What Do I Know? Stewart O’Nan

As a novelist, I’m drawn to characters who are not famous, accomplished, or visible. And yet, two of the books I’ve written — one about F. Scott Fitzgerald and another about a serial killer who sells a story to Stephen King — are one or more of these things. So, I’m all over the place with my characters. But most often I write about people I know and those who are closest to me.

My brother John and I were raised in the Point Breeze section of Pittsburgh. Our father worked for Alcoa and taught, off and on, at Pitt, while our mother taught economics at Carnegie Mellon University. Both of my parents were “numbers” people, so I drifted in that direction. In school, I was always good at math.

My childhood took place during the days of the early moon shots, “Star Trek,” and so on. And I was crazy about airplanes. My father was an engineer, as was his father, so I figured I’d be an engineer too. Up to that point, I hadn’t shown any genuine interest in writing, although I was a big reader. But English was not my favorite subject in school. I was never in the advanced class, so the numbers track seemed to make sense for me.

In 1983, I earned a B.S. in aerospace engineering from Boston University and went to work for the Grumman Aerospace Corporation in Bethpage, New York, as a test engineer. I still hadn’t thought about being a writer until well after that. I never had time to do it, and never really thought I was going to do it until I was actually doing it.

Suddenly, around 1988, Grumman fell on hard times. The entire aerospace industry on the East Coast was fading, and all the companies were moving either to Florida, Texas or California. People all around me were getting laid off. I remember the security guard coming in and saying, “OK, empty out your desk and put all your stuff in this box.” Then he took your badge away and walked you out. I thought, “Things aren’t looking too good here.”

While at Grumman, I’d been doing some writing. I sold some short stories and won a couple of awards, including the “Ascent Fiction Prize.” So, I went out to the University of Illinois to read and got a check, which was awesome. In retrospect, the aerospace downturn gave me a kick in the ass.

In time, I decided to enroll at Cornell to get my M.F.A., which bought me three years to work on learning how to write a novel, and a chance to read books that I’d never heard of, because people up there were reading courageously. I would never have discovered hidden gems such as Stoner, the John Williams book, or Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. From reading these books, I got a glimpse into what the novel could do. In addition, the students in my workshops became my first readers. They helped me to see flaws in my manuscripts and suggested how I might fix them. While at Cornell, I wrote four books. Three ended up getting published.

During childhood, I was crazy about comic books. I was at the Squirrel Hill newsstand reading them all the time. I loved the fantastic storylines and the artwork, too. Then, in my formative years, I devoured the books of Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Shirley Jackson, plus many sci-fi writers of that era, such as Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin. But as an engineering undergrad in Boston, I didn’t get to read much, so I decided that, on my own initiative, I’d stretch myself and tackle some literature.

I started reading French writers such as Camus, Sartre, and Flaubert. Then I moved on to Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and E.M. Forster, but I didn’t read many American writers until I went back for my M.F.A. At Cornell, I was introduced to some great American writers who had been neglected, such as James Salter. I had not read any Alice Munro before I got to grad school, nor had I read Denis Johnson or William Maxwell. But Pittsburgher John Edgar Wideman had a big influence on me. He proved that you didn’t have to go to New York to write a big book. You could do it wherever you were. Wideman’s love of form was masterful. And most often, he wrote about regular people in the neighborhood. The ultimate template for the neighborhood book is Wideman’s Damballah. It tells the stories of people who lived in one small, impoverished community. The richness of those stories effectively transported me back in time.

I haven’t had another job in some time, but I still must pay my bills. The writing game is always a hustle. Fortunately, early on, in 1993, my collection of short stories, In A Walled City, received the prestigious Drue Heinz Literature Prize, which was a huge break. At the time, I was making $5,000 or $6,000 a year working as an adjunct professor and, suddenly, $10,000 fell into my lap. Not long thereafter, my first novel, Snow Angels, sold. It’s about the troubled family life of a teenage boy and the events leading up to the violent death of his beloved former babysitter. I went through a couple of agents before I got one who believed in it. The others thought it was too dark, too grim. But then it won a prize and, once that happened, Snow Angels got the rubber stamp that said, “This book won a prize. It’s OK to publish it.”

In 1997, my novel, The Speed Queen, came out. It’s a crime story narrated by a death-row inmate who recounts her life and a drug-fueled killing spree with her boyfriend and his lover, all while awaiting execution. Its original title was Dear Stephen King. The manuscript started going around and was ultimately accepted by Doubleday. When they heard about it, King’s lawyers called and were not thrilled because a lot of people try to use the “Stephen King” brand to promote their own work. Under pressure, Doubleday folded, as did my agent. But I appealed to Mr. King directly, explaining that the story was meant to be satire. We came to an understanding and decided to bury the hatchet.

After The Speed Queen I was exhausted and needed some rest, so I ventured up to the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire. I roomed in a little cottage in the woods where people brought you your lunch. And there was a little fireplace burning which created a very 19th-century feel. That was when I started to think about Edgar Allan Poe.

