The things I do...
Interviewer: If you wouldn’t mind just first introducing yourself, and that’s gonna be fun because you’re obviously highly schizophrenic here.
Daniel Handler: That’s right. I’m William Faulkner, winner of the Nobel Prize. A lot of people expect an old Southern man, but…
I: The real question that the audience is gonna be most interested: is it Lemony Snicket, aka Daniel Handler, or Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket?
DH: Well, I would say it’s Daniel Handler, allegedly Lemony Snicket, because Lemony Snicket never shows up, and nobody really has any proof…
I: Okay, that’s a wrap, Sally, we’re outta here.
DH: I don’t blame you. I’ve disappointed a great number of people, in this same living room. Some of whom are married to me.
I: Well, I’m glad we got that ironed out. So, moving on to the substance of our interview… My big question is, I’ve seen it said that as a child you devoted much of your life to taxidermy and playing harpsichord. When did you start writing stories?
DH: I don’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a writer. In the same way that I can’t really remember a time before I could read, or at least before people were reading to me, but it was instantaneous as far as I could tell and I could remember… that I wanted to be a part of literature in some way, and at a very young age I was making up stories and stapling them together, or to try to participate in this world that so impressed me.
I: Have you kept any of those? Do you have any of those?
DH: I have some of them. I’d call them… not the highest productions of mine. « They’re genius! » …But, you know, of course imitative, but I wanted to be in the game immediately with literature, and that’s continually how I feel. But there’s not a story about it, because it was just always something that was happening. Like, « When did you decide you’d sleep in a bed? »
But yeah, I was a voracious reader, and I was also always checking under the hood of literature that I liked… Which is a funny metaphor for me, because I’m totally inept at actually checking under a hood, but…
I: But we all do it. We open up the hood and look…
DH: Yeah. Try it now!
But that’s what I wanted. I wanted to figure out what made literature tick, or what I liked about it, and the older I got the more literature classes frustrated me a little bit, because I was being exposed to all this literature, but I wasn’t really interested in talking about it in the ways that you’re encouraged to talk about it academically. I really wanted to know how it worked, how they did it, and…
I: Can you think of an example? I mean, for me, I remember in fifth grade screaming at my teacher that I thought Animal Farm by George Orwell was stupid because animals don’t talk. She said, I think you’re missing the point.
DH: Right, it’s stupid for many other reasons.
Well, I mean, when I was in high school the first writer I was really loving was Carson McCullers, so I started reading her at about 8th or 9th grade, and I thought that was a kind of magical world of things that I couldn’t quite grasp. I remember that in an English class we were doing The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter, and we were supposed to be examining all this symbolism and this history of the South and how that played into different things and I wasn’t really interested in that. I mean, I thought it was vaguely interesting, but what I was curious about was how that spell that was being cast on me was being cast. I would reread it and I would reread it and I made charts of what happened in each chapter, and I was really trying to figure out how it worked. I kept on doing that, and the older I got, the more I was in a space where that could happen. You know, I was in college and I could begin to talk about writing and think about it that way. When I teach writing classes, what I try to convey is go find your favorite thing and reread it a million times until you figure out how they’re doing it. That’s often a really startling and strange idea to people who want to be a writer, but every writer I know… if you say, « Oh, I like this part of this book that you do! » they’ll say, « Oh, I nicked that from this thing… » And it’s distinguishable from their own work because it’s been transformed and they’ve been thinking about it so many times. But they always say, « Oh yeah, I took that from here. »
I: So, in grade school or high school, did you write any stories that ended up in the paper or circulated?
DH: I wrote a lot of poetry by high school. And in college, poetry was what I was studying.
I: Let me guess, Edna St. Vincent Millay.
DH: Mmmm, no! I mean, she’s good, don’t get me wrong… Elizabeth Bishop was a poet I got really interested in. John Berryman, Adrien Rich… I was really interested in all kinds of poetry, but in college that’s what I was mostly doing. I won a couple poetry contests and things. That also put me at an advantage because I was thinking about small things and how to make them better. I was thinking about how a sentence goes, or… maybe how a sentence doesn’t go. You know, the tricks and flourishes and necessary breaks that poetry requires that you can forget to do in fiction. That helped me a lot, and my poems started getting longer and longer, and kind of narrative, and I was speaking with a man who was teaching me poetry and I said, « I’m having this problem. » And he very gently, in effect, took me across the aisle and said, « I believe you’re participating in this long tradition known as prose, which has the advantage of actually being read by ordinary humans! »
I: And they pay for it too!
