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Interview with David Hicks

hicks_davidDavid Hicks is a professor of English at Regis University. He is also the author of several published short stories, a novel-in-stories called White Plains, and a debut novel called The Ruins. David is a Pushcart nominee, and a Colorado Council on the Arts Fiction Award winner. His work has been recognized as a finalist in multiple well-known contests. David shared that he is also co-directing a new low-res MFA program in Denver, the Mile-High MFA: www.regis.edu/mfa.

He was gracious enough to find the time to provide some information about his work, his inspiration, and how teaching literature informs his own writing. David also offered some helpful advice about getting a literary agent. Please visit david-hicks.com to learn more about David and his work.

As an English professor, you’ve been teaching literature for many years. What was the catalyst that prompted you to begin writing your own stories?

Well, I’d been teaching at the college level since I was twenty-two years old, and my PhD is in American literature, so for a long time I gave papers at academic conferences and published academic writing; but I always wanted to be a writer. The catalyst for my big switch was the same catalyst for all the big changes in my life: I got a divorce, quit my job, and moved to Colorado. Every single aspect of my life changed then, including what I pursued as intellectual labor. Also, for my first two years in the West, I lived with a writer, so I had a firsthand look at what the writing life was like, and I admired it. I began writing then–short stories. A few years later, in 2001, I was fortunate to find work at Regis University in Denver, a school that actually values creative work in addition to academic scholarship. (At most universities, creative work doesn’t count toward tenure or promotion.) So now I have the good fortune of working at a school that doesn’t just tolerate, but actually values, my creative work. That helps a lot. In other words, I don’t have to “sneak in” my creative writing; instead, it’s what I do, and my colleagues respect it.

How does teaching literature help to inform or improve your own writing process? 

Oddly enough, I’ve never been asked that question. I think it both informs and improves my writing, both on a conscious and unconscious level. The act of reading–especially, I’d say, reading literary fiction–has no doubt embedded many stylistic, structural, and linguistic “templates” in my brain, and that has probably helped me to be a good writer. And teaching literature means I’m constantly reading and re-reading great works, so all those templates are constantly being reinforced and improved. And when I read, I quite consciously “read as a writer,” noting not just the what but the how of the work I’m reading. So I’m not only thinking thematically, as a professor does–or structurally, linguistically, generically, symbolically–but my writer self is thinking, Damn, my eyes just welled up–how did she do that? and I’ll go back through the passage and try to learn from it. So what this means is that I can re-read a canonical work like Moby-Dick (which I just did, a few weeks ago) and mark passages I want to be sure to go over in class, because they speak to a particular theme or represent a particular stylistic move I want the students to learn, and at the same time know that it’s good for me as a writer because I’m (unconsciously) hard-wiring some of that gorgeous style in my brain and I might (consciously) mimic something of that style, or that theme, in my own work-in-progress.

In your experience as a professor and writing coach, what are some common mistakes that authors make in the initial drafts of their manuscripts?

They make a lot of mistakes in their initial drafts, just as you and I do, but the problem is that they don’t stay with the draft long enough–like fifty or sixty times through from start to finish–to correct those mistakes. But to answer your question more directly, they typically “tell” too much  and don’t “show” enough. They don’t have the confidence to give us the tip of the iceberg; they want to make sure the reader “gets it”–“gets” what they’re trying to say about the character and action and “gets” how eloquent their writing is. So there’s typically a lot of heavy-handed stuff in first drafts, too much explaining and not enough describing, and typically (this was certainly true of me, when I started writing) a great deal of overwriting, writing that draws too much attention to itself.

What was your inspiration for The Ruins, your debut novel? 

Two inspirations: First, I was teaching a short-story workshop for adults and I asked my students to describe a character doing something in a place they (the students) knew very well. I started doing the exercise with them, describing a character (myself as a teenager) walking down the street in Italy where my aunt lives–her house is across the street from the Mediterranean, and there are great smells and sounds there. I continued writing that draft when I got home, and when I got to page 28 and the poor kid was still walking, I knew it was probably not another story I was writing, but a novel.

My second inspiration was my sister. She died when I was young, and for a long time I thought I had caused her death. I wasn’t able to talk about her at home, because it upset my parents so much; so as I was writing about myself as a teenager in Italy, surrounded by so many physical manifestations of upheaval and death (earthquakes, bradyseisms, the constant threat of volcanic eruption, and Roman ruins on every block), it struck me that to give this kid the burden of longing for his lost sister would be just the thing to drive the story, both forward and backward.

Your works include both short stories and novels. Which do you prefer writing? Why? 

I don’t have a preference. Some stories feel short to me, and others feel long. I’m better at the short story–I feel like I can crank out one of those, revise it fifty times or so, and find a home for it–but they’re almost always rather long, and therefore difficult to get published. The novel right now feels more exciting and troublesome to me, so that’s what I’ve been working on lately, and it both frustrates the hell out of me and turns me on–which pretty much describes the creative process for almost any artist.

I read that you are represented by Victoria Skurnick of the Levine Greenberg Literary Agency. What was your process for getting an agent? Do you have any advice for debut authors who wish to begin the query process?

My process was laborious, but totally worth it–and I’m saying that even though she hasn’t yet sold my book, which is a novel-in-stories called White Plains. I queried over a hundred agents for my first book. The Ruins, and I couldn’t get one, even though it was a finalist in three renowned novel contests. About twenty asked for full manuscripts, and all of them wound up saying no, so what that told me was that the book wasn’t doing its job. Somewhere about a third of the way through, it wasn’t sustaining the reader’s attention. So I decided to put that book aside for the time being–a very difficult decision after having worked on it for eight years. For White Plains, I had better luck, no doubt because it’s a better book. I queried the agents I most respected, and who represented books that were somewhat like mine, and Victoria really liked it. I feel very lucky to have her, because she’s not like me at all: she’s forthright, connected, experienced, and confident in my work. She clearly didn’t take me on because I’m an “easy sell.” I’m not. There are no guns, vampires, werewolves, zombies, kinky sex acts, car chases, intense murder trials, typhoons, or apocalyptic devastations in my work. Just a lot of troubled characters.

Here now, my advice for debut authors who wish to begin the querying process:

  1. Make sure your book is as good as it can be, which probably means wait a little longer before querying and revise your book a few (dozen) more times.
  2. Once your book is truly as good as it can be, then go after an agent and be persistent, which means don’t quit after ten, twenty, or fifty rejections.
  3. Learn from any feedback they give you, because they typically know what they’re talking about, whereas you don’t, simply because it’s your book and you have no objectivity about it.

What fictional character would you most like to meet? Why?

I just asked my wife this question and she said, “I’d like to meet [Dostoyevsky’s] Underground Man, mainly to get his coat.” That’s as good an answer as I’ve heard to this question. For me, right now I’ll say Ahab, since, as I mentioned, I’ve just reread Moby-Dick, and an obsessed and god-defying monomaniacal whale-chaser is about as far removed from my own character as I can get. He’s as compelling a character in all of American literature–you can hate him all you want, but he dominates every scene he’s in, and Melville’s writing goes through the roof whenever he talks or thinks.  But a close second would be Janie from Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God–the opposite of Ahab, full of yearning and open to new experiences, but a character I find lovable and compelling.

Thank you, David!