Brandon Taylor’s Real Life opens: “It was a cool evening in late summer when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all.” From there, the reader is along for Wallace’s weekend—his movement through academic and social spaces, his relationships with his peers and with his memories. The prose captures this movement with stunning clarity and precise intimacy.
Brandon’s influences include Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, apparent in the structure of the novel and the measure of its point of view, but Brandon is a novelist all his own—and an accomplished short story writer, senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, staff writer at Literary Hub, and holder of degrees in both biochemistry and creative writing. His style is by turns intimate, hilarious, and devastating.
Conversation with Brandon is a little bit that way, too. Midday one Saturday in November, Brandon and I spent some time on the phone discussing Real Life, out from Riverhead Books today. Read our full conversation in the Winter 2020 issue of Carve, available here.
The simile in the opening paragraph, “as easy as anything”—I thought about that throughout the whole novel. There are other moments, too, when within your sentences there’s a great depth of sensory feeling and a deeply tactile relationship with the world. In the process of composing this long work, how did you focus on the sentence while also moving Wallace through this weekend, through the movement of the plot? How did you think about balancing the two?
It’s hard for me to begin writing anything—a novel, or a story, or an essay. I can’t begin to write anything until the rhythm of the story is really solid to me. Because the fact of the matter is, yes, there are some people who can painstakingly carve sentence by sentence by sentence. I am not one of those writers. I can’t begin until I’ve set the rhythm of the voice of the thing I’m working on, because that voice and that rhythm act as organizing principles. When I get a rhythm in my head, I can more or less rely on that to keep the sentences crackling and alive.
It’s like playing a song—you know when you hit a bum note, you know when it’s not right. Whenever I write a sentence that doesn’t feel right within the organizing schema of the thing I’m working on, I stop and I rethink it. I’m always trying to write sentences that feel very clear and very solid, sentences that have some interesting musicality to them but don’t show off or draw too much attention to themselves. I’m always trying to marry sentences to the thing that they’re trying to contain. I want the sentences to feel alive and to have movement to them. I don’t want to write very clunky or dense, descriptive, rich passages. For me it’s always about how I can be lucid and how I can be attentive to the language, because the language is where the story comes from. Because the story is in tone—its shades of emotion and gradation. That’s how I think about sentences, which is to say that once I get the rhythm going, I don’t usually have to think very much about them until I write a bad one, and then it’s like, all is lost, I have to go back and revisit it.
Also, revision is a big part of it. I wrote the novel very, very quickly, and then I took some time going back through it sentence by sentence and really pushing on the sentences to make sure that they were pulling their weight, so to speak. That took a long time, but I really felt like it sharpened and honed the language. Those places where things got very lyrical and very beautiful but made no sense—I had to eliminate those passages.
I’m interested in the way you speak about voice and rhythm and the way you acknowledged that a lot of your work happens in the third person close. What’s your relationship with the first person? What’s the draw to the third person?
The first person and I go way back. I used to write exclusively in first person. I think my first published story is in first person. Then I stopped writing in first person because I feel like the more I learned about craft and the more sophisticated my understanding of fiction became, the more I doubted first person because I doubted my own ability to construct a narrator. It felt like I needed to know too much upfront about what this voice was doing and what the story was and who this character was.
Some people are comfortable in a very nebulous space. They’re much more comfortable in the first person voice because it affords spreading across time. I’m not that kind of writer. When I write fiction, the first thing that comes is usually the character’s voice, and then the character comes. I only have a very vague sense of them, like they were a stranger at a dinner party, so I need to use fiction to tunnel my way into them by a scene and by action. I only know as much about the character as the reader does at a given moment when I’m drafting.
First person—it feels like a lot of pressure to me. I’m trying to inhabit a voice because it feels like I need to know everything about them, and I don’t. The other thing about first person I will say is that in first person stories, every narrator is both the character and the narrator. It’s a very difficult balance to toggle when you’re writing first person stories. When I write first person stories, or when I try to now, it feels like a head in space—just a head that’s roaming around and observing people. That’s a form, that is a story, but it’s not the kind of fiction that I feel most at home in.
Jane Austen is one of my great heroes. The things that she can do in third person—that feels like what I want to be trying to do, this great elasticity of narrator and allowing a narrator who can step back and offer judgments in place of the character, but also a narrator who can merge with a character and get deep in their psychology. That’s why I tend to choose third person over first person, because first person feels so pressurized, and I start to panic. I’m like, I don't know where they grew up. I don’t know what they look like. How do I get that information into this story? How do I do it without it being an info dump? What am I doing? In third person, it just feels like I have freedom to problem-solve as I go.
This phrase that you just used—a “head in space”—this seems related to how embodied your characters feel. The third person is close on Wallace and his thoughts and perceptions, but the way all of the characters touch each other and move within the spaces of the novel reveals so much about their dynamics and the way they think about each other. That said, I personally tend to think about the act of writing as not a super embodied act. To do it, we have to suspend embodiedness to a degree and sit at the computer for hours. For you, what is the relationship between the body and the imagination, and how does that relationship affect your writing?
What a metaphysical question. When I was very little, I had girl cousins and they had all these dolls. I would play with them and that felt like an act of imagination, making these very tactile things. When I began to write, it didn’t feel distinct from that early imagination playmaking. It didn’t feel entirely different, but instead the dolls are in my mind and my characters are embodied.
I never feel like I’m writing well until I feel like I have gotten a tactile sense of the characters moving through physical space on the page, because to me that’s one of the places the story comes from. It’s a physical human moving through space and interacting with the world in a variety of ways. It’s base level, and that’s what the story is for me. I’m always trying to imagine the body of the character and not just what they look like and can they bench press 250, but what is the history of their body, and how does the world interact with that body, and how does that body interact with the world? I always try to think about that relationship because it is the primary relationship of our lives, right?
When I’m writing, I’m always trying to think about the physical human because so much of who we are originates in the body. To me, a story is incomplete if it doesn’t do that. I’m talking about my own stories—a story never feels complete to me until that human body is on the page. My imagination—a great chunk of it is dedicated to thinking about bodies and space and trying to think of strategies to put that body on the page, both in terms of what I tell the reader and what I don’t tell the reader.
A big concern of my work, especially my short fiction, is how do I render blackness visible in a way that isn’t boring or tedious, or in a way that isn’t just, “He was black.” What are the ways that a black body is coded and what is the history of that body and what are the ramifications of putting that body in, for example, a predominantly white space? How do I interrogate that and how do I make that interesting? Because it’s not just enough to say that a character has brown skin—all of that needs to come together in a way that implicates history and time and place and character and all the people who know them and love them. The body is deeply important to me, and I spend a lot of time trying to imagine both what the body does and also what are the consequences of actions or non-actions.
Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has earned him fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.