Q&A with Carleton Whaley: Writing as Discovery
I’m currently on the ninth day of a daily commitment to be at my desk by 6:00 a.m. for novel revising. It is an extraordinarily slow process to revise a novel, and this is only one revision after many others. What’s amazing to me is that, in a fictional world I know pretty well by now, in these 6:00 a.m. sessions I’m still discovering new things about my characters and their lives. This sense of discovery is the main thing pulling me out of bed at 5:45 and keeping me excited about slow-moving work. It was so much fun to interview Carleton Whaley for this week’s Q&A because experimentation and discovery are at the heart of his creative process—plus, from the vantage point of someone slogging through 300 pages for the 300th time, it was a welcome opportunity to live vicariously through someone who’s been finishing a lot of short pieces.
Carleton is a fiction writer in New England. His work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and longlisted for Wigleaf’s Top 50. He’s been published in Paper Darts, Occulum, New South Journal, Five: 2: One, and so much more. In 2016 he co-founded and was editor in chief of The Slag Review: A Journal of Art, Literature, and Metallurgy (yes, you read that right) after being the Creative Nonfiction Editor of the Long River Review. A graduate of the University of Connecticut where he majored in English (and where we met in the cutely named Nutmeg Writers’ Group), Carleton is currently an MFA candidate at Goddard College (and—fun fact—a newlywed!).
For these Wild Minds Q&A’s, I typically meet with my guest over Zoom, record our call, and write up the Q&A from the transcript. You can imagine my horror when—after an inspiring and delightful interview with Carleton—I went to play back the recording on my phone and it had only saved 14 seconds of me rambling. This was entirely my fault—I take too many videos of my cat, I recently crammed my phone with July vacation photos, and I do not treat my technology very well in general (it’s supposed to be invincible, no?). My phone’s storage was overflowing and it simply could not bear the weight of Carleton’s literary presence. All this to say: a big thank you to Carleton for helping me reconstruct our interview via the written word, and be nice to your technology if you want it to be nice to you.
Q&A with Carleton Whaley, fiction writer
Q: When did you know you were a writer and when did you decide to pursue writing as a career?
A: To be honest, I’m still getting comfortable with calling myself a writer. I was a lot more confident when I was 11 and I was writing a fantasy novel that was basically just my friends and I looking cool while hanging out with dragons. I’ve had a lot of different career aspirations—I was licensed in insurance and almost went to school for architecture, for instance—but settled on the much safer and more financially stable option of creative writing.
Really, I knew I made the right choice in undergrad—I got introduced to contemporary writing (like Haruki Murakami and Laura van den Berg) by some amazing professors, and I just had this feeling. Every time I read something that expands what I thought was possible in a story, I get that feeling again, and I try to bring that to my own work—which I guess is why I kept applying to the MFA.
As far as the MFA goes (and I only just started), the only reason I went for it is because I felt like I needed a community and some guidance in order to grow. It’s not right for a lot of people, and there’s merit to the concern that the MFA is responsible for a general “American” school of writing where everyone sounds like Raymond Carver. But I think it’s the right choice for me, and I’m particularly lucky to be at a place like Goddard College, where experimentation is actively encouraged. But I’m rambling now.
Q: I know you’re working on a novel, too, but you’ve written a lot of micro-fiction and short stories. Are you especially drawn to short form?
A: For me, the short story is just a reliable way to make myself finish something, you know? I recently mentioned to an acquaintance that I write stories, and I was astounded that their question wasn’t “have you been published?” as many people ask, but “have you ever finished a story?” I remember a time when I was focused on writing novels—I grew up on fantasy and sci-fi novels, so it was really the only form I knew—and I never finished a single one. That person’s question reminded me that, even with those early, fumbling stories, I learned a lot just from having something finished.
I’m a slow writer. I let ideas and stories gestate for a long time before they’re ready, and stories are accommodating of that. Not only that, but their length affords kind of a low-risk/high-reward for experimenting. Did that idea work? No? Well, try something else, and maybe you’ll save a couple good lines from that draft.
Q: Do you generally know what the ending of a piece will be or do you figure it out as you go?
A: Both! I usually go into a story with a vague idea, scene, or image that I’m writing toward. But I find that if I already know where the story is going, it’s less exciting to write and, consequently, less exciting to read. Half the joy of writing comes from the discovery of the subject, I think. The other half comes from revision, where you go back in and (sometimes) realize that the ending isn’t on page 10 at all, it’s on page 7, or (devastatingly) that you’re not even close to the ending. That’s been very liberating to me—giving myself more freedom in the revision process to abandon what I’ve done, if necessary, and go off into uncharted territory.
Q: What is the “gestation period” like in your creative process?
