Author2Author: The Goldberg Brothers

Here’s an Author2Author twist: brothers! Lee Goldberg and Tod Goldberg are actually appearing together tonight at the Santa Monica Barnes & Noble, and to celebrate I’m finally getting it together to run the battery of questions and answers they sent me, oh, months ago. (Really, I am finally getting the hang of writing two blogs, honest I am…)

Lee: You broke into publishing by writing short stories (which have been collected in your new book Simplify), but would you recommend other writers take the same route? From everything I’ve heard, the short story market is supposedly dead…unless you can live by eating the free issues the literary journals offer witers as payment. (Anyone have a good recipe for Journals Au Gratin?)

Tod: Everyone has their own route, of course, but for me writing short stories before attempting to write my first novel just sort of made sense in an artistic way and in a self aggrandizing way. When I really began to take writing seriously, which is to say after I got out of college and was able to recognize how exceptionally awful the novel I thought I was writing in my last creative writing course at Harvard (and by Harvard, I mean: Cal State Northridge) was—the premise had something to do with a semi-haunted house in Maine, a state I’d never visited, that a (surprise!) college graduate student had volunteered to watch over summer; I never got past page 65, due in no small part to my Kaypro crapping out and the fact that, well, it sucked—short fiction seemed to be the best way for me to hone my skills. It also gave me a strong sense of completion in a fairly short amount of time, which made me feel good.

The short story market is far from dead. There are literally thousands of print journals and magazines and many more online as well, and I’d venture to say that all of the folks getting published by them are likely not of the Zombie-variety. You can’t make money, at least not at first, but what you can make is something far more important: a reputation and a publishing history, both of which are quantifiable things in the publishing business. I happen to love short fiction—I love to write it and I love to read it—and when it is done well, I think short fiction is as moving and as important as a novel can be; take Dan Chaon or Mary Yukari Waters, for instance, and you’ll find in 5,000 words what often takes other writers 75,000 to achieve.

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17 November 2005 | author2author |

Interview Roundup

• James Ellroy wins the Jack Webb Award for “[advancing] the gloriously deserved positive image of the Los Angeles Police Department,” and talks with the National Review about the honor and why the city’s cops get a bad rap.

• Jonathan Lethem’s going to be at Makor next month, and he discusses short story writing with the 92Y bloggers, along with the Mets, Marvel comics, and why he wrote his Brooklyn novels outside the city: “There’s something about the slight feeling of exile that brings my imaginative relationship with this place to life.”

• Rachel Kramer Bussel was doing interviews at Gothamist all last week, and I’m just now catching up with her conversations with Elizabeth Merrick and Julia Powell.

16 November 2005 | interviews, uncategorized |