DH: Sometimes, yeah! It doesn’t guarantee you a living or anything, but it doesn’t not guarantee you a living, which poetry pretty much does. And it wasn’t as if I was unaware of fiction, and of course I’d always been a big lover of novels, but he said that he thought it was more what I was doing, and it was what I was doing.
I: That’s neat.
DH: Yeah… It is neat.
I: Okay, so, screaming along to those thirty-seven rejection notices, which is almost as many as DH Lawrence before his first…
DH: Yeah, and he turned out fine. Well, he’s dead now…
I: So you went to work on your first books in college, or…?
DH: In college I wrote what I guess we would now call a novella, and then I wrote a novel about a year after college, and I was working hard with Kit Reed, who was really the only person I ever took fiction from and a real mentor for me, and while I was writing this novel, she said to me, « You know, most people who learn how to write a novel end up writing a novel that they throw away. » That’s just how it is, because by the time you figure out how to do it, it’s too late… it’s just that novel. And I remember thinking, « Those poor other people! » That’s what I thought. I thought, surely she’s not talking about me. Thank you for sharing this, but… inferior writers, yeah. It’s sad for them, really! I hope they won’t be too embarrassed when they see me walking around, knowing that I’ve never done that. Uh, so then I threw another book away—I think we all knew where that story was going—and then I started The Basic Eight. So it was kind of my second and a half novel, was The Basic Eight in terms of really working on a long project.
Then, yeah, it was rejected for years by various publishers. I had a literary agent who really liked it, which was already a stroke of luck…
I: And you liked it? You believed in it?
DH: Well, I believed in it as a story, and I believed in it as something that I thought was interesting. I didn’t have any notion of commercial appeal or how that worked. I knew very little about publishing and I still don’t know that much, and I’m still not good at guessing what people are gonna like to read. I mean, it’s hard enough to recommend a book to an individual, let alone some book you think 30000 individuals are gonna buy.
I: John Steinbeck told his publishers, « No one’s gonna read this Grapes Of Wrath, only print 5000, bury it. »
DH: Yeah, the world is littered with such books that we almost lost entirely. So I guess I believed it. I really wanted it, you know. I didn’t have a notion of « someday the world will come to my door ». I thought, « well I sure hope the world comes to my door, because I’m desperate and I don’t know what else I will do. »
I: I didn’t learn auto mechanics like I should’ve!
DH: Yeah, I had no backup plan, which is also a trait in common with so many writers I know, which is that they didn’t have anything else that they felt like they could do, and so it’s more… you’re kind of the last person standing in a way. Other writers fall away, and at least mathematically, that should increase your chances. It still improves them from absolutely nothing to not quite nothing.
I: Tell us about when you learned that it was gonna be published. A letter, a phone call…?
DH: My agent called me and we had a letter from St Martin’s Press offering the least amount of money she’d ever negotiated for a work of fiction. So it was exciting. It was also kind of shocking to me. Not that I’d dreamed of getting rich, but I thought, « Well, it’s one thing to be this desperate and broke when your dreams aren’t coming true, but if you’re this desperate and broke and your dreams are coming true, what in the world are you going to do? » It was kind of for that reason that I listened to an editor who suggested that I might want to read something for children, ‘cause my first novel is about teenagers. It’s not really for teenagers, although plenty of teenagers have found it. They said, « Well, you write about young people, maybe you want to write something for young people. »
I: I have to ask. Is it apocryphal, the story about how you got your name with the telephone call?
DH: No, I was on the telephone with a right wing organization, yeah.
I: It’s so beautiful!
DH: Yeah, I often wonder where she is… the woman who was on the other end of that phone.
I: « Is that spelled the way it sounds? » It’s wonderful! So you’ve learned that you’re gonna be published, you get a book in your hand, what was that like? After all that time, to see your book? Do you remember that?
