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Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
Frank: I´ve heard Tom ask the question whether writers needed to learn to "restructure the spontaneous." There is usually a pretty big difference in what one writes in a first draft and the finished work. Both of you do a lot of rewriting. Let´s talk about this process. Duff?
Brenna: I´m obsessive about it. Really, it´s the part of writing that I enjoy the most, the revisions, the search for the perfect phrase, the perfect word, the lean, well-balanced sentence. I cultivate a cold mind when I revise. I´m usually pretty calm, and at the same time ruthless. Nothing is sacred. I slash and burn, so to speak, and now and then I´m proud of the results, the purity of a line, the way it communicates, the way it seems to shine. I forget who it was that said, "I´m not a writer, I´m a rewriter." Whoever said that is a person after my own heart.
Frank: Do any examples come to mind, Duff, of how a changed word or phrase moved the writing from the banal to the sublime?
Brenna: I wouldn´t say sublime. I´ve never read a sublime sentence. One searches for "sublimity" with the same understanding that one searches for "perfection," always knowing that you´ll never get there, it will always be beyond your grasp. The Grand Canyon is sublime. The Horsehead Nebula is sublime. It seems to me that you have to go to nature to really view anything truly sublime. But what you can capture is a fine word or phrase, or as I said, "the lean, well-balanced sentence." In an early draft of The Altar of the Body, I wrote, "Slow as vodka logic it came, first the bumper and grill, then the interminable hood, the windshield, the long dull side in gloomy black." Then I go on to talk about a smiling, waving woman being inside the car. After several drafts, I changed the image to: "The first time I see her she is steering a Lincoln Continental through the neighborhood. Slow as vodka logic she comes, looking left and right, searching for something. Tree leaves reflect fractal patterns off her windshield, smearing her image, bringing her in and out of focus." To my mind those are three clean sentences, with each word pulling its own weight and adding to the other words around it. We get the woman, we get the car, and we get foreshadowing: fractal patterns connecting with the woman´s smeared image coming in and out of focus. In the book, she is a liar and a manipulator and yet also a very good woman at heart. Life has overwhelmed her, fractured her, so to speak. I tear all my sentences down that way, go over and over and over them. And sometimes I feel like I´ve done well. Other times I´m not so sure and I wish I were smarter and more talented and had a clearer eye.
Kennedy: I want to go deeper into this. I really envy the way you just muscle right in like that, Duff. I don´t mean about seeking le mot just--of course, I do that, too. I´m talking about the very foundations of the work. Of course we learn our craft, we learn it long and hard so that when we come to our writing finally we are like carpenters or bricklayers or wire-lathers--we know how things go together and if we lay a crooked curbing, we curse and tear it out and start over. Not that. I´m talking about something else and I worry about it; I don´t think I´ll ever stop worrying. Calvino says, "Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard." And then to illustrate his point he quotes Paul Valery, "Il faut etre leger comme l´oiseau, et non comme la plume." One should be light like the bird and not like the feather. This is a challenge to me because in the 40 years of my pursuit of craft, half the time I was probably spinning my string, but in the other half one of the most important advances that I made was the discovery of the seemingly haphazard. I won´t say anything about vagueness being powerful, although ambiguity of course certainly can be. This might be an essential difference in our methods--or it might be a mere difference in terminology. We may actually be talking about the same thing. But I have seen you wade into a seemingly final draft and--as nearly as I can determine--savage it, shape it, reverse it. But for myself that can be the quickest route to the destruction of the ephemeral spirit that constructs the fiction, that shows the connectedness of all that is so seemingly haphazard in life. I have had to learn to allow my mind to accept the words that are handed up to it from wherever it is they come from. Or as Beckett said, "It all happens between the hand and the page."
Frank: Is there anything Beckettesque about how you write, Duff?
Brenna: Basically he was a very deliberate craftsmen and he knew exactly what he wanted from his novels and from those who performed in his plays. "Less emotion, please. Play it flat, Billie," was something I heard him say in a profile on TV. I am perhaps as deliberate as Beckett in the revision process, I don´t know. But the big difference is that he was a genius and he knew how to get the effect. I know the effect I want, but I´m never as sure of it as I´d like to be, never as sure my readers will see it the way I see it, and I often have to do what Tom does and just allow my mind to accept the words that are handed up.
