This is the first part of a two-part interview with Avery Chenoweth, a writer and Spanish language translator based in Charlottesville, Virginia. You can see Part 2 here.
Avery Chenoweth has had a remarkable career as a writer and entrepreneur. Growing up in Princeton, he wrote for the local newspaper and also worked on a congressional campaign. At Vassar College, he penned an anonymous newspaper column–his nom de plume was Susan Avery–that caused controversy for its non-PC attitudes and perspectives on campus affairs.
After working as a journalist and essayist–writing memorable pieces on Phil Donahue and the billionaire Kluge family–Chenoweth honed a unique style that might be considered a cross between John Barth and John McPhee. In fact, over the years, Chenoweth has admired the work of fellow Princetonian McPhee and he studied with Barth at the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University.
Chenoweth has shifted back and forth between fact and fiction, using the techniques of one to develop his chops in the other. His fiction include the story collection Wingtips and the novel Radical Doubt. He has also authored imaginative historic works Albemarle and Empires in the Forest.
In recent years Chenoweth has also become a tech entrepreneur. He is the founder of Here’s My Story, an educational app program designed to bring history to life. The app connects visitors of historic sites to the people and backgrounds of those sites. Avery’s work has been featured in The New York Times and other media.
You grew up among storytellers. So when you talk about a topic, you have the unusual ability to frame issues in terms of stories, with vivid characters and scenes. Others, like me, I think have to construct stories more consciously. So I am wondering: How do you let ideas flow and, at the same time, consciously structure your thoughts?
A lot of ideas surface from almost everywhere, and they fall into different areas, almost at once. There are those that come to mind–sometimes as a joke–and stay in the area of being a conceit–a great idea for someone for a story, show, or product, but they ultimately do not hold my interest for long; and I might even put them into a story as a detail.
The ideas that become possessive of my mind and imagination and dreams arrive from some intuition. And the difference might be between being asleep or awake. Over the years, I’ve found that the ideas that arrive when I’m awake rarely hold my interest, like the conceits described above. But stories that flash out from intuition can hold my interest–for years, even for decades. They can begin as dreams, and arrive complete.
One story in my story collection began as a dream. I saw “Powerman” start to end, holding onto it in a lucid manner, trying not to interrupt the flow until I saw how it ended. So, I’m half awake, yet dreaming, waiting to see what happens. I woke up, like, wow. After that, I put in structure later to build the shape, so it stands up as a dimensional creation, not a dream, and works for others. I recently finished the first draft of a novel, at 75,000 words, that started as a dream, and continued opening every night in my dreams until it was done. Though I had an idea of the plot, a new one arrived every night, scenes, dialogue, plot, all of it, with edits, and now that it’s done the dreams are gone.
I love the intuitive story; it feels elusive, like a mood or element in which something normal has gone awry, is broken, or resolving itself, and I cannot figure out what it is. It’s just out of focus as the start of each chapter, and I write it to find out where it’s leading me. It’s lucid dreaming–gently pursuing the mood unsure where it will go yet with conscious structure in mind to make sure it isn’t merely dithering or wandering. I’ve spent years writing stuff that wanders and dissipates. So, if the story idea is a gimmick, it’s DOA, but if it starts flowing and going, I can chase it for a long time.
However comfortable you are as a storyteller, writing great narrative still requires hard work. How did you go about constructing stories in your story collection Wingtips and/or your novel Radical Doubt? In what ways did the stories come easily–and in what ways were they hard work? Can you explain one or two technique you use to solve story problems?
The stories in Wingtips were about siblings finding their way, keeping skeletons in the closet, and themed with landscapes and comic reversals, so each one aimed to get into the next phase of life. Although one of the stories, about the mother was not done by deadline, it was complete.
Radical Doubt was different and a great deal harder. It is a long story, with strong principals, and side characters, and the plot changed after I learned to West Coast Swing. Oddly enough, that was an exercise in physically spinning my partner around, catching her in all new ways, and then resolving the move as smoothly and naturally as possible. Sure, it sound nuts, but I would swear that those neurons, all new, came into play when I began re-writing the novel and giving it a fluency that felt like swinging a partner around on the page.
On another level, RD was hard because a lot of the story sprang from one crazy-scary summer that I spent working at a Poconos resort, which turned out to be a dangerous place in spite of its posh rooms and lovely landscaping. The autobiographical part did not have a story, though; it was just bits and pieces, crazed and confessional monologues, and violent fights that I had witnessed. And I mean violence bad enough to make a sane person quit, as I did, eventually. The hard part was tearing myself out of the main character, and allowing a new, imagined main character to take my place; then let him make all the bad choices that trigger the creepy and deranged falling actions of the story.
While I wrote that part of the story, I imagined what the Theseus and Minotaur story might look like if we rendered it in our day. It sounds pompous, but it was a way to continue visualizing the labyrinth the main characters have to get through to find each other at the end–so that our hero can face the ungodly behemoth behind the terrors in the valley.
When my wife was reading the script, she kept telling me that no hotel, or restaurant could stay in business with that kind of violence going on around the property. A professional in the hotel industry, she found it over the top. Curious, I Googled the actual place, and found out, to my surprise, that it was, in fact, out of business. The subject of an MTV Haunted Places special, the reports all said that it was the extreme violence that went on there, (when I was there and later), that drove customers away–and so I worked all of that into the story, as well. In the end, the autobiographical part was small, and the characters invented from everywhere, to make it all come together. That was writing a social novel with 35 name characters, and it taught me by contrast what it is to write short stories.
