Author Interview: Tell me about editing Martin...

Tell me about editing Martin Sloane. How did you finally know when you had it right?
I was looking through boxes in my basement just last night and found the box that has the very first two or three folders with material from the novel. The novel began with a snippet of dialogue I took down on the back of a manila envelope and this snippet ruled the opening of the book for about four drafts until it, and the scene, and the characters in that scene, were dropped from the book. In the first file folder, there is also a six-inch tall strip of paper that's about three feet long, showing the time-line of the novel, which used to be just a single year. On it is marked the moments certain things happen, events, conversations, instants of revelation, first meetings, etc. It looks like the most complicated football play ever invented, and as I read it, I realized that about 80 percent of what is on that timeline is not in the final version of the novel.

How did I finally know I had it right? The odd thing is that the book centered on a character who is not in the novel anymore, but all the material she uncovers became the basis for the later versions of the novel. Which is to say, once I got rid of my main idea - which was, in fact, an obstacle - everything that I should have been doing was right there, waiting to be formed. And that was the second five-year period of writing; working this material into a structure that breathed and had its own motor.

In a recent profile you say that Martin Sloane doesn't want to "force people to look in a direction they're not ready to look in," and that you yourself don't want to force people to read your work a certain way. Can you expand on this a bit.
I am not a believer in the idea that a work of art means what you think it means; in fact, I emphatically part with it. What I meant by what I said is that "meaning" is not a monolithic thing with a definable shape. You don't stick your quarter in at the beginning of the novel and the meaning pops out at the end. To my mind, a good literary book puts up a scent that is made of many aspects; meaning is a web that comes together as a sense of something. This is served, to some degree, by Martin's dialogue you quote above, although it's his notion, not mine. He just doesn't want to force any kind of preordained experience on a viewer. For me, the engagement with the reader is paramount. The reader needs to be connected to the book almost to the point that they lose their awareness that the book is a made thing.

Where did the inspiration for the novel come from?
The book is rooted in a few different places for me. It began as a textual response to the art of Joseph Cornell, a New York artist who was known for collage-like sculptural works, most of which were assembled in glass-fronted boxes. When I first saw Cornell's work, in 1991 at The Art Institute of Chicago, it affected me in a visceral way that no other work had ever done. Part of my reaction was simply one of recognition, but the work also engaged me intellectually, especially on the level of what it means to love objects, to keep them obsessively, as we do, and to give them the task of bearing memory. To me, there is nothing more moving than the mute talisman brought forth out of childhood, or the thing that, given to you by someone missing or dead, takes on the weight of life. So Martin Sloane emerged, at first, out of encountering artworks that seemed to express all of this without words.

I found a dramatic counterpoint for the novel in the metaphor of disappearance. And so the character of Martin Sloane became an absence in the novel, and the things he left behind parsed the emotion of this loss for the main character. This character, Jolene Iolas, came to the fore at this stage of the writing and assumed the role of narrator as well, so most of the novel is written in her voice. These are the concrete "inspirations" for the novel. The rest of them, perhaps the more important ones, are ones I can't really voice, except that they have to do with the danger inherent in loving other people.

Was it difficult to create a character, Martin Sloane, out of this process of responding to Joseph Cornell's art?
The character of Sloane is not based on Joseph Cornell's personality, nor is the book any longer meant as a response to Cornell's artworks. The character of Martin Sloane came out of a gradual process of revision, partly as a result of understanding what it is Jolene had lost, and also the process of writing scenes between the two of them. One of the balances that had to be struck in this book was between revealing Sloane's character in detail and accepting that he isn't a presence in the book, at least not in the present-tense part of the story. I hope that he's a strong enough presence that the readers will hold him in their minds as they goes on with Jolene's journey.

You're a poet, a playwright and a novelist. Was the process of writing a novel very different for you?
The main difference, for me, is simply one of time. A poem may take years to write, but the actual amount of time spent, draft to draft, is fairly compact. It's not unusual for me to revise a poem thirty times, but it's rare to start over. This is not the case with plays or novels, I've found so far. I wrote eleven drafts of Martin Sloane, and I started from scratch with the novel at least five times (I may have blocked out others!). My play, Building Jerusalem, went through eleven drafts as well, and countless half-drafts. So the mechanics of writing and revision differ according to the complexity of the work, and the amount of energy and time that goes into this revision differs as well. The actual writing processes are different, but considerations of tone, of voice, of rhythm, of pacing, and of language itself are central to all writing, I believe, and in this sense all the writing makes similar demands on the writer, at the roots of his craft.