First, a brief bio:

Nick Arvin, American Author (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Nick Arvin is an American engineer and writer. Born in North Carolina, he was raised in Michigan, and graduated from the University of Michigan and Stanford University with degrees in mechanical engineering, and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He has worked in forensic engineering and accident reconstruction.

Now, on to the questions.

1) They say that all writing is autobiographical. What made you decide to tackle forensic engineering or accident reconstruction – something you have direct experience with – in your second novel?

I did work in accident reconstruction; I sort of stumbled into it. I had worked as an engineer for Ford, but I quit that to do an MFA in creative writing, and then ended up living in Denver on some grant money for a year after the MFA. When the grant ran out, I started looking around for a job in engineering. I’d worked in the automotive industry, but there isn’t much of an automotive industry in Denver. Then I realized that there were a couple of forensic engineering companies that did automotive accident reconstruction. So I sent them my resume, and one of the resumes happened to land on the desk of a guy who’s a reader and was impressed that I had published a book of short stories. Soon I had a job.

I knew from the first day that I wanted to write a novel about the work — the work itself was basically a process of creating little mini-stories about the accidents we were working on, and these accidents were dramatic and tragic, and the process of creating these mini-stories was really interesting, but also discomforting in the way that it required applying cold, analytical techniques to examining terribly human situations. So, the work had all these interesting layers of narrative and emotional disconnect, and I knew I couldn’t cover all of it in a short story. So I collected material from the job in a notebook for a couple of years, and then began to try to figure out how to structure it into a novel. Writing the novel took about seven years altogether.

2) Engineer and writer seem like such very different careers – like they would bring very styles, perspective and different world views. True? Did you bring similar skill sets to both jobs or was writing a break from your “day job” (when you had a day job)?

Actually, I still have a day job in engineering. Most writers need a day job. Nowadays I work on the design of power plants and natural gas facilities. I tend to think that my involvement in engineering is good for my writing — it keeps me out in the world on a daily basis, meeting new people, seeing new things. And it’s corner of the world that most writers never see.

As for the first part of your question, I recently wrote a short essay for the Wall Street Journal on the topic of how writing and engineering mesh. I won’t rehash it all here, but suffice to say, I believe there’s more overlap between the two careers than people might think.

3) What is it about car accidents that they seem to touch our lives in such important ways?

Your life is going along the way it always does, and then all the sudden an accident comes in sideways, creating terrible death and injury and remorse. Abruptly, the path of your life is very different. It forces the people who survive these events to look at themselves and who they really are, what is important to them, and who they want to be, for good or ill. It has a huge effect. And it’s happening all the time, somewhere. We all know someone who it has happened to.

4) Why are accidents so hard to explain – why do people have such a hard time getting details right? Do we over-value eye-witness accounts?

Accidents are by definition unexpected, so it’s not like anyone ever says to a witness: here, watch these two cars smash into each other and remember as much as you can. Instead, something happens at the corner of vision, or you hear a sound and then turn to see the aftermath. And then, in one of these terrible cases where litigation arises, a hundred detailed questions are asked of the witness. And the witness feels maybe just because he was there he should know the answers, and he wants to please the questioner by giving the right answers, so his brain tries to fill in the missing information with a story that makes some sense. None of this needs to happen consciously, of course. Our brains make up all sorts of stuff all the time to fill in for the things we don’t know. Most of the time it doesn’t matter.

There are a ton of studies out there showing that, basically, witnesses suck. They’re polluted by biases and they make up stuff. But to reconstruct events from physical evidence is time-consuming and expensive, and that process too can be polluted by biases. Probably we’re just stuck living with a large degree of uncertainty about the nature of factual truth.

5) It seems there is a little meta-fiction or the very least some literary references weaved into the story. Was this a way to note the influences or just an interesting way to explore the ideas the characters were wrestling with? Or neither?

