Q: How did THE GOD OF WAR come about? What made you choose the remote setting of the
MS: I have long loved the
Q: In fiction, there is the literary principle of ‘Chekhov’s Gun,’ the law proposed by the Russian master of the short story that suggests that if there is a gun in the first act, it must go off by the third act. Did you have this in mind when you first conceived the story?
MS: I always knew there was something buried in this story, but it took me a while to come around to the idea that this hidden thing was a gun. Many things were buried in this sea during various drafts of the novel, all of them leading the characters onto different paths. It was only when Kevin entered the picture and I understood why he was there that I knew that what was hiding was a gun. The gun is an object that represents both Kevin’s violence and, in a strange way, Ares’s fleeting innocence. He is fascinated with war and with guns, and weaves them into his fantasy games with his brother. But as the story progresses and he loses his innocence and becomes embroiled with Kevin, the actual potential of violence changes for him, and the gun becomes an inevitable actor in the story.
Q: In Greek mythology, the name Ares is used for the god of war. At what point in your writing process did you decide to incorporate aspects of mythology? Why is Ares the “god of war” in this story?
MS: Ares was always named Ares from the first moment I conceived of him. It was a name that
Q: Was it challenging to write from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy? How attached do you get to your characters? How much of yourself (if any) do you put into your characters?
MS: It is always challenging to write from any point of view not my own because it requires inhabiting someone totally different from me and understanding them specifically enough so that how they move and speak and act is of a piece, so that these elements create a fictional character who is palpable. Characters need not be consistent, but they have to be inconsistently themselves. A twelve-year-old boy, which I am not, is as challenging as a mother, which I am, because I am not any mother, I am me, and the mother I write is not any mother, she is particular and peculiar to herself. Lately, I’ve been surrounded by a lot of adolescent boys, so I’ve been able to watch how they move and speak and gesture. I watch how they manage being trapped in that moment between childhood and adulthood—it is a potent, achingly lovely time.
Q: The relationship between Ares and Malcolm is so palpable and resilient. Was their relationship based on a relationship you’ve experienced in your own life?
MS: Although I am one of a troika of sisters, the relationship between brothers, starting with Jacob and Esau and Cain and Abel, has always moved me in a particular way. I don’t know why this is. I’ve dedicated my book, in part, to my father and uncle. My father’s stories of his life with his brother are full of humor and heartache. I have been captivated by these tales since childhood. I guess I still am.
Q: How did you decide to include autism, which wasn’t widely understood and in the 1970’s, in the book? Tell us about this choice.
MS: The book, at its heart, is about the war Ares must wage between responsibility to his family and responsibility to himself. This is an issue we all have to deal with on some level, and Ares particular struggle is all the more pronounced because of his brother's condition and because of his mother's denial of Malcolm's troubles and their implications. Malcolm is autistic, although at the time the story takes place, that condition was not as widely understood as it is now, and the protocols for therapy and medications were not so widely available, especially in a place as remote and off the grid as a desert town by the
Laurel does not seek out a diagnosis, and Mrs. Pearl, as well intentioned as she is, is not an expert. She is simply the one staff member at the school with any knowledge about learning difficulties, but her knowledge does not extend to a condition as complex as autism.
It is important to me not to romanticize illness. Autism to the degree that Malcolm has it is a hard and often heartbreaking condition. But as I wrote the novel, I began to understand how both Ares and
Ares, who struggles with his identity and who is continually confused about his behavior and about the kind of person he wants to be, nearly envies his brother for not having to go through the trials of adolescence. By the novel's end, he understands well the mistakes his mother has made, and the real consequences of his brother's situation, but he also has developed a fierce and protective love for his brother, and a sense that his brother, as silent and unconnected as he seems, understands something Ares has come to understand about struggle and hardship and the ties that bind. Whether Malcolm really understands matters little. What matters is that Ares has come to accept that his brother is an elemental part of him and will always be.
Q: You write about characters that sometimes make poor decisions and sometimes do awful things, yet it never seems like you are judging them. How do you keep your own feelings out of the equation?
MS: There is no person who makes good decisions all the time, but most people make poor decisions with all the best intentions. Their mistakes might come from reading a situation wrong, or from the emotional scarring that they bring to their experience of life. We are none of us experts in the one job we have, which is to live and to love. I find this predicament of existence humbling and poignant.
Q: The imagery and the detailed descriptions in the novel are so evocative and beautiful. Was the strong animal imagery intentional from the beginning or did it come about organically during the writing process?
