Interview with Richard Russo

The career of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo stands out somewhat from those of other “serious” writers for its strong, if arm’s-length, connection to the film industry. Since working with director Robert Benton on the 1994 adaptation of his novel Nobody’s Fool, Russo has written not only adaptations of his own works — including Empire Falls, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and became an Emmy Award-winning miniseries on HBO in 2005 — but original screenplays as well, including “The Ice Harvest,” released in 2005. He’s even picked up an acting credit: a bit part as a faculty committee member in the 2003 adaptation of Philip Roth’s The Human Stain.

But despite his steady work in film, Russo is a novelist through and through, and a brilliant one at that. He’s the author of five novels — large, ambitious, and often humorous works that depict the lives of people trapped in dying northeastern towns (Tom Bissell in Esquire called him the “Stendahl of blue-collar America”) — and he’s also the author of a stunning book of short stories, The Whore’s Child.

Russo visited Boston recently to give a reading and Q&A session at Emerson College, and before making his way back home to Camden, Maine — where he’s currently busy finishing up the first draft of a new novel — he was kind enough to sit down for a quick chat about his work and his writing life. The following are some highlights from that conversation.

CC: People talk a lot about your work as a screenwriter — in a question to you last night someone said you used to be a novelist.

RR: Right. I did want to set the record straight on that one: I am a novelist.

CC: But if, as you’ve said before, screenwriting comes so easy to you, what keeps you coming back to novels? Why do you insist on calling yourself a novelist?

RR: I think the question there contains the answer: it’s because screenwriting is easy. Writing screenplays is seductive to me because it really plays into what I’m good at as a writer. I’m good at dialogue, I’m good at hearing things — people talk about film being a visual medium, but that’s all up to the director; the screenplay itself is really only concerned with what people say, and that’s what I do best. But, as I was saying last night, one of the beauties of coming back to novel writing after screenwriting is that the task seems so much larger and so much more complex, and you get to use every tool in the toolbox and flex all of your muscles, and I like that it’s just this big thing that you can’t quite get your mind around at the start. You start with someone somewhere doing something, and in the case of me and my books, that turns into a manuscript of eight, nine-hundred pages, and it’s just thrillingly exciting to do something like that, and to know you’re going to be engaged in something for a long period of time. A screenplay takes me about three months to write, and in that sense it really is seductive, because it means that theoretically I could do three of those in a year, where it takes me four to five years to write one novel.

CC: How do you juggle the two forms? Do you have to finish a screenplay before you can get to work on a novel?

RR: I can work on them together depending on the stage I’m at in a novel. It’d be very difficult for me to work on a novel and a screenplay together if I were just starting the novel. But if I’m, say, 300 pages into a novel and I get a screenwriting project that I like, and I’m at a point where it’d probably be a good idea to stop and take stock anyway, then I can do it. I can do revision work, take stuff that I’ve written and reverse the order, or I can put something that’s on page 270 and say “This should really go sooner,” and I can move it, massage it into something earlier. As I get older, for some reason, a lot of my revision is inserting things — realizing that I’ve left something important out, and then going back and inserting it right in the middle of things, and then it’s always smoothing things over, smoothing the ripples. So I can do all of that kind of stuff on my novel while I’m working on a screenplay, and in doing that I can even reverse the usual order of my routine — do my screenwriting work in the morning and then go to the novel in the afternoon. I just delivered a draft of a screenplay about six weeks ago, and went back to my novel that I was about 600 pages into, and since then I haven’t done anything but the novel because I’m drafting, and when I’m doing that, when I’m really just thinking my way through the story, it’s hard for me to break off from it. It just divides my attention.

CC: It’s interesting that the way you revise has changed as you’ve gotten older.

RR: Yes. I used to — and it was, in a way, kind of healthy — I used to write a hundred pages in longhand and never go back and look at it. If the sentences were ugly and hulking it never troubled me terribly because I knew I’d just go back and fix them later. Lately, as I’ve become more of a mature writer, I find that those ugly things trouble me, and I go back to them maybe even before I should. I draft in the morning, take a break, and then I do revision work in the afternoon. I just don’t like to get more than two or three days behind in what I’ve written before I go back to it. It does allow me at a fairly early stage to say, “Was this any good at all, this whole block of stuff I did today?”

CC: Has screenwriting in any way changed the way you write novels? Last night you said you used to let your novels develop out of your characters without much thought about structure, but that now the overall structure of your novels is more important to you.

RR: Screenwriting may have something to do with my wanting to see the thing whole and have a sense of the completed project earlier now than I used to. Why that should be true is interesting, I’m not sure I know why. Whether it means I’m less trusting that it’s all going to work out, or that I’m less … I just don’t know. In some ways it just seems like a matter of trust. One of the things that novelists have to have in spades, I think, is the ability to take small bites and chew thoroughly. Writing a novel really is an act of faith, because you can never get your mind around the whole thing; it’s like trying to intuit the Empire State Building one floor at a time. In my case, I don’t know if it’s a feature of becoming less trusting, or really just being much more interested in getting the parts right before moving on.

