- With ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL
Robert Anthony Siegel, an American writer and professor, writes about the complicated knot of family and place, the imaginative freedom that books and art provide, and the beauty and confusion of cross-cultural encounter.
Interviewer studied [remotely] with Siegel at the 2021 Iowa Summer Writers’ Festival and is honored to renew the acquaintance for this novel craft discussion.
CG: One of my big takeaways from the summer class was something you threw out one morning as an aside, a remark about the ‘earliest’ novels. That surprised me, I never really thought about the novel having originated at a certain point in time, I guess I thought novels had always existed, like the Torah—
RAS: [Chuckle]
CG: —which I consider a very old novel—
RAS: I know what you mean. The novel as a form is so central to the way we think about our cultural life now that it feels like it’s always been with us. And that it’s always been central. But it hasn’t. It is fairly old. Often, Cervantes’ Don Quixote is fingered as the first novel in the Western world.
CG: So you wouldn’t call the novel a distinctly Western art form. Did it emerge around the same time in the non-Western world?
RAS: You could arguably cite The Tale of Genji as the world’s first novel—dating to early 11th century.
[The Tale of Genji is a classic work of Japanese literature written around 1020 by the noblewoman and lady-in-waiting Murasaki Shikibu]. That predates Cervantes by about 500 years—Don Quixote was mid 17th century.
CG: That still seems relatively modern—
RAS: Late Renaissance, on the verge of modern times. Yes, the novel is very much associated with modernity—the experience of being modern, and part of a technologically advanced, every-changing world.
CG: That’s such a good point. If Gutenberg hadn’t been around, how would we have had the means to mass-produce stories—
RAS: Absolutely. The very existence of the novel and its readership is linked to modern technology—the printing press—which created an audience.
CG: This puts it all in perspective. So you say Don Quixote could be considered the first novel, but I remember in class you were tracing the novel’s origins to the Victorians—
RAS: I remember that discussion. We were talking about the centrality of scene in novel writing—why scene is so important to us. The scene is a fairly late innovation too. We often think of the advent of scene in terms of writers like Jane Austen, in the late 1700s early 1800s. She came from a theatrical background. And the question she asked of herself as a novelist was: why can’t novels have the same sort of dramatic scenic quality that I know from plays? Up to that point, novels were told largely through exposition.
CG: I know as a reader I instinctively identify old-timey sounding literature with an omniscient point of view—It was the best of times, it was the worst of times—then Jane Austen comes along and says, ‘hey, we could adapt the same techniques we’re using on stage to happen on a page. So would you credit her then, as one of the real…
RAS: [dimpled grin] I LOVE crediting her—with everything, because I think she is SO brilliant. Even though it’s never one person—just like scientific breakthroughs are so often a group of people either working in tandem—or in parallel, perhaps not even aware of each other—but the idea is in the air. Now, Jane Austen was an incredible innovator, a super-smart writer. She had a revival in the 90s that has just continued to go and go. Though she had a sharp, acidic writing that the movie remakes don’t always capture. She can be rough on her characters—rough on everybody— but a fascinating writer.
CG: I was interested in what you said about changes being ‘in the air’—again, how art is affected by societal trends, technology—the Industrial Revolution had started, and now you have female authors writing books about female characters for female audiences. Is the novel a gender-specific art form…?
RAS: [Thoughtful nod] There is truth to that. The readership has been predominantly women for a long, long time. But the privilege of WRITING novels has been a more complicated situation. Most of the great Victorians—Dickens, Thackeray—men. George Eliot wrote under a male alias. Both Brontes originally published as men. But the novel always depended on a female readership. Women of a certain class had the leisure time—but also the novel was very much about the ‘marriage plot’ – family, community—all things that fascinate me. That subject matter is in no way gendered, in my view. Its unfortunate that men haven’t had the freedom to indulge in it – it’s only recently that men haven’t had to limit themselves to the world of ‘affairs’ – law, business whatever, all this dry stuff they were forced to read when they’d have really preferred to sit down with a novel.