Or both! Definitely both. I think you’re referencing the way that the character Boggs blasts audiobooks at top volume from his convertible. That Boggs did this came to me very early in the writing process, and it helped me to get a handle on who he is. That being so, I needed to give the reader some idea of the kind of books he listens to; it’s kind of like when you look at a person’s bookshelf to try to figure out who they are. And it also gave me an opportunity to allude to some writers in the past who have touched on the book’s themes.

6) There is an awful lot of time spent driving in cars in the story. Was it a challenge to convey a real sense of what long distance driving is like without obviously letting it unduly bog down the book?

Yes… I wrote a lot of material about driving that I later cut, and there’s still plenty in the book. The nature of long distance driving has always been fascinating to me — it’s at once dangerous and meditative and maddening. I wanted to explore that. And I wanted to explore the roadside landscape, because we spend so much time in that landscape, and yet we hardly look at it. But I was aware, too, of the need to keep the story moving and the characters developing, and I did my best to balance all of those elements.

7) It struck me that you were really trying to depict the interior lives of your characters and how their exterior lives don’t always match up to their interior assumptions and beliefs or how these worlds often collide with unintended consequences. Are novelists like psychologists in some sense? What do you find interesting about your characters?

I suppose that novelists are amateur psychologists in a sense, although I try not to think of it in those terms much, for fear of reducing my characters to psychological constructs. The danger, I think, is that you could lose the contradictory elements of surprise and mystery that make characters feel real.

As for the characters in this book, I think you put it very well. The real world keeps refusing to conform to their assumptions and expectations, it eludes their attempts at analysis. I think we all struggle with this, in different ways. How the characters deal with that disconnect between inner process and outer reality is what’s interesting to me.

8) You have also written short stories. What is the challenge in writing short stories and how is it different from novels? Do you plan to continue to write both?

Yes, I love both short stories and novels and plan to keep working on both — as well as the middle ground of long stories or novellas, which may finally have some opportunities for reaching readers via electronic publishing. The main difference, for me, is that with short stories I feel like I’m always starting at the beginning with a blank page again, which requires a burst of raw creativity that’s sometimes hard to find, while in a novel I follow the same characters and themes day after day, year after year, which can feel like a grind. It’s nice to be able to work in one mode until I get tired of it, then switch to the other.

One of the curiosities of this business is the way that MFA programs tend to push writers to write short stories, because they are easier to workshop; but once you are out in the world, the publishing industry pushes for novels. Write a collection of stories and send it to New York, and the response is almost always something like, “This is lovely, but do you have a novel?” Chad Harbach’s essay on this topic, “MFA vs. NYC,” is very smart.

But there are some writers, like myself, who have day jobs outside academia, which provide a certain freedom from those two pressures. I don’t teach in an MFA program, and to pay the bills I don’t have to make a ton of money off my writing (though, to be clear, it’d sure be nice!). I try to use that freedom to follow my interests and characters wherever they may lead, and let a story find its own form and length.

9) There are some TV or movie type elements in this novel (a sort of CSI subject). Have you been involved in screenwriting? Any interest in trying your hand at that? 

Generally, I tried to avoid making the book feel like it’s made-for-TV, because I tend to think that literature these days is already overly influenced by the conventions of screenwriting. But it’s also simply inherent in the material in this book that it has CSI, police procedural aspects to it, and I wanted to do justice to those parts of the story.

I’ve never attempted to write anything for the screen. Sometimes I think it might be fun to try it out, but to date I’ve never gone any further with the thought. I always seem to have a novel or short story that I’m more interested in. Maybe someday.

10) You have been involved in teaching writing. What is the best advice you were giving about how to succeed as a writer?

Read as much as possible. Write as much as possible. Work to find your inner voice and be true to it. Listen carefully to the advice of others, and then quietly reject most of it.