MS: One of the pleasures of writing is to make a scene sensory—to invest it with touch and smell and sound. One of the challenges is not to overburden a reader with so much information that it all becomes a meaningless wash. So the job is about picking and choosing details that not only describe a place, or a face, or an emotional moment, but also illuminate character, or cause the reader to make an association that expands his or her understanding of the scene, of life. When I hit the target, I know it, and then I clear away all the other stuff around it so that the detail makes the most amount of emotional and visceral impact.
Q: What is your writing regime like? Do you outline first or just go where the story takes you? Who are some authors that have played an important role in your life?
MS: I wish I could outline a story. I wish I knew where I was going. I have no idea. I start with a situation, with some sketches of characters, and then, like a painter, perhaps, I fill in and fill in, deepening the lines and the colors until something feels real and until action and drama tell a story that moves me, that I care about telling. It is a herky-jerky process: a character does one thing, and then the story heads in a certain direction. But maybe that’s wrong. So the character does something else, and I head down that new path. I recently learned how to throw a pot on a potter’s wheel. As I watched the clay rise and fall and rise again, puff out here, slim down there, become something ungainly and then right itself, I thought: this is just like writing, only dirtier.
I read a lot. Old stuff. New stuff. William Trevor and Alice Munroe always. Madame Bovary, William Maxwell . . . the list is vast and there is no central theme. Sometimes I read simply to see how an author handles an aspect of craft: first person voice, flashback . . . Sometimes I read to let my conscious mind wander around in a world of another’s words while my unconscious mind stews over my own work without my having to think about it. I keep note cards by me at all times. I wake up at night and write down things that I think are the solution to problems I’ve run into only to wake in the morning and find out that they solve nothing.
Q: You came from the film world, having directed films like Old Enough and He Said, She Said. How was it adapting to the more solitary life of a fiction writer? How are the two worlds similar? Which do you find more creatively rewarding?
MS: On a superficial level, of course, the worlds of filmmaking and fiction writing could not be more different. Standing on a set with upward of one hundred people who are all contributing to the final outcome, is about as diametrically opposite an experience from sitting alone in my room with my computer and my books as it gets. Personally, I’ll take my room and my computer every time. I love the solitude (maybe to an unhealthy degree) and find that writing gives me the opportunity to slowly and carefully excavate character and story in a way that is hugely satisfying to me.
Issues of craft in the two forms, however, overlap quite a bit. Filmmakers and writers are each telling stories with tools, and although a writer has no camera, she does have point of view, narrative distance, and movement at her disposal. At every moment of writing a scene, I am thinking about who I am seeing, where I am in the room, where characters are in relation to one another, what is happening in the background that may inform the scene and the emotions of it. The editorial choices in filmmaking are not dissimilar to those in writing—when to move to a new scene, what scenes to juxtapose to one another—all these choices serve to move the story in various ways. And when I am in a scene, I am, in fact, really acting through my characters, trying to feel what they would feel, say what they would say. Although I have never acted before, I imagine that the process I go through in creating characters and in trying to make them feel real and specific is not all that different from what an actor goes through.
Q: Your literary career really took off after you were featured in the inaugural debut fiction issue of The New Yorker in 2001. How did you come to the attention of the magazine’s editors?
MS: My agent sent my work to The New Yorker when they were putting together the first debut fiction issue. Having my fiction debut in The New Yorker was a tremendous experience. I grew up with The New Yorker, and to see my story printed in that idiosyncratic font for the first time was quite a thrill. The magazine has a legacy that has meant a lot to me and that I was so proud to be part of. It was also great to have my work in a magazine that the committed readers of fiction turn to when looking for work from both new and veteran writers.
Q: Do you have a preference between writing novels or stories?
MS: Writing short stories and writing novels are two enormously different jobs. The requirements of each might seem the same, except for the length, but, to me, they are quite different. A short story requires an economy of character and event. It requires that you illuminate a whole world in miniature. The challenge is compression. A novel, of course, is more expansive, but it has the added challenges that controlling a story over time and place involves. I love writing both, but both are equally hard for me. Although it was difficult at first, I have grown to appreciate the length of time it takes to write a novel. I like seeing how, year by year, the process develops, how the story shapes and reshapes, how characters deepen and define themselves over time. Writing novels has taught me patience.
Q: Are you working on anything else? If so, can you share a bit about it with us?
MS: I'm working both on a new collection of short stories and a new novel. I generally don't talk about what I'm working more specifically, because I've found that talking about something can take away the urgency to write about it. So I have to keep it all inside in order to ensure that that urgency, which is such a part of the writing process, remains.
