Flipping the bird at answers

Ronnie Scott: is 23; moved to Melbourne from Brisbane in 2004, leaving behind a community-radio breakfast program and bringing with him the first slim issues of The Lifted Brow: Bi-annual attack journal, which he still publishes and is now sometimes massive; is doing a PhD in creative writing; has been Associate Director of National Young Writers’ Festival, had his finger in the Melbourne Writers’ Festival pie; throws epic indie parties to fund and promote TLB; has written tweaked stories for HEAT, Wet Ink and Voiceworks … not to mention all the long-form non-fiction, music journalism and an advice column there for a while. We have to stop him, before he changes something, so I went to straight for the jugular.
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Some of your writing is the most challenging I’ve read: it often has to be read twice before your intention can be deciphered; your language is occasionally self-consciously innovative, abstract even. Are you deliberately challenging a style of writing that you’re tired of reading, or are you just weird and that’s how it comes out of your head? I know that’s a loaded question. Sorry. Meanwhile, others of your stories are straight up narratives, carefully and laconically depicting scenes and the nuances of human behaviour that create them. These narrative-driven stories are almost the antithesis of your mood pieces, which tend to spurn narrative. Are these polarities indicative of a stylistic tug of war? Do you feel that you are yet to find the style that suits you best? Or are you deliberately aiming for diversity?
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I’m interested when you say that the narrative-driven stories are the antithesis of the mood pieces; I don’t think of them that way, but maybe you’re right. I do write them differently; I enter different grooves while writing those two types of stories. The more abstract stories—I guess you mean ‘Blocking’, which was published in [Wet Ink], and ‘Deadly Diamond Bestiary’, which was published in Torpedo—are a product of my most natural writing mode, the voice that is just the easiest and which feels the most natural. It’s how the words come out of my head, more or less, and whenever I’ve tried to write a very long piece of fiction, this is the voice that I employ.

The more straight-up stories are written in less of a natural voice, although it looks more natural to a reader because it focuses on observable, describable reality. In those stories—like ‘Together Now, Very Minor’, which was published in [Wet Ink], and ‘Season of the Shark’, which you published in Voiceworks—I try to keep sentences very short and concrete, while staying away, as far as possible, from describing characters’ thoughts, or using idioms. That’s the whole trick to it, really, and the restriction makes the stories very realistic and normal because it’s kind of like you’re just watching a scene from a movie. It’s a lot more challenging to write those ones, though, which is not surprising if you’ve ever tried to write a straightforward-looking story that is not boring.

When you say the more abstract stories spurn narrative, that’s where your question doesn’t ring right to me. The difference, if I’m doing my job right, is in the parts of narrative that the two types of story try to focus their attention on. In the more direct stories that feel very driven by narrative, the narrative attention moves on a sentence-by-sentence basis, where you’re paying attention to how one sentence (and the movements it describes) steps up to another, then another. The big-picture narrative progression is moved forward exactly on these terms. But in the more abstract stories, narrative progression is actually all I’m thinking about when I’m writing them, even though the sentences may seem more affected. They probably seem more affected because they’re not as well-developed, and because when they’re not moving the story forward clause-by-clause, you look around for something else to focus on, for instance the language. But really, those stories are all narrative. I’ve got the next paragraph in mind before I start on the preceding paragraph, and I’ve got a very clear idea of where the current paragraph should end to take the story into a different event and mood. So really, the difference is between whether the narrative happens sentence-by-sentence, or whether the narrative happens paragraph-by-paragraph. In that way, it feels like a difference of degree, not a difference of type.

Neither type of story tends to resolve all that clearly, but a sentence-by-sentence story like ‘Season of the Shark’ ends on a down-note, and a paragraph-by-paragraph story like ‘Blocking’ tries to end in a big accumulative rush. That’s again just a function of scale. Paragraphs are good at big things. Sentences are good at small things.
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That’s interesting that you mention ‘focus’, and how the style you choose might result in the reader focusing on different elements. Do you worry that if you get too abstract readers might lose focus altogether? If you allow your narrative to develop at a paragraph instead of a sentence level, when many are writing and reading in 140-character bursts now, might readers decide to check their email again when they realise they don’t get what’s going on?

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No. Well. On the one hand, you want to think about the reader. I think it’s funny that we almost exclusively call our work “the writing industry”, when other industries are pretty comfortable using a few interchangeable terms: “the mining industry” is production-based, but “the coal industry” emphasises product. I’ve never once heard “the reading industry”, and I think that with literary journals, we’re really lucky that some readers are willing to overlook the fact that journals are usually for a specialist audience and actually buy our industry’s “insider material”. I mean, lots of levels of the writing industry are pretty exclusively focused on readers, and those people more often call themselves “the publishing industry”; but it’s easy to forget when you’re a struggling writer, or a struggling indie publisher, that you’re trying to be part of a business that serves readers, rather than being part of an industry that’s there to serve… what? Its own consumption? The distinctions and results sometimes really spin me out. But so if a reader decides they don’t like my work, then their feedback should be taken as very valuable to me as a writer, though not taken personally. In 90% of cases, it probably means that I’m not doing my job well enough, and there’s not really any excuse not to listen to that.

On the other hand, you kind of can’t think about the reader when you’re writing, simply because it’s frustrating, terrifying, and paralysing. It’s very instructive to learn about your market, and to think about your work as though you’re developing a career, but whenever I’ve tried to write for a certain type of contact or publication, I’ve found myself accidentally trying to pull the wool over their eyes, and sometimes I’ve sent them sub-standard work. That’s because, the way I figure it, writing is usually frustrating at its best, and if you’re thinking the whole time “Is this good enough for X? Is this going to be good enough for X? … What about this?”, then eventually, the temptation not to need to overhaul something is going to beat out a really honest mental response. So instead, I try really hard just not to lie to myself; at a certain point I got sick of writing work that I knew was going to be “good enough for X”, and I know I’ll never advance as a writer unless I set the standard at a point that’s much harder to imagine tricking, which is the voice in the back of my head saying “I think you can do better”. People aren’t dummies, and it’s not like they don’t “get” ideas that are very abstract. If my work’s noticeably too abstract, then it means I should probably communicate the abstract ideas better.

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