Frank: Let´s ask John Calder, Beckett´s publisher and life-long friend if Beckett simply knew what he wanted or if he was also consumed by great doubt whether what he wanted and what he achieved were the same. Hold on, I´ll call John in London right now... It´s ringing.... John, it´s David in Paris. We´re in the middle of an interview with Tom Kennedy in Copenhagen and Duff Brenna in San Diego, and we have a question for you. You knew Beckett like few others did; help us understand if even the greatest of the greats, a Nobel Prize winner, was obsessed with self doubt as a writer.
John Calder: Of course he was. Every writer is. On the other hand, Beckett constantly worked gradually from doubt to resolution in his writing. 99% of everything Beckett wrote he threw away by revising and pruning down. What´s important is that he knew what he wanted to say, but he had to work out how to say it. He once said to me "All I want to do is to put my head against the cliff wall and move it one millimeter." Beckett´s greatest talent was to cut through all the beliefs that we have been told and to decide what he disbelieved and then cut through it. A good example is religious ceremony; we cling to it because it gives one security, but in the end it stops us from thinking. Beckett was certainly a craftsman, but one that was never satisfied.
Frank: Thanks John... Tom...
Kennedy: What a privilege to hear that! About a third of my hundred or so short stories, maybe more, and maybe the best of them, if I can say that, occurred in such a way that their structure was largely inviolable--if I started trying to pull bricks out it would topple. I think all the stories in Unreal City came that way and many of them in Drive, Dive, Dance & Fight. Sometimes I didn´t understand the story at all, I only felt its rightness, and later, after it was published, I would discover the "meaning." Of course, I rewrote, polished, shifted sentences about, but the basic thing was basically as it came to me, and I learned how to judge this by ruining a few stories first with undue and unnecessary monkeying, trying to insert "reason" into what was essentially "wild."
Frank: Tom, you´re an avid writing teacher. How do you teach aspiring fiction writers to trust what comes naturally while also insisting on a strict attention to craft?
Kennedy: For me, the hardest thing to teach, but one of the things that has occasionally seemed to work, is to advise the person struggling with a story to take a walk with its main character--or with its voice. To imagine the narrative persona strolling through a known or imagined landscape and seeing that landscape through the persona´s sensibility and allowing language to crystallize around the thread of that movement. As often as not, I find my character or my voice will lead me to the heart of my fiction and reveal what the story is seeking.
Frank: Don´t you often have your writing students shine flashlights into the dark corners of their childhood memories and other haunting exercises to see what really lurks within? I remember once in Amsterdam you completely freaked out a young writer by having her go down into the cellar of her house when she was five, or something like that.
Kennedy: Yes, I do a ´basement´ exercise which I contributed to Pam Painter´s book What if? which seems to have been useful to a number of workshop participants. The object is to find an unknown door by traveling through remembered sensations into the basement of your childhood home, by remembering the smell of your father, the sound of your mother´s voice, etc. Once you find the door you open it and start to write, it is supposed to convey you from deep remembrance into an instant outflow of expression. Afterwards, those in the workshop who wish to are invited to read what they have written. Well, sometimes I have a feeling that some of the participants would like to be gently nudged to read their piece rather than push themselves forward, and in the case you refer to, I asked one of the women present if she would like to read, and she nearly burst into tears, whispering hoarsely, "You don´t want to know what happened in the basement of my childhood home...." I was terrified that I may have called forth some serious difficulty for the poor woman and began to question my right to work with this exercise; however, that woman did come back to me later in the day to assure me that she had come through the terror and found something valuable in the experience. Still, it was a scary moment and I am reluctant to try again. Free association can be a dangerous game, and sometimes you can inadvertently put people into a near state of hypnosis.
Frank: Duff, you teach writing as well. What´s the most important lesson you share with younger writers?
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