Suzanne McConnell on How to Become a Writer

Suzanne McConnell was a student of Kurt Vonnegut’s at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop when Vonnegut was finishing his novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. They stayed friends for the rest of his life. She has published pieces of memoir about the relationship, and has just published a fine book entitled Pity The Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut with Suzanne McConnell. She is the perfect person with whom to discuss how to become a writer. Listen in and read along as we do so. 

Marion: Hi Suzanne.

Suzanne: Hi Marion.

Marion: Lovely to have you here. Let’s set this up for people a little bit. Kurt Vonnegut has that rare status of being someone whose work impresses on us, the place in life we were when we read him. Like other totemic moments we have, depending on your age, it’s where Kennedy was shot, or where you were on 9/11, one of the things millions of us share is who and where we were when we read Slaughterhouse-Five. Let me just refresh for readers who Vonnegut was. His career spanned 50 years, includes 14 novels, 3 short story collections, 5 plays, 5 works of non-fiction. This is a formidable writer to write about and to, posthumously, write with. Was there fear in taking this on with him, about him? Did you have a fear factor engaging in this project?

Suzanne: Actually, I didn’t. At the time I was asked to do it, it really felt like my fairy godmother had just touched down with her magic wand and said, “This is exactly what you’re supposed to be doing right now, and you’re the perfect person to do it.” As egocentric as that may sound, it’s not how it felt. It really felt like I was somehow in exactly the right appointed place, which is a very rare feeling. I can’t remember when I felt quite so clear about it ever, so no, I wasn’t afraid.

Marion: Oh, that’s wonderful, and I agree with you. There’s a fit. The first thing editors or agents ask, or people receiving an op-ed from a writer is, “Why this writer? Why now?” So you felt that fit. Can you just talk a little bit about what made it feel like a fit for you?

Suzanne: Well, there were several criterion I had, which was that I was his student. I also was his friend, knew him all his life, from the time I met him, but also I taught fiction writing all my life, and I’m a writer. So those things were the bottom line given, but for me personally, I had just proposed a panel discussion on Vonnegut for a conference. I’d been teaching at VA hospitals, and I had just proposed this panel on … now I’m going to forget the name of it, but it’s something like the legacy of Vonnegut talking about war and other debacles, something like that.

It had just been accepted. I also had just put down a novel that I was trying to … I had edited at once, but I just couldn’t face trying to market it at that moment. I was completely disheartened and discouraged, and so I started writing a short story, a story I’d always wanted to write and I was really onto it. So I had switched my gears, was really onto this story, got the panel accepted when I was asked to do this book. I finished the story first, and then it just felt like the totally correct thing to do to get away from my novel, take a break from it and crown my writing teaching career, by being able to offer this book to other writers.

Marion: That’s lovely. I love that. Just to be clear, Mr. Vonnegut died in 2007. So you wrote this using photographs, reproductions, aphorism, short essays, articles, speeches, your own friendship. There’s an enormous amount of research, but there’s also an enormous amount of personal experience. Never before has an entire book been devoted to Vonnegut, the teacher, so I really admire that take on it. You have to have, however, been inundated between the personal memory and the remarkable amount of data out there on him and his own writing. Was the selection, was getting it down, was winnowing it one of the harder projects of this, aspects of this project?

Suzanne: Yeah, it was pretty amazing. I have to back up and say there was one more preface to this event of being asked, which was when he died, I wrote a piece. It’s still online. It’s on the Brooklyn Rail online, about him as a teacher. It’s a profile of him as a teacher, and the voice in that is similar to the voice in this. So I had that, but what I started to do right away was just to read everything. I had a … there was a working outline. I had something in my mind, but then I would find these other things and I’d put them into these broad categories. I’ve just been rereading Mother Night, and I see that half of my notes in there are the categories I never used because they didn’t become relevant. But I was using these cheap paperback, the cheapest ones I could find so I could mark them all up and so on.

But then there was a daunting task of taking those and putting them in the computer. So I hired somebody because that would have taken me a year. I had all the books digitally. I had access to those. I hired somebody and she just followed my marks and put them in these broad categories. So then I had all these digital notes, and when I actually began writing, a magical thing happened. It’s, I think, why the book is such a funny hybrid. I began writing the way I taught. I didn’t even recognize this voice exactly. I realized, oh, this is my teacher’s voice. In a class that I taught, I threw in whatever was relevant to the class, so I allowed myself to do that. Therefore, you get a little bit of my memory, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, all hanging on these pieces of Vonnegut’s words, because it had to be at least 60% of his words. So he was the focus, but I was riffing all over the place off of that focus.