A: When I say that I let stories “gestate” I mean a couple different things. Sometimes I’ll have an idea but won’t write it down, or I’ll only write out the first line, and then I’ll let it sit in the back of my mind for a month or a year and then bang the whole story out in an afternoon. Another way of letting a story gestate is that I’ll know sort of what I’m getting at for a long time, but the story just isn’t working. Rather than coming back to the same pages and editing them to death (which has usually happened by this point), I start a new document or go to a new page in my journal and just write the story again from scratch. If the basic idea feels good, I’ll usually get something out of these later drafts.
Q: There is a bit of a zany and surreal element in much of your writing, like in “Schnoz or Bar with Infinite Seinfelds,” but to me it always feels like there’s a serious thread underneath (i.e. the mother in “Infinite Seinfelds”).
A: I’ve always felt like the best way to emotionally open a reader up is to get them to laugh, then hit them with the ol’ one-two in the emotions. But in all honesty, that story in particular came about from a lot of what I mentioned before. I’m really sensitive about the novel I’ve been working on, but in stories I get to take more risks and just have fun. So, I started a story about a guy who gets nosebleeds (because I used to get them all the time growing up), and then it turned into a story about jokes. Seinfeld is pretty ubiquitous, so it was natural to add that and to make it surreal. It’s also my mom’s favorite show, which led to me thinking about my relationship to her, and how I’ve actually never watched that much Seinfeld.
I think the thread of seriousness you’re talking about in my stories comes from two things. First, the revision process, where I’m looking over half-baked ideas and thinking, “Okay, but what is this actually about?” I was at a loss for a little bit trying to end it, and a friend of mine gave me pretty much that exact advice. What is the story about, and how can you draw more out of the images you’ve already used? I try not to take myself seriously, which is how I get this and stories about the Charmin Bears and Mr. Clean, but I take the stories themselves seriously.
Second, and this is more personal—I am terrified of death. I think that every story I’ve written is about death in one way or another. The Seinfeld story is about a son grieving his mother, and in my own way it’s my way of processing a future grief.
Q: Where do you get your ideas?
A: From everywhere, really—just from living. I think a lot of early writers get so wrapped up in writing (I know I did), that living becomes secondary. But that’s what really matters. How can you bring beauty into other people’s lives if you’re not observant of it in your own?
On a more practical note, I am constantly writing things down. When I worked in a café, I used to write on the back of order slips. When I worked in insurance, I had a little black notebook. What I write isn’t important—little snippets of overheard conversation, odd things I see from the apartment windows—these things don’t even need to get used, it’s just that writing them down keeps me in the habit of being aware and noticing the strange things in life.
A lot of stories come to me from juxtaposing different things—characters, images, ideas—to see if there’s any resonance or conflict. How does this play with that? If there’s new meaning, or even some interesting tension, I try to mine that, putting everything into a context then. Sometimes I have to force myself to take things out—every story can’t have a train and a river just because my apartment is next to train tracks and a river.
Q: What is your favorite part of the writing process?
A: All of it! But, if we want to get hyper-specific, I really like titling pieces. I know some people hate it, but I find that I can’t get into a story until I have a somewhat-workable title. Early on when I was dating my wife, my father-in-law found out that I was a bookworm and asked if I’d ever read Hemingway. I told him yes, and he responded, “Oh, I never have. Guy’s got good titles, though,” and I burst out laughing. It was perfect—literary criticism can go home.
Q: What did you learn from your experience editing a literary journal that you’ve taken to your writing?
A: As far as its effect on my writing, I’ve learned not to take rejection personally—there’s so much good writing out there, and journals not only have limited space, but have responsibilities to curate an aesthetic that my writing may not fit into.
As for what I learned in general—oof. I still feel bad about closing The Slag. I loved it, but I couldn’t run it by myself anymore. After the other editors left (normal life moves, we started the journal right after we graduated college), communication suffered and so did production schedule and consistency. I had so many grand ideas, and that was part of the problem. I learned a lot about my own limits. As a writer, I endlessly admire editors and lit mag teams, partly because I didn’t think I was the kind of editor that I wanted to be.
I started The Slag Review to focus on craft and community, and I found myself thinking a lot about my role in the literary landscape—if you’re not actively helping people, what are you doing, you know? That’s also why I applied to Goddard. I want to become more involved in the literary community. I’d like to teach someday, and hopefully come back to editing as well, and to do those things well you need to be committed to giving back to a community.
You can read Carleton’s short story “Schnoz or Bar with Infinite Seinfelds” in Maudlin House and find more of his writing at his website.
Since Haruki Murakami came up: Absolutely on Music is a wonderful book of conversations about writing and music between Murakami and conductor Seiji Ozawa.
Do you, too, need a little inspiration to clear your damn phone storage? Marie Kondo to the rescue.
Read more Wild Minds posts here.