Bukola Shonuga
A Different Kind Of Machine: Matt Bell Shares Insights On Creative Writing

Matt Bell’s latest novel, Scrapper, set in the aftermath of the destruction of Detroit, published by Soho Press in 2015, received accolades from notable press:

“In Scrapper, Bell’s strengths shine through on the sentence level, the grim and the poetic side by side.”
— S. Kirk Walsh, The New York Times

“Scrapper is a devastating reimagining of one of America’s greatest cities, its beautiful architecture, its lost houses, shuttered factories, boxing gyms, and storefront churches. With precise, powerful prose, it asks: What do we owe for our crimes, even those we’ve committed to protect the people we love?”
—Publishers Weekly

“Matt Bell has built a national reputation on his own terms, completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas, which are wholly original and singularly his own. He is that rare sort of writer whose work the reader would recognize even if were published anonymously.”
—Kyle Minor, HTMLGiant

Bell also won acclaim for his novel In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods (Soho Press, 2013) and his collection How They Were Found (Keyhole Press, 2010). His writing has been featured in Best American Mystery Stories, Tin House, The New York Times, and many other publications. He’s the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award.

I met Bell shortly after the release of Scrapper, a selected read for the fiction workshop class taught by my then-professor, Joseph Salvatore, at the New School. Bell was invited as a guest author and I was so excited to have had the opportunity to chat with him. Little did I know that our path would cross again. As Interview Editor of 12th Street and a proud candidate of The New School Riggio Honors: Writing and Democracy program, it’s an honor to introduce our readers to the prolific contemporary fiction writer Matt Bell.

12TH STREET: Welcome, Matt, and thank you so much for taking the time to interview with 12th Street.

MATT BELL: Thank you, I’m very excited. It’s going to be fun.

STREET: I would like to start with a quote from Kyle Minor at HTMLGiant: “Matt Bell has built a national reputation on his own terms, completely outside the support system of New York publishing, on the strength of his stories and novellas. He is that rare sort of writer whose work the reader would recognize even if were published anonymously.” That’s huge! When did you realize that writing is your calling?

BELL:  was always a reader. I read a lot when I was a kid and I’ve read a lot my whole life. I wrote some when I was young but I never looked at that as writing, I looked at that as an extension of reading. I didn’t really start writing seriously until probably twenty, twenty-one. I dropped out of college. I was originally a computer science and a political science major, and I left school. I started reading contemporary sort of literary fiction. I found people like Denis Johnson, Raymond Carver, and Amy Hempel; people like that got me started and I realized that there was something I was looking for and I immediately started wanting to make more of it again . . .  wanting to recreate these things that I was finding in books. As soon as I started writing short stories, at that age, that was what I wanted to do, and I’ve pretty much stuck with it ever since.

STREET: The simplest and most powerful quote I found on your webpage reads, “Day one is the point of no return,” by Werner Herzog. How do you arrive at day one?

BELL: Yeah, I like that! The only thing I can think about day one is that it’s the beginning of a project, and that’s usually exciting, right? I don’t know how it is for you when you’re writing, but for me the beginning is always so exciting and things are fresh and new, and it’s all potential and that’s really great. That’s always a good feeling—then the trick somehow is how to keep recreating that feeling for yourself. The second day, you look at what you made and it’s not good enough, right? The despair is that it’s easier just to keep starting over, instead of committing to something. One of the things that was most striking to me about novel writing specifically is that a short story is short enough that you can get a draft of it while you’re still in the full enthusiasm phase, right? You can write it from beginning to end without having some sort of doubt, but one of the things I had to learn as a novel writer was that the first draft, second draft or even the third draft, but especially a first draft, was this long passage through uncertainty, that there was very little evidence on day one that it would pay off. It’s always part of the process with my previous novels and the one I’m working on now, where it feels insurmountable, it feels like I’ve made a huge mess, it’s not going to work out, or you get bored and you lose interest or you have a lack of faith in it. I think what I like about that Herzog quote is, he’s talking about like once you begun, begin, stay in it! You’ve already passed the point of no return so you should make something you’re committed to making.

STREET: By the time you put pen to paper, are you kind of clear at least on where you want go with the story? Is it totally formed in your consciousness?

