By Laura Whitmer

Andrew Martin joined Mountainview’s faculty in the summer of 2021. He is the author of the novel Early Work (2018) and the short story collection Cool for America (2020). He discussed the craft in writing real-life experiences, how to reject the all-or-nothing editing process, and the politics behind point-of-view with Laura Whitmer via video call.

Laura Whitmer: In preparation for our conversation, I read several other interviews you’ve done in the last few years. I was struck by how many people asked you about the role your real-life experiences influence your fiction. I’ve always felt like that’s a reductive question, but I understand people’s impulse to ask it. How do you feel about that question? What does it add to or take away from in a conversation about your work?

Andrew Martin: I think that’s such a good question, the meta version of it. Because to me, the real life is raw material that’s available to you as a writer and it’s kind of irrelevant, from a craft perspective, how much of it is true and based on your life. It’s really about how you use it and what you’re doing with it. If someone I know writes a book, I’m interested on a personal level, how much they’re using from their life, how they’re transforming it, and how they’re thinking about real life material. And I think it’s a valid craft question. How do you transform your life into art? How do you use what you know about the world, relationships, and friendships to make fiction? So, I wish people phrased it more the way you are. I do use biographical elements pretty heavily, at least in my initial setting out. I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. My wife was a medical student. I taught in a women’s prison. These things are true, but then from that basis, the perspective [in Early Work], the actual events, the way the character feels about his life, the way he thinks about the world, and the actions he takes based on that initial premise are different. So Early Work has a lot of that “what-if” thinking. What if, in this moment in my experience, this whole different set of elements was added, and this whole different set of thoughts and events came in?

LW: Early Work and Cool for America seem to orbit each other, with a handful of characters appearing in both books. What are you working on now, and do those characters inhabit the same universe?

AM: I’m working on stories right now. In the similar way that those two books coexist, I’m putting a lot of characters and ideas into a stew and seeing if a novel will emerge from it. None of the characters in the work I’m doing now come from the characters in those books, but the way I work is often that I’m writing scenes and characters and trying to figure out what I’m interested in. Then over time, sifting that into stories, into a novel, taking things out of novels and putting them aside, seeing if they can become stories. I have so much leftover material from the first two books that got shaved off. I think the new work feels like a continuation of the work from those two books, but they’re older versions of those characters, not specifically those characters. In some ways I’m following my own life trajectory, so my characters have gone from being in their mid to late twenties and early thirties into their mid-thirties. Grappling with some slightly more existential questions about what they’re doing with their lives. I’ve thought about calling my next thing “Other People’s Kids.” [Laughs]

LW: I think that’s a great title. How do you approach a story—or part of a story—that isn’t working?

AM: Oh gosh. Try everything! I feel like the number one thing that helps is putting it aside. It’s like when you’re working on a knot, and you pick at it and pick at it and you’re like, ‘I cannot look at this thing anymore. There’s no way this is ever going to get fixed.’ So then you just have to put it down. And then you give it a month, you give it a couple months. And you come back to it, and suddenly you can see it clearer, you can see it fresh. That can be really helpful. Or sometimes you can see that it’s not interesting enough or not going to work for you and you can put it aside. For me, dialogue and voice in general is such a huge part of what I do that reading it out loud and playing with the rhythms of it ends up being really helpful. If the story is not interesting for some reason, often the problem is in the prose, the voice, or the sound of it. So, trying to chop it up can help. First paragraphs are often really hard for me. I read a piece when we did our residency, and as I was reading it out loud, I realized the sentence lengths in the first paragraph were not right, and I was like, ‘Aw, shoot.’ [Laughs] Trying to break down the components can be useful. When you feel like, ‘Oh no, this thing is a mess, it’s not working,’ it’s like, okay, what’s not working? Which paragraph doesn’t feel right, and why? Once you find a little thing to work on, then you can start addressing the bigger questions, but you’ve got to take it into its constituent parts, otherwise you’re never going to do it, you know?

LW: Yeah. That’s helpful for me to hear, just personally right now as well. I think we all need that reminder.

AM: Yeah. I’m very dramatic, so it can feel very all or nothing. Like, this whole thing needs to go, and I also need a new career. [Laughs] But I think often it’s more like, no, that paragraph sucks, you just have to cut it. You have to be willing to cut. I think a willingness to cut or a willingness to throw out has become sort of a fetish in the MFA world. Like, ‘kill your babies.’ Or, ‘the best sentence in the piece, that’s the one you have to cut.’ But if it’s really good, then probably keep it. If something doesn’t work in the greater whole, if something doesn’t feel right in the context, you have to have that willingness to get rid of stuff, or a whole story, if it doesn’t work.

