Interview: Beautiful Days by Zach Williams

Zach Williams’s debut short story collection, Beautiful Days, which we reviewed last year, was named a Best Book of 2024 by The New Yorker, was a finalist for the 2025 California Book Award for First Fiction, and was longlisted for the 2025 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize. In this interview, Joanna Acevedo talks with Williams about his drafting process, as well as his writerly interests and influences.

Joanna Acevedo: I saw a few of these stories in draft form while we were classmates at NYU (“Wood Sorrel House,” “Lucca Castle,” and a few others feel familiar). What is your drafting process like, and how do you decide when a story is ready to publish?

Zach Williams: It’s different every time. And lately it feels like I’ve had to relearn the basics of drafting—I spent so long revising the story collection, I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to initiate a new project. Some of those stories, too, are a little mystifying to me now: Why did I write about this, or how did I decide to do that? It’s not always easy to remember. What I’ve just recently rediscovered is that the best way to start, for me, is in a spirit of fun, or adventure. By which I mean that it’s best when a story gives you the energy to want to fuck around some, to try and be a little audacious. Like, what happens when I push this button? That’s a good feeling or sensibility to start with. And that kind of fun, to me, doesn’t mean frivolity or whimsy or even lightness. It’s a state in which highly varied things become possible, when things flow very easily into the story. Donald Barthelme wrote about what he called not-knowing, the operating position from which, in a draft, you are at liberty to surprise yourself precisely because you don’t know what comes next. That’s part of what I mean by fun. When it’s going well, you can’t sleep at night because your mind is racing. I like that feeling. My sense is that you build to that state in a given project through routine, continuing to try even when it’s going badly. As far as routine is concerned, I like ambient music, my internet blocking app, and tea.

Knowing when a story was finished was one of the hardest things for me. I was always hoping someone would just tell me. My sense now is that if I’m still asking the question, then it’s probably not done. What I had to learn was the glacial timescale on which that question gets resolved.

How do you feel about the short story form versus the novel, and do you think a novel is something you could ever consider? Your short stories are so expansive, you do so much in such a short space, you’re almost more effective here than most novels ever hope to accomplish.

That’s so kind of you to say! I love writing short stories. You can start with just one image or idea, something from the subconscious, without having to know what it means. And when they get longer, they feel to me like episodes, or affairs. A night at the opera. With some of the stories in the collection, I didn’t know what they were when I started them. I wasn’t planning in that way. I kept writing things that came out at inconvenient lengths, twelve or fifteen or twenty thousand words. If any one of them had started to feel like it wanted to go longer, then maybe I would have tried to write a novel. But at that time, I was drawn to the short story form in part because I wanted to do a lot of different or even incongruous things. I didn’t have one basket for all the eggs.

But yeah, I’d like to write a novel. One of the projects I’m working on now started as a short story but might be turning into one. That shift had to do with the kinds of sentences I was able to admit into the draft. I had a sudden idea one night, after months of poor progress, about a different formal approach, a slight change in perspective. And then not only was it much easier to write, but it started to move in other directions that felt vital while having less to do with plot or scene. I liked writing in those directions, and some of that work in turn suggested other digressions, other branches. I started to see how I could find a novelistic rhythm for the project. That was a new feeling. In the story collection, I wanted everything to move as quickly as possible. Now I feel the pleasure of slowing down. I thought about that recently while reading Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I love the passages in that book that are drawn from Bruno’s letters about Neanderthals. It felt like a reminder—oh, right, novels can accommodate things like this. You see that and want to try it yourself.

Your protagonists tend to be loner types, bookish and at the fringes of society. Why are these the voices you are drawn to? Is there a particular question you’re trying to answer as you approach these characters and their lives?

