27Apr

A Written Interview with Authors in the Spotlight with Lucie Dunn

• Saved in: A Real Piece of Work, Chris Orcutt Books, Craft, Favorite Books, Interview, Novels, One Hundred Miles from Manhattan, Process, Radio Interview, Short Stories, The Dakota Stevens Mysteries Series, THE MAN THE MYTH THE LEGEND, The Rich Are Different, Written Interview
• by Chris Orcutt
• with Comments Off on A Written Interview with Authors in the Spotlight with Lucie Dunn

In my blog post yes­ter­day, I men­tioned my upcom­ing inter­net radio inter­view with Pam Stack, host of Authors on the Air, on Wed., April 30 at 8:00 p.m.

Well, as a corol­lary to that inter­view, Pam’s co-host, Lucie Dunn, does a writ­ten inter­view with authors appear­ing on Pam’s show and pub­lish­es them to her Authors in the Spot­light page on Face­book. I thought Lucie asked some ter­rif­ic ques­tions, so I want­ed read­ers of this blog and the inter­net at large to have access to this inter­view.

Lucie’s ques­tions are pre­sent­ed in the bold­ed text, and my answers appear below each ques­tion. I hope you enjoy it.

_______________

Yes­ter­day I had the dis­tinct plea­sure of doing a writ­ten Q&A inter­view with a very artic­u­late and intel­li­gent man. His most recent nov­el, One Hun­dred Miles from Man­hat­tan, was released at the end of March, 2014. He has the first two nov­els in his acclaimed Dako­ta Stevens Mys­tery Series pub­lished and I am told he has enough ideas stored for quite a few more. He comes to us from New York but is a true New Eng­lan­der hav­ing been born in Maine. I present to you Chris Orcutt!

OK, first ques­tion: Were you always a read­er?

Absolute­ly. This is going to sound apoc­ryphal, but I taught myself to read at age 3. The sto­ry is that I walked into the liv­ing room and start­ed read­ing out loud from Time mag­a­zine. My par­ents were dumb­found­ed. So, yes, I’ve always been a read­er, and I enjoy read­ing the very best writ­ing. I’ve also read my fair share of junk over the years, but over time I learned that life is short and you can’t waste your time read­ing the junk when there are so many mas­ter­pieces to read.
Very true! How old were you when your first man­u­script idea came to you?

Well, if by “man­u­script” you mean sto­ries, then I began writ­ing them at about age 12 and would read them aloud to my friends on the school bus. I seri­al­ized the sto­ries so every day, or every oth­er day, there would be a new install­ment. I still remem­ber some of the char­ac­ters I cre­at­ed. One was a James Bond-esque spy, anoth­er was a detec­tive.
Is this the detec­tive that went on to become Dako­ta Stevens?

No, not at all. Dako­ta came much lat­er. I got the first name of my detec­tive, Dako­ta Stevens, when I learned that a girl I went to mid­dle school with had named her boy Dako­ta. I filed that away. “Cool,” I said to myself. Then I wrote a humor­ous sto­ry with a PI named Dako­ta Perez—a sto­ry that mir­rors the short sto­ry “An Occur­rence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Any­way, the first glim­mers of what would become Dako­ta arrived on the scene in my ear­ly 20s, but it was­n’t until I was in my ear­ly 30s that I decid­ed I want­ed to start a PI series. I was laid up for weeks with a back injury and did noth­ing but read Chan­dler and Park­er nov­els, and that’s when I said, “Hell, Chris—you can do this.”
And you did!!! Are you work­ing on book three, assum­ing there will be a few more?

Yes, I’ve already writ­ten the first drafts of what I think will be books 3 and 4, and I’ve been tak­ing notes for book 5. Hon­est­ly, I have more than enough ideas for a dozen Dako­ta titles. To me the ideas have always been easy; it’s the exe­cu­tion that’s hard. The writ­ing and pol­ish­ing of the work takes the most time. If I were con­tent to sim­ply pub­lish my first drafts, I could have a dozen titles out in no time, but I’m not con­tent with that. I want every­thing I write and pub­lish to be the very best work I’m capa­ble of.
That just means you take total pride in your craft. And there is noth­ing bad about that.

