David Means / Features / Untitled Books

"There’s a lot of lame writing out there, and when the good books appear, they roar into the mind like the wind that comes sucking up after a raging fire."

David Means

Short-story craftsman David Means discusses his writing life at the desk, at the coffee shop and on the move, and reveals which fellow writers have inspired him. Get ready to dig...

Where are you right now?
I'm at my desk in Nyack, New York, about twenty miles up the Hudson River from Manhattan.

Where do you write?
First drafts are often written out of the house, in a local coffee shop. I write by hand in notebooks and then put them into the machine, print them out, and begin to work.

How do you write?
I get a vision of something - a very specific set of characters in a specific setting with sometimes a specific situation and then I dig in as hard as I can and keep going. Revision can take weeks or months. Each story arrives out of a different set of principals.

What keeps you writing?
I keep getting the feeling that there are stories that need to be told, want to be told. I'll travel somewhere - a few days ago I was in Texas - and talk to someone, just hanging out, and listen to a voice, and then I'll think about that place and just feel compelled to write. I was sitting on a bench and struck up a conversation with an older gentleman - this was at the Texas Book Festival - and he was so formal and thoughtful, with a great voice, but with thess sorrowful eyes, and we were talking about problems with genetically-engineered corn seed, and I felt he had a secret hidden self I'd only see if I got around to making him into a story. I might, I might not. It's hard, tough work, but that's the best kind. I'm not beyond admitting that getting critical praise and being published in good magazines helps.

Who do you write for?
Really, that's a tough question. I think I'm writing for the reader who's willing to really dig in and bring to the stories close attention and some poetic insight.

Do you discuss your work with anyone?
Well, Jonathan Franzen is a good buddy, and he reads a lot of my drafts and I know I'll get very honest, clear, specific feedback coming from a particular direction. We're hugely different in so many ways, but we both have built-in bullshit detectors - as Hemingway called it - when it comes to the work.

How do you know if your work is good?
You're never ever really sure. But when something finally gets into shape and begins saying things to you that you didn't expect - then you know you're on the right track. You know you're done when you start taking things out and putting them back. That's another bit from Hemingway.

Do you have any unwritten characters in mind?
Yeah, a hell of a lot, actually.

Which book do you wish you'd written?
Oh, man, that's hard. Some days, I'd say Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. That book takes in all sides of the good and evil, God or no God debate and synthesises it. But his prose isn't elegant. Other days I'd shoot for one of the great Chekhov stories.

What is your literary guilty pleasure?
I read a novel, One Day, by David Nicholls over the summer and felt guilty about liking it so much. It hit something in my psyche, some part of my youth.

Which writer made you want to write?
Well, I'd have to say Hemingway and Faulkner and Fitzgerald. All three together when I was a kid in Michigan.

Who's the most exciting author writing today?
Oh, man, that's impossible to answer. There's a lot of lame writing out there, and when the good books appear, they roar into the mind like the wind that comes sucking up after a raging fire. Alice Munro is quiet and lovely, but she has some radical things going on in her stories. James Kelman nails something each time. George Saunders has great visions. Denis Johnson never cops out by releasing weak material.

If you weren't writing you'd be...?
Most likely hospitalised. But if not, I was thinking of being a doctor.

What next?
I'm working on new stories and a novel.

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David Means' latest collection of short stories, The Spot, is published by Faber and Faber.

Read his story The Actor's House.
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Thursday, 25 November, 2010