In this particular batch of stories, I kept writing characters who just don’t feel existentially comfortable, somehow or other. Maybe in ways they’d struggle to articulate. I remember reading that Steven Spielberg said he made Close Encounters of the Third Kind out of a deep-seated longing to fly off in an alien spaceship. I’d bet a lot of people can relate to that. And, yeah, some of the characters in the book feel something similar. There’s a quote attributed to Timothy Leary in Robert Anton Wilson’s Cosmic Trigger: “Most so-called ‘neurosis’ is best analyzed as somebody programmed to play football wandering around in a baseball field.” When I started writing the collection, I’d been working as a school teacher for a number of years, and in a lot of ways I was ill-suited to the job. The introverted part of me struggled with the constant performance. I didn’t want to be an authority figure. Maybe it’s just that I was younger, but I drank a lot then. Over time I developed severe insomnia. So there are also things in the book that draw on those feelings of insufficiency. But I like characters who are uncomfortable, who are trying to figure something out, not least because then I can try to figure it out with them. Maybe I can help.

There’s a layer of absurdity in many of these, and it becomes a natural bridge into the magical realism you veer into, the supernatural becoming a kind of mysterious element that propels the plot forward. Can you speak to this theme in your work and why you reached out of pure realism to portray what you were trying to speak to?

Writing outside of realism has always felt natural to me. That stuff is just what’s around me, what’s available to be picked up. The stories I wrote as an elementary school kid were about aliens and interdimensional portals and things like that. So I don’t do it with any particular purpose in mind, or on any sort of principle. With that said, I feel a deep gratitude to the writers who broke that ground and made it easy for me to write that way. I read plenty of genre sci-fi when I was younger, but then in high school I read Naked Lunch, and that was a turning point. I like when fantastical or unreal elements in writing seem like a form of looseness, or expressiveness. A swerve into the speculative can feel like a kind of boundary-crossing, or even like the dissolution of a story’s boundaries, a way of making the story porous. At some point while working on the collection I began to think about the stories as explorations of various states. In that way, a story’s world can be a kind of projection or spatialization of a particular feeling. I think it feels natural to speak to certain feelings—anxiety, dissociation—with narrative elements that aren’t “real”

Who were your influences as you worked on this collection? Did your time in the MFA contribute to your completion of these stories?

I learned a great deal in the MFA. I went in a little cynically, thinking I mainly needed time in which to be left alone. And then I encountered all these incredible teachers who showed me how to read like a writer, which isn’t something I knew at that point how to do. My reading life was weird, too, when I worked as a teacher—I spent so much time re-reading the same books every year. So when I started in the MFA, there were a lot of writers I was reading for the first time who had an outsized impact on the way I thought about stories and sentences. I think of Joy Williams, Yoko Tawada, Amy Hempel, George Saunders, Samuel R. Delany, Percival Everett, Anna Kavan, Gerald Murnane, and Katie Kitamura, among others. And then Annie Baker—seeing her play, John, in 2015, was one of the most ecstatic art-experiences I’ve ever had. That was the year I started working on the collection in earnest and that did a lot, I think, to inform my trajectory. I read Jonas Eika’s After the Sun when it came out in 2021 and was deeply inspired by it. I was revising the collection at the time, figuring out what to leave in and what to take out, and I thought, I want my collection to be like that. Outside of fiction, I was reading Douglas Rushkoff, Erik Davis, Jeffrey J. Kripal, Patrick Harpur, and Whitley Strieber. And I’m always reading books on UFOs—that’s the reading I do most compulsively.

I also thought a lot about putting a story collection together like an album. Early on, I listened to Flood Network by Katie Dey over and over. And Devi McCallion—all the work she’s done under various project names. And Alex G. And Deerhoof—the way they put a set of live music together. Phish, too, especially from the early 90s. I thought a lot about artists who can take really varied things and hold them all together with some underlying feeling or energy.

And David Lynch. Twin Peaks season three came out while I was drafting.

Where do you see yourself going next?

I hear that question very literally. We’ve been in California for four years now, but my teaching position here will be ending soon. We’ll probably go back east. Lots of family and friends in the Mid-Atlantic. But I’m working on what might be a novel, as I said, and then I have several other projects waiting. Stories, as well as few essays. I just need more time. I always feel behind.