When I was writing the fiction-writing chapter of Creative Writing Demystified, I called upon David Reich to review the chapters, helping me feel secure that I was sharing pertinent and useful information with the book’s readers. He took on the task of helping me examine tone in writing novels by generously offering first drafts and revised drafts of scenes from his novel The Antiracism Trainings, as well as discussion of why he made certain changes to improve the tone of his scenes. You can read that article here.I’ve been following David’s work for years, especially his nonfiction work. So it is a pleasure to be in conversation with him this week about his novel writing. It is always interesting to read about where authors get the ideas for their novels. Since David’s come from the workplace, I think his thoughts will prove an inspiration to those of you working on fiction and wondering how you can find the extraordinary in the ordinary. –Ed.

Sheila
From short stories written decades ago to your novel The Antiracism Trainings, which came out last year, much of your fiction is set in the workplace. Is that coincidental?

David

I never made an explicit choice to focus on workplace material, but you’re right, I’ve often gravitated toward it in my writing.
 Sheila
Why?

David
Work throws people together who have very different backgrounds, very different ideas about the world. Sooner or later, that leads to conflict, and conflict is the mainspring of narrative writing, the thing that propels the story forward. Without it, the reader doesn’t move past page 1.

Sheila
Any other reasons to write about work?

David
Work tests people’s competency, and this doesn’t apply exclusively to what we like to think of as challenging intellectual work. Take my story “Black Dreams,” published in the late 1970s in a literary journal called The Smith. The narrator’s a fellow who has a good education and an incisive way of looking at the world and himself. He’d probably make a good college teacher, a job he did part-time while in graduate school. But by the time frame of the story proper, he’s no longer a teacher but a taxi driver, and if he used to be a pretty good college teacher, he’s at best an average cabby, scuffling to make a buck and make it through his shift without getting lost or being robbed, either by his passengers or the owner of the taxi company. And when people are pushed to the edge of their abilities in the way this guy is, they reveal things about themselves that they tend not to show us at other times. In his case, it’s things like the ability to adapt, dark humor, a tendency to fantasize.

Work tests people in another way, too. Given social arrangements and human nature, situations arise at work that test the worker’s values. Sooner or later, work makes you choose, and people’s moral choices, and the process by which they arrive at those choices, have always fascinated me.

Sheila
That kind of choice lies at the heart of Antiracism Trainings.

David
Absolutely. To summarize the story very briefly, Mickey, my first-person narrator, and his boss, a guy named Don Sykes, make up part of the staff of a magazine published by an outfit called the Liberal Religion Center. At a certain point they’re told, by the higher ups, to attend a lengthy training where they learn to their dismay that, as persons of European ancestry, they are ipso facto racists. Then, over the course of several years, the magazine comes under pressure to adjust its editorial stance to this so-called antiracist thinking. That pressure and the characters’ responses to it, which range from acquiescence to sneaky resistance and vary over time and from character to character, give the book its theme and its central conflict.

Sheila
How would you articulate that theme?

David
If you’re looking for a brief formulation of the message I’m trying to convey, it might be that inauthenticity serves as its own punishment — a special case of the Hindus’ law of Karma.

Sheila
Thank you. Being able to articulate a theme succinctly, I think, helps a writer know what is pushing a story forward and what might not be important to the story.

Let’s talk about the rather complicated structure you chose for Antiracism. The novel starts in the year 2000, goes back to 1996 and works its way forward to 1997, goes back further, to 1994, and works its way forward to 1995; then it picks up the thread of the 1997 events that you dropped more than a hundred pages earlier. Why not just tell the story chronologically? Wouldn’t it be simpler and easier to follow?

David
I did that, or something much closer to that, in my first few drafts. Then I put the book away for a year or so. When I went back to it, I started to recognize for the first time Don Sykes’s central place in the book’s moral framework. Of Sykes and Mickey and their colleagues at the magazine, Sykes is the one whose responses to the pressures from above are most varied and ambiguous — and therefore most interesting, at least to me–and thus I didn’t want him to make his first appearance in the middle of the book, as if he were an afterthought. I wanted readers to know how crucial he was and to keep a close eye on him from the start. On the other hand, the book’s plot demanded that Sykes arrive at the magazine several years after Mickey does.

Luckily, there’s no rule saying novels have to start at the beginning of the story and move forward in time until the end, and indeed many novels start at the end or in the middle of the story, as do literary works going back at least as far as the Odyssey. After all, memory doesn’t usually work chronologically; more often it zigzags, following paths of association.

So I rearranged the structure of the book so that it more or less starts with Don Sykes’s arrival. Then, after two chapters, I moved back and picked up Mickey’s history at the magazine in the pre-Sykes era.

By re-jiggering the structure, I not only got the character of Sykes up front, but I also improved the book in other ways. For instance, I delayed by some 50 pages the chapters in which Mickey attends his antiracism training, and for many of those 50 pages, the reader gets to anticipate the advent of the training–with the same sense of foreboding that Mickey himself feels as he waits to attend it.