DH: Yeah, I remember the first time I saw it in a store. I mean, I had it mailed into my hands, and when you have it mailed into your hands, it’s still kind of unbelievable. It’s exciting, but you’ve also spent all this time proofreading and checking it, and you’re kind of tired of it in a way. So it’s not some happy, light-hearted moment that it is in some movies… « Oh look, it’s the first copy, everybody! » But I remember I saw it at a bookstore in New York, and that all the other books looked real, and my book looked like an old shoe or something. Every other book looked like, oh, this is a bona fide piece of literature. And then this looked like, who let that in here?
I mean, it was a great lesson. There were a few things like that that were very good lessons for me to learn that literature is not this kind of tower to which people aspire. It’s just people doing work. Some of it’s great, and some of it isn’t, and nobody can agree on which parts are great and which aren’t, and it’s all work. Things like, « That author’s going through a hard time, so she couldn’t focus on her book as much on her book as possible » can change literary history. So that book isn’t as good, and people didn’t think of her this way, and people are inspired by different things, and then people rediscovered them and thought this and that… That constant tug and pull… Looking at my book and seeing how silly it was made me begin to understand how things like that work.
I: You’re prolific. I mean, your body of work is amazing, and you work obviously a great deal, or… all those people working in that back scriptorium, were those people working on your new books?!
DH: *makes a whipping noise* Faster!
I: So… do you still have the joy in coming up with a story?
DH: Oh yeah, I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t like it. I have the joy and the terror. I have the excited about doing it, and then not feeling like I know how to do it. I mean, it’s the opposite sides of the same coin, I guess, but it’s still the joy of having an idea and then the terror of thinking that I still haven’t got any expertise. So the good news is that I haven’t become jaded when I get excited about starting on a story, but the bad news is that I don’t seem to gain any real skill doing it either, I have to learn how to do it every time. A friend of mine said it was like when you decide you’re gonna try a new recipe, and you have to buy some bizarre ingredient, and then it just lives on your shelf forever. There’s this little jar of this special oil or the special paste, and you know how to make that thing that you learned how to make, but it doesn’t seem to teach you how to make the next thing. I like that, too. It’s good to have a little terror.
I: One of the writers we spoke with, and I don’t recall who, said that in the process of every one of the books he or she has written, there’s this knowledge she’s the most brilliant creature on the earth and has obviously found the ultimate truth, until she’s put that last period on, and then the terror begins of when she sends it out… they’re gonna discover that I’m really an idiot.
DH: Wow. I’m impressed she has that first part! That must feel nice, to feel very confident at any stage of it. No, I usually think… I tell myself that I’m doing the best I can do. That’s how I comfort myself. But I mean, it feels like amateur hour every time to me. But you know, beats working.
I: Yeah, but do you only work what, an hour, half hour a day?
DH: I do get to stop when I think most people want to stop. I usually stop at about 3 or 4, and I feel like that’s where everybody wants to stop, but everyone else has to kind of fake it for a couple more hours.
I: Have you developed over these years a regimen, a discipline?
DH: I guess it doesn’t feel like a regimen, because it’s something that I like to do. I’m not happy if I’m not doing it, so if I have a bunch of days in a row where for whatever reason, if I’m promoting a book or if I have some travel that I need, I’m really really hungry to get back and do it. So it doesn’t feel like a regimen. I don’t know.
I: Would you call it a habit?
DH: I would call it my work, is what I would call it. I mean, I get up in the morning and I have some coffee, I get my kid ready for school, and then I don’t know what else I’m supposed to be doing. I mean, and I like it, I’m eager to get back to it.
I: When you travel or go on a book tour, you’re obviously coming up with an idea or a phrase or something, do you jot these in?
DH: Oh yeah, I keep a notebook with me wherever I go.
I: By hand?
DH: By hand, yeah. I’m not much of a digital notetaker. It’s a long, ridiculous, multistep process, I would say, where I have ideas and I put them in notebooks and when the notebook is full I type it up in a document on a computer, and then I print that out, trying to remember to adjust the margins to 3x5 so I can cut it out and tape it to index cards, and then I move the index cards all around. Then I’m staring at them and starting to write the note on legal pads and then I’m typing the legal pads into my computer, and then I feel like it’s the most securitist route to having a typed text that I could imagine, but I do it.
