TC Boyle on Writing About What You Want to Discover

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to TC Boyle about his new novel, Blue Skies.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: You say you write instinctively. What is that like? And how does your logical mind work with your instinctual mind?

TC Boyle: What a great question. So, I wanted to be a musician—I went to music school, flunked my audition, wound up being in a rock band for a little bit. Music, especially if you’re the singer in a band, is 99 percent pure emotion, maybe 1 percent controlling mind, right key, etc. Writing fiction is a kind of dream parallel to that. Maybe 90 percent is your controlling mind, but 10 percent is also this complete opening of the soul. You don’t know where you are, you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s just this fierce inner concentration. And that’s the joy of it. So, I roll with it. And my logical mind will be doing the revision the next day and making little discoveries of where it’s going in terms of theme, and even in terms of plot. I don’t know, I’ll find out.

Mitzi Rapkin: Do you feel like there’s something about your instinct that has become like an electrical current that has gotten stronger over the years? Meaning that when you first started writing, maybe it felt more timid, or you weren’t exactly sure when it was there, but now it’s like this live wire that you can just tune into, and it is maybe more certain for you that you can follow it?

TC Boyle: I don’t know. Each work and each period of your life is different. I will say that I think I have a larger command of what I’m doing than when I was beginning. When I was beginning, I was much more interested in language and design than in character. I’m interested in all of that still, but then I began to write novels and to develop characters. It’s hard to say. I hope that I’m producing mature work and I’m using all the experience that I’ve gained as a working artist to continue to produce great works of art. I mean, that’s what it’s about. That’s why I do it. That’s why I’ve never compromised. That’s why, by the way, I’ve never worked for anybody. I’ve never done anything else. I’ve never written anything with the idea of, wow, this will sell. I never cared about that. Luckily, an audience came and followed me along and that pays my bills. Great. But I’m just an explorer. I’m just going to think about and write about what I want to discover. And I never know how it’s going to go or what it will be.

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T.C. Boyle is the author of 30 books of fiction including most recently, Blue Skies, The Harder They Come, The Terranauts, The Relive Box, Outside Looking In, and Talk To Me. He received a Ph.D. degree in Nineteenth Century British Literature from the University of Iowa in 1977, his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1974, and his B.A. in English and History from SUNY Potsdam in 1968.