Thomas E. Kennedy is the author of over twenty-five books and hundreds of short stories, essays, poems, translations as well as literary criticism. His latest book, In the Company of Angels (Bloomsbury, 2010), has received great reviews in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, Publishers Weekly and many others. He has been the subject of a documentary film and written rock songs in the 60s, recorded on Atlantic records. He even finds time to teach and lecture on top of his impressive career. In fact, I was lucky enough to have Mr. Kennedy as a professor during my MFA program.
During my years with Mr. Kennedy, or Tom as we called him, I was privileged to get to see him read and lecture numerous times along with working with him one on one. Even with his busy schedule and numerous students, he took the time to mentor me and became a friend. After graduation he helped me work on an essay which he and Walter Cummins published in their anthology Writer’s On the Job (Hopewell Publications, 2008). Several years later now, we have stayed in touch.
Though he has just come off a 14-city book tour and is still promoting his novel, Thomas agreed to sit down and talk about his career and the craft of writing. The following is the conversation we had.
Mike Aloisi : You have a great quote from Something to Fall Back On, where you explain how you decided to write, it says:
“When I was 17, I read a story by Katherine Mansfield that infuriated me, “Miss Brill,” about a lonely old woman ridiculed by thoughtless youngsters. To my mind Katherine Mansfield was responsible for the old woman’s pain — she had done this to her. It never occurred to me the “woman” was just words, a character… I decided to send Miss Mansfield a scolding letter. Then I discovered from the book jacket that she had been dead for forty years. I was startled. To think that the words of a woman so long dead could reach beyond the grave to touch my heart … I decided that was what I wanted to do — be a writer.”
After this realization, what did you do to pursue that dream of writing?
Thomas E. Kennedy: I immediately wrote a short-short story about an old woman living in poverty and solitude and showed it to my father. He praised it and encouraged me – in fact, I had a good deal of praise and encouragement in the years to come, but nonetheless, it would take me 20 years from that night to sell my first story. Despite that I had a lot of encouragement from teachers and editors, won a three-year grant from the City College of New York for a novel-in-progress, that New American Library on Fifth Avenue asked me, on the proposal of Theodore Solotaroff to whom I had sent a story at NEW AMERICAN REVIEW, to expand that short story into a novel – despite all those near misses, it took me until 1981 to finally sell a story. I think the reason for that was because I did not give free play to my intuition. I was always trying to understand the creative process, always trying to understand my stories, instead of just allowing them to happen. Samuel Beckett said, “It all happens between the hand and the page.” Wright Morris said, “How do I know what I want to say until I’ve said it.” I was always trying to understand what I was about to say BEFORE I said it, and it blocked me from writing a successful story. In those 20 years, I wrote maybe 20 stories and four novels but none of them were any good. However, I learned something from each failure (Beckett again: “Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.”) Finally in 1981, I sat down to write a short story, and I could feel by about the fifth hand-written page that this was going to be the first story I published. And it was true. I sold it to CONFRONTATION magazine at Long Island University for 20 bucks. But from then on it began to go better – I think I published three stories that year, five the next, six the year after, etc. I guess you could say that I had found the place where my stories were hidden.
MA: Do you feel that writing came naturally to you or did you have to work at it?
TEK: Please see my response to the previous question. Of course you have to work at it, but it is the most blessed work. Faulkner once said, when someone suggested to him that he must love writing, that a writer has to hate writing – the way a man hates his wife.
I don’t really hold to that. Writing is hard work, yes, but it is also blissful work, it is also the greatest, most satisfying work I know. There is no reward greater – not money, not publication, not praise – no reward greater than the work itself. If you don’t feel that the work itself is its greatest reward, then I don’t think you are likely to do well as a writer. Look at how many writers – great writers – lived in poverty, lived hand-to-mouth, but were determined to get those books written. And how much more impoverished life would be without their work – without Dostoyevsky’s novels, without F. Scott Fitzgerald’s, you name it. The reward has to be in the writing – because when you are writing top-end, what could be greater than that? It’s like flying.
MA: With your busy schedule, what is your typical writing routine, if you have one? As in, are you a writer who can write anywhere or do you have to do certain settings to get the creativity flowing?
TEK: I tend not to write according to a schedule. Of course when I am deep into a novel, I am writing regularly for many hours at a sitting. But otherwise, I am sort of writing all the time, but not at a desk. I am observing the world, listening to the thoughts inside my head, listening to people talk, watching the expressions on people’s faces, and jotting down notes which I will use later. When a voice goes off in my head which is the voice of a story or a novel, that is when I hunker down and start working every day or nearly every day.
MA: If you are writing a novel, do you plan it out before you write or just go with the idea?
TEK: I might have visions of scenes, scraps of dialogue, thoughts, lines of narrative, but no, I do not plan a novel out in any methodical way. I depend on my intuition to a great extent. If I try to plot a novel out and see what is going to happen and how it is going to happen, that novel is dead for me. Some others write in another way, but for me, as someone once said, If there is no surprise for the writer there will be no surprise for the reader. I may even know – or think I know – how a novel is going to end, but I don’t know how I am going to get to that ending. And generally when I do get there, the ending is different anyway.
MA: When it comes to first drafts and revisions, how close do you feel your first draft is to the completed book? How many drafts do you do on average?
TEK: That’s difficult to say. With a short story it might be as few as, say, half a dozen or as many as twenty. With a novel, the process is so different from the process of a short story, that it is difficult to say how many drafts of the whole novel you go through. You draft and redraft chapters, switch them around, expand them, reduce them, and so on and so forth – so I wouldn’t venture a guess as to how many drafts of a novel on the whole I go through before I have something finished. But I always start hand-writing a novel – I hand-write the first draft of everything. Then at some point, with a novel, I feel impelled to go to the computer – maybe after fifty or a hundred hand-written pages, and I key those pages in and print them out and reread them, but when I get to the last of those printed pages, I start with my trusty Montblanc ballpoint again and hand-write for a while, then I go back over the printed pages and make amendments, corrections, expansions, etc. So it is very difficult to say how many drafts it comes out to in the end.
After a year or two or three, the thing is done, and I’ve got a whole bunch of pages of draft, but generally around 200 to 450 pages of final manuscript.
Please continue reading this article: Thomas E. Kennedy Interview Part 2
To learn much more about Thomas, his books and other ventures, be sure to visit his website at: www.thomasekennedy.com
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