The Gerhold Lecture Series featured novelist Michael Cunningham as its 2015 feature speaker this week. In a Question and Answer session, Cunningham fielded a series of questions from Capital students and faculty. The Chimes was given the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Cunningham after the session.
Scott: At what point in your life did you realize you wanted to become a writer?
Michael Cunningham: The idea of writing came when I was in college. It is hard for me to imagine anyone ever wanting to be a writer if they are not a reader first.
S: Do you have particular authors who you found to be influential to your style of writing?
MC: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor, and Cormac McCarthy are all fantastic. I read Marilyn Robinson’s ‘Housekeeping’ when I was in college and it changed my world. ‘Jesus’ Son’ and ‘Train Dreams’ by Denis Johnson were influential for me. I encourage everyone to read Jayne Ann Phillips’s ‘Black Tickets.’ Don DeLillo I believe just writes the greatest and most beautiful sentences.
S: What was it about Woolf’s ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ that made such an impact with you?
MC: It was Mrs. Dalloway as a character. I wasn’t bookish at all growing up, more skateboard than literary. When I was 15 years old, Mrs. Dalloway was suggested to me by a girl. It was the first great book I ever read. It clicked on a light bulb in my head and turned me around. I had no idea you could do something so beautiful with this language. It was the first [novel] that stayed with me in a way no other book has.
S: What was the most important thing to come out of your time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop?
MC: By far the most important thing was spending those two years in an enclosed world where writing mattered more than anything else. Most of the rest of the world, especially when you are a young, unpublished, and still finding a voice, doesn’t really care about what you are doing. It was the immersion for two years in a world where nothing else mattered as much as a just a beautiful sentence. I was a part of a group of writer friends there and we all shared our stories with each other, getting different perspectives. Even years after our time together in Iowa, we are still sharing work with each other. It was important to give input from writers outside of the faculty.
S: What aspects of your novel ‘The Hours’ do you believe made it so powerful and worthy of your Pulitzer Prize in fiction?
MC: Certainly it is true that with any prize, especially the Pulitzer Prize, I am happy to have it, but I must keep it in perspective. The way the Pulitzer Prize works is that books are chosen by committee of three that changes every year, and they nominate three books each year. After the winner is announced, they reveal the names of judges. [The year I was awarded] one judge was a critic for the LA Times, another was a writer whom I admired and whose work mine was similar to, and I realized it was just the right jury for me that year. The other two nominations were very good books and with a different jury, ‘The Hours’ would not have been chosen. I am incredibly grateful, but I make sure not to get carried away with it.
S: You wrote a screenplay for Susan Minot’s ‘Evening.’ What was that experience like, and how was writing screenplays different from writing novels?
MC: I like writing screenplays; they’re a funny hybrid of creativity and puzzle-solving. Screenplays have to be a certain length. They can’t be 45 pages nor 400 pages. They need to be constructed in three acts. If you see a movie without a plot reversal in the third act, it can be hard to watch. It really is a smart assessment of our attention-span as humans. Screenplays are creative but they’re also like a crossword puzzle. I admire Susan enormously and one thing I learned was I don’t think I would ever adapt a novel that I admire as much as I admire ‘Evening’ because you do have to change it. You have different sensibilities and capabilities as different writers, and it can feel like I’m betraying Susan’s novel. But it really was enjoyable, and in fact, I am starting on one now.
S: What has been your most memorable experience to come from your career as a writer?
MC: I can’t point to one particular experience but [as a published writer] you get letters from people who have been affected by your books. They are total strangers from all over the place. It is the most unambiguous satisfaction. It really is the letters from readers that mean the most to me.
S: What is it about writing that you enjoy the most?
MC: I feel like I’m doing the work I was meant to do. I am sure every writer would say that, but I suspect every writer would also say there are days when you love writing, and other days when you hate it. You have on-days and off-days. I feel compelled to [write]. I can’t imagine doing anything else. You always want books to be better than they are, but that’s just a part of the deal.
S: What advice would you give to students interested in writing and aspiring writers trying to get their foot in the door in the creative world?
MC: Don’t give up. It is the only advice I have, but it is serious advice. It took me ten years to get any recognition. I went to graduate school and had a group of close friends who were all gifted writers. Over time, the only difference between me and some of them is that I wouldn’t stop [writing]. The rest of them, as talented as they were, drifted off as the rejection slips piled up and full-time jobs got in the way to the point they just gradually stopped writing.
Student-asked questions
Question: There is a social media movement of growing popularity, the National Novel Writing Month, in November. What are your thoughts about this movement?
MC: I didn’t know about it, but that’s great! One of the fantastic things happening now is the internet. If you are a novelist, or short story writer, you don’t have to go to a publishing house to get permission to put [your story] out there. I love the idea of greater access for writers. The Internet makes it possible for writers with real gifts to produce works that don’t have to cater toward a certain market. Publishing has become commercial. [Getting work published] has never been easy, but it has never been this difficult. So I think the internet is a fantastic thing for writers to use.
Q: Have you ever catered your novels toward a commercial or an editor’s preference?
MC: God help me, no. It is widely-known in publishing that the book that is calculated to be the best-seller doesn’t sell. Most of the trashy best-sellers are actually the books the writers most want to write. When I started writing, I felt like I wanted to write novels that are compelling. I write the books that I most want to write. I patch a living [together] by various means such as teaching, screenwriting, and lectures. You might as well write what you most want to write because you don’t know what a best-seller would be, nobody does.
Q: How did your novel ‘The Hours’ get made into a movie?
MC: Well, The Hours had been out for a couple months when a producer picked it up in a Hawaii airport. He contacted me to see how I felt about optioning it to a movie. I wasn’t sure, because I didn’t know how it could be a movie, and if it was I was afraid it would be bad. So then he offered to put famous playwright David Hare to write the screenplay adaptation. After I agreed, he quickly signed a director, cast some big-name actresses [like] Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore. I did have input in the movie’s production, which is unusual. Usually when you sell a novel to become a movie it’s not yours anymore. They were very generous in including me [in its production].
Q: How do you write female characters?
It’s mysterious to me that men have trouble doing that and vice versa. There are differences, but primarily it’s about how the world receives you. When I finish a novel with female characters, I show it to astute readers that are biologically women.
Q: Has the success brought you happiness or satisfaction?
MC: I was shocked when got a Pulitzer Prize for ‘The Hours.’ After the Pulitzer, I was happy for three days and depressed for the next six months because to me bringing home this little object was not that impressive. I had this fear that nothing I write was ever going to get this much attention again. It’s funny because [if people loved one novel], people will hate your next book before you write it. But if all those years of little-known recognition didn’t stop you from writing, why would you stop after you get recognition? One of the plusses of being known is that you get to publish anything you want. However, certain fundamentals don’t change. There’s still the next book, the next page, and it’s still challenging. You don’t want to write the same book over and over again.
Q: Will you ever get tired of discussing ‘The Hours?’
MC: I sometimes do get tired of discussing ‘The Hours.’ Then I grab hold of myself and recognize that by some incredible stroke of fortune, a book I wrote is still being talked about. Most books vanish entirely. So I shut up and answer those questions about The Hours.
Q: Do novels you write ever end the way you envision they will?
MC: Never. I found that if I know the ending in advance, the characters become employees of a novel–hauling it to a destination. I’m much better if I flounder and follow the characters to see what they reveal and create. It’s about trying to write a book smarter than you are. I’ve never written a novel that turned out how I thought it would end, and I’m okay with that. How can there be surprises for a reader if there are none for the writer?
