David Wroblewski on Writing by Brute Force

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to David Wroblewski about his new novel, Familiaris.

Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!

From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: This novel is such an epic. There’s so much in there. So how did you start this? And then how do you balance your research? Because it sounds like you do a lot of research with those unexpected gifts that happen with your unconscious.

David Wroblewski: We talk about process, the first disclaimer I have to say is, I have a horrible process. I recommend no one do things the way I do them, and my process is mainly brute force. I write and write and write and write and throw most of it away. Most of it is for me to understand what things are happening that the reader doesn’t need to know, but that I need to know. And the only way I know to do that is to is to write that down, to overwrite scenes. My process is, it’s based on the idea that if you were to plan out a novel, something as complicated as a novel, in advance, in detail, A, it would be tedious to write afterward. And B, you couldn’t do it anyway, because as you’re working, you discover things that you could not have predicted were there or would be there or would be interesting. For me, writing is a discovery process, and I wait for the half made thing to begin to give me feedback. The way I like to describe it is, you know, you’re building the monster. It’s on the slab, and it’s just lying there and one day, you apply the electrodes, and you pull the switch, and the monster sits up. And after that, your job changes. Until then, you just were trying to put together some parts, but once the monster sits up, now you have to negotiate with the monster and say, what do you want to do? Because the first word out of the monster’s mouth is always no, no, I’m not going to be a submarine pilot, or I’m not going to be a spy, I’m not going to be an actor, but I can really play the banjo. Well, you want to see some of that, right. So now you’re in this process of negotiation with the work in progress. And to me, that’s actually great fun, but you have to sort of let go of where you think it’s going to go, except in a very general way.

***

David Wroblewski is the author, most recently, of the novel Familiaris, his followup to the internationally bestselling The Story Of Edgar Sawtelle, an Oprah Book Club pick, Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, winner of the Colorado Book Award, Indie Choice Best Author Discovery award, and Midwest Bookseller Association’s Choice award, in addition to being selected as one of the best books of the year by numerous magazines and newspapers.