Marion: I love the description of it. As a, “funny hybrid.” It is a funny hybrid. It’s a charming hybrid. We feel like you’ve locked elbows, and I wonder, as you guide us through nearly everything Kurt Vonnegut said or wrote about the art and craft of writing. There’s 37 chapters of the book. You take on everything from the practicalities of making a living, to the abstract ideas of creativity. So among that amazing, remarkable amount of material, is there something of his that inspires your own practice every day that you could pass along to these listeners?

Suzanne: What inspired me as his student and just as a fellow writer, it’s not so different than other writers, I suppose, who could inspire you, but it was a slightly different twist, I think. His dedication, his commitment to writing, knowing all the time I was a student. When I was his student, he was writing Slaughterhouse-Five. We all knew what he was trying to write over there in that house while we were in our little rooms, trying to write. Knowing that he was trying to grapple with deeply serious, larger than himself issues then, and for the rest of his life, always was like a mainstay for me, like more than just somebody writing. He was so … he believed in writing as an agent of change. I have a chapter called Agent Of Change. Plus he’s so damn funny. It was a pleasure to be quoting him and laughing. I felt him over my shoulder all the time, but that’s what inspired me and has always inspired me about his work.

Marion: Yeah. I think that’s what it is about Slaughterhouse-Five when we all read it and then we all experienced it. It’s more than just reading it. We felt that we were in the presence of someone who was urging our better angels out of us. There’s some great deal of condemnation of things, but there is this continued urging. I read this great quote when you were a student of his at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop from 65 to 67. During that time when he’s writing that masterpiece, you generously tell us, At the Iowa Workshop, having been admitted with only one story under my belt and having majored in sociology, so that I knew little about the profession of writing, and like Kurt, felt outclassed by my peers and ignorant of English literature, I used to compare myself with my writing teachers.”

The question I think could really be helpful to us is … I mean, I found that so gracious of you, so incredibly generous. We’ll talk in a minute about the other things you’ve written. I mean, you’ve got a wonderful writing career here. How do you go from that person in that chair, feeling outclassed with one story under your belt, to saying, “This is my life. I want this life. I’m going to have this life.” What is do you think was the driving force that allows us to stay in this world of writing?

Suzanne: Well, Marion, such a good question, and I … It was such a long, long time with different periods of my writing life, hanging on with my fingertips, with my bit of faith, with having things breakthrough just when I most desperately needed them sometimes. Part of me feels like it’s fate, part of me doesn’t. It sure doesn’t feel that way while you’re struggling. But I also had things I was burning to say, and I think the book opens … I mean, I’m on Kurt’s wavelength. A lot of people were on his wavelength, but I, even at the workshop, could really resignate with that passion to tell a story that you have to tell that’s burning up inside of you. I think if you don’t have something burning up inside of you, why would you bother to do this? It’s tough. I would not do it.

Marion: Yes, thank you, it’s a t-shirt we should get made, yeah.

Suzanne: I mean, I did…

Marion: If you don’t have something burning up inside you.

Suzanne: Exactly. I mean, I can see writing for fun. I have written for fun when it was fun and funny, but I don’t think that would propel me through my life to get the words right. It’s really hard work. I’m always surprised at how people think that it’s easier than it is. It’s hard work to write well.

Marion: It is.

Suzanne: That was the other thing I think I learned from Kurt, because he was struggling. We knew that he’d been struggling. That was very valuable to know that your teacher, who’s published several books, is struggling and struggling to write.

Marion: There’s an enormous generosity in that. It’s never good advice to tell an aspiring writer to go quit their job and rightful time. I mean, you have to eat and you have to live. You write of Kurt Vonnegut hating his job at GE, but that it provided him with the subject of his first novel, and the passion to write it, as well as valuable instruction in public relations. You and he maintained that all jobs are goldmines for fiction. So explain that a little bit, if you would, please. Maybe not everybody listening to this will quit their jobs tomorrow.

Suzanne: Oh, that’s so funny that you’re saying this, because I am putting together a collection of short stories. It includes my very first short story, which is from the point of view of a dishwasher, because I worked in restaurants all my life, as I say in the book. It starts out I’m the dishwasher here, and that job and what happened on that particular waitressing job was the source for my first published story. There’s a quote in the book from Vonnegut in which he talks about the best years of his writing life when he was on Cape Cod, when he was really struggling, didn’t have money, didn’t have promise, lots of rejection. I think I make the comment, after I quote him, that here it was the time he was struggling the most, but he did his best writing. It’s because somehow that conflict and the passion to keep on going, including the job you hate or the jobs you love, are the stuff out of which you write, as you’re pointing out. I mean, I’m so glad you brought that up about GE.

