Jared Young grew up in
Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and currently resides in Ottawa. His
short stories, essays, and reviews have been published around the world in
places like Maisonneuve, The Millions, the Bangkok Post, Toronto Star, Ottawa
Citizen, and more.
His writing has also been anthologized by McSweeney’s. You can read his work
at The
Jared Young Review. Jared is also a co-founder and contributor at the film writing
website Dear
Cast and Crew. You can read his film reviews here. His debut novel is Into the current (Goose Lane Editions, 2016).
1 - How did your first book change your life?
How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel
different?
My first book
is at the bottom of a closet, in a box. My second, too. This most recent work
is different, primarily, because it’s out in the world where people can read
it. Which feels weird, despite the fact that, you know, that’s kind of the
whole point of writing a book.
2 - How did you come to fiction first, as
opposed to, say, poetry or non-fiction?
My father
is a writer. Growing up, he’d send me audio cassettes filled with stories about
werewolves and time-travelling cowboys and curious kids who accept homemade
cookies from mysterious old ladies and get turned into cats. When we’d drive at
night, he’d tell stories about ghostly hitchhikers and killers lurking in
backseats and generally scare the shit out of me. Throughout my childhood, a lot
of value was placed on storytelling; making things up to provoke a reaction. To
this day, if someone asks me what time it is, I’ll tell them it’s a half hour
earlier or later than it actually is, just to see their reaction—I feel like
that’s somehow symptomatic of some primal storytelling urge. Either that, or
I’m just a jerk.
3 - How long does it take to start any
particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it
a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or
does your work come out of copious notes?
Slow.
Painfully slow. And not just for the usual logistical reasons (ie. social/professional
responsibilities and general human needs like food, sleep, etc). I used to
compare my process (favorably, for some absurd reason) to downloading a
torrent: it’s not linear, the story isn’t developed in chronological order,
rather in random bits and pieces – scenes and phrases and individual words – which
you then must assemble into something that resembles a coherent, sequential
story. I did work from copious notes, but those notes came after the fact, as I
tried to apply some sort of rational narrative logic to all these beautiful
little pieces of prose I had created. To be honest, it wasn’t ideal, which is probably
why it took me almost a decade to finish Into
The Current. I am trying to get into the habit of writing first drafts longhand.
I’m hoping it will enforce the big-picture aerial perspective that is essential
for big projects like a novel. I’ll let you know how it goes.
4 - Where does a work of fiction usually begin
for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger
project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
Into The Current actually
began as a collection of short stories. I had published a handful of stories in
literary journals and magazines, and, after realizing that all of them shared
in common a straight white male protagonist of about my age and socioeconomic
background, I thought, hey, these could all be stories about the same dude. To
be honest, it was a shortcut to writing a novel; I’d been obsessed since my
teenage years with the idea of being a prodigy – the next Bret Easton Ellis or Michael
Chabon – and wanted to accelerate my ascent into the annals of literary
superstardom. The narrative conceit I came up with (someone re-experiencing
their memories) was, at first, a simple framing device that was introduced at
the beginning and end of the collection. But it ended up being so much more
interesting than the stories around which it was built that it kept expanding
and expanding, until eventually it pushed all that old material right out of
the manuscript. Sort of like how your body expels a sliver.
5 - Are public readings part of or counter to
your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I’m not
sure I’ve done enough of them to truly know whether I like them or not. I invest
a lot of meaning (rightly or wrongly) in the physical structure and appearance
of words/sentences/paragraphs – I’ve often changed things I’ve written because
I don’t like where lines break in my Word document – so the idea of reading
text aloud being relevant to the writing process has always seems very weird to
me. But I think I could come around to it. How the rhythms of speech can inform
the way you put your words together on the page. Yeah, sure, I could be
convinced. I’ll try it.
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind
your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?
What do you even think the current questions are?
