Go Forth (Vol. 16)

One of the first fiction workshops I ever took was taught by Stewart O’Nan back in the mid-90s. I remember being in awe of him in the classroom—in his early thirties he’d already won the Drue Heinz Literature Prize for his first and only book of short stories, In the Walled City. He’d also won the Pirates Alley Faulkner Prize for his first novel, Snow Angels. Stewart was a lively and constructive force, with insights far beyond what I imagined could ever take place in our weekly workshops. Since that time he’s published twelve more novels, a screenplay based on the life of Edgar Allen Poe, and two books of nonfiction, one of which he co-authored with Stephen King on the Boston Red Sox. He is one of the most generous men I’ve met. I’ve kept in contact with him over the years, often sending him my own fiction to which he responds with well-thought criticism and revision suggestions as equally direct and compassionate as he did nearly twenty years ago, asking nothing in return.

—Brandon Hobson

Brandon Hobson: In the past you’ve talked about point-of-view being the writer’s greatest tool. Can you talk a little more about that, and maybe how it’s better than, say, voice?

Stewart O’Nan: Getting inside your character’s head and letting the reader see the world through not just their eyes but their sensibility creates an intimacy that can’t be duplicated in any other medium.  And point of view includes voice, discovering the appropriate language and tone for each character.  Every choice contributes to bringing the character’s emotional world across to the reader, and as you’re making those choices in your early drafts, you as a writer understand more and more about your characters—their fears and desires, their history, the people closest to them—so that when they face situations, both you and the reader understand why they do the things they do, whether or not you (and the reader) agree with them.

BH: You’ve told me about the way you work slowly, revising each page and getting it where you want it before moving on to the next. Does this in any way affect your planning of a novel? Do you know exactly where you’re headed in a book, and if so, does that take away from the excitement of not knowing where you’re headed?

SON: Lately I’ve been working from initial imbalances that knock characters out of their normal lives, sometimes drastically, and then seeing how they adapt to their new circumstances, so I’ve been working mostly by feel, or in the case of my newest, from life.  Early on, in the more dire books like...