Author Interview ~ Marisa Silver

Marisa Silver made her fiction debut in The New Yorker when she appeared in the inaugural “Debut Fiction” issue. Her collection of stories, Babes in Paradise, was a New York Times Notable Book and a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. She is also the author of the novel No Direction Home. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tell us about your latest project.

THE GOD OF WAR tells the story of Ares Ramirez, a 12 year old boy living in the desert of California by the shores of The Salton Sea with his mother Laurel and his six year old brother, Malcolm, who is developmentally disabled. The story takes place in 1978 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, but the war of the book's title refers to the war that brews inside of Ares as he seeks to untangle himself from the knot of guilt and responsibility he feels for his brother and discover his own individuality and identity apart from his mother.

Laurel is a prickly, mistrustful product of the counterculture who has chosen to protect Malcolm by not opening him up to the judgement of doctors and testing. So the responsibility for taking care of Malcolm in the world falls to Ares. The novel deals with the sometimes divergent impulses of love and responsibility to oneself, as seen through the struggle of one young boy who is journeying through the thorny, complicated world of adolescence.

Place plays a huge part in the novel. The Salton Sea is an enormous inland ocean in the middle of the desert - an anomaly and the result of human error.The sea houses an incredible ecology of birds and fish, many of which die off in the semi annual "die offs" that occur as a result of the chemical make up of the sea. The human ecology is no less fraught. The towns around the sea are small, desolate, and remote, and yet , many of the people who choose to live in them are a hardy, complicated group of off-the-griders, people who choose to live at a remove from society at large and who find solace in the mysteries of the desert. Laurel is such a person and her sons must deal with the consequences of how she has chosen to live.

We love to hear about your journey to publication. (How long were you writing, did you have an agent, etc.)

THE GOD OF WAR is my third book. My first, BABE IN PARADISE was a collection of short stories, the second, NO DIRECTION HOME, my first novel. I already had an agent from this earlier work and when I was finished with the novel, which took about two and a half years to write, he sent it to an editor he liked at Simon and Schuster who made an offer for it. I liked her and I liked the offer so I took both!

What is one weakness you have as a writer and what do you do to overcome it?

Well, the obvious: discipline, which I counter by giving myself a firm assignment each day: I write three pages. If it takes me one hour or four hours, I do my three pages. The progress is steady and doable for me and after a while, when you add three and three enough times, you get a draft. The second challenge for me is always plot. It's not what I think of first- I think of characters and situations and feeling. So I'm always saying to myself "what are they gonna do now?" I think action reveals characters more than internal dialogue or description, so I'm always forcing myself to figure out what my characters should do with themselves.

What is one strength you have as a writer and to what do you attribute your success in this particular area?

I guess a strength is creating credible characters, and one of thee ways in which I do it is by being patient and by not having fixed ideas about the people who I write about. Creating a character, for me, is a lot like getting to know a person in actual life. You meet someone and form some opinions about them by clues - the way they dress, their smile, something they say. And when you get to know them better, when you see how they respond in given situations, how they behave, how they act, many of your initial feelings about them change and deepen and you get a more nuanced notion of who they are. And every time they are called upon to behave or act in a moment, they may surprise you and widen your understanding of who they are and what they are capable of. So characters in a story are no different than real people in this way. My job is to not have an opinion about them but to throw situations in their way and watch how they behave and then stand back and realize all I didn't know about them and how much more there is to discover.

If you could go back to the young writer you were when you were just beginning, what advice would you give yourself?

I'd advise myself to spend less time fretting about not writing and just write. It's a job of work. It's a discipline. It's not magic. There's not muse hanging around waiting to show up when she feels in the mood. Writing is a craft and like any craft it needs to be honed through constant practice, continual mistakes, occasional successes.

What’s one publicity tip you can share that you’ve gotten a good response with in promoting your work?

Although I am a private person by nature, and I am suspect of any cult of personality, I think it is important to share a bit of yourself during readings. People are as interested in the story you've written as in your story. They are curious about invention, about inventors. We all are!

What do you to improve as a writer?

Hmm..Not sure what the question is: What do I want? What do I do? I'll answer that I want to learn how to use fewer words to get across greater feeling.

What are a few of your favorite books not writing by you?

There are so many but here are a few: the stories of Alice Munroe and William Trevor. Housekeeping, Fugitive Pieces, So Long, See You Tomorrow, The Great Gatsby, Anna Karenina, most books by Philip Roth…the list goes on.

Have you received a particularly memorable reader response?

A woman in Tehran wrote to me after reading one of my stories in The New Yorker. I was knocked out that the story had traveled so far, and that it connected with someone from such a different culture. But it reminded me that we're all not so different from one another in terms of what moves us, and in terms of our love of stories.

Do you have a pet peeve to do with this business?

The question "How's your book selling?"

What’s your favorite part of being a writer/least?

Favorite part: the chance to spend a lot of my waking hours in my dreams. Least: the blank page.

What has surprised you most about this industry?

How human it still is. When you go on book tours, your are sitting in a room sharing your story with a handful of people. You could be sitting around a fire together. You could be telling a bedtime story to your kids. It's old fashioned in the best sense.

Advice to aspiring authors?

Go to a bookstore, look at ALL the books on the shelves, and believe that you belong there and then go home and do the hard part.

Parting words?

It's easy to open the newspaper or turn on the news and be overwhelmed by the hardship so many live under and wonder whether writing is at all useful or meaningful. Writers are not, after all, saving lives in any strict sense of the phrase. But I believe stories are necessary and meaningful. We need to be able to stand back for a moment and see ourselves through the lens of a writer and his or her story so we can notice how much bigger and broader our experiences are than we might have thought. Writing gives us back to ourselves in ways that can allow us to see the depth and breadth of our natures, it can connect us to other people's experiences in a way that can make us feel less alone and that can allow emotions to burn in us that need to burn so that we can feel fully human Writing may not save lives, but it can, from time to time, give flight to the soul.