George Singleton is the author of Pep Talks, Warnings, and Screeds: Indispensable Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers. In addition to publishing four collections of stories, he has contributed short stories to The Atlantic Monthly, Glimmer Train, North American Review, Fiction International, Epoch, Esquire.com, and many other places. George and I discussed fiction writing as well as his favorite authors.
Urban Muse: You've taught writing, so what mistakes do you notice other writers making?
George: In the short story, it’s always spending way too much time on the setting for the first, oh, ten pages, before getting to the conflict. With some younger writers it’s not having a g on their keyboard, so everyone’s spittin’, cussin’, hopin’, and prayin’--even the omniscient third-person narrator. For writers wishing to get published now, it might be good to stay away from trick O.Henry-type endings.
Urban Muse: Do you get into a writing rut? How do you work through it?
George: I get in ruts, but most of the time I don’t realize I’m in one until I’m halfway through a story and/or novel. And then I usually shrug my shoulders, cuss for a couple days, and ram the story on through. Almost always I’ll find a paragraph or minor character that will work better in the next story. I wouldn’t say that I get writer’s block, per se, but there are a lot of days when things are not going smoothly. That’s okay, for me, at least. In order to know what good clean air feels like, one must know nasty, polluted, smoggy fumes.
Urban Muse: You write both fiction and nonfiction. Do you have a genre preference?
George: I never, ever think of myself as a nonfiction writer. Every piece of nonfiction I’ve ever written was the result of an editor’s prompt. I don’t like to write nonfiction, for I’m always wanting to make things up that’ll sound better than the truth--or the Truth as I see it. Nowadays that doesn’t seem to be such a problem in the publishing world. It should be. There needs to be a genre called almost-nonfiction.
Urban Muse: What is the best advice you've ever given (or gotten) about writing?George: The best pieces of advice I’ve ever received are probably “Comedy must be serious” and “Just tell the damn story.” I’ve told the same things to writing students. Some of them took my advice, and some of them maybe didn’t quite understand what I meant, much like I didn’t.
Urban Muse: Who are some of your favorite authors?
George: I have a signed copy of the Bible, which I cherish. Not really. My old school writers are Flannery O’Connor, Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Yeats. Then there’s the period of time when I read Pynchon, Barthelme, John Barth, John Irving, Salinger. I go back to Don Quixote and Candide on occasion. I go to John Cheever when I can’t figure out how to make a story go from Point A to Point C. Dale Ray Phillips’s My People’s Waltz is perfect. So are the stories of Richard Yates. There’s Barry Hannah, Harry Crews, Charles D’Ambrosio, Lorrie Moore, Jennifer Egan, William Gay, Fred Chappell, Bobbie Ann Mason, Richard Bausch, Michael Parker, Brock Clarke, Ron Carlson, Lewis Nordan, Charles Portis, Ron Rash, Jill McCorkle, Clyde Edgerton. It keeps growing. I like Joshua Ferris’s stories, Donald Ray Pollock’s, Will Allison’s, Brad Barkley's. And there are others. And there will be more.
Urban Muse: Thanks, George! Read more on his website.