LW: What did you take from your MFA experience that you don’t think you could have gotten anywhere else?

AM: There were a couple of things. The one that truly changed my trajectory as a writer is that I worked with David Gates, who became one of my favorite fiction writers, and he was really the first person I’d ever worked with who brutally line-edited my work. His way of working was, he would hand you back your pages top to bottom covered in pen with the way he would’ve written it. So, it wasn’t like, ‘this is bad, this is wrong, this is whatever;’ it was, ‘if I was writing this story, here’s how I would do it.’ He’d scrawl rewritten versions of the dialogue, he’d cut words out of sentences, he’d cut paragraphs or move them around. He’d be like, cut everything after this line, cut these last two pages. He had an active editing instinct in a way that was really, really helpful because that’s more like how book editors edit and more like how really good magazine editors edit.

As a teacher, I don’t go that hard because I do feel a need to respect my students’ work more. And in that class, some students hated it. It was really a divide. To me, I thought it was life changing because even though I don’t think any of the stories from that first workshop ever saw the light of day, it gave me a template for how much pressure I needed to put on the stories. Not pressure in a bad sense, not anxiety, but physical pressure to make the story tighter, sharper, better.

And the second thing was my peers. I grew up in New Jersey and then was working at a magazine in New York, and so I was very much a part of the east coast literary/publishing world, and then I went to Montana for my MFA and met people from all over the country, a lot of people from the Midwest, from the West, from small towns. I went to an Ivy League school, I was part of a particular set, and I really thought I was such hot shit. [Laughs] It was really, really useful to meet people from all over, all walks of life, different kinds of education and backgrounds, all of whom were really good writers, and I was like, ‘Oh, my very privileged life does not privilege me in this sphere.’ You can be a great writer from all kinds of different places, and I learned so much from writers of different backgrounds and styles and everything else. It seems kind of obvious and almost embarrassing to have to learn that at twenty-five, but it was a wakeup call in a really good way.

LW: What has teaching taught you about your own writing?

AM: I’m continually renewed and energized by reading student work. To me, it’s a reminder of the possibilities of what you can do. As a writer, I feel so trapped in my own head a lot of the time. I think that’s one of the professional hazards of the job. So, what’s cool about teaching is that suddenly you’re seeing a student take a whole different path, a whole different approach to writing fiction, and they’re trying things you hadn’t thought of. Also, it’s very hard to take your own medicine, but that’s happened to me a bunch of times, where I’m saying to a student, ‘You need to read it out loud, you need to think it through, you need to take it paragraph by paragraph’ and I’m like, wait a minute, I could do that!

LW: You’ve spoken previously about your tendency to write female characters from a close-third POV and male characters from a first-person POV. Do you feel like writing a female character in first-person is inauthentic, or a line you can’t cross, even in fiction?

AM: It’s an interesting thing. I don’t think I’m not crossing that line out of any political reason. I don’t think it’s because I’m afraid of appropriating the perspective because I’m doing that just as much if I’m writing in close-third, really. I’m inhabiting the character’s thoughts. It’s something that I want to figure out how to do. It’s relatively rare. It’s kind of surprising how rare it is to see people writing first person across their gender identity. And I don’t know why. One of the great exceptions is Mating by Norman Rush, which is this amazing, very long first-person female-narrated novel written by a man. But I think there’s something about claiming that ‘I’ and the intimacy of ‘I’ that I find difficult to do if it’s not a character who, forget even the gender part, kind of resembles me specifically. I’ve never written an ‘I’ character who’s twenty years older than me, you know? Whenever I write ‘I,’ it’s a character who’s around my age and perspective. I’ll use close-third for younger versions of myself or projected older versions of a character like me. The female characters I write, I feel very close to and might be almost more autobiographical in a lot of ways. I think the removed aspect of third person helps you be more honest in some ways because you’re not stuck with what would this character literally say, but what’s a slightly deeper level of their consciousness.

LW: What are you reading right now?

AM: I just read this hilarious and sad novel by the British writer J.R. Ackerley called We Think the World of You. I also just finished a galley of a friend’s book called The Midcoast [Adam White, forthcoming 2022] about crime in small town Maine and it’s really good. I now know a lot more about how to run drugs from Canada than I used to, so I’m guessing that’ll be useful.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Laura Whitmer is currently developing her fiction craft at the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA. She currently lives in Massachusetts.