Writ­ing is my life. It’s ALL I do.
You have a great resume though. A high school his­to­ry teacher for instance. Are you a his­to­ry buff?

I do enjoy U.S. his­to­ry and am fair­ly knowl­edge­able on the Civ­il War and WWII—especially D‑Day. I’ve been to Nor­mandy, stood on Oma­ha Beach, and I’m in total awe of what those men did. I’ve walked the long walk up to Ceme­tery Ridge at Get­tys­burg and been in awe of both the Union and Con­fed­er­ate sol­diers. I enjoyed teach­ing his­to­ry for a cou­ple of years—the stu­dents I had were won­der­ful, tal­ent­ed, bright kids (and I stay in touch with some of them!)—but oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties came along and I pur­sued them.
Well as a read­er, I’m glad you did.

Thanks! I espe­cial­ly enjoy going to his­tor­i­cal sites, because I’ve always believed that there are cer­tain things you can’t know about an event unless you’ve been there. For exam­ple, when I went to Oma­ha Beach, I got there at low tide, just when the U.S. sol­diers land­ed, and let me tell you, it’s a LONG way from the water to any kind of shel­ter from the with­er­ing fire they endured.
WOW!

It’s at least 300–400 yards. At least.

 

 

So tell me about read­ing The Great Gats­by. You have read that sev­er­al dozen times. They say that you nev­er real­ly read the same book twice. After read­ing The Great Gats­by that many times were you able to walk away with a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive than you came away with the pri­or reads?

The Great Gats­by, in my opin­ion, is an absolute gem. I have a framed ver­sion of the book from this ter­rif­ic lit­tle com­pa­ny Litographs, which prints the entire text of the nov­el (and many oth­er nov­els) on a poster, in a nice pat­tern. It hangs in the hall out­side my bath­room. Let’s put it this way: Every time I come out of the show­er, I stop and point at a ran­dom place on the Gats­by print, and every time I see some­thing new: some new metaphor, some deli­cious use of an adverb, some join­ing togeth­er of words that you’ve nev­er seen before. Orig­i­nal.

When I was first pub­lish­ing the Dako­ta books on Kin­dle, I weighed epub­lish­ing vs. tra­di­tion­al pub­lish­ing, and the touch­stone I used was Gats­by.

The ques­tion I asked myself was this: Are the words of The Great Gats­by any less poet­ic and utter­ly per­fect pre­sent­ed in e‑ink than they are in print? No. In fact, I sub­mit that you could paint those words on a dark cave wall and they would still be as great. Great writ­ing is great writ­ing, regard­less of the medi­um in which it’s pub­lished or who decid­ed to pub­lish it.

One point to add to that: Each time you reread a book (and we writ­ers do a lot of re-read­ing), you see dif­fer­ent things—and you espe­cial­ly begin to under­stand how the writer does what he does. I wrote a [lov­ing] spoof of Gats­by titled “The Mag­nif­i­cent Mur­phy,” which I’m very proud of. It’s in my [short  sto­ry] col­lec­tion The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end.
How did you come up with the ten men and their pro­fes­sions for The Man, The Myth, The Leg­end? I par­tic­u­lar­ly enjoyed the homi­ci­dal vio­lin­ist.

What can I say? I did­n’t come up with them. These char­ac­ters just arrive on the doorstep of your brain and insist that you write about them. They start talk­ing to you. You ask “What if this? What if that?” a lot.

The African big-game hunter, Buck Rem­ing­ton came from read­ing some arm­chair safari books. The road sign engi­neer came from spec­u­lat­ing about what such a man (and woman) would be like. As for the homi­ci­dal vio­lin­ist, that came out of a sum­mer when I had been fan­ta­siz­ing a lot about find­ing a bul­ly from my past and con­fronting him. Not killing him, obvi­ous­ly, but con­fronting him. Instead I saved that ener­gy for the sto­ry. I had been lis­ten­ing to Beethoven’s “Kreutzer Sonata” over and over all sum­mer long, along with eat­ing a water­mel­on a day and hack­ing into the water­mel­on with a big Henck­el’s chef’s knife. It’s the “bits of string” idea that Nabokov talks about—these sto­ries and nov­els come from the col­lect­ing of these lit­tle bits of string and fluff.
I loved Buck Rem­ing­ton’s name, being a hunter and hav­ing Rem­ing­ton as your last name is just so apro­pos for a hunter.

