture and the sort of secret machinery of culture and then also have characters that are compelling and provide a vehicle for the story. So growing up, it was probably Stanley and Walt Whitman and Marvel Comics and Stephen King. … In college, Nathaniel West, Ralph Ellison, Beckett. So I definitely seem to prefer 20th-century writers, Post-modernists. I think there’s a larger awareness of the culture that creeps into fiction in the teens and ’20s. How’s that list? (laughs)
Q. Other than artists, has there been anyone in your life who has had an effect on your writing?
Not really. I mean, nobody ever really supported me (laughs). Never had mentor. No one ever took a shine to me. No one ever gave me advice. Which I think is actually good training for us writers. No one really cares when you’re working. I’m pretty established and people like my books, but it’s still hard to just find somebody to read, like, a draft of something new. Who wants to read 300 pages of someone’s draft? It sucks, no matter who you are. So, in fact, I think the lack of mentors and people to give me good advice made me do it on my own. I think it made me a better writer.
Q. Have you ever attended a writer’s retreat?
I like working at home. So, I’ve done it twice. Once was in the middle of “John Henry Days,” when I took a year off in the middle and I moved. The “Intuitionist” had come out and I had trouble getting back into the book. So I went to [one] for two weeks and that was good. I went to [another] in Wyoming, which was great except it was after 9/11 and I was really depressed so I just looked out the window, watching deer all day. So are they good? I think some are really social, some are really sort of isolating. I think I got a lot of work done the first time and made some good friends. The second time, it was very quiet and I didn’t get any work done. So it’s really about where you are in your process, if it’s going to help you. I would say now in terms of residencies, I just like working at home. I have an office and no one bugs me. So I don’t see the need to go away to work.
Q. Have you pursued genres other than the novel, like poetry or spoken word?
No. I mean, I wrote a few bad poems in high school – very Jim Morrison influenced (laughs). So nonfiction and fiction, but there’s a lot of stuff you can do with nonfiction. The Colossus of New York is a weird book. It’s so-called nonfiction but it’s really just a strange hybrid.
Q. You’ve mentioned that “Sag Harbor” is semi-autobiographical, how did it become a work of fiction rather than a memoir?
Well nothing interesting has ever happened to me so it wouldn’t make a really interesting memoir. I knew I wanted to write it. I spent my summers in Sag Harbor before college, then I stopped. I started going again in my early thirties. I would rent my aunt’s house for the month, two weeks or three weeks, and I would have friends out and I would just go through the story of the community, like, “oh that’s the house where I beat this kid up, and he beat me up, and then his sister beat me up.” (laughs) So there was this whole network of strange connections that seemed like it was good material. But that said, I wanted to base the characters on people I knew, but each time the Fred character would have gone on stage on the page, he would do something un-Fred-like. So the higher authority was telling the story, not what happened in June of ’85. …
Q. How did you get to the point where you were able to write in the first person without speaking as yourself?
Well it’s not as myself because there’s a character who has to do certain things and jump through certain hoops. Well, with that said, that’s the longest time I’ve ever been able to sustain a first-person narrator. It always did lapse into some voice that was very much like my own. So it took me about four books to be able to do it for 200 and something pages. But then I think definitely, the voice generally stabilizes in the first quarter or third. So, once I did know how he talked and what kind of jokes he made, then it became easier.
Q. You mentioned in an interview with Tavis Smiley that you incorporated pop culture to make the novel relatable to a wider audience. What elements of pop culture did you specifically draw upon? And did you have to do a lot of research, or was it just based on your memory?
