Lynne Tillman on Taming Wild Thoughts

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 Lynne Tillman about her new collected stories, Thrilled to Death.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: How do you approach these stories?  There’s a lot of surrealism and feelings of chaos within your stories, but you’re also writing them, and you’re creating a form, and you have to have, by its very nature, a beginning and a middle and an end to a story. So, what’s your process when you have all these wild thoughts to tame them into something?

Lynne Tillman: I think you could say that my work is voice driven, which would mean character driven. The story usually emerges from the character, you know as I’m developing a character or the voice. And a voice seems to call upon a way of presenting a story. So, what I hope I do is have different voices in my stories, different voices telling the stories, you know, More Sex, for instance, that narrator is kind of in a kind of crazy speed of telling the story about sex with men. And, you know, it’s quite funny, I think. And how that story came about was, in fact, Steve Erickson was editing a magazine called Black Clock, which was named after one of his novels, I believe, and he had themes for his magazines or journals, and I think he was doing one on sex. And I thought, after having written Weird Fucks very early in my first novella, longish work that I kind of, oh, no, I’m not up for writing, you know, straight on a sex story. And then I woke up one morning and I just thought of this woman who was thinking about trying to write about sex. And you know, the difficulty of that. You know, it’s really hard to say, but it was about writing the difficulty of sex, and the difficulty of writing sex and the difficulty of sex itself. I think one of the things that we’ve been led to believe is that sex should be easy and fun and no problems, where people deal with sex in their lives with a lot of anxiety, and not just performance anxiety, but the question of intimacy, and what do we really feel about this partner or about oneself, one’s body.  If there is something that is different about us from our other animal kind, I think, is much more anxiety about sex.

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Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and cultural critic. Her novels are Haunted Houses; Motion Sickness; Cast in Doubt; No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; American Genius, A Comedy, and Men and Apparitions. Her nonfiction books include The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965–1967, with photographs by Stephen Shore; Bookstore: The Life and Times of Jeannette Watson and Books & Co.; and What Would Lynne Tillman Do?, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Her new collection is Thrilled to Death.