That was exact­ly why I gave him that name.
It was a great read and I am not gen­er­al­ly one for short sto­ries.

Thanks! One of the things I try to do in my short sto­ries is to actu­al­ly give the read­er what I call a “dis­tilled nov­el” expe­ri­ence. Fin­ish the thing and feel like you’ve expe­ri­enced a nov­el, but it did­n’t take you days to read.
I like that, “dis­tilled nov­el.” Tell me about your first two books, Nick Chase’s Great Escape and I Hope You Boys Know What You’re Doing. I am think­ing I would def­i­nite­ly love to read the lat­ter.

I wrote Nick Chase and I Hope You Boys back in my mid–late 20s, and they were the best I was capa­ble of at the time. They’re well-writ­ten, humor­ous sto­ries—Nick Chase is a com­ic nov­el; I Hope You Boys is a col­lec­tion of main­ly humor­ous stories—but not only has my writ­ing advanced pro­found­ly since then, I as a per­son have evolved and deep­ened. When you’re young, Life has­n’t beat­en you down very much, but as you get old­er and have some bad things hap­pen to you (and some good things), you gain per­spec­tive.

What I would say about those first two books is that I’m glad they’re out there in lim­it­ed quan­ti­ties (they’re no longer pub­lished) as a record of my ear­ly work, but if read­ers want to read ful­ly matured work, read my lat­est four books.
I think the I Hope You Boys appealed to me because I am a Mom, and I could just pic­ture say­ing that to my old­er son and his friends…MANY TIMES!

Let me tell you where that title came from…

My friend Carl and I were “land­scap­ing” for a very old woman (her son hired us), and our idea of land­scap­ing was this: When in doubt, cut it out. Every so often the old woman would come out on the porch and yell at us, “I HOPE YOU BOYS KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOIN’!”
Ok, last ques­tion. I think I know what one part of the answer will be, let’s see if I’m right. Every writer has a “tool­box.” You know, things that you must have or must do when you sit down to do some writ­ing on your work in progress. What is in your tool­box?

Think­ing…

For me, it’s a thor­ough knowl­edge of gram­mar, punc­tu­a­tion, syn­tax, and sto­ry­telling prin­ci­ples. Because you don’t want a lack of knowl­edge of these things to slow you down. And when you know them, when you know the rules, you know when you can break the rules.

Also in my tool­box is desire. Desire not mere­ly to become a good writer. There are plen­ty of good writ­ers. I want to become a great writer. My heroes are Chekhov, and Fitzger­ald, and Cheev­er, and Hem­ing­way, and Chan­dler, and Flem­ing, and Nabokov. The desire is a major tool because it gives me some­thing to strive for. Sure, I’d love to be sell­ing my books by the bushel, but it’s more impor­tant to me to write work that will last.
Very nice.

Oh, and COFFEE and REALLY GOOD PENCILS!
I would like to thank Chris Orcutt for his gen­eros­i­ty and time! It was def­i­nite­ly a tremen­dous plea­sure chat­ting with him! I invite you all to go and check out his web­site at www.orcutt.net and if you would like to pick up any of his awe­some books you can find the links on his web­site. If you would like to pick up his lat­est nov­el, One Hun­dred Miles from Man­hat­tan, here is a direct link to the Kin­dle book: http://amzn.to/1fo9hdY, or if you pre­fer a paper­back: http://goo.gl/RqQkxy.

_______________

Thank you, Lucie! It was a plea­sure.

—Chris

Tagged: Authors in the Spotlight, Authors on the Air, Chris Orcutt, craft, Dakota Stevens, Dakota Stevens Mystery Series, interview, novelist, novels, writers, writing

• Share on: Twitter
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• Google+