Literary Flaneurs: Stewart O’Nan

 

A guest series curated by Jeffrey Condran. Project intro here.

 

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The World That Matters

by Stewart O’Nan

 

 

When I’m writing a novel, I like to do location scouting as if I were shooting a movie.  If possible, at the very beginning, or at least early in the first draft, I go to the actual setting of the book and drive around taking pictures, looking for where I might set scenes.  As Laurie Anderson says, “Let’s put some mountains here so the characters have something to fall off of.”

It rarely happens that I find readymade settings.  Or maybe it’s that the ones in my head are better, more evocative than the ones I run across in real life.  It could also be that I’m a terrible location scout—impatient to get back to my desk and the world of the characters.

Because that’s the world that matters.  Not the real world we can see everyday, but the world as seen through the characters’ emotions, and usually, for me, that comes together in the actual writing, not taking pictures or taking notes, but live, improvised as I’m with the characters and dreaming up what comes next.  It’s good to have a stockpile of material already in my head, but more often than not, the telling detail or locale that makes it onto the page floats up out of some reverie.  The photos pinned to my corkboards and the notebooks open on my desk help set the tone, but they supply less than you’d expect.

Lately I’ve been writing about Scott Fitzgerald, focusing on his time in Hollywood between 1937 and 1940.  Most of that world is gone, but years ago, my French translator, a Chandler fanatic who moved from Paris to L.A. to be closer to his muse, took me on a tour of the hotels and motor courts and dives and cafeterias left over from that golden age.  I was at once fascinated and yet unmoved by their style.  They were played out, empty shells, just as visiting the Italian restaurant in Montparnasse that used to be the Dingo Bar where Scott met Hemingway was pointless, a dusty tourist trap with awful carbonara.  La Rotonde, La Coupole, Le Select, Flor, Les Deux-Magots, La Closerie de Lilas—all their old haunts are like wax museums.  Better to visit them in my mind—or his, since that’s where the story ultimately takes place.

More involving—more alive–was my research for The Night Country, which I unwisely set in the town where we were living at the time, and set in the absolute present, as if it were happening right then.  Every day when I drove the roads of Avon, Connecticut, I saw our town at once through my own writer’s eyes, the objective eye of a stranger (the editor, the reader), and the eyes of my characters, all of whom were tortured and one of whom was a ghost.

Writing fiction involves distance.  The process takes you away from your normal life, yet paradoxically brings you closer to it, because whatever time you spend outside the world of the story, you’re looking harder at the real world for things you might include in the story (things you may not know you need until you see them).  So the emotion of the story—the emotional world of the story—bleeds into real life, adding a strange charge or excitement, a hidden meaning only you can see with the help of your characters.  Normally the two worlds can be held apart easily, but in this case the overlap was too great.  The characters ended up at the same places I went to everyday, and came to haunt the roads and parking lots and woods that, by simple proximity, were inescapable.  A year of writing Avon in Avon led to a Borgesian double vision that was fun but also unnerving, as if the two realities might collide and mingle.

It was a trick, of course, believing in my own imagined world of Avon based on close and repeated examination of the real one, but a trick I needed to believe in to write the book, and one I fell further into as it went along, precisely as I should have.  Writing will mess with you if let it.  Or if you do it enough, I guess.  Magical Bradburyesque ghost story or realism–doesn’t matter.  I believe in that made-up Avon as much as I believe in the real one.  Maybe more.  I remember walking along Lovely Street one sunny October afternoon, daydreaming about the rainy Halloween in the book, and looking up through the trees at our own house, interrogating its bland face, its shingles and windows, the fallen leaves matting the grass and the pachysandra and the cracked driveway, wondering, with deep curiosity, what kind of people lived there.

 

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Stewart O’Nan is the author of fourteen novels, including Snow Angels, A Prayer for the Dying, Last Night at the Lobster and Emily, Alone.  Viking will publish his novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, West of Sunset, in January 2015.