Steve Erickson: For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because...

Strip away the morphing landscapes and rips in the space-time continuum, and my stories are about things that novels have always been about: love and sex and identity and memory and history and redemption.

Steve Erickson

rip memories sex

If you're a smart writer, you listen.

Steve Erickson

smart ifs

These days in particular it seems not only unavoidable but even irresponsible to not acknowledge politics in some way.

Steve Erickson

these-days acknowledge way

To me experimental fiction ultimately is about the experiment and I'm not interested in experiments for their own sake, and if anything I've always steered a bit clear of that kind of thing, because it seems gimmicky to play around with text rather than do the work of telling a story and creating characters.

Steve Erickson

creating play character

In essence I'm really a very traditional writer. I subscribe to the notion that, ultimately, characters do drive everything else.

Steve Erickson

notion essence character

My own personal experience has become more first-hand.

Steve Erickson

my-own hands firsts

The material dictates the approach.

Steve Erickson

materials approach

Certainly the last thing I want is to be "difficult."

Steve Erickson

difficult lasts want

I tell the stories in the way that feels natural to tell them.

Steve Erickson

natural stories way

Western music is arguably America's greatest contribution to the 20th century, cultural or otherwise.

Steve Erickson

western-music century america

The last thing I want is that sense of artifice - rather I want the reader drawn into the story and lost in it and vested in it. So the emotional connection is everything, albeit a connection on my terms.

Steve Erickson

connections emotional stories

With a few exceptions like Kraftwerk, most great 20th century Western music is in some way American-based. And the great paradox of America, the paradox that distills America, is that this greatest of American contributions to humanity, this American contribution that probably has influenced more people around the world for the good, that probably has brought more people around the world unqualified joy, was born of America's greatest evil, slavery. Or one of the two great evils anyway, counting the European extinction of those who were on the continent first.

Steve Erickson

two america people

Being a man of taste and sophistication, the 80s were objectively, quantifiably, empirically, diagram-it-on-a-blackboard the worst decade in the history of recorded music.

Steve Erickson

diagrams taste men

Out of the house and on my own, I faced the fact I didn't much like who I was. I didn't like my judgmentalism; I didn't like my absolutism. I didn't like my repression of natural empathy, my pinched lack of emotional generosity. How I had been thinking politically had less to do with what was wrong with the world and more to do with what was wrong with me, with my fears and insecurities, failings, weaknesses.

Steve Erickson

generosity emotional thinking

Obviously cheap sentimentality isn't something any good novelist wants to traffic in, but I think it's a problem if you consider it to be the most egregious of all creative sins. I think it's a problem if you consider it the thing to be avoided at all cost. I think it's a problem of you're not willing to risk the consequences of that kind of emotionalism under any circumstances. Then you wind up in the cul-de-sac of irony.

Steve Erickson

creative wind thinking

While a particularly deft sense of irony may be one of the tools of great storytellers, I think it's also true that if irony serves as a retreat from an emotional engagement that you're overly concerned is uncool, that's a failure of nerve.

Steve Erickson

nerves emotional thinking

Is the humanism intuitive or labored over?, the answer is: Yes. It begins intuitively, it becomes the reason for writing the thing, and then it's to be considered and fine-tuned and even calculated.

Steve Erickson

reason answers writing

In terms of America, I think any profound consideration is bound to return us to the notion of twins because, though you certainly can contend there are many Americas, our history has been binary from the beginning, with its hairline fracture down the country's center between what American has wanted to be and what America has been. That fracture is slavery, of course. To some extent it's still slavery, in that collectively we refuse to come to grips with the American fact of slavery.

Steve Erickson

country america thinking

In the end I write the novels I need to write when I need to write them.

Steve Erickson

ends writing needs

While I do believe I become a technically better writer over time, in others ways writing gets harder because inspiration is finite.

Steve Erickson

inspiration writing believe

For better or worse I'm the writer I am today because of hearing those Dylan records. For better and most certainly not for worse, I'm the person I am today because of hearing Charles.