CC: Do you show your novels to anyone while your working on them?

RR: I’ve never shown a partial book. I’m tempted to on the novel I’m working on now, but I’m not going to.

CC: Do you have any other types of counsel — trusted friends and so forth?

RR: Not any more. When I was a graduate student I had a couple of writer friends that I used to share stories and portions of novels with, but I don’t do any of that any more; I’m too busy, and they’re too busy. My wife is my first reader. She’s not a writer herself and she can’t give me technical advice, but she can tell me when the story is slowing down and when her attention flags, and she’s actually a very generous and very astute reader who likes to read both serious and genre fiction — she’s not above reading the odd potboiler, nor am I. So she has a good sense of story and when it’s floundering. And so she reads, and then my agent reads, and that’s pretty much it.

CC: Let’s talk about your short story collection, The Whore’s Child. You’re known for writing these sprawling, humorous novels that contain a multitude of characters, but the stories in The Whore’s Child are darker, more compact creations — and this is your only short story collection. Where did it come from?

RR: I’m not a short story writer; the seven stories in The Whore’s Child took me over a decade to write. Three of them were originally part of novels. Sister Ursula, from the title story, was one of Hank Devereaux’s students in Straight Man. In the novel there were more students originally, and Sister Ursula was one, but when I gave the book to my editor I said, “I love Sister Ursula, but I have a feeling she doesn’t belong here.” He wrote me back and said, “I love her, too, but you’re right, her story is so dark in such a comic novel that when you come out of it you can’t quite get back” — because you’d get a section of her story, and then you’d get Hank’s story, then a section of her writing submission to class, and it was so dark, and so heartbreaking, that it was difficult to get back into the comic spirit of the book. So we took her out. But I loved her so much that I decided to make a story out of her, and so I had to create another whole character to interact with her and to tell her story. It couldn’t be someone like Hank Devereaux, it had to be somebody with a problem, and a pretty serious secret of his own, because here she’s revealing herself, but to a man who’s reluctant to share much of anything back with her.

CC: I always assumed the story was based on your experiences as a teacher. Is the teacher, the narrator of that story, at all autobiographical?

RR: People have asked me that before, and I always say, “How come you don’t ask me if I’m the nun?” Because I’m more emotionally connected to Sister Ursula. I was never a whore’s child, but I was able to draw on a lot of my own experiences to write her story — childhood cruelty, for example.

RR: A teacher of mine once said, “You can learn a lot from a Richard Russo story,” and I think she meant that what makes them work is out there in the open, not obscured by style. Do you think that has anything to do with the fact that you were working in a form you weren’t quite as comfortable with?

RR: Actually, to me, as a novelist, it’s incredibly liberating to work on short stories — the very fact that I can see the whole, that it’s a manageable thing. With a novel you’d go crazy if you tried to think of the whole. I just finished another story, my first in three or four years, and I obsessed over it, but I could see the holes in it, and there was an element of control to it — I felt so competent. So I love when I get to work on short stories; I don’t feel uncomfortable with it. But I agree with this idea of being able to learn from them. One of my first teachers said that the best way to learn how to tell stories is to read those writers whose stories are upfront like that and are not obscured by style or any of that. He recommended reading writers like John O’Hara, because whatever was in O’Hara’s stories was right there on the page to see, it wasn’t obscured in any way by any particular feature of style. You can read some writers who are so style-oriented, and you’re so dazzled you can’t figure out what’s going on — writers as different as Raymond Chandler on one end and James Joyce on the other, or William Faulkner.

CC: Do you still write in public places?

RR: Oh, yes. I get up in the morning and go somewhere, to the Camden Deli or a café — someplace where they don’t mind me sitting for a while — and I work for a couple of hours. The people on staff know me and are very good about not interrupting me. I’ll take a break every so often and talk about baseball with the staff — it’s good for me to get out and about, as my wife says. And then I’ll go home and type out what I’ve written on the computer, and that’s usually the first revision.

CC: You seem to place a lot of importance on your routine.

RR: Writers have to find habits that allow them to write. I had a mentor back at the University of Arizona, where I did my Ph.D. and MFA — the best teacher I ever had, Bob Downs. And he was very good about teaching his students how to be writers. He stressed the single-mindedness we needed, about how to cultivate a series of habits that would work for us and not allow us to be distracted by the world around us. You can be distracted by serious things and by trivial things — like having the T.V. on while you write, that’s terrible. But there are also the serious things, world events that can trouble you and keep you from writing, and you can’t allow that to happen. That may sound a little troubling; it’s a morally ambiguous statement to say that you should tune out the world in that way and not let it distract you. But the fact is, as writers, we have to be bastards about the work, about getting it done, no matter what happens around us.