Author Interview ~ Nick Taylor

Nick Taylor is the author of The Disagreement (Simon & Schuster, April 2008). He has received fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the William R. Kenan, Jr., Trust for Historic Preservation. A graduate of the MFA program at the University of Virginia, he is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at San Jose State University and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Visit him on the web at http://www.readthedisagreement.com/.

Plug time. What new book or project do you have coming out?

My first novel, The Disagreement, was published in April by Simon & Schuster. It’s the story of a 17-year-old medical student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville during the Civil War. UVA was turned into a hospital complex during the war, and the protagonist is pressed into service as a doctor when the war goes on longer than anyone expected.

How did you come up with this story? Was there a specific 'what if' moment?

Between my two years of graduate school (I did an MFA at Virginia), I needed money to pay for daycare for my daughter, who at eleven months old was ready to be with other children. I figured I could try to go back to my old job doing computer programming, or I could get something temporary, like waiting tables, but my preference was to do something academic. So I found this grant program, sponsored by the William R. Kenan Foundation of North Carolina, to fund research projects about the history of the University of Virginia. I had never written any historical fiction, but I thought I’d give it a try. I wrote three short stories about residents of a particular dorm room – one story set in the 1820s, one in the 1860s, and one in the 1940s. I had so much material left over from the 1860s story that I decided to turn it into a novel.

Tell us about your publishing journey. How long had you been writing before you got a contract? How did you find out and what went through your mind?

The Disagreement is my third novel manuscript. I tried long and hard to get an agent for the first two, but it didn’t happen. I think I queried forty agents for the second novel. Anyway, I had a much smoother ride this time out. I found my agent, Jennifer Carlson, fairly quickly. She sent the manuscript to publishers, and I was fortunate to land with the world’s greatest editor, Denise Roy at Simon & Schuster.

Do you ever struggle with writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?

I’m a big believer in setting daily word quotas and sticking to them. There’s no way you can get writer’s block if you force yourself to sit in the chair until you have a thousand words, or five hundred words, or whatever. It doesn’t matter if the words are any good – you just have to get them out. Chances are they’re not as bad as you think, and besides, you can always write another thousand the next day. Writer’s block is a form of self-criticism – you’re criticizing the work you haven’t done – so the trick is to deactivate, or desensitize, the self-critical impulse. I just swamp the internal critic under a flood of words. One thousand, two thousand, three thousand. I drown that little b*****d.

What is the most difficult part of writing for you (or was when you first started on your writing journey), i.e. plot, POV, characterization, etc?

Physical description has always been the most difficult part, especially characters’ physical appearances. When I’m writing a character, I usually have a sense of him or her, but it’s not always a physical portrait. I have to force myself to give the character some physical traits so that the reader can see him or her more specifically.

Where do you write? Do you have a dedicated office or a corner or nook in a room?

Currently I write at a desk in my dining room. It’s a big room, so there’s space for a good-sized round table and my desk. It’s the best setup I’ve had so far. In the past, I’ve written in the living room, the foyer, the public library, the airport – pretty much anywhere I can plug in a computer. For me, time is more precious than space, so I try not to be picky about my surroundings. It’s a valuable skill, I’ve discovered, because you can’t always choose when and where you’re going to have time to write.

Do you have a word or page goal you set for each day?

When I’m writing I try to produce a thousand words a day. Some days I do a little less, some a little more. It depends what I’m working on. For instance, the nineteenth-century language in The Disagreement was more time-consuming than, say, the responses to these questions.

What does a typical day look like for you?

When I was writing The Disagreement, I was working eight to five, so I wrote at night. My wife was getting her MBA at the time, so she worked all night on her laptop. That made it easy for me to sit down and write – it was either write or hang out by myself after our daughter went to bed. I fell asleep at the keyboard several times, but it was a very productive time for me. Between the two of us (my wife and me), we must have gone through ten pounds of chocolate that year.

These days I’m teaching at a college, so my schedule is more flexible. I have time to write while the sun shines, which is a real luxury.

Take us through your process of writing a novel briefly—from conception to revision.

If I’m writing a historical novel, I start with research. For me, that means reading secondary sources first, in order to familiarize myself with the time period. Then I delve into primary sources (journals, letters, etc.) to get a sense for what it was like to live at the time. Then I begin writing the first draft. I usually don’t stop and read what I’ve written until I get to the end. Then I re-read and revise as necessary. It’s not too glamorous, really.

What are some of your favorite books (not written by you)?

The Known World by Edward P. Jones
Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders

What’s the best writing advice you’ve heard?

Make your reader feel smart. This applies especially to surprise endings. I once received a rejection for a novel manuscript in which the agent claimed I had tricked her at the end. I believed I had merely written a surprise ending, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood what she meant. By giving the book a totally unforeseeable ending, I was breaking a compact between author and reader, which is that the reader should be able to say, “Aha!” when the solution is revealed, no matter what it is. Even if they couldn’t have possibly figured it out, you need to create the illusion that it was possible.

What do you wish you’d known early in your career that might have saved you some time and/or frustration in writing? In publishing?

In order for a plot to work, you need to put your characters in some kind of danger. Too often we write (or read) stories in which nothing much happens and the action seems to drag along. Normally the culprit is an author who is afraid to put his characters in danger. No surprise there – we spend a great deal of time creating these people, and we don’t want to see them suffer. But readers are danger junkies – they read about car wrecks and horrible murders so they can feel what it’s like without having to put their own lives (or emotional well-being) at risk.

I remember being blown away when I read this formulation in a book called Techniques of the Selling Writer by Dwight V. Swain. It’s been in print for something like fifty years, and the prose is a little purple, but Swain wasn’t afraid to break it down. I think literary writers – and especially young literary writers – could benefit from his kind of advice. I certainly could have.

How much marketing do you do? What have you found that particularly works well for you?

I have been lucky to have the excellent marketing and publicity teams at Simon & Schuster helping me with The Disagreement. In addition to what S&S has done, I paid some friends to do my website, http://www.readthedisagreement.com/, and I have sent out dozens of Advance Reading Copies and postcards. It’s kind of early to see how well this all plays out. I’ll let you know in a few months!

Do you have any parting words of advice?

It is absolutely true that a career in the arts is one of constant rejection. Even the most established writers get rejected. And the more famous you become, the more visible your rejections get. Yes, it would be nice to be reviewed in The New York Times …. if the reviewer has nice things to say! But we all know that doesn’t always happen. My advice is to develop a thick skin. The MFA program I went through did that for me. In fact, that was one of the most valuable benefits of the program. You have to let rejections roll off your back and keep working even when it seems that no one is interested in what you have to say but your sister and your dog. Eventually your time will come.