I reviewed Dan O'Shea's debut novel PENANCE, last month and gave it a perfect FIVE STARS rating. I don't do that often. In fact, it was only the third time since November, so that makes roughly a 6% of my total reading output. I reserve this to novels that both floor me by their execution and their emotional charge. PENANCE is that kind of novel.
So I asked Dan if he could spare a couple minutes to answer my questions and he gentlemanly agreed to do so. He was generous enough in his answers that this interview will be posted in two parts, one today and the other on Thursday, May 2nd. Other than his smashing good looks, Dan is know for his quirky, understated charm and his no-bullshit approach to the writing game. I hope you enjoy reading this interview as much as I enjoyed leading it.
If Dan's words convince you to buy PENANCE, you can order it here. I also suggest you check his debut short story collection OLD SCHOOL, which I also dug. If you're broke or don't like fiction at all, you can always read Dan's blog GOING BALLISTIC. Dan always has something interesting to say. Without further ado, here is the proof of that outrageous claim.
PENANCE struck me as a genuinely original conspiracy novel. It's a rare thing since most of these are about JFK or about the U.S government foreign policy one way or another. Where does that interest for conspiracy originate form and how did it develop into PENANCE?
PENANCE struck me as a genuinely original conspiracy novel. It's a rare thing since most of these are about JFK or about the U.S government foreign policy one way or another. Where does that interest for conspiracy originate form and how did it develop into PENANCE?
Hmmm... I guess I never really thought of it as a "conspiracy" novel. To the extent there is a conspiracy, it's just the usual outcome of corruption and human nature. When someone does something wrong and it looks like they're going to get found out, they can do one of two things. Admit it and accept the consequences or lie about it and try to get away with it. On the small scale of our everyday lives, the consequences of the later approach can be dire enough, but the damage is usually limited by our own limited resources. When the great and powerful try to get away with something, the reach of their influence inevitably compounds the damage.
The word conspiracy, at least to me, implies some kind of proactive, intricate, preconceived plot. Say Lincoln’s assassination, where Booth and his cohorts not only meant to kill Lincoln, but also Vice President Johnson and Secretary of State Seward. Pretty much a grand scheme to decapitate the US Government. Yet when I look at most of history's famous conspiracies, say Watergate, what I usually see is a reactive attempt to cover up some stupid, half-thought-out plan. "Gee, let’s break in to our opponent’s campaign headquarters; see what kind of information we can get!" That plan, in all probability, was not even vetted all the way up the chain of command. But when the press started picking at it, you got this huge, haphazard, ad hoc attempt to stuff the genie back in the bottle. What usually happens is that the cover-up snowballs until the damage to everyone, the conspirators and the victims of both the original act and the attempted cover-up, is far greater than it would have been if the bad guys had just admitted everything in the first place. That’s the corruption of power, the idea that somehow you will always be able to bend the world to your will.
So I guess where you say conspiracy, I'd say that PENANCE is really about the corruption of power.
The other problem for me if I try to think of it as a conspiracy novel is this. That would imply that I had some grand plan from the start. I didn’t. When I started writing the novel, I had one idea about a sniper with a bizarre religious motivation. (That was an idea that had been kicking around my head since theology class in high school.) Then I started writing and all the rest of it just sort of emerged as I went along. At every turn, I had to ask myself “Why is the killer doing this?” or “If I were a cop, who would I talk to next?” The answer to each question would lead to the next question and the next chapter. I was better than three-quarters of the way through the draft before I knew how it was going to end.
Did you use some sort of method to plan and plot something so deep and complex or did you just go with the flow?
For me, plotting is an organic process. I don’t plan plots, they just emerge. What I need to start a story is a character I’m invested in who is in a situation I find interesting. How that character responds to that situation dictates what happens next. How far ahead I can see changes throughout the drafting. Sometimes I have a little breakthrough where I suddenly understand a motivation clearly or envision a bit of back story that buttresses a plot line and then I’m in happy writer land where I can sit down and crank out five or six thousand words at a go. Other times I sit down having just run the characters into a dead end and really struggle to find a way forward. All I can do then is ask myself “If I were this character, what would I do next?” Then I write about them doing it. Eventually, they find their way forward. Frequently that leads to some wasteful meandering – they make some false starts before they get a new foothold and I end up with a few chapters I have to cut. But almost always, when they do find their way forward, it is in a direction I really like and never could have anticipated in an outline.