Well, pop culture is definitely important to me and music is important to me and my friends. So, there were key songs from different summers that played a big role in our consciousness. So, I initially picked ’85 because that’s the summer when Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s The Show/La Di Da Di came out. And they were a part of a van guard in hip hop that was moving away from these sort of corny, kitschy singles, like “Roxanne Roxanne,” and into a new, oddball and interesting strain of hip hop. And it seemed like I could use hip hop to comment on the characters’ lives. They are boys turning to men. There games are kind of corny and innocent and hip hop is sort of innocent. On the horizon is gangster rap and the “corporatization” of hip hop and their adulthood is on the horizon. So, I’m using pop culture to comment on the different aspects of the characters’ lives. … It turned out that Doug E. Fresh didn’t work out, so I used UTFO instead. But once I picked ’85, the new Coke thing paid off; lucky for me it was the same year. “Road Warrior,” I remember, was always on Showtime, so that’s a part of chapter five. And you don’t want it to be an empty name-checking of references. You want always specific choices of pop culture to meet dividends. So the savvy easy-listening songs that form chapter seven, hopefully are a way of accessing a higher emotional feeling while keeping it down to earth. Corny love songs become a way of talking about longing and love and nostalgia. And part of the thing I was trying to do was pick things that would help the characters along.
Q. Your novel seems to be more episodic in technique as opposed to traditionally plot-driven; what was involved in this strategy?
Most people’s summers aren’t particularly action-packed where, like, you go to the beach and a big shark is killing everybody or all the sort of stuff that happens in coming-of-age novels. I didn’t want to inject fake melodrama — a serial killer, a lynching or the KKK running around. I wanted to be true to the arc of summer, which is very slow. You’re only, no matter how much you invest in your dreams of reinvention, you’re only really .001 percent smarter at the end of the summer. So, the hard part is capturing that slow progress without having another “you’re being chased through the woods by Jason” sort of plot. So, hopefully the writing and his point of view are enough to get you through these chapters. And hopefully he’s a lively enough narrator that you’d want to take your time with him and see the world through his eyes. …
Q. You’re writing is very metaphorical. How do you find the balance between the use of metaphor and your direct storyline?
Well each book is different. Talk about plot-driven books, “The Intuitionist,” my first book, is really plot-driven. It’s a take off on detective novels. So each book has a different sort of balance of effects you’re trying to achieve. So you’re really sort of feeling your way along until you’re done with the book. It is too much of this? Too much of that? You show it to people, get their response. But you just get better at it over time and try to be true to what the book needs.
Q. When you began writing, did you draw upon personal memoirs such as journals or photographs?
It’s not really a journal because I was too self-conscious to actually put my own thing in it, so it’s coded. It’s song lyrics or whatever. But I didn’t look at it because that’s me, it’s not the character. I found a box of junior high/high school stuff and I haven’t looked in it but I do feel really cool. … I had to write these two papers in eighth grade. One on dreams; I had to write two dreams down. And the other one was on being 13. So 10 pages on what it’s like to be a teenager. So, I’m sort of scared. I guess when I go pull it out and see what kind of weirdo I was and maybe write an encyclopedic annotation of it. But, yeah, I have that stuff. I just haven’t looked at it.
Q. Do you keep a journal now? Are you less self-conscious about that sort of thing?
I am less self-conscious, but I don’t keep a journal.
Q. On your book tour for “Sag Harbor” did you perceive differences in the reception of the book in the North versus the South and other regions?
I didn’t go a lot of places in the South, but not really. I was surprised at how many people would say, like, in Michigan, “Oh we actually have our own sort of upper-middle class summer place called Idlewild, half an hour from Ann Arbor.” So there are black resort towns all over the country. They’re on beaches, they’re on lakes. So the book wasn’t necessarily tied to one specific community. People could still relate to it, black people could relate to it, even if they weren’t from a small part of the northeast. And then people were saying, “I’ve never been to the Hamptons, but I would go to my cousin’s house every year, for a week every summer and a lot of stuff you describe reminded me of that.” So I think there are very open experiences in the book, like your first crappy minimum-wage job, trying to figure out what clothes or song to listen to that are sort of transcend a very specific ’85, east end of Long Island setting.