I: That’s great.
DH: I guess it’s great. I don’t know, it’s what I do.
I: And that’s true for both your adult fiction and children’s work too?
DH: Yeah. There’s so much beauty in writing and rewriting in hand… that you can cross something out and still see it there if you need it later, or you can see what part you fussed over a lot and so you want to check to make sure that it’s not too fussy, and you can see the parts that you haven’t touched at all and you want to check that too. And then you get to sit and type and you’re editing as you go. I don’t know, it’s the way I like. It also makes me really portable, so I work in my office that’s just two feet from here, and then I work in cafés and libraries and things like that, and I don’t need anything. I have a legal pad and a pen and some index cards.
I: In your earliest days, starting, what were some of your most influential writers?
DH: In my early days of childhood, or early days of writing?
I: Either one.
DH: Well when I was a child, it was Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl and Zilpha Keatley Snyder, and you can certainly see traces of all of them in my work now. When I was hitting adolescence it was Carson McCullers and Rachel Ingles, who I still really adore. When I got to college it was Vladimir Nabokov and Virginia Woolf, and then right after college it was Haruki Murakami… but yeah, I’m pretty voracious, and even literature that I’m not that crazy about, I feel that you can steal something from it. There’s always something to take from it.
I: Ann Houston… It’s interesting to say, she said, « Even bad books will teach you good writing. »
DH: Yeah, well, bad books in some ways are more inspirational to me. I mean, the good books nourish me and sustain me and there are plenty of tricks to take from. But it’s a bad book where I think, « You’ve done that entirely wrong. I guess I’d better do it. » I have that feeling. I’m like, if you want something done you’ve got to do it yourself. I mean, A Series Of Unfortunate Events was kind of all born out of a response to terrible children’s books, which insist on delighting you, and it’s tiresome. I’m something of a contrarian, so I get a lot of inspiration from books that I don’t like. The trouble is you gotta keep reading books you don’t like in order to stay inspired.
I: And that just makes you sad and grumpy…
DH: Yeah, then you get uninspired ‘cause you’re reading so many books you don’t like. But if you read a good book, there’s no… It can do good things to your brain and your heart, but for your work, I don’t really know what it does. ‘Cause you think, « Well, that was really good. »
I: What were some of those books that you said you liked to keep at hand and refer to? What are some of those?
DH: Well, it kind of changes book by book. For this pirate book I was really fascinated by a book of William Maxwell’s called Time Will Darken It. So I read that probably three or four times over the course of charting out and writing the first draft of the book. Then I would keep it on my desk to remind myself, « Oh, that’s what you’re doing. » But it’s a really good example of something I kept on my desk until one day I got bored of keeping it on my desk or I forgot it or I went to another town to work… But I generally do that. It’s helpful for me to find something that I’m doing. If I have an idea, I think, « Who did this right? » And then I have to read all these things.
This shelf, actually, above us is books that I’m saving for different projects. You know, they’re just books that I keep throwing up there where I say, « That sounds like the kind of thing I’m working on. So I haven’t cracked that project open yet, but that’s the shelf I reserve for it. And it’s very excited when I get to start on a new project and I get to pull all these books down and look at them and think, « Why did I put this in this pile?? »
I: Great Sanskrit Plays… That’s fascinating.