I like to think, at least, that it keeps my plots from being predictable. If someone gets a few chapters into PENANCE and can predict how it’s going to end, then they are way smarter than I am. Because I didn’t have a clue when I started writing it.
I know there are writers who swear by outlines and I’m not claiming that my way is better or anything. You just have to do what works for you.
Did you always know your destiny involved writing a novel, or did it dawn on you at some time? What lead you writing fiction?
Great. Now for the shameful confessions portion of our program.
First off, I’m not your usual punk-kid debut novelist. I’m on the wrong side of fifty. And it ain’t that I woke up a few years ago and thought “Gee, I should develop a hobby to entertain me during my creeping dotage. Think I’ll give this writing thing a try.” The fact is I’ve always wanted to be a writer and, professionally, I’ve always been a writer. And good thing, too, because stringing words together is really the only marketable skill I possess.
But I sorta accidentally backed in to a weird little corner of the writing world. Started out as a proofreader at a major accounting firm, got promoted to editor because, frankly, I suck as a proofreader, but my boss liked the way I ripped up some of the copy. I eventually spent so much time writing and editing stuff about the tax code, finance and similar topics that I had the background necessary to deal with that type of shit.
Profitable niche. There are a lot of companies out there that will pay good money for that stuff. But it’s not like, when I was a kid and I realized that I wanted to be a writer, I was thinking “Boy, I hope someday I get to do five thousand words on transfer pricing planning for multinational corporations.” I wanted to write novels.
And I messed with fiction writing from time to time. There are a couple chunks of PENANCE that date back almost twenty years. But I never got serious about it, disciplined about it. I excused that by telling myself that hey, I had a family to support and I didn’t have time to fuck around with this fiction crap on spec when there was real money to be made. Told myself that dreaming about being a novelist was like dreaming I was gonna play third base for the Cubs. That I was a grown-up with grown-up obligations and no time for childish things.
A few things happened. Some people died. My best friend died. My father died. I realized that I only had so much sand in the glass and that, if there was anything in this life that I actually wanted to do, then I better get to it. That I wasn’t going to be on my death bed pissed I didn’t squeeze in another few dozen articles on capital gains taxes. I actually got serious about writing fiction maybe five years ago. I don’t have any more time now than I had all those years I only toyed with writing fiction, but I’ve written three novels now, a mess of short stories. I watch a little less TV. Waste a little less time. Mostly, I just stopped pissing on my own dreams.
You hear how publishing has changed, about the good old days. And I think sometimes what might be different if I hadn’t been such a dumb ass, where my writing career might be today if I were twenty years into it instead of just starting out. But I try not to. Nothing to be done about it.
So, a cautionary tale. You wanna write, then write. Don’t wait for some better time.
You have a way of writing dialogue and intimacy in general that is very striking and yet, I can't really pinpoint what writers you remind me of, on that aspect. Who were your main influences on that aspect? Has a writer ever gave you an epiphany?
I’ve been writing dialog in my head my whole life. I hear somebody saying something and I’m translating it into what I think they should have said. Sort of my own private Cyrano de Bergerac.
I don’t know that there’s a good answer to the influences question. Everything you read influences you in some way, I suppose. Even bad stuff. Just when I was getting serious about writing, but back when I still had that “I don’t know if I’m actually good enough to get published” crap clouding up my head, one of my kids bought me a Vince Flynn novel. Hated it. Transparent plotting, cardboard characters, clichéd dialog. Seemed like Walter Mitty violence porn. But it helped. Guy sells a lot of books. I figured if he could get published there was no reason to think I couldn’t. (That’s probably stupid, I guess. I haven’t sold shit. What do I know? Probably not supposed to say anything bad about anyone else. Vince Flynn could be a prince of a guy. But that was an important moment for me, so there you go.)
The intimacy thing is maybe a pet peeve of mine. I hate throw-away characters. Gotta be careful how I phrase this so I don’t tip over into pretentious bullshit territory, but I feel an obligation to the fake people I make up. Big role, small role, each of them should still be a human being in this universe I created.