Q. In interviews and reviews of “Sag Harbor,” the term post-black is referenced a lot. What do you think of that term?
I have no idea what it means (laughs). It has nothing to do with my stuff. It was really only Toure in the New York Times book review. I like the guy, he’s a neighbor. I mean, the way he was describing it was like, it’s OK if you’re black and you like Led Zepplin. It was always OK. You write the book and other people have weird theories but it has nothing to do with, actually, you. Because of that … I keep being asked to do panels on “what’s writing in the post-racial America?” And it’s like, we’re not post-racial. So, it’s ridiculous, as if a switch was hit last November and suddenly racism doesn’t exist anymore.
Q. Were you trying to help “reshape the iconography of blackness” as Toure alluded to in his New York Times book review?
No. I felt when I started out 15 years ago writing fiction, there were clichés of the African American novel that I would want to avoid. So how do you do that? Write a book about elevators. Use elevators a weird metaphor for race. But now, there’s nothing I’m trying to get across. I don’t feel like I have to change the agenda of African American literature. We all do different things and I think it’s great that there isn’t this sort of monolithic idea of what we’re supposed to be doing as African American artists.
Q. In terms of reviews, do you read them? If not, why not?
Well, I do read the first third or half that come out because I do want the book to do well. I can’t pretend that I’m not interested because that’s a lie. … I do get anxious the first month or two. And the book mostly got good reviews. But … two magazines published negative reviews really early, like eight weeks before it came out. So I was like “wow this book’s gonna totally bomb. I’m totally screwed. I’m depressed.” But luckily they were sort of atypical.
Q. Do you write every day or just finish certain chapters when facing deadlines?
You have to find out what works for you. I thought being a journalist, writing shorter pieces, was good training. Because if you had to meet a deadline so that you could have food money – you know, hand your piece in so you can to eat – you learn to sit down and write for five or six hours and get the piece in. So learning self-discipline helped me when I started writing fiction. You know, no one’s watching you. It’s just you all day, so you can produce or not produce. It terms of how I work, I’ll take a year or a year and half off between projects and now I teach sometimes. But when I’m working, I’m really working. I try to figure out a quota of how many pages I want to have a week, like eight, six or 10, depending on what the book is. And I need the whole day. If I have a doctors appointment at two, I’m like, screw it, I’m not gonna start. And then once I have like eight, nine months to myself I have to fulfill my quota. I’ll do, like, Monday, Wednesday. Then if Sunday rolls around and I’m behind, I’ll just work all day Sunday. So for me it’s just getting that number by Sunday midnight. … I guess I’m just disciplined enough that I’m not worried I won’t get back to it. When I’m in it, it’s like four days a week, probably.
Q. For “Sag Harbor” specifically, how long did the research and writing process take?
Well, this book was different because I decided I wanted to do it in ’04, but I was halfway through another book and my daughter was born, so I didn’t do crap for two years. So basically I ended up just going out there for a month and just taking notes for a couple years. And I’d walk around like “oh that’s the house where that happened” and stuff like that. So this book I did a lot more prep work than usual, but eight months would go by without me thinking a wit about it. But when I started, I had the arc of the summer and I figured what parts of my Sag Harbor experience I wanted to use. And then it took about 13 months to write. I was doing eight pages a week. So I would take a month off here, a month off there. But if you’re doing eight pages a week, a year goes by and that’s 280 pages. …
Q. What advice can you give to us as writers in terms of getting published?
Well, always keep writing. Get better. No one is born a great writer. You just have to keep doing it, make mistakes and learn from them. I started writing for Village Voice 18 years ago. I think there were more opportunities in journalism then than there are now. A lot of magazines have folded. A lot of newspapers have folded. In the world of book reviews, there are smaller reviews. A lot of newspapers have gotten rid of their review sections. I think it’s harder in some ways. I think because of the blogosphere or Twitter, you can actually get your name out there. You’re not getting paid for it, but you can write and make your own outlet. And sometimes people get picked up that way. But economic climates get better, they get worse, but you have to be on top of your own game. So, keep writing. Each time you go out will probably be better than the time before.
Contributors: Saria Canady, Ashley Easton, Tamara Green, Katie Hester, Alexandria Jemison, Brandon Marshall-Todd and Talia Witherspoon.