DH: Yeah, well… I mean, I can’t talk about this at all, and I have no idea what it is, really. But I’m grasping at the hem of an idea here and then I put the put things about the idea there. That’s generally what I do and some of my closest friends who are also writers and I are always saying that to each other. If somebody says, « I’m trying to do a book that does this… » then we’ll say, « Oh, four years ago I read this book, and nobody talks about this J.P. Donleavy book, but it’s the perfect thing that you’re trying to do. » And then I think we’re almost always wrong for each other. We’ll just say, « That wasn’t at all what I meant! » But we’re all thinking that way. We’re all thinking, what did I just read that does the thing well that I want to do? To me, that’s what’s so wonderful about literature, is that it’s there. You can go find it. And also that it’s all there on a page. There’s so much with music where you think, I’m trying to interpret Mozart in this way and I heard there’s this person who interprets Mozart the best way, but the recording isn’t what I want or I didn’t get to hear it… so there’s something ineffable that you can’t grasp. But I just think with writing, it’s either there or it isn’t there. You can go—and this is what I teach my students all the time—if you want to write a book that feels like Mrs. Dalloway, you can read Mrs. Dalloway 12 times. You can outline it, you can talk about what’s being done on every page. You can take those tricks. Maybe they’ll take you a while to fit it into your own rhythm, or maybe you’re not gonna be able to do that, but you can’t say, « If only I knew how she did it. If only I had many examples of Virginia Woolf working. » You do. You have them.
I: You work with students, you teach writing, you write, you write in multiple genres, you’re out on the front cutting edge of storytelling in the world and history right now.
DH: Huh. Okay.
I: Okay, I made that up! That’s not true.
DH: Yeah, I’m listening to the charges being read against me, but I’m neither guilty nor not guilty.
I: But you have given thought, or do you have any opinions about what the future is given—these remarkable changes in technology, the means of transferring information, the way people are reading… what do you think’s going on?
DH: One thing that I’m excited about in what’s going on is that I think the advantage of the web is that you can search. There’s a certain kind of browsing that’s lost, I think. That’s the difference between going to a website that sells books and going to a bookstore. Like if you go to a bookstore and something catches your eye and you thought, oh, I never thought of that.
I: Serendipity.
DH: But if you’re looking for a book—I mean, there used to be books that were out of print that I was looking for, and I would just go whenever I was in a bookstore and look for them. And now, what can’t you find if you want it right away, right? You can find it. Even if you can’t afford a Gutenberg bible, you can find one if you want it. I think there’s a lot of small press action that you can find. You can find really interesting writers who are writing for tiny presses, and they’re young writers who are working entirely outside of the standard publishing system. And that’s exciting to me. I missed that train, kind of, because when I was that age, you could start your own publishing house, but no one knew you were doing it. You couldn’t have people on the web learn of it and do that. And so I’m excited about that. I read a lot of tiny chapbooks and tiny publications, and I like that that’s happening, that you can do that.
I don’t know if some of what feels like new forms and things like that are actually the same old thing. That’s what I tend to think, is that… for this pirate book, for instance, I was just talking about somebody and the pirate book opened to the narrator and the narrator kind of vanishes into the text. And I nicked that from the first chapter of Madame Bovary, which most people forget. It starts with a first person plural narrator. It says, « We were in the classroom and Charles Bovary walked in. » Then it fades after a while and we’re just in the story of the Bovaries. And I thought that was a really interesting, indirect way to introduce people, so you’re not sure who you’re meeting right away and what they mean. I liked that, and Flaubert stole it from a couple of medieval manuscripts apparently, which do that very thing where it just disappears. And it feels very cutting edge, but it’s not. By definition, it’s not cutting edge. I think that with much of that kind of trickery—which means no disrespect for it, it just means it wasn’t invented yesterday, it was invented hundreds of years ago.
I: But it also means when you look under the hood you actually do know what you’re looking at.
DH: I mean, I think I have a sense of how a lot of literature has gone, but it’s an infinite study, so you’re never gonna get a whole grip on the whole enterprise. I write this column for The Believer magazine called What The Swedes Read, where I’m reading one book by each Nobel Prize winning laureate in literature, and the variety and the breadth of material is just astonishing. You know, there’s just… Greek lyric poetry traditions, Finnish epistolary novels, and there’s all this stuff, and some of it is very familiar even if it’s strange and something that you haven’t read. But some of it is utterly beyond the grasp of even what you’re thinking was literature, and that’s really interesting. I think often in America, with mainstream publishing getting so corporate, you have a very narrow view, and suddenly what counts as diversity of literature is actually part of a very strict set of boundaries, and I think small publishers and international publishers and all these things that we have new, quite easy access to now on the web can give us more of an idea. That’s what I feel like is the future, is that interconnectedness is so much easier. When I see hyperlinks and, « Oh, this book has blah blah… » that’s interesting too, but that doesn’t feel like future to me, that feels like a tradition. But the idea that somebody can be inspired by something they read from an entirely different culture that they would have previously been unaware of, but that they can get in the mail in two days and read, or download instantly… that’s exciting to me. That points to something that’s going on.