BELL: Oh no, I’m not actually much of a first draft planner. I have some idea of where I’m going, at least in the very short term. I don’t write outlines. With something like Scrapper, for instance, what I knew when I started was that I was interested in that world, interested in that sort of job and the geography, the abandoned buildings in Detroit. I didn’t know the main character’s name. Actually I didn’t know very much about him. I don’t think he had a name the first two months I was working on the book. I didn’t know about the kidnapping that was at the center of the book until I was writing those scenes. So very little planning in the first draft, and then after I have a draft of the book, one of my revision techniques is to outline what I made and then sort of revise the outline into a better structure, a stronger plan, and then rewrite the book based on that outline. So in some ways, the whole first draft is really like a way to get half of the story I want to tell, and then I start to tell it better.

STREET: That’s a good segue into my next question on Scrapper. I was curious about what I observed to be a close link between journalism and fiction in Scrapper, in terms of the actual occurrences of some of the scenes. For instance, in the dialogue between the rapper and the detainee Adnan Fahim in Gitmo, the rapper says, “I’ve come to ask you for your cooperation, I want to make a movie about you to bring attention to the problem of your detainment and treatment, how you’re cleared for release but haven’t been released . . . It isn’t the same president now, the president who had you tortured, isn’t president anymore . . . ” Is that particular scene fiction or is it based on an actual event?

BELL: It didn’t happen. The actual conversation with the rapper is completely made up though the end to that chapter—the video, the documentary that the filmmaker made about force-feeding in Gitmo—is based directly on events that were happening at that time. I was reading a lot of books on Guantanamo and other materials related to the war on terror. I was still living in Michigan when I started the book so I was able to spend some time in Detroit as I was working on it. Most of the buildings that Kelly goes into in his scrapping—the schools, the churches and auto plants at the beginning of the book—those are real places that I was in, where I got to spent some time in so that I could feel it for myself. The crimes that happened in the book, other than Daniel’s kidnapping, all of those things were happening in Detroit in the time I was writing the book. Even though the book is fictional and the main story is fictional, there is this sort of—more than anything else I’ve written—this kind of heavy presence of the world I was writing in, when I was writing the book. To me the book takes place really at the time I was writing it so I was trying to write about now, as opposed to writing about time in the past . . . so embedding the research I was doing directly into the book was part of that mode.

STREET: Another current event featured in Scrapper was the killing of Trayvon Martin, which further led me to believe that you have a strong interest in social, cultural, and political dynamics in present day America?

BELL: Yes, one of the things the book is about for me is the link between fear and violence; it’s so much in Kelly’s character and I think it’s so much of the things that happen at a personal and political level and everywhere in between where we are made to feel afraid, and like the only way to deal with our fear is to commit violence against somebody else, which makes somebody else afraid, and which creates this cycle of violence. Some of the things that had influenced me like Guantanamo and the events of Trayvon Martin’s killing and the environment at the Chernobyl nuclear plant . . . why not put those directly in the book, why not show my work? I felt like, if you have important things to say, let’s say it. So those chapters are definitely hit or miss for some readers but I feel like it’s a risk I’m glad I took. It was something that meant a lot to me, to attempt at least.

STREET: Excellent! Thank you for that detailed account. From what I read, Scrapper is a total departure from your previous books How They Were Found and Cataclysm Baby, so what inspires your writing, and sets the premise so far apart?

BELL: The goal does not seem to be to find one thing that I’m good at and repeat that—so the novel before Scrapper, In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods, is much more like mythic in setting and sort of overtly magical and sort of fantastical with a fabulous bent. I really loved writing that book and I’m really very proud of it, but because of its sort of fantastical-fabulous nature, it dawned on me to do some of the things we were just talking about in Scrapper, some of the journalistic things, some of the current event things, the overtly political things. I was finishing that book during the 2012 elections and was thinking about things I cared about a lot. So yes, in some ways Scrapper is responsible for that feeling. I made one novel shape, that did one thing really well, you know, as well as I could do it. It was a different kind of thing, a different kind of machine, and I think that’s kind of the fun part of being a writer. If you’re interested in a story collection, you can do more range in one book, right? You can have ten stories do ten different things in one book. But the novel process is just slower. The most prolific literary novelists mostly don’t write fifty books, right? They write ten or fifteen in a lifetime.

