What:
Fiction, most notably novels but I believe my real talent is short stories. With less effort, I can see the shape of them as they emerge. I can see the spark of them, the conflict, in strangers walking by. The form and structure is more clear to me. They are the thing I do best and the thing I’ve published in the largest quantity, and in some pretty big places, and yet I still haven’t published a story collection. And I’ve had some small plays produced in Chicago. But it’s all fiction—narrative what-iffing.
Why:
I became aware, a couple decades into writing, that I write to create an empathetic bridge between myself and the world. Meaning not just for the reader to span, but mainly, for me. I was told at a very young age that I should be a writer, and I think originally, like a lot of beginning writers, I wrote to explain myself to the world. That’s probably how it should be, in the start. This went on well past grad school and after several sizable story publications. But sometime in my late thirties, something shifted and I realized I was now writing to explain the world to me. I don’t have any religion, and I feel I’m often, personally, not that great at empathy, though I desperately want to be, and I think story is where I can get inside people who are decidedly not me and see the world around them and attempt to feel what they feel. The side effect of this is I create a world of empathy for the reader, as well.
How:
I write every day, even days that are barely productive or don’t yield the sort of top notch stuff that might constitute the highlights of my life’s work. You have to write on the days you don’t feel like it, or you might miss the day the good stuff arrives. I wrote the day I was married and the day my only son, Huck, was born. Sometimes it’s scribbles in the blue chemistry notebooks I’ve filled since I was eighteen—much of which I can’t decipher—or in Word, if more formalized work, something that I feel I know what it will be. Or yellow pads if I’m still sort of discovering it and I don’t want to contain it or box it up or label it yet. When I don’t know what it is. OR, when the power goes out, as it did for much of the writing of the new novel. Years before, I’d lost the computer file for my first attempt of the “Dutch book,”—what would become You Shall See the Beautiful Things—and I lost a big chunk of it in a computer crash and only returned to it years later when there was a power outage and I had nothing else to work on, so I started over with legal pads and candles and wrote must of it that way, longhand scrawled in the dark.
Sometimes I set daily quotas for myself, though lately it’s mostly been time quotas—“Okay, I’ll spend THIS much time doing this today, then I can quit…” In the past, it’s been page quota. I wrote 200 pages of my first published novel, The Lake, the River & the Other Lake in ten days, insisting I wouldn’t go to bed till I had 20 pages each day.
The second novel I wrote entirely in two months, starting the day after I first conceived of it, setting the requirement at a mere 5 pages a day (figuring x 60= 300 and that’s a novel.) In that case, I had a baby on the way in about three months, so there was a window there I wouldn’t have later. Pressure, self-imposed deadlines… Sometime this helps. It helps to be compulsive. I know so many people who say they’d LIKE to be a writer, but they seem to be waiting for the impulse to hit them. Much better to be compulsive than impulsive as a writer.
In younger years, I spent a lot more time at it each day. I just can’t focus like that anymore and also, I tell myself that I spend less time at it now because maybe–I hope–I don’t go down the wrong path for long stretches of time like I possibly used to. On the downside, I feel I no longer escape so entirely into the narrative bubble quite as deeply as I once did, where I’d look up and the sun had slipped away and I couldn’t move my legs because I’d been sitting writing for seven hours. That just doesn’t happen anymore.
Bio:
Steve Amick is the author of You Shall See the Beautiful Things: a Novel & a Nocturne (Acre Books, 2023.) Previously, he published two novels with Pantheon, a division of Penguin Random House: Nothing But a Smile (2009) and The Lake, the River & the Other Lake (2004), which was a Washington Post Book of the Year, a BookSense Pick, and was cited in the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Britannica Book of the Year as one of three “standout” debuts of 2005. Both were Michigan Notable Books. His shorter works have appeared in Playboy, McSweeney’s, Zoetrope: All-Story, Southern Review, Story, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and on NPR.
He has had plays produced in Chicago and has composed and recorded original music, including the album There’s Always Pie…(2005) He has a Clio for work in advertising.
He received an MFA in creative writing from George Mason, and has taught as part of MFA programs at Northwestern and Pacific universities. He lives with his children’s librarian wife, Sharyl, and his son Huck Lightning, in Michigan: in Ann Arbor, where he was born, and in the U.P., where he was reborn.
Links:
Website
Instagram
Music video of song inspired by the new book, composed by Gregory Dean McIntosh
Stateside interview with April Baer
Buy You Shall See the Beautiful Things: Acre Books; Amazon; Pages in Detroit
Thank you for visiting
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist.
Multi-award winning novel: In the Context of Love.
Picture book: Gordy and the Ghost Crab.
Latest poetry chapbook: Sleepwalker
Social media links: LinkTree