Podcast #57: T.C. Boyle on Finding Stories and Themes
T.C. Boyle has written over a dozen novels and several collections of short fiction. Recently, he was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement for writers of the West. On April 1, we welcomed Boyle to Books at Noon to discuss his latest novel The Harder They Come. This week for the New York Public Library Podcast, we present the author speaking on finding stories, discovering creative writing, and observing themes emerge in his body of work.
At Books at Noon, Jessica Strand asked Boyle if it was true that he finds the narratives for his fiction in newspapers. Boyle does, he said, but he also finds them just by living his life:
“My wife and I are among the last people on earth who actually read a newspaper. This is our ritual in the morning. I don't know about you, but I love to be depressed to start the day off, so I read the newspaper. I feel the world is shit and that there's no hope. Then I take a nap and go to work. I mean, I don't always get ideas from newspapers. I get ideas from what you might tell me, what anybody might tell me. A friend of mine had his car stolen last year. I live in Santa Barbara. And it was a wonderful story. His girlfriend’s dog was in the car when it was stolen, and she was upset. So I wrote I story about that. All my friends, my true friends, and I see at least two of them in the crowd here today, know that anything they reveal to me, especially intimate details, will be used by me.”
Of course, this was not always the case. As a young man, the author actually didn't consider writing to be his career path:
“I've been teaching at USC, and I started the writing program there. My students have an astonishing pool of talent, and they're far more sophisticated than I was at their age. They've been taking creative writing since kindergarten. When I grew up, in Peeksill, up the river here, we didn't have creative writing. I had no conception of it. I went to Potsdam, SUNY Potsdam, to be a musician. I played saxophone. I could play it upside-down, backwards. I could sight read anything but nonetheless, I flunked my audition. Meanwhile, I was in a liberal arts college. I declared a history major. Second year, I took a course in the American short story and discovered Flannery O’Connor, and I said, ‘Alright, I'm a double major: history and English.’ In my third year, I blundered into a creative writing classroom and found voila! I've discovered my métier.”
Since then, Boyle's become one of America's most prolific writers. Even with the volume of prose he produces, however, he says that he does note a relationship between his texts:
“You don't know what your themes are when you begin to write. They discover you over the years. I can see how all the books are aligned and what the themes are. For instance, in this one, I’m obsessed with nature and our place in nature as an animals species on this earth and how that’s different from our spiritual being or intellectual being. This is what I'm writing about over and over about obsessively in many different ways.”
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