Maybe it’s because I am older, I don’t know. But in recent years it’s really hit me that each of us is a universe entire unto ourselves. Sure, we all inhabit the same planet, but each of us lives in the center of this immense web of experience and interpretation that only we know, that only we can fully understand. With every person’s death, an entire and unique psychological ecosystem of their own creation disappears, one that was only partly ever understood by anyone else and that will never be again. I drive down the street sometimes and the idea of all that experience, all that longing and loss and hope and despair and joy and pain that we only really fully understand in the context of our own lives, that every person on the sidewalk, the lady smoking in the minivan next to me, that all of them are carrying around this entire world that I’ll never know. There’s an almost crushing melancholy to that sometimes.
I was editing a scene in my second novel, MAMMON, in which a young gangbanger is killed. Guy’d never been in the book at all before that scene, wasn’t going to be in it again. He was, frankly a plot device. But when I was going back through the book and I got that scene, it really pissed me off that I was treating a human being, even a fake human being, like a Kleenex, just something to blow some writer snot on ‘cause I needed to clear a nostril. So I fleshed that out a bit. Even sent that off to Shotgun Honey as a flash piece in its own right
So yeah, I want readers to feel like they’ve been inside the characters to some extent. I suppose writers I really love helped engender that – Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, even genre writers like James Lee Burke. But every writer has their own mental blender. Everything goes into it, gets pureed up, and then you pour it out, and I don’t think there’s any way to tell anymore what came from whom. Just they are all on the ingredients list I guess.
Doesn't it drive you mad though, this sense of responsibility? What were the biggest challenges you've faced writing something with such a sprawling scope like PENANCE?
I dunno, calling it a responsibility makes it sound like work. What’s satisfying to me is writing a story that I can connect with on more than a completely superficial level. Yeah, the plot matters. You have to have a story. But books that are just plot or that are mostly plot where the author doesn’t really bother developing characters I can dig into, those bore me. If I just trotted out stereotyped tropes for characters, I’d feel like I was writing crap and then I wouldn’t be enjoying myself at all.
Because PENANCE was my first novel, the biggest challenge was just finishing it. The organic story development approach I use is great and all, but there comes a point where I realized I had to force things to some kind of conclusion or the book would go on forever. There are still a couple of points, reading back through it, where I cringe a little, where the plot seems forced to me. But I guess that’s part of the curse of being an author – you know what you did. I hope the seams don’t show as much to anyone else.
The sprawling part? I didn’t set out to write a sprawling book, and I’m not sure what makes a book sprawling or not. Yeah, there are a lot of characters, the plot gets pretty involved, but that’s just what happened. It does make rewriting kind of challenging sometimes, just making sure you keep things consistent.
One thing I did notice. My first two novels, PENANCE and MAMMON, are written in third person with multiple points of view. My third novel, ROTTEN AT THE HEART, is told in first person. That switch changes things a lot. I couldn’t just introduce a new character and a new point of view to move the story along, everything had to filter through a single character’s experience. That certainly kept the story from being as sprawling.
I dunno, calling it a responsibility makes it sound like work. What’s satisfying to me is writing a story that I can connect with on more than a completely superficial level. Yeah, the plot matters. You have to have a story. But books that are just plot or that are mostly plot where the author doesn’t really bother developing characters I can dig into, those bore me. If I just trotted out stereotyped tropes for characters, I’d feel like I was writing crap and then I wouldn’t be enjoying myself at all.
Because PENANCE was my first novel, the biggest challenge was just finishing it. The organic story development approach I use is great and all, but there comes a point where I realized I had to force things to some kind of conclusion or the book would go on forever. There are still a couple of points, reading back through it, where I cringe a little, where the plot seems forced to me. But I guess that’s part of the curse of being an author – you know what you did. I hope the seams don’t show as much to anyone else.
The sprawling part? I didn’t set out to write a sprawling book, and I’m not sure what makes a book sprawling or not. Yeah, there are a lot of characters, the plot gets pretty involved, but that’s just what happened. It does make rewriting kind of challenging sometimes, just making sure you keep things consistent.
One thing I did notice. My first two novels, PENANCE and MAMMON, are written in third person with multiple points of view. My third novel, ROTTEN AT THE HEART, is told in first person. That switch changes things a lot. I couldn’t just introduce a new character and a new point of view to move the story along, everything had to filter through a single character’s experience. That certainly kept the story from being as sprawling.
The conclusion of this interview will be posted next Thursday, May 2nd. Leave comments, ask your own questions to Dan, I'm sure he'll drop by at least once or twice to answer them.