Charles Baxter Lets Stories Tell Him When It’s Time to Write (and Other Literary Morsels)

Charles Baxter’s novel, Blood Test, is available now from Pantheon, so we asked him a few questions about writing, reading, organizing books, and more.

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Who do you most wish would read your book? (your boss, your childhood bully, etc.)
My ideal reader for Blood Test: A Comedy would be anyone who needs a good laugh and wants to be taken away by a story. I would like to raise the spirits of the downcast, the broken-hearted, the unconsoled, the lonely, and the troubled. I hope to make them smile and to help them forget their troubles while they’re reading my book.

How do you tackle writers block?
I wait it out. I try not to get anxious. It’s good to forget yourself, to get free of self-consciousness and worry. I look at the world and observe it, and I try, in a small way, to help others who could use some help, and I work at other tasks. Your life does not depend on your writing another book. If a story wants you to write it down, it will let you know.

I keep a little notebook and write down what I hear people saying, and sometimes I get ideas for something new. You can always watch and help your friends and ask yourself what sort of trouble they might get themselves into. Or: what trouble might you yourself get into? There’s always a story there.

What was the first book you fell in love with (why)?
The first book I fell in love with would have been a little drugstore paperback selling for fifty cents in 1963: The Night of the Hunter by Davis Grubb, a lyrical nightmare/melodrama novel about orphaned children and a mad preacher, Harry Powell. I read it in tenth grade and was startled to realize that good novels have beautiful sentences.

That thought had never occurred to me before. I didn’t even know what a beautiful sentence was until I read that novel.

How do you decide what to read next?
Sometimes someone grabs me, metaphorically, and tells me about a great book that I must read. I love hearing, “You’ve got to read this!”

Sometimes I find a book that fits my mood, and at other times I want to read about a particular subject: happy/unhappy marriages; identity theft; not knowing how to cope. And sometimes I just want to go back to a favorite author. And sometimes a book pushes itself at me, wanting to be read.

Which non-literary piece of culture—film, tv show, painting, song—could you not imagine your life without?
Classical music and in particular the music of certain composers: Brahms, Ravel, Debussy, Myaskovsky, Virgil Thomson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Alan Hovhaness, Caroline Shaw, and many many others. I couldn’t live without them. I wouldn’t want to.

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Blood Test: A Comedy by Charles Baxter is available via Pantheon.