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five questions
I'm taking part in an interview game introduced to me by Angela. The rules:
1 - E-mail me, saying you want to be interviewed. (My e-mail address is jeremy [at] invisible-city.com.)
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal / blog with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.
So: what follows are Angela's questions for me and my answers.
1. How often do people you know (besides me) react to "seeing themselves" in Imaginary Year chapters?
Not as often as I steal from them. I'm a scavenger by nature, and the lives of the people who are close to me are a great source of raw material. Sometimes I just lift huge chunks of experience and put them in the work almost verbatim, but more commonly the act of reflection that's going on is more indirect. It's more like the lives of my friends represent to me a (enormously broad) pool of "believable" experience, and so when imagining the lives of my fictional characters, I know that if I draw elements from that pool the characters will seem more believable. I'm especially concerned with wanting my female characters to seem believable, because I don't have firsthand experience of what it's like to be a woman in this culture, and I don't want to "get it wrong." To a certain degree I can imagine what it's like, or infer it from how it feels to be a man (I don't think the two "subject positions" are completely alien to one another), but I also rely heavily on the experiences that women have told me about in conversations (or have written about in their novels, poems, blogs, LiveJournals, zines, etc.)
How do you respond to them?
I'm always pleased to hear that people are reading, so when someone remarks about seeing themselves in the work, I feel complimented. Usually what I most want to ask is whether they feel like I got the tenor of the experience right, whether I described it in a way that feels true to them.
2. If you had the power to change one person's mind about one important thing, who would you pick, and why?
I think it is unethical to (forcibly) change other people's minds. So I'd have to find an instance where I think the eventual benefits might be worth violating my own ethical stance. This probably means making George W. Bush a pacifist.
3. Would it be better to be a popular writer with lots of money but lukewarm critical response, or a writer who makes just enough to live on but is critically acclaimed? Why?
I have very little interest in being popular. I am clear-eyed enough to know that the topics I personally feel most interested in are relatively unpopular, and the works of art that most speak to me—the ones I would most like to emulate with my own work—are ones focused on unpopular themes, perhaps to the point of indulgence. Any work that fits this bill is unlikely to attain major mainstream success.
Critics, though, also tend to be people who are deeply interested in relatively unpopular topics, and, inasmuch as this is true, they tend to be people who are more like me than the average person. As a result the opinion of a small number of critics is more important to me than the opinion of a large number of anonymous people: it feels more like the judgment of people who I would consider to be my peers in a meaningful way.
As for the money question: there are so few fiction writers that even make enough to live on directly off of their writing that I treat the financial dimension of writing as entirely negligible.
4. I know you have said you're not interested in raising children. If you had a female friend who wanted you to father her child but take no further responsibility, how would you respond?
I don't feel very comfortable with this idea, for many reasons. The primary one is that I'd feel highly curious about how the child was "turning out," and I imagine that this would translate into a strong impulse to take more responsibility, probably in the form of meddling in some way—I think it's clear that all the ingredients necessary for some hideous boondoggle are present here. Even if I could resist the impulse to interfere, there is no guarantee that the child would not thrust some sort of responsibility upon me once he or she got old enough to do so. The only possible safeguard is to deceive the child in some sort of enormous way—which I think is powerfully unethical.
5. If you had an extra day a week, what would you spend it doing?
Probably the same things I'm doing now: reading books, hanging out with cute girls, and trying to make art. Labels: personal, writing |
