(or, Constantine Sult, in conversation)

…Writing started for me, as most things start for me, as a real lark. Though I suppose that, looking back, anyone can realize that things that start as a lark turn out to be things that they have actually been doing their entire life… …But, being a novelist, proper, was all a lark. I don’t think I got especially serious about it until my third novel, kill Christian. I didn’t start writing in a particular direction until then. Though (to continually say things and then contradict myself) I think that the principle ideas, the themes, the basic way in which I wanted to express the world was present in my earliest works, without my even knowing about it…

…Stories are a little bit boring, in my way of looking at things. I do enjoy a story, but as it comes to novels, the story line is about the least interesting thing imaginable to me. There should not be a story present in a novel any more than there is a story present in just one particular hour of the day. A novel should be told more as a description of the space between each spec or molecule or atom of what happens to one in life than it should be a rendering of where this and that point intersect or meld…

…I cannot think of anything particularly profound or changing that happened to me. Or, when I do, when I can think of a time that I was deeply changed or affected by life, what intrigues me is that it took up about an inch of space out of a mile long day. And out of a week, it took up scarcely a hairs breadth. Out of a month, less. And so on. This is what makes it interesting to me, profound (or Intriguing, at least, I don’t really know about Profound)…

…That I have more in common with people that I have distinct from them, and this in the most basic way possible. What I have in common is a large mass of particular little things that most of the time are hardly even considered specifics (things like blinking and feet hurting and sometimes not quite hearing part of a telephone conversation and not caring, little globs of light floating in front of my eyes if the lights come on too fast). I try to express that with my work. It gives everything that sort of indistinct, lark sort of feel. If the changing moment lasted a half hour out of a month, I don’t think it can truly be expressed if it is allowed to occupy more than, say, two thousand words out of fifty thousand, half a page out of two hundred pages…

…I think back to writing my first novel, October People. Locking myself in a motel room for three days (this was for a contest). An interesting story, that, one might say. But, out of seventy-two hours, I spent fifty writing the book. I spent a few hours sleeping. I watched some television. My girlfriend came and visited me. I got candy from the machine. I smoked cigarettes in the room and in the parking lot. Immediately after checking out of the motel, I had to go to work. I had to go to my second job, after that. The next day I had to run errands, go to a get-together, things like that. Out of the week, I can hardly remember a moment of sitting at the little computer I had brought into the room. And it has never really changed from that, throughout everything I have written…

…I took night security jobs and during the course of a week that I wrote a novel, I was more concerned with doing my rounds, calling my friends on the phone, going through people’s desk drawers, finding places to take naps than I was about the prose. I liked pacing around in the cold smoking, talking passages into the night and early morning air more than I liked sitting and coming up with the actual paragraphs…

…Literature needs to be an expression of just this kind of thing. It needs to have at its base the notion that banality and tick tock tick tock is what the world and people and ideas consist of. Tell me about a painter going to the grocery store to buy more cigarettes or even about a painter buying paint or new brushes, admiring this pad of canvas paper more than this other, and I am fascinated. Tell me about their ideas of what painting is, about how they want to make the unknowable known, about some conceptual aspect of who they are, though and you might as well be telling me about what you think a rock’s favourite colour might be and why. A novel needs to tell all about the vaguest intersection of these two sorts of ideas. Just write about the actual motions of the painter moving or wetting or scratching his ear with the brush. Tell me all about where some random one of the daubs of white kind of presses up against one of the random daubs of pink. But, never tell me what the painting is. And never tell me if anyone, let alone the painter, ever gives it a thought…

…I always liked a passage out of a story by Calvino. A man and his wife are traveling and tasting various foods, the wife wanting more and more to learn every little nuance to the spices, to the glazes and all of that. She and the husband get into a spat and she calls him Insipid (I seem to recall the way the passage read. The husband thinks “Ah, there it was. Insipid. Tasteless.” And then he remarks to her that he may be Insipid, but she is ignoring that there do exists flavours and nuances that are not as bold or important as some particular spice. Something like that. This is how I feel…

…It’s easy to care about the struggles of other people, the people who want and who work to achieve and so forth. It isn’t so easy to care about the people who don’t, or to even think about the moments in the lives of the people who do that seem to contain no kernel of these higher ideals. I’m not interested in what a chefs finest meal tastes like, but I’d be fascinated to know if he could distinguish the taste of his spit from his lovers when they kiss. Or if he even has a word to describe his spit. I don’t care to know what an ideal taste likes. I, however, care very much to know what the spit of someone who longs for this ideal tastes like. And I wonder if they would even care to know if I offered to tell them. It is, I think, of some interest. It’s what they swallow all day long, it’s what they taste more than anything else…