Interview with Mark Wisniewski
by
Jack Smith
Mark Wisniewski, serving on the Editorial Board of GHLL, is a short story writer, novelist, and a poet. He has published over 100 short stories in the most prestigious literary magazines of the country. He is a Pushcart Prize winner, and one of his stories has appeared in Best American Short Stories. His book-length works include one story collection, All Weekend with the Lights On, and three novels: Confessions of a Polish Used Car Salesman; Show Up, Look Good; and, in January 2015, Watch Me Go, published by Penguin Random House-Putnam. Besides writing, Wisniewski also works as a book-doctor.
How much
would you say formal training in writing has helped you? How much
did you learn from the university and how much on your own?
MFA workshops taught me how to tighten, how to
imply to make fiction more literary, how to avoid certain characters and
expressions and lines of human thought in order that my work be
published by university magazines and small presses. These workshops
were very good at teaching these things; in other words, they were very
good at telling me what not to do. They weren’t so good at teaching,
say, how to tell a story. That, I think, I learned from hanging around
people who drank a lot.
You
recently published your third novel, Watch Me Go, at Penguin
Putnam, your first commercial novel. Can you speak to the process
of getting a novel published at a commercial press?
There are more people involved than you might first
think. There are far more emails than when you work with a small press.
There’s this palpable pressure to excel that, for me, is darned
exciting. I sleep far less than I used to.
Watch
Me Go is pretty grim in
places, and yet your first two novels—Confessions of a Polish Used
Car Salesman and Show Up, Look Good—were much more on the
light side, especially Confessions. Which direction do you see
your future novels taking?
The novel I’m working on now is a literary
thriller. Sex, death, who should you trust—whatever it takes to keep a
lot of readers turning pages. This is not easy. I can see why the
Stephen Kings of the world get ornery when they’re snubbed by
the writers of poetic fiction.
Regarding what I’ll write or do after finishing
this one I’m now drafting, I have no idea. I keep telling my wife that
after this one I’ll take a long vacation. She tends to respond by saying
nothing. Which is her way of saying, “That’s what you said when you were
finishing Watch Me Go.”
You’ve
published a lot of short fiction in high-end literary magazines, plus a
collection of short stories. Which form comes most naturally for you—the
short story or the novel? Or are you drawn about equally to both?
The first thing I wrote after undergrad—where there
were no writing workshops—was a novel. It wasn’t well-crafted, but it
was about 300 pages long and had a plot, and it was turned down by an
agent, and I was devastated. It was only after I enrolled in a workshop
that I began writing short stories, probably because that teacher
preferred to workshop short stories—which might have been the case, now
that I look back on it, because that teacher preferred writing short
stories to writing novels. And at first I wasn’t very good at short
stories. But I’m not a quitter. And, well, with enough practice, just
about anyone can improve at just about anything.
How long
does it take you to complete a short story, and what kind of process do
you go through?
I can draft a short story in a few days. It’s the
revision that takes forever. And for me, it’s the revision that makes a
story publishable. Usually something on the macro-level needs to be
changed (for example, a different narrative voice, a different point of
view, a new ending), and then there’s the endless tweaking to improve
matters on the sentence level. Now and then a story comes out in fine
shape as a first draft, but not lately. Lately I grind them out.
How about a
novel?
It depends on the novel. Confessions of a
Polish Used Car Salesman took not even two years to draft and
revise. Watch Me Go took forever, albeit with several breaks
during which I set it aside to work on the novels of other writers.
For you,
what makes a great story? If you had to sum it up in a sentence or
two, what would you say?
Inevitable surprise. And at least one very likable
character. If you can get these into a narrative, you’re well on your
way.
Does this
vary with a novel?
A novel is, after all, a very long story. At least
that’s my opinion on the matter; obviously, several writers and
publishers disagree.
What do you
think convinced your publisher to go with Watch Me Go? What
strengths did it have that swung the deal?
I don’t know. That was a rather confusing process.
Sometimes I think that maybe what happened was a few gatekeepers in
publishing finally decided that the Deeshes in the world actually
mattered. And it troubles me to say this, but to some extent it seemed
that the violence and tragic twists I added as I revised helped the book
sell. Or maybe it was that the violence forced me to add more conflict?
You’re a
book doctor as well as writer. What’s it like trying to manage
being both? What’s a typical day like for you?
For a couple years now it’s been dealing
with more emails than I can handle. I’m not a phone person, so it’s like
Gmail city around here. And lately I’ve been writing emails that say
that, until October at least, I can’t look at anyone else’s fiction
because I need to work on my next novel. Still, people keep emailing to
ask. I think a few have gotten upset. I think some liked me as the guy
who busted ass on their fiction—and they’re not sure what to make
of this guy now that he works on his own.
Any tips
for fiction writers you’d like to share?
Tell your best story. Yes, show-don’t-tell when
you craft a particular sentence, but overall, above all, when you wake
up thinking about how you will do what you’re about to do on a given
day, remember you are here to tell your best story.