The Goldberg Brothers, pt. 2

Here's some more questions and answers from Lee and Tod...

Lee: How do you begin thinking about a novel? Does it start with a character? An image? A situation? A scene? And at what point do you make the decision to commit to writing it or toss it aside and start thinking of something else? Which do you prefer writing...short stories or novels? For you, creatively, what are the pluses and minuses of each?

Tod: All of my stories—be they novels, or short fiction, or, to some extent, even my nonfiction—begin with a character. I'm a fairly vain man, as you know, and since I primarily write in first person, the character invariably has to be someone I'd like to spend time with or someone I wish I was. That doesn't mean they have to be nice, or moral, or even attractive, but at some level they should be compelling to me and should have enough going on internally and externally to keep me interested for the year or two I'll spend writing the novel or for the month I'll spend writing the story.

What's weird, however, is that if you look at my books, you can kind of see the issues I was going through personified in the characters. When I was writing Fake Liar Cheat, I was a dumb punk who thought literary fame was on his doorstep and Richard Ford, Paul Auster, John Irving and, hell, Fanny Flagg just for good measure, should just get the hell out of the way and clear some shelf space, dammit. When I was writing Living Dead Girl, I was older, recently married, and confronting the ostensible REST OF MY LIFE. And the short stories in Simplify run the gamut over such a long period of time, nearly 10 years, that my evolution as a writer and as a person start to become clear. Though, uh, upon re-reading those stories, I apparently have dad issues...

On a purely artistic level, I prefer to write short stories. It's an intense and driven process for me and I like that in a month, I'm usually done with it, have rewritten it and am already prepared to have someone pay me next to nothing for it. A novel, on the other hand, is a living thing. What I write on page one and what I write on page 200 may be separated by a year or more in time and I often find myself overwhelmed by that sense. But there's no better feeling than printing out that final copy and typing A Novel By Tod Goldberg across the cover page.

How is it that we both grew up in the same house and yet we both write such dramatically different things? People always ask me if I see similarities in our work, but I rarely do, other than that we are prodigious killers of fictional people and that we've both set novels in the same exact place (Loon Lake, WA). Why do you think we write such different kinds of books?

Lee: I'm still trying to figure out the Loon Lake thing. It's like our family's collective unconscious (our uncle also set part of his novel at Loon Lake). You don't know this, but I also have fifty pages of a torrid, James M. Cain-esque novel set at Loon Lake that I started writing three or four years ago and never finished. Before I gave up on it, I scrawled the key plot points on a napkin in case I ever wanted to get back to it. It was as if I knew I was going to abandon it even before I did. Well, I didn't entirely abandon it. I think about it ever few months and I lifted a paragraph or two from it for The Man With the Iron-On Badge, so those fifty pages weren't a complete waste.

But to answer your question, we write different books because we are different people. Given a choice between reading a literary novel or a thriller, I'll choose the thriller most of the time. You'll choose the literary fiction. That's not to say I don't read non-crime/non-genre novels...I do. We share some of the same favorite authors. But I love thrillers, mysteries, and westerns—basically, escapist fiction—with a passion that you clearly do not.

Maybe it has to do with TV. I was a voracious reader as a kid, but I also grew up watching a lot more TV than you did and developing a true love of the four-act structure. Maybe watching all that TV shaped what I expect from a story...a kind of narrative engine, conflict, and personal stakes that aren't always found in literary fiction. Or I'm just superficial.

The only similarity I see in our work is our sense of humor. We have different writing styles but even so I still see the same approach to humor, the way we present a joke or create a funny situation (whether in dialogue or prose).