CG: [Hands waving]. How were these Victorian housewives landing book deals?
RAS: Victorian publishing is a fascinating subject and there’s a lot of scholarship about it. I know that it was closely tied to bookselling. Booksellers became printers and publishers looking for content to sell – not even out of the store—serialized, through correspondence. It was kind of like the Amazon of the day.
CG: So booksellers decided they wanted to sell a product and they went looking for content to bring to market – very Amazon- retro as you describe it—
RAS: I like to remind my students of the relation between the novel and ‘novelty’ – that even if they’re writing on an age-old universal subject, it has to feel new. And that newness has to come from the writer, which gets us to the question of originality. Which scares people. Am I original? Am I talented? Do I have something to say?
CG: Does anybody give a—
RAS: Yes, we all frame these questions differently. But I feel there’s a simple solution. Strip away everything about you that is similar to everyone else, and what’s left is your individuality. I see talented students running away from their individuality all the time. Trying to make their work more like something they’ve read.
CG: Well yeah, we’re shown all these examples from writers we admire, and we’re taught here’s how so-and-so handled this particular situation and we’re trying to apply these techniques that we learn in these workshops…
RAS: [pulls stool forward, face fills monitor] True! But there’s a difference between craft and content. Absolutely we learn craft from pre-existing models—
CG: So in your years of teaching do you see styles come and go—trends that your students are picking up on…?
RAS: There are trends all the time. If a book starts getting attention, for whatever reason, suddenly an entire generation of young writing students will start imitating it.
CG: For example—
RAS: I haven’t read it, but suddenly I had a whole series of students writing these twisteroo plots, point of view trails with an unreliable narrator, I was like, what is this? [Shakes head] Gone Girl had come out…
CG: Yeah, I’ve been seeing all this point-of-view weirdness in workshops, and books I’ve been reading recently, multiple points of view, is this now a thing? [Interviewer natters on for a while, referencing her perplexity with Overstory]I mean, multiple points of view from various trees, it was nerve-wracking…
RAS: [Chuckling] I haven’t read Overstory, but I’ve read other Richard Powers.
CG: I mean, it was very ingenious, and so forth, but…
RAS: [Nodding] I always counsel students to keep it simple, especially in short fiction, but in the novel as well. There’s a commitment as a craftsperson to doing the most with the least—concision, simplicity, a sort of thoughtfulness.
CG: Do you have more advice for novelists and other long form writers?
RAS: Partly craft and partly process. I think it’s good to write in scene. [Slowly, emphatically.] Write those key dramatic moments that really matter. So that the narrative is like a string of pearls, where the pearls are the scenes, strung together with a thread of exposition—of telling—underneath, that leads the reader from one pearl to the next. But it’s not easy to get to those scenes. So I encourage students to do what I call writing outside of the story. Write about what you’re going to write about. Outline, do character studies, take notes, figure things out, have your characters talk to each other, none of this has to go into the narrative. Then, switch your focus back to producing text. It’s not always all about text, you can play around outside.
CG: You’re saying to first get the big scenes in your head, then on paper—and figure out how to get from A to B later…that’s good advice I’ve gotten from other instructors, I just have such a hard time FOLLOWING it…
RAS: [Knowing nod]. And my last piece of advice is, follow your own inclinations. Do what works for you. Whatever keeps you motivated, and excited, and eager to sit down and write some more…that’s what you need.
[CG thanks RAS; they wish each other happy, healthy holidays. Meeting ends].
Robert Anthony Siegel is the author of two novels and numerous short stories and essays and has been recognized with O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes among other awards. He currently teaches in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and has been a Fulbright Scholar in Taiwan, a Mombukagakusho Fellow in Japan, a Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and a Paul Engle Fellow at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He works privately with writers of novel, memoir, stories, and essay: learn more here.