Reading Nick Antosca’s second novel Midnight Picnic was one of the most intense experiences I had last year. A surreal ghost story (of sorts), set in both a surreal landscape and an immediately, tragically contemporary America, it moved towards its conclusion with an unknowable but clearly present logic. Via email, we discussed process, Antosca’s work past and present, and television advertising for independently published novels.
[Previous interviews in this series can be found here.]
In your interview with Tao Lin for MobyLives, you talk about a number of novels, some of which you’re planning to revisit; what is your process when returning to something that’s been dormant for a while?
I think it’s: Hope something comes to me. I wrote the first few pages of Midnight Picnic something like a year before the rest of it. There’s another manuscript I have lying around that is a trainwreck, and I know what I need to do with it, but I’m occupied by other things right now, so I’ll just wait until the enthusiasm grabs me. I just kind of lay around on the floor a lot, or on the couch or the bed–that’s a lot of what I do with my life–and while I’m sort of mentally fading from one place to another, I’ll get a new idea that makes me super interested in an old idea again.
Do you ever find yourself returning to unseen work for ideas or concepts for new work in progress?
Do I look at stuff that failed and try to harvest cool things from it to use again? Yes, I do that. Sometimes I’ll get an idea for a scene and write a whole story around it just to preserve the scene, but I know the story sucks, and then I just let it sit around for a while and maybe one day take the scene (which I now remember clearly because I wrote it out) and fit it into something else. It’s like I’m saving up the scene for later.
Reading your blog, there’s definitely a sense of community — both the one inherent to the online space and a collection of likeminded writers. Do you find that this has happened by virtue of similar styles or education, or a less defined set of thematic concerns? (I’m thinking specifically of Helen Oyeyemi — I noticed that she was thanked in Midnight Picnic, and at times I was reminded of The Icarus Girl, not necessarily in the setting or themes, but in the shared use of sinister spirit-children and a blurred line between this world and another.)
Oh, interesting. No, I think that’s coincidence. Most of my writer friends don’t have similar educational backgrounds or stylistic inclinations. Midnight Picnic does have things in common with Helen’s sensibility. (Helen btw is a genius. I’m reading a story of hers right now and it’s just chilling.) But my other books don’t really. I met Helen before I had read any of her stuff (or she any of mine). I also have very little in common with, say, Noah Cicero or Karan Mahajan, other people frequently mentioned on my blog. All we have in common is the experience of trying with varying degrees of success to get published and read, I guess. Actually that’s not true. Our tastes are similar; we seem to like ‘strange’ things. I’m not so into the ‘flat affect emo’ style of writing that’s most associated with Tao and that’s been kind of brewing in the indie lit scene for the last few years, although I think Tao is an extremely talented guy. I’d rather read Ray Bradbury than Raymond Carver. If I could be friends with one writer I’m not friends with now, based on talent and writing style, I think it might be Kelly Link, or Alicia Erian.
Do you have a sense of what the response has been to the trailer for Midnight Picnic? (Between it and the news that Drag City is apparently buying some television advertising for the new Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy record, it seems like there’s a rise in the amount of — for lack of a better phrase — independent culture being unexpectedly advertised on television these days.)
People wrote to me saying they liked it, but I assume that the people who didn’t like it wouldn’t write to me… so in general I’m not sure. My friend Fred Guerrier made it really fast and I think he did a good job. I think it’s cool that you can buy TV advertising pretty cheaply from Google. I like the idea that trailers for my book ran during Lost next to car ads or something. Maybe a few people got a kick out of it.
Midnight Picnic brings together a timelessness in its opening chapters with a number of events that are very contemporary. Was that juxtaposition something you consciously sought? And do you have a sense when you’re writing of how a reference might read ten years from now?
I do worry about references being dated, but, like, what are you gonna do? I don’t know. I wonder how American Psycho read when it came out almost 20 years ago. It still reads great now. The truth is I don’t think much about stuff like that as I’m writing. To me the primary point of writing is to experience creative euphoria, which is a very specific feeling of like hunger and aptitude and accomplishment and possibility and incredible momentum all mixed together. Now that’s not the only point, because if it were, getting published would be irrelevant. So the secondary point of writing is to convey that experience in some transmuted fashion to a reader. So what a reader experiences while reading your book should be some distilled version of that euphoria you had while creating it. I don’t know if I’ve said that properly, and I also don’t know how well I’ve succeeded in doing that so far in my writing, but that’s what I believe, and I’m definitely getting better at it.