I: That’s brilliant, that really is. It’s exciting.
DH: Yeah. I was reading about someone who was making a documentary about the New York accent, and that the New York accent is fading, because so many people are going to New York. If you’re born in Nigeria and now you’re living in New York, you don’t sound like a cab driver from 1954, and I like that feeling that everything is recirculating, and that the specificity of micro-cultures stops being taken for the general. You stop thinking, « Oh, everybody’s like this. » You start thinking, « Oh, everybody’s like everybody. »
There’s another thing that did that was this poet Paul Legault, who published this hilarious but then also very philosophically deep book, which was a translation of the complete poems of Emily Dickinson from English to English. So it’s basically one sentence summaries of each Emily Dickinson poem, and what it reminds you is how weird Emily Dickinson is, and how she’s been canonized so much that you can think of her as a lonely woman who wrote in rhyme… and then you read the poems and think, what is she going on about? When you think that one of the nucleuses of American poetry, if not of American literature, is Emily Dickinson, and that she’s a complete nutjob—her poetry is insane—you begin to think, you know what, all good books are crazy. The whole notion of literature is crazy. And it gets normalized so much that you begin to think of Emily Dickinson like she’s somebody cozy on PBS, when actually she’s a crazed rebel. It’s projects like that that I like to be reminded of how spiky and strange a jigsaw literature is.
I: My little soapbox is that storytelling is the one function that separates us from virtually every other living thing on this planet.
DH: As far as we know, anyway.
I: As far as recitations. Whales may be storytellers too, but we’re still working that one out.
DH: I always wonder when we’re talking about differences between humans and other animals, because what do we know what we’re talking about? There might be a great oral tradition of mosquito poetry that we don’t know.
I: I’m fascinated with the paintings in South France from 30000 or 40000 years ago. People talk about them as art, and I think of them as stories. These were storytellers, telling the stories of migrations of the buffalo.
DH: Well, for me it’s why poetry is so interesting to think about, because if you chart the novel—there’s arguments about where it started and where the first novels were, and it goes back—but you can kind of find it. Poetry just disappears. You go backwards, and it’s hitting ritual and religion and art, and no one knows what it is. It’s something somebody was muttering over and over again while they were making food, or it’s something that they drew up on the wall and it reminded them of something, and so much of that painting… I mean, there’s some research that indicates that it was stylized. It wasn’t that they couldn’t draw a more realistic antelope, it’s that they wanted to draw an antelope that looked like that. Now, for what reason, we don’t know. And so that is storytelling, but I think it’s connected to everything else as well. I mean, all storytelling is is one thing after another. It’s things that are linked together and we’ve decided that they go in an order or we’ve decided that they add up to something or that they mean something.
I: And our culture has a certain order… Eskimo culture has a different order...
DH: Yeah, when you read all the ancient epics, they’re all insane. Then there began to be Pythagoras, who said, « Okay, okay, we gotta get everything arranged! » Which is good. It’s good news when you’re seeing a play, because you know that it’ll be over soon, but it might be bad news for other forms of literature.
I: A round of applause for that remark. So: recommendation, thought, brilliant insight to give to an aspiring young writer who comes to you and says, « Dear master, give me one sentence… »
DH: For aspiring young writers? Stop watching other writers on YouTube! How about that? Get back to work!
But no, I think… to look at what you like, and figure out how it works, will make you be the kind of writer you want to be. That’s what I think, and there’s an infinite number of perspectives to write from, and so you have you to see what you like and how it works.
And to get to work! We don’t know anything. We writers on YouTube, we have no idea what we’re talking about.
I: You made all this up anyway, didn’t you?
Well, we’ve covered all the topics that we want to do, and I know that you’re pressured for time. We want to really thank you for taking the time.
DH: My pleasure. Thanks for the cookies.
Well, we’ve covered all the topics that we want to do, and I know that you’re pressured for time. We want to really thank you for taking the time.
