Matthew Salesses selected S. P. Donohue’s “Curious Monster” as the 2nd place finalist in the 2023 Novel Excerpt Contest. Donohue’s terrific excerpt was published earlier this week; be sure to read it if you haven’t yet, and then check out our interview with the winner below.
There are plenty of important technical decisions in here, but the one that captured my attention most (perhaps simply because it’s our introduction to everything) was the use of the reflective, far-in-the-future narrator that drops us into this story. That allows you to use first-person almost as an omniscient narrator capable of floating between the narrator’s previous year of college, general family information, and occasional albeit brief moments after the trip. What led you to that choice?
When I first began writing this novel I was using a third-person perspective to achieve the distance I thought I wanted on the character. This choice was functional, but I couldn’t seem to get the tone right. Something was off. Eventually I realized that a huge part of the story I wanted to tell was the way in which time can change our view of things but doesn’t necessarily render our judgments straight or true like a wobbly line that self-corrects. I needed Mina’s ongoing struggle to understand her mother and herself to be part of the telling. Once I started experimenting with the first-person perspective, the narration took on an intimacy it hadn’t had before, and that’s what had been missing.
I found myself thinking a lot about the physical spaces this story was inhabiting, both large and small, as we moved from the posada to the zócalo to Monte Albán. Can you talk a little about the setting, and how you view its role in this piece—is it important because it’s not-home and so unfamiliar, are there pieces of character or plot that could only have been revealed/happened in this place specifically, etc?
The novel actually began with Oaxaca, before I had the characters or the story. I’d traveled there years before, it was my first time in Mexico, and the intensity of the stimulation in that new environment stayed with me, especially the sensory experience—the smells of food and flora, the juxtaposition of the lush gardens and the arid mountain plateau. Travel can release us from our habits—the way we think of ourselves and our lives—so that we sometimes feel capable of profound change; but what would happen if someone did in fact enact a great change? Mina and her mother drop down into a location that’s equally unfamiliar, but whereas Mina finds she’s in the same awful predicament as before the holiday, her mother does what many of us wish we could, abandoning her old life to discover herself shiny and new.
I’m assuming that these are the opening pages of your novel (although I suppose I can’t be 100 percent sure of that, the epigraph and chapter title sure do seem to suggest it heavily), but did you do anything to make them work as a standalone? Was the idea of an excerpt, of these pages being a self-contained piece, part of your thought process at all as you were editing these pages, or does the inherent pull of an introduction make it stand alone already?
Yes, these are the opening pages of the novel and shaping them into a somewhat self-contained excerpt was surprisingly smooth. Working on it was really an opportunity to imagine the reader’s experience and make edits to sharpen the writing. I did want to provide the excerpt with a kind of preliminary disposition and did some cutting and compressing to get the story to a particular moment that might provide that within the word count.
Since this is a contest geared specifically to the excerpt, I feel like I have to ask: What do you view as the responsibility of an excerpt? What does it need to do to successfully function as a piece of literature on its own (or, I suppose, does it?)?
Some novel excerpts can read like short stories, complete unto themselves, but I knew that mine couldn’t do this, at least not within the given length restriction. It relies heavily on the context of being part of a novel to work. An excerpt can be tricky: by definition it’s incomplete, yet you want it to do in fewer words what the novel does in hundreds—or at least to suggest what the novel will do. I’d say that an excerpt, though, has less wiggle room than, for example, a first chapter: as a reader, I can feel overwhelmed if an excerpt gives too much information, and I find that I have less tolerance for confusion and meandering. So maybe an excerpt needs to have the ambition of the novel but the directness of a short story. Certainly I think we all want satisfaction from an excerpt just as we would from a short story—a sense that we’ve encountered something exhilarating that comes to a resting place at the end. But it still needs to tease.
I’m that annoying guy at the reading that always wants to ask the two super-cliché questions, so apologies in advance. First, can you tell us a bit about your writing routine? (mornings with coffee pecking at the keys; ten hours in front of a keyboard every day; chunks when inspiration strikes, et cetera?)
I have a great deal of variation in my writing routine depending on the time of year. When I’m teaching, I find it a challenge to do much of my own work, both because of time constraints and the way that my students compel my attention. I love my faculty work, but it does tend to expand into the nooks and crannies of my days. So I do most of my writing in the summer months, when I have no other obligations and can set my own schedule. Most days will have several hours of writing, sometimes at a noisy café, depending on my mood. I have this ability to concentrate even when there’s a lot of background noise, and sometimes prefer that atmosphere when the work is difficult or slow. I think the noise distracts the part of my brain that wants to judge what I’m writing.
Second, beyond writing routine, what about your writing process? Are you a seventeen drafts before your first reader sees it kind of writer, or does it all flow brilliantly to fountain pen on first thought (someone someday will reply yes to that, I’m sure), or do you write a single sentence a million times until it’s perfect, or…?
I’m a dense and slow writer—meaning, it takes me forever to see what the unfolding story is. So I’m constantly re-working scenes and scrapping entire sections when I have a brilliant revelation, only to do the same thing all over again when I have an even more brilliant revelation. It’s a kind of blindness interrupted by sudden flashes of insight. I don’t naturally think in plot. I never know the whole story before I start writing; with a short piece, I might know a mood, a moment, an image, maybe a scenario, and everything has to spring from that. For a novel, I’ll have the primary situation before I start working. Then I feel my way along. My roots are in poetry and I think this way of working is how I think—using language and pattern and image to investigate. When I’m having trouble moving forward, I’ll go back and revise my sentences until I recognize what comes next, so by the time I’ve finished a full first draft, all the writing has already been heavily revised. It takes an eon to produce that draft. This is not an ideal way to work, it seems to me, if you want to produce a lot. Every fiction writer I know who works in a similar way wishes they didn’t.
This excerpt is so much fun to read, and certainly does great work in whetting my appetite for the full work; obviously avoiding spoilers, is there anything you’d like to tell us about the novel?
Well, things are always darkest before they go pitch black—the late Senator John McCain liked to say that. Which is not to equate his suffering with Mina’s. But when you’re seventeen, every sharp surface can feel like a knife.
Interviewed by Brandon Williams