Sheila
I like that parallel between the reader’s feelings and anticipation and Mickey’s feelings.
When you did this restructuring, did you just shuffle the chapters around, or did you need to rewrite them to fit the new structure?

David
I had to rewrite, but much less than I’d expected. I added a few sentences here and there to function as signposts — to explain where we were among the different time frames, and I broke the book into four main sections, each with its own title and each corresponding to one of the time frames. And that was about it. I don’t think readers come to a narrative expecting a strict chronological structure, and with help from the writer, minimal help, they typically can follow other structures.

Sheila
Another thing I noticed about the book is how extensively you drop the characters’ magazine stories, conversation transcripts, emails and other work documents — all fictional, of course– into the middle of the narrative. I found them funny and entertaining, but what literary purpose do they serve?

David
Well, there’s a lot to be said for entertainment. But to answer your question, the book has one first-person narrator, Mickey, so all these pseudo-documents, most written by characters other than Mickey, allow me to access other narrative voices, other ways of thinking and using language and other perspectives on the events that make up the storyline of the book, without formally adopting a more complicated point of view that uses multiple narrators.

Granted, all these characters already get their voices heard via dialogue in passages narrated by Mickey, but in their own writings, we hear their voices unfiltered, and we hear their written voices, as distinct from their spoken voices. That’s important because people don’t write the same way as they speak. Compared to their speech, their writing may be more considered, more pretentious, more logical, more calculated, so showcasing my characters’ written expression adds another dimension to the readers’ understanding of them. That’s the intention, anyway.

Probably the most important of all of the pseudo-documents, the series of columns for the magazine written by Don Pulliam, the denomination’s president, is a good example. The columns get more and more bizarre and disjointed over time, allowing us, essentially, to watch Pulliam go crazy, and to see this process from the inside. I stole the device from Mario Vargas Llosa, the great Peruvian novelist, who wrote a book [Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter] in which a series of soap opera scripts trace the script writer’s worsening mental health.

Sheila
That use of the columns is very convincing. And that leads me back to the question of writing about work. What advice would you give beginning writers who want to use their workplace experience as material for fiction?

David
To take notes, for one thing. In my last job, I got into the habit of taking out a notepad and nonchalantly recording people’s words and gestures whenever something interesting was being said. Granted, I was working in a place where one routinely took notes as part of the job. Not every setting is as friendly to workplace scribblers, so in some settings taking mental notes is clearly the better part of valor, until you get alone and can transfer them onto paper.

Another thing I’d recommend has to do with how you handle the notes you took, along with other raw material, as you transform them into a short story or novel. And that’s never to forget that you’re writing fiction, and that you therefore needn’t stick to what people actually said and or did. In any human transaction many things are left unsaid, yet I’ve often found it useful to put some of these things into characters’ mouths — to get them to speak the unspeakable. Of course, whatever you instruct your characters to utter needs to be credible coming from them, which means that your fictional characters will differ from the people on whom you may have based them.

Sheila
In what sense is it useful to the writer for a character to speak the unspeakable?

David
In the sense that the things that are left unsaid often cut to the truth of a situation. The truth can be dangerous, after all, which is why it’s so often left unspoken.

Sheila
I remember working with a fiction writer who had trouble allowing her characters to be “mean.” She had to work at what she called “torqueing it up.” It wasn’t easy to make things hard for her characters, but as you said earlier, conflict is what a story is all about.

Have you written anything since Antiracism?

David
Yes, around the time that I finished the novel, a friend of mine died, leaving no husband and no offspring. It so happened that I was her executor, and given her medical history, I had no choice but to sue her doctors for malpractice. Well, like that taxi driver in “Black Dreams,” I soon found I was in way over my head, and my memoir Executor: My Years in Probate, for which I’m currently seeking a publisher, tells the story of my education in the ways of probate and malpractice law.

Sheila
That sounds like a book that will be helpful to many people when it comes out as well as one that strikes a chord with our baby boomer population. I love sharing nonfiction excerpts with my readers. Please remember us and let us know when the book is available.

Final question: I can’t help but ask you what kind of jobs have you held.

David
For the last ten years or so, I’ve freelanced as a writer and editor. Before that, I had a staff position on a religious magazine — sound familiar? — and before that I taught college for a number of years. Going back further, I did assorted things — economics researcher, factory worker, restaurant cook. Loader of trucks and railroad cars.

Sheila
Did you ever drive a taxi?

David
Yes, on and off for half a dozen years. Of all the jobs I ever had it was by far the hardest.

Sheila
I know that good stories come from hard situations. Thank you so much for the interview, David. I am looking forward to the next one.
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If you’d like to read reviewers on David Reich’s novel, here are two links:

Review by Peter Mladinic in The Scrambler:

Review by Kadzi Mutizwa, Prick of the Spindle literary magazine