I had wanted to write about Poe’s life for some time. I just didn’t know how I wanted to write it. Poe was one of the masters of the craft of fiction: an absolute genius. Eventually, I settled on writing a screenplay. So, I was up at McDowell with my notes in this little cabin, enjoying a respite. In the early days of my career, I’d write a novel and then a screenplay. In the case of Poe, I had an unreliable narrator who was spiraling into madness. I wanted to do it in a gothic way but perhaps weirder, with the feel of one of director David Cronenberg’s movies. If I could have fun inhabiting the material, which I really loved, why not do it? So, I did. But as is the case with most screenplays, a film was never produced.

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m a baseball guy. I played Little League in Pittsburgh’s 14th Ward. When I grew up, Pittsburgh was a baseball town. Today, my wife Trudy and I live in Boston only three blocks away from Fenway Park. Amazingly, one day Stephen King, an avid baseball fan himself, called and asked, “Would you like to go to a Red Sox game?” I said “Sure.” And we’ve been fast friends ever since.

My friendship with Steve led to us writing two books together: A novella called A Face in the Crowd and Faithful: Two Diehard Boston Red Sox Fans Chronicle the Historic 2004 Season, which was published in 2005. It grazed the best-seller’s lists and did very well. I often say that the luckiest thing that ever happened to me was becoming a Red Sox fan.

When writing a book, I try to work 9-to-5. I’ll take a break for lunch in the middle of the day, revise the pages after dinner, and then prepare corrections that I can punch in first thing in the morning. I prefer to write one double-spaced page every day just to keep things moving. The hard part for me is not doubling back, trying to perfect everything every time. I’m always struggling to leave the manuscript a little bit loose and messy. The only trick is to just sit there and keep going.

In 2007, my novel Last Night at the Lobster was published. It’s set on the last day of business at a Red Lobster restaurant and tells the story of “Manny DeLeon,” a conscientious and committed restaurant manager. The novel was inspired by a Red Lobster in Torrington, Connecticut, where people had been going for years from Sunday Mass for a nice, after-service lunch with their families. One Sunday, however, they found the doors of the restaurant chained and locked on the outside to keep the workers out. It all happened overnight. How weird. So, I started thinking, “Who’s going to miss a Red Lobster?” Who would care? And that’s how I came up with a character named “Manny.” He was interesting because he actually cared about the closing of the restaurant.

I never was a huge F. Scott Fitzgerald fan before I wrote the book, West of Sunset, about Fitzgerald’s time in Hollywood. He was at MGM which, at the time, was the gold standard for moviemaking. I became fascinated by that because it’s really a gray space in his biographies. They mention that he goes out there, but don’t really talk much about it, and certainly don’t know anything about it from his point of view. So, I decided that I would use that gray space and try to feel what it was like to be him in that place and at that time. We’re talking 1937 through about 1940. The War is on. Europe is starting to fall. Austria is now the Sudetenland, and it’s clear to Fitzgerald that terrible events were coming.

Emotionally and personally, everything was going wrong for Fitzgerald, and yet he fell in love, maybe as a way of hanging on to at least something. He was trying to write movies, a craft at which he was not skilled. No one cared that he was F. Scott Fitzgerald because that’s the way Hollywood is, even more so because he had not been a success there. In the 1930s, Fitzgerald was a titan of American literature, a man who wrote funny romance stories featuring women characters. But most of his books didn’t sell very well. He was in debt so deeply that he had to hock his car just to pay his rent.

Fitzgerald was a self-sabotaging guy. He was troubled, which made him a good character to work with. His story had a great time and place setting. That’s where I got into it and learned so much more that I became a fan and champion of his. When you start researching someone’s life, it’s amazing how much more there is to their story. People are deep, and wildly contradictory.

I lived in Pittsburgh until I was 18, moved to Boston to go to school, then traveled around and ended up back in Pittsburgh in 2009. We got the kids through high school, having promised ourselves that we’d give them a stable home during their teenage years. Pittsburgh seemed like the right choice. It’s affordable, which makes it a great place to live and work for an artist who doesn’t know where his next check is coming from. And it has great housing stock. You can choose what neighborhood you want to live in, which you can’t do in any other major American city. And it’s a beautiful, green place. The people are friendly, maybe because I’m a native.

My most recent novel, Evensong, was composed of loving portraits of people I knew, which made it special for me. But once the characters get down on the page, they always change. They become fictional, but you must make them consistent and believable. And you must be honest about them and not pull back when the tough stuff comes because that’s the interesting stuff. That’s where the heat is. Drama unfolds in the ways we deal with each other, and that must come out in the writing. You must convince the reader that what you’re telling them could actually happen. That’s the art of it.

Writing is a little like aerospace engineering. You’re always trying to be exact. You want to say exactly what you want to say. And like engineering, in writing, there’s a lot of trial and error. But in the end, it’s just a lot of playing with words. It’s a fun thing, playing with words — more fun than digging ditches.