Tuesday, May 17, 7:30 p.m.
Columbus Performing Arts Center
549 Franklin Ave.
Columbus, OH 43215

Here are the details from The Thurber House:

Join Thurber House for an event you can really sink your teeth into when award-winning author Justin Cronin reads from his hugely popular novel, The Passage. The first in what will be a post-apocalyptic vampire trilogy, The Passage is a relentlessly suspenseful adventure and an epic chronicle of human endurance in the face of unprecedented catastrophe and unimaginable danger. After a breach at a secret U.S. government facility unleashes the monstrous product of a chilling military experiment, it takes little time for the world as we know it to die, and another to be born – a new primal landscape of predators and prey. The Passage has been likened to Stephen King’s vastly popular novel, The Stand.

Cover of The Killing Sea

I am a big fan of Richard Lewis. I Loved his first book and have been enjoying his writing ever since. Maybe it is his unique background, or just his personality, but he brings a different sensibility and viewpoint than most authors – and I enjoy it.

His latest work was self-published as an e-book for reasons discussed below. It might not be economically viable in today’s publishing world but – like all of his books – it is an engaging and entertaining read that I hope you will check out.

BTW, in light of recent events you might want to check out Lewis’s The Killing Sea.  A novel Booklist called “a powerful fictional tale of survival and cooperation in the wake of the 2004 tsunami.”

Richard graciously agreed to answer some questions via email about his books, writing and career.  My questions in bold and his below.

Remind us how you ended up writing young adult fiction in the first place.

I wrote a book for adults called THE FLAME TREE, set in Java, against the backdrop of 9/11, about the friendship of the son of American missionary doctors and a Muslim village boy.  It went on submission after 9/11, adult houses passed, but an editor at Simon and Schuster YA read it and loved it.  I had to cut out some sub-plots, but I still think it’s adult.

And what led to your self-publishing The Last Witch as an e-book?

Essentially, my four YA novels that S&S published didn’t make them money.  My career as Richard Lewis, YA author, was pretty much done–at least in the traditional publishing sense.  One of the brutal (and impersonal) facts of the business.  I had this novel on my hard drive, and I liked it enough to think it should at least have a chance for an audience.

How do you think the ability of authors to sell directly to readers via e-books changes the self-publishing and standard publishing worlds?
Gosh, so much has ink has been spilled, and pixels aglow on blogs and industry websites, about this topic.  As Yogi Berra said, prediction is hard, especially if it’s about the future, so I’m not sure what is going to happen, but I do think some measure of equilibrium between the two will be reached (by standard publishing I mean standard publishing houses publishing both print and electronic editions).  I’ve been honored to be a part of the traditional world.  There is a sense of self-validation in being print published by a major publisher.

What’s happening in the self-publishing world (whether a printed book or an e-edition) is a growing cacophony of noise, and so it seems to me that clever, dedicated, sly, and at times very loud self promotion is key to standing out. People aren’t going to read you if they don’t know you aren’t there.  Unfortunately, I don’t have that personality. I’m a writer–I love writing stories–well, I hate writing stories because it’s a process of continuous, frustrating, hair-pulling dissonance resulting in many nights of insomnia and grouchy mornings, but I do love it too. I’ve always loved putting together puzzles, and there’s nothing like making a story fit together from out of nowhere. But the process is like having ants crawl around in your brain.

The Last Witch has elements of science, higher math, faith/religion, mysticism, etc. All of these elements have appeared in your previous books. Do you use things that might not have been used directly in previous projects or that you “collected” along the way?

Everything that I’ve ever experienced in my life, or heard about, or read about (and I read a TON of non-fiction, love it) is fodder for my imagination, plus my imagination can come up with things on its own.  Being the son of missionaries, who grew up on Bali where the mystical world is just real as the world you see, add in my education in science and math (only to a first year PhD level before I bailed to go surfing), and that’s just the start of what I have to draw on in making up my stories.