Marion: Yeah, don’t quit your day job. I heard the great novelist, Pete Dexter once say, “never trust your downstate reviews,” which is a complicated phrase. It has to do with Chicago being a very different part of the world than downstate in that state. That just because you got a good review one place doesn’t mean you should quit your job and go.

Suzanne: Yes.

Marion: So never trust your downstate reviews has always been one of my favorite quotes, but it needs a little explanation.

Suzanne: Oh, that’s great.

Marion: It’s good, right?

Suzanne: Yes, it’s great.

Marion: We get a lot of bad advice along the way. It seems that you didn’t take the advice to specialize. I’m really glad to meet someone who’s tried memoir, and fiction, and nonfiction, and essays, and teaching. Whatever gave you the good sense to ignore that terrible advice? You’ve done journalism, and I mean, this newest book is no way your only book so far. How did you have the good sense not to take that bad advice and just do one thing in the writing world?

Suzanne: I don’t feel like I chose it. I feel like it chose me. I mean, I had to make a living, so I had to teach or waitress or do something. The different kinds of writing have just come as the subject came, as something showed up, and I really like the variety. My stories also are … have varied voices. Some writers have a pretty clear tone of voice. I suppose I do in some of the realistic fiction, but then I have characters like the dishwasher character. He’s not me. He’s Pierre. I don’t know. I don’t really know the answer.

I do have one sense about it, and it’s because I’m rereading Mother Night. I’m thinking about the issues in it because I’m going to do a radio interview, be on a panel talking about it. It’s that you’re writing out of your personhood. You’re not writing out of nothing. You’re writing out of who you are. So who you are needs to be expressed in various ways, whether it’s by writing differently in fiction, or by having different jobs, or by whatever. All of the things you do feed who you are. You are your instrument. You are your voice. I just read somewhere, someone said, “How can I become a more political writer?” The mature writer’s answer was, “Become more political yourself.”

Marion: Oh, there you go. Fascinating. Yeah, the very selves that we are, I think it’s a real recognition, and to accept that the very selves exist. I’d love a little more advice. One of the things that I noticed a lot is people always want to meet writers, but I think when they do, maybe in hopes that they can get the writer to read their sets, their stuff. I always give young writers the same advice. If you have the great, good fortune to meet a published writer, ask a good question. This comes from years ago, I met my equivalent of Kurt Vonnegut for you, is William Kennedy who’s still alive and still writing well into his 90s. I asked him for a piece of writing advice and he said, and this is now 30 years ago. He said, “Read the Paris Review interviews,” which I now have religiously. Practically every day, I read a piece of one.

They’re all online. They’re all available. It’s the best writing advice I ever got, and it keeps on giving every day. So what would you suggest? Can you think of something just to get people started thinking next time they run into a writer? We run into them. When we’re back out in the world, we are going to run into them again. I remember looking at John Updike once across the theater lobby in Manhattan and not being able to figure out what to go and say. I should have, of course, just gone up and said, “Thank you, Mr. Updike,” and walked away, but I didn’t have the good sense to do so. But do you think you can just … Just, is there any … What would you tell a young writer to ask a published writer at this point for advice?

Suzanne: Maybe I would ask that writer, what is the best advice you can give a young writer?

Marion: That’s good. I like it. I like it a lot. Yeah, they have something to say. They’re going to have … It might be that Paris Review.

Suzanne: Marquez has just a fabulous interview in Paris Review. Thank you for telling me that. I think I’ll start doing that.

Marion: Well, some people meditate every morning, but I spend about 30 minutes reading online, on an exercise bicycle, wherever I can. I’ll read just maybe a section of one, and I’ve never run into one that didn’t inform me, never, whether it be a poet, fiction writer, non-fiction writer, it just does doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t matter.

Another thing that really struck me is writers can get into no end of trouble writing about someone they admire. You can miss so much. You can overlook something, or let some bad habit blow by, or whatever, or you never know when to stop. I mean, this would be an experience in insatiability for me, if I was writing about someone I admired. So what parameters … I mean, you said before about just the sheer amount of stuff that you had, but did you set out with this book to go from A to B or A to Z, or how in the world do you ever control it when it’s someone you admire so much?