STREET: Kyle Minor further stated that “Matt Bell is that rare sort of writer whose work the reader would recognize even if it were published anonymously.” That’s a great compliment. Do you agree that your brand can be distinguished from thousands of other writers out there, and what are the craftsmanship elements that set your work apart?

BELL: That’s a very kind thing for Kyle Minor to say and I appreciate it, but that’s hard for me to say. But what I know is that I can see the things I can’t do well in my book, I don’t know… there is probably some identifying stuff… there is probably some DNA. I had a friend who recently pointed out that I had written one very rural pastoral novel and one urban novel, and it does occur to me that actually in some ways the treatment of the landscape is very similar in both books. Even though they seem to be about completely different settings, there is a shared sensibility, right? There is shared stuff between the narratives of both novels. I think it’s harder to get really far away from yourself than you think, and it’s hard to be your own best reader in that way.

STREET: What advice would you give to students and beginner writers on finding their voices and style and creating compelling characters, that’s woven into authentic stories that could eventually generate an audience?

BELL:  Right around the time I started to write seriously—I can be a methodical person—I started this thing where I would read all the books that got the best awards for the year. I also started reading a lot of experimental fiction and that was really great for me. If you only read books that everyone is reading, you’re going to produce books like everyone is writing. Find interesting, good sources . . . read what you love . . . read what you’re moved by, and not necessarily what other people think you should be reading. You asked a question about creating compelling characters. What immediately came to mind for me is that one of the techniques that I think I use that’s really helpful is to get the character in a situation where they’d make a different choice than I would, and be more dramatic about it. Once a character has done something I would never do, then they’re a little unknowable to me, so that mystery creates character … why did they do that, why did they react that way? As soon as I don’t understand what they are doing, they become very alive to me, in the same way that we don’t understand what most people are doing all the time.

Young writers especially often write something weird, there is something unique and very special about the way they see the world or the way they feel or work with language—and often times these urges are not very developed yet. So they come into workshop and they’ve got this weird quirk, and it’s an interesting quirk, but it’s a quirk—and everybody’s like, that’s not quite right, that’s not working, I don’t understand that . . . and so eventually, the person pulls back and does something more typical instead, and they lose that special thing about them. So one of the things I try to do, and I think you can train yourself to do, is to look at a piece of writing and say, “What’s the thing that this writer is doing that no one else will do? What’s the choice they make that other people wouldn’t think of, even if it’s weird and even if it’s not yet successful?” and then try to encourage the quirk, to preserve that weirdness. I think it’s so easy to doubt the thing that makes a student unique on the page because they’re going to have to develop that themselves, and they make have difficulty figuring it out because other people haven’t done it before—but that’s “the thing” that makes them unique and special. Whatever that is, it’s more important that they develop it than learning how to write dialogue or whatever in the most typical way. So it’s a tricky but fun thing to teach. Once every student in the class gets used to looking for the quirks in each other’s work, classes get really interesting. So much of life is about conforming but on the page we’re supposed to do the opposite—and it’s fun to be in a room full of young writers who are pushing each other to be more who they are, in the weird and special way they could be. It’s pretty great.

STREET: Wow. That’s totally awesome and inspiring. So what books have your read or reading that influence your writing skills, your style?

BELL: In some ways it’s almost impossible to answer this question because there’s so much stuff—I think there are books that sort of wake you and makes you say, yeah! that’s someone speaking in a voice that I haven’t heard before and needed to hear. I mentioned Denis Johnson before, I remember reading his books Jesus’ Son and Angels when I was twenty or twenty-one and they just like blew my mind. I had no idea you can do that kind of thing with fiction and I did at some point make some Denis Johnson imitations, but I don’t really write like him now, he’s just someone that’s important to me. I really like Christine Schutt’s fiction, and her sentences are a big influence to me, I think she’s one of my favorite writers of prose—I go back and just read her prose all the time. Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo—I read a lot of different things. I read a lot of experimental fiction. It’s very helpful. Anne Carson is a favorite writer of mine. One of the things I love about Carson is her ability to work in so many different modes. She has this kind of broad ability as a writer and critic that I really admire. I also grew up as a reader of fantasy and sci-fi. I can talk Cormac McCarthy all day but Stephen King is just as important to me. It’s good to allow yourself to be influenced by whatever you’re really influenced by, not just what you supposed to be influenced by.