I think you will agree that writing is a craft, like carpentry or teaching or cooking–something that you need to hone and develop over a lifetime, with distinct skills that you have to “try out” and master over time. So what are some of the techniques of craft that have proved most useful over your career?
When I was at Johns Hopkins, I was fortunate to study with John Barth and Stephen Dixon. They were masters of craft, and exponents of the freedom of using story structures that appear first in Aristotle’s Poetics. Jack gave us his own cheat sheet, which had Freytag’s pyramid and elements he had observed in the literature he’d been reading his whole life; and it was like some wonderful new addition to the works of Northrop Frye and Joseph Campbell. That taught me to read, really, for the first time in my life.
Not everyone believes that you can master a skill with practice.
In English classes at Vassar, what we did, frankly, was talk about the characters as if we were watching soap operas. How did we like this one, or that one, who were we cheering for?
I remember asking my creative writing professor what tricks a writer used to re-write a scene, and his honest-to-God answer was, “We don’t know. That’s why writing is a mystery.” That baffled me, frankly, because across the campus in Art History, the professors showed us slides of drawings, compositions and failed attempts, and final masterworks, all to show us that art was plastic, not a fixed perfect thing, but created with revisions all aiming at an aesthetic. And the artists worked the material to get the results that they wanted. Emphasis here on the word “worked.”
Not so in English, where it was all magic, and the teachers had only personal experience to go by, so they only spoke from their solipsistic experience. That was true at Virginia Creative Writing Program, where I went to finish the collection I started at Hopkins–personal subjective feeling about what makes a story work, but no craft discussion. So, Hopkins freed me to carry on, while UVA left me feeling like I couldn’t know unless a professor reassured me.
Sure, you cannot teach talent, but you can teach craft, and free students to work on their own without having to rely on a mentor, though it’s great to have a few trusted readers. I didn’t buy the idea of the mystery, but I believed it to an extent–because it is hard to see in that morass of abstract words what the structures are, how they were stack up into arcs, reversals–much less the real mystery of how words come to life. I’ve read plenty of dead novels by famous writers whose books read like instruction manuals for installing a stereo system.
The best way to learn, sometimes, is by reading–and rereading–the masters.
If Jack taught me anything, he taught me to read, which not only made my life better, but also opened whole libraries, and let me carry on teaching myself. To be sure, knowing those elements doesn’t mean you can use them right away. They can be heavy and unnatural at the start, but they get lighter over time, and then they’re intuitive. And it is liberating. It doesn’t mean the story is a standard type; it’s individual and is shaped differently every time by the story and characters.
The only trick that I aim for, if I’m stuck, is to work with my character’s hands–fixing a light bulb, changing a tire, anything sweaty and detailed that will get me into his or her skin. Being in that intensely focused problem transports me out of my chair and into the page.
You have taken on some complex historic subjects in your books Albemarle and Empires of the Forest. How do you research such topics so that you can give new life to well-trod topics? How do you frame and reframe familiar stories, like John Smith and Pocahontas? What kinds of details shed new light on familiar topics? Are there any special tricks here, about character portraits, scene-making, action, and other elements of storytelling?
Reading landscapes was fascinating to me when I started doing the research for Albemarle; and the story of how we shape the land, and the land shapes us, has been compelling enough to carry over into a lot of areas over the years. The first piece of business with Albemarle, was to find out what it was like 10,000 years ago, and who was here. That alone separated the book out from others, which tend to romanticize Jefferson and the loveliness of the county. Everything was new, in that respect.
Empires was different. The story of Smith and Pocahontas is corrupted by cartoons and politics, both. You can’t tell that story without seeing a sneer of condescension from a listener, and they can often interrupt with a snarky crack about Disney. It’s odd because her name is famous yet her story remains almost virtually known, and even the Malick movie, The New World, fell into so many of the cliches and bullshit around the Jamestown colony, that I met a lot of folks with an axe to grind, literally, and called me out on Malick’s alleged racism, and the white-hero worship that typically covers Smith like insect bites.
After I’d read a few books, and found them all disdainful and correct, or, worse, heroic and swash-buckling, I decided to read the journals. These were the events as the Jamestown men wrote about them in sometimes inchoate English. That changed everything. Their vivid and sometimes electrifying accounts astonished me, and presented a real and moving portrait of a native girl who is caught between the men from a brave new world (a contemporaneous play, not coincidentally), and her father’s imperative and dicey political gambit sending her to spy on them as a precocious child, and report back on those poor idiots dying in one of his nasty old swamps. And they were the losers, to be sure: no women, no weapons with skill, speed, or accuracy, though they made a sound like thunder; and no ongoing organization, dying in numbers, unable to grow corn and feed themselves. And in their midst this one loon in charge, driven by his experiences in war, who is now beset by his men, who want to frag him, in case he beds the king’s daughter, and comes back to the fort with his warriors and kills them all. So, they decide to kill him, first.
Well, you may imagine that this research was a breeze and fascinating: and for good reason. It’s too much drama for the historians I was reading, who dismiss it as mere melodrama, and whose focus returned instead to the facts that they could prove–the bones and shards of history, which left the psychology and internecine social relationships for me to write about. I could go on, but you get the idea: if the academics have gone there before you, it doesn’t mean that they got the story, just that they got what they could prove to a dissertation committee, god help them.
The backstory of how we made the book, by the way, was just as bizarre–politics in fundraising, at powwows, and in the Indian community, with so help from Governor Mark Warner, Senator John Warner, and the Chickahominy people who embraced the book and played starring roles in its pages–many of whom Malick had pissed off by firing from the film for not looking “Indian” enough! Thankfully, we got a lot of that story into the Afterword.