Suzanne: Well, the first part of the book, I really used the end pages have his very short, how to write with style in there. It’s a two page. I had seen that … I say this in the book, but I had seen that in the newspaper myself when it came out, and cut it out of the newspaper and used it in all my classes. My outline starts with his first thing, find a subject you care about and think others should care about. Then I followed along the questions in my own experience with that. Like, it’s not as simple as that, sounds really nice in the two-page short thing, but what I did was just follow it out, like, okay, Kurt found a subject he cared about, but it took him 25 years to write it. So what did he do?

Then I made the chapter detouring forward and I saw, as I was reading, especially the books on the way up to Slaughterhouse-Five, how much he was writing about his war experiences in these other books without writing about directly. How much he had to learn by writing short stories over and over learning his craft, which was a very hard one for him. So that’s what I did. I followed out the kinds of questions I would come up with. Then when I got to the certain place, I was going to go right into the real nuts and bolts section of this. I guess I should interrupt myself for a minute because I had categories that were taken out by the editor. I had this book divided into categories, so it’s not as narrative in my writing of it as it is as a published book.

Before I was doing the craft section, I thought, but it’s so much more than craft. It’s what your attitude is. It’s how you approach it. It’s all the things you need to approach it. So I have several chapters there about patience and those kinds of emotional and attitudinal things. Then the chapters are all nuts and bolts. I just followed Vonnegut a lot because I don’t have a chapter on point of view because I couldn’t find anything he wrote about point of view.

Marion: Fascinating.

Suzanne: I do have chapters on humor because he’s a humorist, and I do have chapters on language, which are some of my favorite chapters actually.

Marion: Yes. Let’s talk about that for a second.

Suzanne: Okay.

Marion: One of the most wondrous things in the book is your portrayal of how he plays with the language he handled. That may not be the right word, but the delight. I think we often forget all these memes online talking about how hard writing is, you open a vein and you bleed all over the page. Yeah, I’m always telling people you better love the work, because there’s absolutely no guarantee that anybody’s ever going to see it. So could you just remind us about how much he delighted? You say it was a hard task for him to learn, but you write beautifully about his delight in the word.

Suzanne: Yes, and I’m going to show, even read an example of that because I also found myself-

Marion: Great.

Suzanne:… teacher that I am, making up exercises when, as I wrote those particular chapters on craft here’s a funny one. This is a quote and throughout his work, Vonnegut conjured and indicated words. So here’s a quote from him. “Dr. Ed Brown coined a new word for Sylvia’s disease, Samaritrophia, which he said meant hysterical indifference to the troubles of those less fortunate than oneself.” I just think that’s hilarious, Samaritrophia. Then I concocted an exercise, and my exercise under that chapter is to invent a noun and definition for a phenomena that has, as yet, no defining word. Make its sound echo its sense, employ it in a sentence. It’s just what he did. He just really plays with words. He really has … He plays with words and he plays with metaphorical things that we say. He turns it around. Instead of making the metaphor, he undoes the metaphor. Yeah, so I-

Marion: The delight is wonderful.

Suzanne: Yeah. Then, I guess, I have one more thing to say about the book as a whole, which is that I … then I got through all of that and revision and so on. I had a section called how to live. No one asked me to write that, but I had all these notes, because he has a lot to say about it in his non-fiction and fiction. I went to an AWP conference one year in which there was a panel discussion with some title similar to that, and I thought, I’m just going to go and see if people show up. People were sitting on the floor. People were pouring out the door. People want to know how can you support yourself, have a family, be a writer, all those questions.

So I thought, okay, I’m going to do it, but I’m slogging away. I’m getting pretty tired by the time I got there. One night, I woke up with this epiphany in the middle of the night, I don’t have to have any of this. I can stop right now. I got up in the morning, the whole next day, I felt so free, and the day after that I went, “Screw it, I have to go back to this. I have to do this slog slog.”

Marion: Oh, well I hope you never stop. I think we’ll wind it up there with that because that’s wonderful. We’re going to have those days where we say no, no, and then we’re going to go back to the slog. Thank you, Suzanne. That’s a joy and a perfect place to leave it. It’s been wonderful talking with you.

Suzanne: I hope we get to meet in person sometime.

Marion: Yes, I would love that. I would love that very much. Thank you for your beautiful book. That is Suzanne McConnell. Her book, Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style by Kurt Vonnegut with Suzanne McConnell is just out. See more on her and her writing at Suzanne McConnell dot com, and buy that book and all of the rest of her work, wherever books are sold. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lauren Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com and take a class with me. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go.

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