STREET: Beginner writers especially face the challenge of not being able to make a living as a writer. I know firsthand that once writing is in your DNA, you’d continue to write whether you get paid for it or not. What’s your take on this?

BELL: Yeah, unfortunately we are not in an era in which most people who want to can make a living from their writing, which is a problem for everyone. It’s a problem culturally, and it’s a problem personally, not just for beginner writers but for established writers as well. It’s hard to control the system you’re born into, it’s hard to control the age you’re born into, but you have to find a way to work and to live. When I started writing, I was not going to school, I worked in restaurants and bartended for a long time before I went back to undergrad and grad school. I published my first story while bartending and going to community college and it was difficult, but at the same time like you said, I was going to do it anyway. . .  and I’ve been lucky to be publishing books, I’m lucky to be able to make my living as a writer and a teacher. I wish I had better answers to how everybody could do the same, but I think in the end, you’re right, it’s exactly what you had said . . . Are you going to keep on writing, even if no one is reading or paying you?

There are two things to consider. One is: What allows you to be a writer in a way that sustains you, so that it’s part of your life for the rest of your life? The other is: What does it mean to you to have the career of a writer and how do you make your living? I think there are a certain number of chances for people to have the full career like that. But to be a writer, to be able to be part of the community of writers, to be a writer that makes important art, that does require it to be the way you make all of your living. Before I made any money off my writing, I was lucky to live a life of sort of reading and writing, being around a lot people who valued those things more and more every year—and some of that had to do not with financial things but with building community and being invited in—seeking out other writers and readers online, going to readings, going to the bookstore, writing reviews of books I like, interviewing writers for publications, trying to advocate for the kind of work that I valued and that I wanted to create—doing that kind of stuff brought me some of the friendships and relationships and the community that I needed, which helped me to last until I had some of the financial component of it together. To be around people who were making art, who care for the arts: That really, is the thing I desperately wanted when I started out fifteen years ago.

STREET: I agree that one should continue writing and making sure to connect with a community of writers in order to stay fresh and relevant, but more importantly and as you said earlier, the chances of getting your work recognized and eventually published would depend on the friendships and relationships that were cultivated and nurtured over the years…

BELL: It’s amazing how many writers that I’ve known for years and their first book or third book gets a lot of attention or something and it looks like they’ve suddenly exploded—like they showed up that day, already a genius. People forget that they’ve been building towards that, believing that’s it’s going to happen—and I think it usually does. I do think there are more opportunities to have some of that recognition now than ever before. There are so many good independent publishers and so many different ways to have people find your work. I think as publishing diversifies that way, the small publisher gets this sort of reputational parity with the bigger presses, and I think it will create more opportunities for more people. Again, not all that opportunity is financial but it does at least leave a more diverse publishing industry behind, that results in more different kinds of publishers that can succeed.

STREET: With all the competing priorities that we all struggle to balance in today’s timeless time, how many books do you get to read and is there a method to your madness?

BELL: I do read a lot. If I don’t have sort of a constant input of great books, great movies and great music, that kind of thing, I’d write much less. If I didn’t read, I wouldn’t write at all. I aim for reading about 100 books a year. I’d say that’s about two books a week. I don’t always get that, but I read a lot, I read everyday. You asked about the method to the madness; I used to have this thing where I just sort of read whatever I felt like, whatever interested me, but in the last couple of years, I think I’ve added a little more structure to how I read. It’s a couple of things: one, I started this thing where I try to read all of the writers in like a year, like I had a year where I read all of Cormac McCarthy, and last year I tried to read all of Toni Morrison and another all of Anne Carson. The other thing I’ve been very moved and convinced by is the recent discussions about gender and race representation in fiction and publishing, which have been furthered by organizations like VIDA. I think I decided to apply more intent to my reading—to at least be mindful of why I was reading what I was reading, to be sure I’m reading widely in style and background and to see what else is out there. Especially as a teacher of young writers, I feel very responsible to be able to speak to them from my own reading and show them what’s out there that they might need to find.