If you haven’t yet read Austin Tucker’s prize-winning piece, “The Increasingly Unfortunate Circumstances Which Have Led Me To Wave You Off The Highway,” stop what you’re doing and read it now. And once you’ve finished, continue on below for our interview with the winner!
How did you land on the current title? Did you intentionally want something long for a flash piece?
A great piece of advice I got early on was “the weirder the set-up, the more work the title has to do.” I don’t know if that’s totally a truism, but it has helped guide my thinking. For me, titles are a special little gravestone that can preface the deeper concerns of a piece—they can demonstrate voice, tone, and pacing all before the main show starts. I pinned this one down right after the shape and voice of this thing formed. I was at the bar scribbling it out and laughed about it a little, which is always a good sign, and I remember thinking that I was ripping off “The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret.” Either way, that tends to happen a lot—I get the shape or voice, and the titles come as a result of that, which then helps inform the direction when I go back to revise. It’s a little ouroboros. It wasn’t intentional as a kind of flash piece irony, but I think with how much energy the voice has to hold up, it gives the reader a little more buy-in early on.
I’m curious about what the revision process for this piece was like. It reads like it all came out in a single (lucky) moment, but that’s not usually true.
The core voice and shape of the piece came from one sitting, but the concerns in the piece really came out through revision. I tend to write in big bursts—I won’t get anything good going for a few weeks and then one day I’ll crank out the bones of two or three things that I like. This was in a Burst Era. The good thing about that kind of propulsion is you can get into a sort of frenzy capturing that voice—it’s one of the few really good feelings in writing. The bad thing is that revising something from that frenzied feeling is often pretty tedious because you don’t want the energy that you captured to bottom out because you were freaking out about plot or something. In the beginning stages, I really imagined this as someone looking into a camera doing a monologue and that just didn’t work. There had to be someone for all the hurt to collide with, which is where the you came from. I think that unlocked how I was seeing the piece—a frantic, one-sided conversation with someone who is clearly having a bad couple of years.
This piece feels very voice-driven. Did the voice come to you first, or was it the scenario?
Voice always comes first for me, I think because I’m not really a great plot writer. Finding a voice and squeezing myself into it tends to feel more organic—it comes with more surprises, gets me mashing up thoughts or phrases I wouldn’t normally mash up. I really need the writing process to come from that fiery place and leaning hard into a voice right when it starts to manifest is the only way to keep me in the chair. The scenarios often fall into the architecture later because the voice leads me toward those concerns. In this case, the voice felt burdened by the heavier and heavier weight of being alive, and so I fell back on when I most felt like that: working at a call center six days a week, with a boss named Preston (hey!), driving twenty-five minutes in a car with a busted radio. The scenario is important scenery, but the voice is what drives you to your destination and asks if you don’t mind if they smoke in the car.
I really like the ending of this, where we shift from a more internal stream-of-consciousness to an interaction. For me, this is where the piece turns to the universal. Was this always your ending?
No, definitely not. I’m a big believer in endings—for me, they matter more than the meat of a piece a lot of the time. I think that’s because I come from a poetry background where there’s less written real estate and the ending has to really pop or else the poem falls apart. The original ending was the speaker calling out of work and to be totally real, that ending sucked. It was tacked on in the initial writing stages so I could feel like the bones were there. The turn outward to the you came in the third or fourth pass of this piece—I wanted something a little risky to shove the piece out of the stream-of-consciousness and into the arms of the Real World.
What’s your writing process like? Are you an every-day-same-time writers, or a write-when-you-can person?
God, I wish I were an every-day writer! But I’m not. I’m a walk-around-and-drink-a-lot-of-coffee-until-my-eyes-hurt kind of writer, which means I’m often doing a lot of thinking about writing and not a lot of writing. I have to be not-at-home, I have to have an incredible amount of noise. I write in bars a lot, or while watching movies. I have to be in some kind of state where I’m not resistant which is to say I’m often trying to trick myself into writing, which sounds easy but does not feel easy. Writing can be profoundly unenjoyable. When a really good line hits me, I have to stop what I’m doing immediately to try and pin that voice down or else it’s gone. There’s not a lot of magic in looking at the lines I jotted down in my notes app or something two weeks later.
What else are you working on?
Right now, I’m finishing a poetry collection tentatively titled I Feel Like Shit, and a novel about a bunch of call center employees. I also write essays about the politics of time in labor, attention, and acceleration, but that’s for the freaky people who are into political or cultural theory. Let’s stick with the fun stuff.
Interviewed by Jen Dupree