I’m not overly
conscious of it, but, looking back, I suppose much of my work deals with time
and memory and nostalgia. The past, generally. Observing the past, trying to
change the past.
7 – What do you see the current role of the
writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the
role of the writer should be?
It has
never been easier to publish your writing and share it with the world. The
sheer volume of words/stories out there is overwhelming: from Buzzfeed lists to
travel blogs to self-published fantasy novels to tweetstorms about Star Wars
casting rumours and everything in between. In that sense, everyone is a writer,
and everyone has an audience—George Saunders, Tim Ferriss, me, you, your wacky
aunt who posts Facebook statuses about the squirrel who has been eating her peonies.
Everyone is writing and publishing, constantly. I suppose the trick, then, for
Writers, is to apply a superior level of craft and a depth of understanding to
the writing they produce so that it convinces and enlightens and affects (and,
sure, entertains) in a way that squirrel-hating aunts simply can’t. The
question that really interests me is:
what is the role of the reader in the
larger culture? If we’re all producing content, who is left to consume it? At
what point does the literary community become an echo chamber: writers writing
for other writers.
8 - Do you find the process of working with an
outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
Essential,
absolutely. For years I had been acting as my own editor; going through my
manuscript, marking it up, redacting, adding—even writing notes to myself in
the third-person, like I was a completely separate entity, a sort of editorial
split-personality. Besides being psychologically unhealthy, it was also
inefficient. You hear stories about Raymond Carver and Gordon Lish and you
can’t help but think of the editorial process as this brutal, bloody,
antagonistic, hyper-emotional process. But my experience with it was the
complete opposite of that: an act of professional sympathy. In the end, the
book ended up being a more accurate expression of my worldview because other
people had gotten involved—far more accurate than it would have been if I’d been
the sole arbiter of it’s size and shape and content. Weird, huh? It’s almost
like you can’t truly understand your own aesthetic perspective without a
separate perspective to gauge it against it.
9 - What is the best piece of advice you've
heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
I recently
met David Mitchell, the author of Cloud
Atlas and Black Swan Green and The Bone Clocks and basically every
great epic genre-bending book of the last twenty years, and after I stuttered my
way through an introduction about how I had just published my first book, he
told me, “now do the next one.” Which happened to be exactly what I needed to
heat at that exact moment. I’m also a fan of Steven Pressfield and his approach
to making art, just because it’s so damn practical, and practicality really
seems like the only meaningful way to talk about the creative process. A quote
that I particularly like is: “Stay stupid...you have to be clueless enough to
have no idea how difficult something is, and cocky enough to think you can do
it.” Stupidity is very easy advice for me to follow; it’s important to set
achievable expectations for yourself. I’m operating at peak stupidity on most
days.
10 - How easy has it been for you to move
between genres (fiction to non-fiction)? What do you see as the appeal?
I write
both, and like both, but sometimes get stuck in this hazy grey zone between
them, where, when writing fiction, I find myself relying on real experiences
and memories and transcribing them beat for beat, and then, when writing
non-fiction, I’m constantly stifling the urge to stretch and twist and fold the
facts to suit my narrative aims.
11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to
keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Routine
is difficult to maintain, for all sorts of reasons that are unique to my
living/working situation, but the little rituals of writing – those basic
components of a routine – are something
I depend on. Whether it’s where I write (my desk at home, Black Squirrel Books on Bank Street in Ottawa) or what I consume while writing (espresso, dark
chocolate, those little mini-cans of Coke Zero), I do my best to maintain some
little bit of consistency. I have this formative memory (which, even with the
infinite power of the internet at my disposal, I can’t verify) of a Michael
Crichton profile on 60 Minutes in which he’s taking a reporter through his New
York apartment. He gets to the kitchen and opens the fridge and the shelves are
filled with cans of Coke and ham sandwiches, and he explains that he doesn’t
want to disturb his rhythm by having to make choices about what to eat. So he
eats the same modest lunch every single day. I was twelve or thirteen when I
saw that, and it seemed like a profound (and very practical) insight into how
to become a writer: eat the same thing whenever you write.
