An Interview with Christopher Meeks

2009 at 3pm     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

 I recently had the pleasure of reading  and reviewing Christopher Meeks’s debut novel The Brightest Moon of the Century. I loved it, so I was thrilled when Chris (who, by the way, is always very pleasant and generous) agreed to answer a few of my questions.

Throughout the book, Edward wrestles with experiences, questions, and struggles that we all face one way or another. His teenage years are a particularly vivid example of universal experiences and awkwardness. I recognized many of my own experiences in the pages of The Brightest Moon…how much of your own experience informed these? Is anything totally invented?

 This book will be the most autobiographical one I’ll ever do. I chewed through the landscape of my life, especially those early years of growing up in Minnesota, attending college at the University of Denver, working at a camera store in Los Angeles, and, yes, arriving at a trailer park in Alabama where I had moved with a friend.

I take Tim O’Brien’s idea of story, which he explains in his book, The Things They Carried. He notes the difference between “happening truth,” which is the way things happened in life, and “story truth,” which is how you the author change things, often molding events to get to the deeper truth of how things had really felt. Thus, my mother did not die (she’s still alive), and the father in the novel is more an amalgam of my father, George, and my stepfather, Phil.  Still, all of us feel lonely at one time or another, so making that clearer for Edward was important.

While I experienced Hurricane Frederick in 1979, no tornados ripped through the park, nor did an airplane crash into my trailer.  It seemed darkly funny to me, however, to have those things happen. Trailer parks seem to be magnets for natural disasters.

Nothing is totally invented, but things are certainly pushed. I include a few photos in the book to echo the reality of the settings, but some of the specific events are invented to underscore Edward’s character. Each of the nine chapters are informed, however, by events in my life.

 Talk about your writing process with The Brightest Moon. How was writing it similar to and different from creating your short story collections?

I had an agent interested in representing me, but he kept saying, “Write a novel.” I was trying to convince him at the time of his taking my manuscript of The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea to publishers. He said, “No. There’s no money in short fiction. Write a novel.” A novel was simply too intimidating to me. I’d written a bad one in grad school, and so I learned first hand what a wild horse the form can be. It’s hard to control or even see. Still, I felt so close to landing an agent that maybe I should give a novel a try again.

Once I decided to write a novel and came up with a starting point, I stopped. The task felt like climbing Mt. Everest while being afraid of heights and having only a few tools. When I mentioned to a writer friend my fears, he said, “Write each chapter as if it’s a short story. You know how to write those. Just keep the same protagonist in each. You’ll do fine.”

I smiled. That seemed easy enough.  One of my favorite books, The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank, was written that way, so I gave myself permission to write this way. When I finished three chapters-separate stories-I sent them to the agent, who was impressed. He said if I kept it up, I’d have a novel that he could represent. He suggested the idea of writing the year at the start of each chapter.

That’s the way the first draft came about.  I had more than a dozen story-chapters originally. One or two I didn’t like and removed. I expanded the college and Alabama sections, dividing them into “Parts,” because the story there just needed “more.”

I didn’t want this to be another short story collection, and as I worked on it more, I added foreshadowing, an important ingredient in novels that’s hard to include in a first draft. You have to know your story well before you can foreshadow, so that’s something that comes later. Over the years, before and after I wrote drafts of two other novels, I went back to this novel to rewrite and interweave the chapters more.

That first agent signed me on, but he didn’t like my calling him every month to ask him how things were going. To occupy myself, I went and wrote a second novel and never called until I finished that novel. I then learned he had forgotten to send out the first because I hadn’t bugged him.

I looked for a new agent and found one, one who happily takes my calls. Jim McCarthy at Dystel and Goderich Literary Management in New York signed me based on my second novel, not this one. When I showed him this one, he wanted to go out with my second one and felt this one was perhaps too long. Last year, I took out two chapters from The Brightest Moon and worked with my editor to tighten it more. Thus, I removed about a hundred pages, which made it better.

After the advanced reading copies (ARCs) went out to reviewers, I read the ARC as if I were a casual book reader. That is, I read it trying to imagine it if I hadn’t written it. The Alabama section needed tweaking. I found a new beginning to that chapter that heightened Edward’s confusion about his future, and I condensed two scenes, and the section felt right. I added the photos, too, after I’d loved the handful of photos in Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, a novel about a vet in a traveling circus in the Great Depression.

