Colossal words

Blake Butler interviews Gary Lutz for Vice:

I remember you saying once that you only write one story a year, during the summer. Is that still true? If so, do you have the urge to write during the time you are not writing, or is it more of an incubation thing?

I cannot recall ever having felt the urge to write. My stock of urges has always been awfully small—eating, trying to sleep, and walking as far away as possible from everything are the big three. I’m not what you would call a writerish type. Writing is something I have done to make big bad time go away when there is too much of it coming down upon me at once, as there often is in warmer weathers. Nothing of a verbal nature is incubating in me during the rest of the year, when I am not writing. Nothing wells up. My writing doesn’t come to me organically or bodily. It’s not a thing of the mind, either. Writing is mostly a reason to get out of the house. I’ll drive to one place for lunch and then right afterward to another place for another, more cholesterolly fortifying lunch, then pick up some lousy croissants-manque at a doughnut dump and arrive finally at a windowless office where I situate myself at a work station with the lousy croissants and start loading words in 24-point type up onto the screen. This is a slow and drowsy approach that usually yields one low-word-count stretch of fictionesque sentences by late August. But my last couple of summers have been different. Time began battering me in ways I wasn’t accustomed to.

In his introduction to the interview, Butler mentions Lutz’s essay, ‘The sentence is a lonely place’. It’s a fascinating piece that should be read in its entirety though here’s a taster:

The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.

Also required reading, David Winters‘ interview with Lutz for 3:AM Magazine:

I guess I write with the sentence as the unit mainly because my neurology seems to limit the reach or the scope of my apprehension of experience. Continuities and sweeps and ongoingnesses are often beyond my grasp both as a person and as someone touching words and arranging them into formations. Individual moments seem more within my capacity to capture. I can spend large blocks of time within the enclosure of a single sentence, so by the time I get finished with a sentence, there might be a lot of emotional stress on the words. I think there can be a kind of micro-narrative unfolding within a single sentence, and I think that emotions can surge in the tiniest sectors of a sentence; the story, to me, needs to be in the syntax itself, not outside it in plot points or story arcs or whatever they are called. When a few sentences of the sort I’m talking about get stacked into a paragraph, without transitional cushioning between them, there can be a halting and faltering effect, a bustle of emotion, that is faithful, at least, to my way of going through the world. My pieces seem to be built up out of those stackings and pilings-up. There’s nothing organic or natural about the procedure.

Finally, 3:AM recently ran a short fiction by Lutz, ‘Loo’.

[Image: Charles Burns/The Believer]