The Surf Guru
by Doug Dorst
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Interview by Queenie C
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru
I
believe that writing a short story is more difficult than writing a novel. How did you come about writing short stories?
Like
a lot of writers who cut their teeth in college writing workshops, I started out writing short stories. (It's easier for a class to discuss a complete, self-contained
story than a novel excerpt, so stories tend to be the dominant form in workshops.) I didn't start working on a novel until my agent suggested to me that
he was maybe not so interested in continuing to make 10% of the jack-squat that my stories were earning...and I decided, well, I probably need to write a
novel if I want to do this for a living, so here goes.
I agree with you that writing a good, tight, unified short story is really difficult. That said, I also think a novel is an endurance test, and it can be
a very grueling one. They're both challenging, but in different ways.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru
The
Surf Guru is an interesting title and title story. How did the idea originate?
Thanks.
The earliest draft of that story (which was quite a bit different from the version that's in the book) was written for an undergraduate fiction class when
I was a senior at Stanford. I had a Monday deadline for a new story, and I was spending the weekend on the beach in Santa Cruz...so I just wrote about what
I saw around me. One of the people I was with mentioned that the owner of a big surf-gear company lived near that beach, and that seemed interesting to me -- as
good a starting point as any.
I was, at the same time, taking a lit class in which we had read stories by Donald Barthelme, who experimented a lot with nontraditional story structures
and forms. I was really captivated by his stuff, and I wanted to try to tell a story of my own in a nonlinear way. That's where the short-sections-with-headings
approach came from.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru
Was
there a definitive theme or meaning woven throughout these stories? What was your intention for this collection?
There
are some wonderful story collections that are very tightly linked in theme, character, concern, style, etc. I chose to go in the other direction: to try to
have the reader finish one story, be satisfied with it, and have absolutely no idea what sort of world (s)he'll be entering when they turn the page and start
the next one. As a reader, I think that sort of experience is a lot of fun.
I generally leave it to other people to extract themes from my work. It seems presumptuous and condescending for me to try to dictate to people what they
should get out of it. These stories fit together in a way that makes sense to me intuitively (and/or emotionally), but I probably couldn't put it into words,
even if I wanted to.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru
In
"Twelve Portraits of Dr. Gachet," Dr. Gachet says, "...Melancholy afflicts all the great artists." Do you believe that to be true? By artists, do you
consider writers and actors as well as painters?
I don't
really believe that -- not as an ironclad rule that "art must come from suffering," anyway. (It's a question that the real Dr. Gachet was deeply interested
in, though.) I do think that people with creative sensibilities (in whatever fields) tend to see the world a bit differently than the majority of people
around them, and that might tend to result in a bit of alienation, but that's not at all the same thing as saying You Must Be Miserable To Make Art.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru
I
really like Kacy's character. Did you have a favorite character in these stories?
I'm glad you did--it
means I did something right. Because, really, a lot of what she does is pretty unlikable. I wanted to explore how a not-horrible person (one with good
intentions but some real flaws) might find herself doing what Kacy does.
I don't think I have a favorite character -- I find things I like in all of them, even the ones who don't make the best choices. I'm fond of Kacy's daughter,
and I'd like to give her a story of her own at some point. I like Jo in "Astronauts" a lot, too, and Manolo in "San Humberto." And I can't even begin to
tell you how much fun it was to write in the voice of Quilcock, the surly botanist in "Splitters."
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru
What
was the significance of the baby in "Vikings?"
The significance of
the baby is simply that it is a baby: it's a living human being in some degree of peril, and Trace and Phil--two guys who don't really handle responsibility
well--find themselves in the position of having to choose whether to take responsibility for it (and then to act on that choice). One of the axioms of writing
fiction is that your characters will reveal their true selves when they are put under pressure, when they are made deeply uncomfortable and forced to act.
That's what I was trying to do here.
I suppose there's some thematic resonance, too -- i.e., that Trace and Phil have functioned as a kind of family for each other (since their real families
are pretty broken), and adding a baby is a way of complicating that surrogate-family relationship. But I don't think of the baby as A Big Symbol Of Something.
I'm not terribly interested in symbolism in fiction, I guess. As a reader, I'm interested in experiencing a story, not in having to decode it.
Book Club Discussion: Interview with Doug Dorst, author of The Surf Guru
Can
you tell us what you are working on next?
I'm
collaborating on a novel with filmmaker/TV maven/storyteller extraordinaire J.J. Abrams. It should be out late in 2012, I think. It's a very challenging
project and also an incredibly fun one. Can't really say any more about it; as with everything J.J. does, it's cloaked in about a hundred layers of secrecy.
Which, frankly, is part of the fun, too.
Return from The Surf Guru to Home
|
