Quickie Q & A with failbetter Author Grant Ginder
We try to be a full service journal over here at failbetter, anticipating your wants and needs as readers before you are even wanting or needing. That's what 2 or 3 Questions is all about--and now, it's Grant Ginder's turn in the hot seat.
1) Which has been better for your writing: Being a speechwriter, working for a literary agent, or teaching expository writing?
They've all been good for my writing in different ways, to be honest. I think speech writing was the first job that taught me the importance of narrative -- how a story, or the sense of an arc, is necessary to draw in an audience. And also, obviously, the importance and ability to write in different voices that speech writing teaches is invaluable when it comes to creating new and distinct characters. Still, though, when we're talking about what's been better for my writing, I've got to say being a literary agent (as much as I'm loathe to). In many ways, it was a wholly depressing job; seeing how the sausage gets made, so to speak, can be devastating. That said, I read a ton, and a lot of that reading was from potential clients. I very quickly gained a sense of what I responded to as a reader, and as a writer -- what got me excited, so to speak -- and (more importantly) how to incorporate those elements into my own work without sacrificing my nature as a writer.
2) Where did the awesome image that the excerpt ends with come from?
I'm assuming you're talking about the house built out of records, right? Really, I think it came from a few places. For starters, I'm sort of obsessed with memory (as this excerpt, and the rest of the book for that matter, shows), and the physical traces of memory. I'm also really interested in jazz. I don't know anything about it -- I mean, absolutely nothing -- but I've always had this sort of visceral response to it, so the prospect of doing a little research on the topic was exciting (the fact that Wylie Avenue in Pittsburgh used to be such a hotbed for music made it that much more fun to research). So, right: the two threads sort of came together into the idea of records, of vinyl. And I got to thinking: Okay, what could Alistair, the grandfather, do with these records to preserve memory, or to use memory to protect it from itself, and the idea of a house built out of records struck me.
3) How does being from Orange County inform your writing and your existence?
Well, Tamra Barney and the rest of the cast of Bravo's The Real Housewives of Orange County regularly read and edit my work. Also, whenever I go home to visit my parents (I've lived on the east coast since I was 18), I always get sand in my laptop (I write on the beach). I'm kidding about all that, of course. Orange County is a place with (probably rightfully so) a lot of negative stereotypes: plastic surgery, suburban sprawl, a fuckload of foreclosures, etc. It's also, of course, a very beautiful place. And I guess it was interesting growing up with that tension -- that idea that beneath such a beautiful place was all this hilarious (and sad, maybe) absurdity. But I think you can find absurdity anywhere, if you look hard enough. I mean, I suppose it says something that when I turned 18 and went off to college, I got the hell out of Dodge and haven't moved back. Still, at the end of the day, I think I'd be lying if I said Orange County has had this drastic impact on my existence and my writing. If anything, I look at it with this sort of comfortable ambivalence.