12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do
you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
For a
while, I used to begin my writing routine by transcribing another writer’s work
(this is back when I had ample time to practice these kinds of indulgent
rituals). I’d spend twenty minutes copying random pages from a Norman Mailer
novel or something; it was like stretching before playing sports, or singing
registers before going onstage. Think of how people learn to play the guitar;
they play other people’s music, figure out chords, progressions, all that.
Writing isn’t that different. And when you get stuck, its nice to go back to
basics. You have to remind your brain what prose is supposed to sound/feel
like, prepare your fingers for the physical act of writing.
13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Rock. The
dusty, mineral smell of rock. Which is a cousin to the smell of dirt, and a
second-cousin to the smell of wood, but which is its own unique smell and the
singular perfume of Yellowknife, where I grew up.
14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come
from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether
nature, music, science or visual art?
There are
three forms of art that are perpetually vying for my love and attention: books,
movies, and comic books.
15 - What other writers or writings are
important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
My dad
(see above re: how he terrified me during long drives). Michael Crichton was
the first writer I wanted to become; I aspired to be like him the way other
kids aspired to like Mario Lemieux or Kurt Cobain. John Updike was the first
writer whose greatness I felt I could understand; like I was able to open up
the back of a Swiss watch and see all the miniscule gears and wheels and
whatnot.
16 - What would you like to do that you haven't
yet done?
Write a
movie (like, a movie that actually gets made). A real movie with real actors. It
doesn’t have to be anyone famous—maybe someone semi-famous, maybe Nicolas Cage.
Yeah, I’d love to write a Nicolas Cage movie. Not a weird art film or
self-serious drama. A good thriller/suspense flick. With an outrageous plot
twist in the final act. And I’d go to theatres where the movie was screening,
sit in the back with a big bag of popcorn, and listen to everyone gasp when
it’s revealed that Nic Cage is actually a ghost or whatever.
17 - If you could pick any other occupation to
attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have
ended up doing had you not been a writer?
Movie
director, comic book artist. I have tried to do both of those things before,
and hope to try doing them again in the future. It’s all storytelling, I guess.
Writing just happens to be the easiest (for me) to actually execute. All you
need is paper and a pen. Maybe, in whatever dystopian future awaits us, when I’m
forced to develop some sort of practical skill in order to survive, I’d be a
craftsman of some kind; like, a really top-notch door-hanger. Something obscure
like that. (Also, I think it says a lot about me that I think door-hanging will
be an essential skill in the post-apocalyptic wastelands).
18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing
something else?
I love
being alone. I love being inside my own head. I love having total control over
the world, which is something that can only happen inside your head.
19 - What was the last great book you read? What
was the last great film?
The last
great books I’ve read have been Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel and The Break by Katherena Vermette. The latter cast a unique magical spell; that a
thirty-something white guy could read a book about indigenous women in the
north end of Winnipeg and feel like it represented, both directly and
indirectly, his own feelings and anxieties and experiences in the world, speaks
volumes about the universality of great art, and is proof of why it’s so
important to search out worldviews that are different than your own, because,
when it’s done well, as in the case of The
Break, they’re actually not that different at all. The last great film?
Well, this is going to be a terrible subjective answer, but when I first saw Captain America: Civil War, I was
inexplicably disappointed by it—not because it was bad, but because it was so
different than I had envisioned it (to be specific: different than the 12
year-old version of me who lives inside my brain and, when it comes to certain
contemporary things like superhero movies and, usurps my sophisticated tastes).
But I watched it again, recently, and must say that, as far as big-budget,
fan-servicing, corporate-controlled, global entertainments go...it was pretty
great. I also really liked Carol,
which I’ll mention here just to assuage the weird guilt I feel about a
superhero movie being that last great film I saw.
20 - What are you currently working on?
A book
about the future.