How long did it take to complete The Brightest Moon from inception to publication?

 Ten years. This novel was a huge experiment for me.

When you asked this question, my instant response was it took five years. However, I just looked in my letters file, and I see I had the conversation with the first agent in 1999. I have a letter dated October 11, 1999 saying that I was now thinking of the novel, but could he show my manuscript of short fiction? He encouraged me to write the novel and forget the book of short fiction.

 That year, 1999, I’d read about the brightest moon of the century being on December 21, 1999. I cut out that article about it.

By the way, I didn’t listen to the agent about the short fiction. The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea came out in December 2005, six years after I’d asked him to send it out, and when the review of the book appeared in the Los Angeles Times on January 2, 2006, he called up and congratulated me, saying I’d been right to go ahead with it.

I would come back to The Brightest Moon of the Century every few years until this one felt ready at last.

I’m glad I didn’t think about this until now. If I thought about the time spent along the way, I might have thought writing was hopeless.

Taking a page from Edward’s book, please tell us about an embarrassing/awkward memory of your own teenage years.

I used up many of those memories in the book, but there are certainly hundreds of others. Luckily, when we’re in our teenager years, we don’t realize how clueless we really are. Also, it’s amazing how most of us survive. A friend’s older brother thought it was funny trying to scare us by driving close to the edge of a swamp back and forth.  Of course, he was encouraged by our laughter-until the car ended up in the swamp and we had to flee. In Minnesota, the lakes freeze so hard, you can drive on them. One spring as my friends and I were in a car on the lake-probably the last weekend it would be safe-we saw a way off the lake that took us through melted water. We raced for the edge to have momentum-and we shot through with an amazing spray. The ice was still strong enough underneath. We could have been a sad story on the news, though. Teenagers don’t see themselves as mortal.

We overdrank in those years, too. What else was there to do in Minnesota?  When I turned eighteen, the drinking age lowered to eighteen. By then, though, alcohol had little appeal to me. It didn’t seem fun or funny to me anymore.

If the adult Edward at the end of the book could go back and tell his teenaged self one thing, what would it be?

Don’t worry. Be happy.

 Any weird author quirks or writing habits you care to share? Do you have a particular writing routine?

I’m not sure why people think authors or artists are particularly quirky. Everyone is. Anyone who has lived with anyone else for a while (think of your spouse, for instance) discovers incredible quirks.

In my Freshman English class at Santa Monica College, we just finished reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. It’s written from the point of view of a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome, which may be the epitome of quirkiness. For one assignment, I had my students write a scene from their lives in the style of the main character. What I loved about this assignment is they all found some quirk of their own and wrote about it matter-of-factly. One young woman, for instance, wrote about her fear of spiders as if, of course, spiders should be feared, and it’s natural to sleep on the couch for two weeks after she saw a spider in her bedroom before realizing that the single spider she saw might be hatching eggs and the whole room should be scrubbed with bleach and everything washable washed.

We’re all funny people, which is something I love to write about. Life has many absurdities.

I try to write every day, even if for just twenty minutes. If you write at the same desk at the same time daily, you’ll pick up from where you left off.

Finally, please tell us a bit about what you’re working on now. When can we expect another novel?

Now that I ran out of novels based on my life, I’ve looked outside myself. I’m writing a mystery. While I haven’t been a rabid mystery reader, I’m often in awe of good mysteries, such as The Two-Minute Rule by Robert Crais or nearly anything by Michael Connelly. I aspire to something along the lines of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett, but instead of creating a hard-boiled detective loner, I can’t help it: life’s absurdities are sneaking in.

 I’m learning a lot, and we’ll see if I pull it off, a balance between a strong plot and an “everyman” character whose needs and realizations make him interesting. I appreciate how good mystery writers make a novel a page-turner, and yet the protagonist can surprise us with his or her contradictions. My novel starts in Las Vegas with a murder, and my protagonist, a home-and-garden businessman at a trade show, is pulled in as the main suspect. He’s innocent but has to find the real murderer when the police don’t think it’s anyone but him.

What I’m working on is my fourth novel. Jim McCarthy, my agent, has two others. If any publisher is reading this, give him a call.