As for the LAST WITCH, I’d been doing a lot of reading in science & religion, and the “new atheism” of Dawkins, Hitchens and the other High Prophets of There is No God, plus I’d read Philip Pullman‘s GOLDEN COMPASS trilogy with its atheistic world view, and so I decided to try my hand on the other side of the ledger, so to speak.  Not that I can write like Pullman, but it was a certain aesthetic & world view I wanted to express for myself in a YA story.   (And I’m doing the same again right now, but in an adult novel).  I was not entirely satisfied with the result, but satisfied enough to let it go out into the world, alone with bag slung over the shoulder, to make its way as best it could.

Do you find it a challenge to write from the perspective of a young girl? What helps you capture that voice?

Having a daughter helps an awful lot.

What drew you to Central Park as a setting? So famous and yet probably full of little known secrets and facts.

A huge sprawling park full of nooks and crannies (Eden both pure and corrupted) in a huge sprawling city (Gotham and Babylon)?  What a set-up for a fantasy, for all kinds of what-ifs.  I devoured books and websites on the park, scoured it with Google Earth.  And I might add, I’m not the only writer attracted to that place. A colleague of mine, Lesley Livingston, used Central Park as a principal setting in her terrific faerie novel WONDROUS STRANGE

Do you write with a particular audience in mind (Americans of a certain age, etc.)?
Nope.  The story shapes itself.  Who reads it, reads it.

You like to surf. What comes first writing or surfing?  Do you have a set schedule?

Surf depends on swell, which comes and goes. So if the surf is good, yeah, I probably go surfing before I sit down to write.  I also do a lot of boat trips to outer islands to go surfing.  I don’t write, but I catch up on my reading.  (I can’t wait to get a Kindle and travel with one device with a thousand books on it–but Kindle, and other e-devices, aren’t  available in Indonesia, not just the physical platform, but the downloading service.

What is one thing that surprised you about writing YA and something you find frustrating?

Nothing particularly surprising.  Or frustrating for that matter, except for maybe the increasing PR writers are expected to do.

What’s next? On to “adult” fiction? Can you give us some insight into what you are working on now?

Oh, adult fiction for sure. Last year I wrote a very adult novel on the 1965 massacres in Bali (over 50000 Balinese massacred by other Balinese as a consequence of a Communist-inspired coup attempt in Jakarta, although it’s more complicated than that).  Impossible to get this book traditionally print published at this moment of upheaval, but there is definitely a niche audience, so I will probably get it e-published later this year.

Right now I’m working on a more commercial project, a kind of post-apocalypse set in the States, from New York to Chicago to Vegas to LA. More info later!

Related articles

• The Last Witch of Manhattan by Richard Lewis (collectedmiscellany.com)

You have to wonder, under the circumstances, whether the ambitions of a young conservative novelist would be unreservedly encouraged and diligently nurtured in a contemporary MFA program.

If the answer is no, then the ramifications are profound — and profoundly disturbing. For the issue here runs deeper than the run-of-the-mill ideological browbeating that goes on in college classrooms across the country. Students can always weigh their professors’ rants against more moderate views, and indeed contrary ones, that they hear off campus. But MFA programs now seem to exercise a gatekeeper function. If you don’t pass through one of them, your odds of literary recognition are vastly diminished. It may be that we’re cutting off future generations of conservative novelists at the knees.

That’s not fair. Fairness, though, is a secondary consideration. If conservatives are being denied entrée into the halls of literary production — not by a sinister gentlemen’s agreement but by an inbred ideological disdain — then what we’re cutting off is not just a group of writers, or a political agenda, but an entire sensibility.

Be sure to read the whole thing.

- First, they have a symposium on Shakespeare:

Nobody knows precisely when William Shakespeare was born. It was in 1564, probably a few days before April 26, which definitely was the date of his baptism, as recorded in the parish church at Stratford-upon-Avon. The Bard’s birthday is traditionally observed on April 23, which is also the date on which he died, in 1616.

To celebrate his life, we’ve asked a few NRO contributors to pick their favorite play by Shakespeare and explain why they love it.

- And John J. Miller talks with Maria Tatar, author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, in the latest episode of Between the Covers.

There are some benefits to this book blog.