The ambiguity of brilliance in writing; an interview with short fiction writer, Gary Lutz

While I prepared to interview writer Gary Lutz, I found myself more intimidated than I expected to be. One page into his book Stories in the Worst Way and I was astonished by his use of language and the element of ambiguity included throughout his work. His writing is the kind that makes your mind spin, questioning every word in every sentence. That is what writer and Pitt – Greensburg professor of writing, Gary Lutz intends for his reader to experience. He is the writer of many pieces of short fiction including single stories and books which compile them.

Sitting in his cluttered office, decorated with stacks of paper, I feel captivated by his spoken word. Lutz is the kind of brilliant that doesn’t seem forced, but rather intended, quite like the way he writes. As I interviewed him, I attempted to understand his perception of writing and being a writer.

Kirstin: In your one story, “Slops,” a character finds a newspaper open to a blank cross – word puzzle and writes, “Could everybody please be a little less specific? Starting right now?” I find this to be a really wonderful image, but I wonder why do you choose to write in such an ambiguous tone?

Gary Lutz: I like ambiguity. I don’t like certainties. I don’t like things that are resolved or explainable. I prefer things that are uncanny and ultimately unknowable.

Kirstin: During your discussion at Columbia University, you call the sentence the loneliest place for the writer, in fact, that is the title of the lecture. Where do you get inspiration to compile the individual sentences?

Gary Lutz: I don’t really feel as if inspiration plays any role in the writing that I do, but I’m drawn to the sentence as a kind of self – contained utterance that can be almost a universe unto itself. I like sentences that can be detached from their context and be able to stand on their own as interesting artifacts of language with unusual acoustical properties and their own topography of shape. I am less concerned with the contextual surrounding of a sentence, or rather, I like to stack one sentence on top of another so that the relationship between the sentences are not necessarily a consecutive relationship but more of a relationship of mood or tonality.

Kirstin: So your writing is less about actual content, and more about the overall tone of the piece?

Gary Lutz: Yeah, I’m not drawn toward plot in any conventional sense, and I’m not concerned with causality the way a lot of fiction is. I think it’s because there are certain people who experience or apprehend the world in a series of flashes as opposed to a continuous stream of perception. I don’t think in terms of overall structures, I sort of zero in on the individual phrase, the individual word, the individual sentence and certain forms just arise as a consequence of placing one phrase next to another or one word next to another. So, I think very carefully about each individual word.

Kirstin: Is that difficult to expand into larger compositions because, typically, you hear of poets describing the writing process with such scrutiny and less with novelists or short story writers?

Gary Lutz: Yeah, it takes me a very long time. To write a twenty story it might take me four or five months. I will write it one sentence at a time. One afternoon I might be working on two sentences and I really won’t know exactly where those sentences will fit into the story until I’ve generated maybe a hundred or so sentences. So, it’s a very laborious, very time consuming process. I often spend hours on a single sentence; I’ll write multiple versions, I’ll keep substituting different words in particular slots in the sentence. So, some people have said to me that essentially I am writing poetry; it’s just that I’m formatting it as prose. I think poetry is defined as the most compressed, condensed form of utterance, and I think my work shares those qualities, but I never really think of it as prose – poetry or poetry. But, I don’t really think of it as stories either, so when I was using the term stories in this interview, I think simply fiction might be more accurate.

Kirstin: So then, how do you develop a character?

Gary Lutz: I don’t really develop characters in the conventional sense. The characters emerge from the language itself, so I don’t start off with a preconceived sense of who the narrator is going to be or who the other people in the story are going to be, but they essentially form themselves out of combinations of words. A lot of writers start with an apiary notion of what a story is going to be about and I try to do this the opposite. I never want to know in advance what the sentences will add up to, and often, I’ll rearrange sentences individually into shapes or configurations that I would not have been about to come up with if I were writing in some kind of sequential, logical fashion.

Kirstin: I was going to ask if you saw yourself in any of the stories or found any of your writing autobiographical, but I see that your writing is not so much based on the creation of plot, but rather finding the story created in what you write.

Gary Lutz: I would not call my work autobiographical at all, but the emotional states, the moods in the stories are certainly ones that coincide with some of my own moods. There really isn’t much in my work that is drawn from my first – hand experiences, but nor is it drawn from imagination. It is something that materializes through the shapes of the language.

Kirstin: What attracts you to the genre of flash fiction?

Gary Lutz: I’m not sure I would really call my stuff flash fiction because flash fiction is generally stories that are one or two pages long. Some of my very first pieces were that short, but they gradually grew longer. So, the things I have been working on recently are usually maybe twenty pages or so. But my initial work, I wasn’t even aware at the time that it could be called flash fiction, I was just looking for something that was very compressed, very condensed, that presented the most crucial moments or instances without any kind of surrounding explanation of exposition. In other words, I was trying to excise every irrelevancy and just concentrate the language as much as possible and make it as potent in terms of its concentrated force.

Kirstin: Have your publications affected your relationships with other people in any way?

Gary Lutz: It definitely brought about good things in my life. I have met a lot of people, interesting people, through my writing that I never would have encountered in any other context. I can’t think of any really negative consequences of my writing.

Kirstin: As a rather ambiguous question, fitting your format, why are you a writer?

Gary Lutz: That is a difficult question. I think primarily because I find some kind of fulfillment in construction combinations of words that have not previously existed, that may evoke strong emotions in a reader. The aim of my writing is to have an emotional affect on a reader, whether it’s a reaction of disgust or a sense of identification. Some people have told me that my fiction makes them feel less lonely, that they feel as if they are not the only person in the world who feels a certain way, that they feel some kind of kinship with the characters that I write about, who tend to be outcasts and unconventional people in the way in which they peruse their lives. So I think ultimately a writer wants to be read and a writer wants to reach a particular audience that needs to hear certain things so that they feel more at ease with themselves in their own unusual circumstances or their own unusual interiority.