Hayden Casey Interviews Matt Bell

Matt Bell is the author most recently of the craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision, published by Soho Press in 2022. His latest novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable Book) was published by Custom House in July 2021.

He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur's Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, Orion, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

You can purchase a copy of Refuse to Be Done here.

From Associate Editor Hayden Casey: Speaking as a current student in Matt’s novel-writing workshop course—from which, in his teaching over the years, much of Refuse to Be Done’s content originated—there are a few familiar tidbits here, pieces of advice and bits of encouragement that have been given to students around our classroom.

But so much of this book is new to me, particularly the content in the later-stage editing territories most of us won’t reach in the course of our semester. And what’s new to us students, too, is the thorough and compact presentation of all this info. In this one svelte volume is a thorough, encouraging guide from a draft’s messy beginning to its polished end: it’s a pep talk, a creativity thesaurus, a troubleshooting guide, a permission-granter to play, to follow the most exciting impulses, wherever they lead. It’s a masterclass in how to discover, how to refine. I wish I had this book years and years ago, for old disasters of novel drafts, but I’m so glad to have it now.

I had the joy of emailing with Matt in early April about the book and the stages of the novel-writing process.

HC: A common piece of advice writers get before they leap into revision is to let the first draft sit for a while. You propose, more concretely, for a writer to gather two things between the first and second draft: lived time, meaning calendar days; and art time, meaning the intake and production of new art. Can you talk about what this process has looked like for you in the past? Are you writing/reading/watching toward the world of the project or away from it?

MB: At this stage, I'm usually writing away from the current project, in part because if I had something like the novel it'd already be in the novel. For the last two novels, I've written nonfiction in the gap between drafts and then finished those projects once I was finished with the novels. In between drafts of Scrapper, I wrote my book on Baldur's Gate II, and in between drafts of Appleseed, I wrote Refuse to Be Done. Who knows if that pattern will continue, but for quite a while there I was alternating between longer novels and shorter book-length nonfiction. I'm not much of a poet, but I've also gone through phases where I'm prosed out by the end of a novel draft, and I need to write something entirely different: poetry's been a good way to keep writing during those periods.

HC: I’m so fascinated by this idea of using form as a sort of reset between projects! I’m curious how this applies to the novel projects themselves: as someone who has written lots of fiction in an experimental vein, how do structural and formal considerations affect your first drafts? Do you ever use formal experimentation, or structural scaffolding, generatively?

MB: I do! I try a lot of different things as I draft, some of which stay in the final book and some don't. For Appleseed, for instance, there was a time when I was moving between the time periods in a much more experimental fashion: at one point, I was doing so mid-sentence even, which was interesting but ultimately not sustainable. (And there probably would've been about ten people on earth who would've wanted to read that version of the book.) But I think a lot about dares and games as I write, and sometimes something good comes out of that: for example, there's a five-page sentence in Appleseed that came out of my daring myself to try to suspend time in a sentence for as long as possible. Sometimes all you want is a fun way to get through the writing day.

HC: (Count me in as one of those ten people.) At what point in this process does feedback from others come into play for you? Are you actively showing bits of rough material to folks during the drafting process, as we do in the novel-writing workshop, or do you keep the book in your own hands till it's the best you can make it? What do you think are advantages of (or hindrances to) early-stage feedback?

MB: I generally don't show anyone anything until I've taken the book as far as I can on my own: the three-draft process described in Refuse to Be Done is, for me, all done before I let anyone else in. I don't need a lot of encouragement to keep writing, thankfully, and so I'm more concerned with protecting my novels while they're most fragile. My drafts are also not particularly readable in the earliest phases. What I do like is to kick around ideas with a couple friends, who in recent years haven't been other writers: the person I talked to most about Appleseed, for instance, was an environmental philosopher I had beers with every other week or so. Getting to bat around the themes of the book is much more helpful to me than getting comments on pages that aren't meant for the reader yet.

In our novel-writing course, the reason we share early pages isn't to benefit the writer, although hopefully some benefit happens too. What we're really doing is studying each other's novel-writing processes, which is something you can't do without access to those pages. So that's serving a different function in workshop than it likely will in your post-MFA life.

I do think everyone has to find their own relationship to feedback, and discover who they want it from and what they want out of it. I can go three years without anyone looking at my prose, but not everyone can or should.

HC: Both in the book and in our workshop, you've talked about the fact that writing the middle of a novel kind of sucks. (Or, as you more eloquently put it in the book, "So far, [your] experience has been that beginnings are easy, middles dreadful, and endings inevitable.") The book mentions several middle-of-the-novel reinvigorators, but which is your favorite/most helpful for you?

MB: Middles are hard! I've been thinking a lot lately about Blake Snyder's three-act structure from Save the Cat, where he talks about what he calls the "fun and games" part of a screenplay, right after the break into Act 2. Snyder says this part provides "the promise of the premise," and is where "most of the trailer moments of a movie are found." That's a fun way to think of the early middle of the book, and a good task to set yourself: insert more fun and games, looking for the memorable dramatic actions that, if we made the kinds of trailers for novels we make for movies, would make you pick up a book.

I also think that what's originally conceived of as the end of a novel often turns out to be only the end of the first or second act, and so we initially elongate all this middle material instead of moving the "final" action up and then going beyond it. One of the reasons a lot of novels have saggy middles is that the writers have padded out an arc that should either be shorter overall or that should get to what originally seemed like the end earlier, and then go beyond it.

HC: You caution writers against getting too sentence-focused in a novel's early stages, in service of bigger-picture thinking, but how do you swat away the gnat in your ear that's repeatedly saying, "These sentences suck"? (If you've managed to!)

MB: Here's the thing: by the time you're ready to write a novel, you're also usually a good enough reader to know when, as a writer, you're writing bad sentences. So that's dismaying, when it happens. But sometimes the bad sentences are in service of something else: you and I have talked a lot about my feeling that when I'm trying to make a big plot move, my sentences fall apart. And they do! Always! But that's what revision is for: to unify the different kinds of good that exist in a draft and to rewrite and replace the different kinds of bad.

HC: One of my favorite concepts in the book is the idea of "manifest[ing] yourself upon the page . . . dozens or hundreds of times, until you end up with a book . . . collaborated upon by the many selves who existed over the likely hundreds of days you were writing." In this spirit, what do you think the Matt of today would provide to an older novel of yours, like Scrapper or In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods? What has your "spectrum of selves" accumulated since those early novels were written and revised?

MB: I love this question, although it feels so hard to answer! I don't think I'd ever want to reopen a finished novel again, in part because I like the way that each one is a time capsule for the person (or persons!) I was at the time they were written. I do have new skills I didn't have then—for example, I'm a better dialogue writer than I was when I wrote either of those books, and that has allowed me to write a different kind of scene—but the workarounds for my "missing" skills also provide what was probably some of those books' strengths. So much of style is just making the most of what we have while hiding our lacks!

Another way to think about the "spectrum of selves," of course, is to think about it across books. There's a late late career move—maybe after you've mostly stopped writing—where a writer rereads all the novels they wrote over the decades. And in that reread, I imagine, one might be able to see not just the hundreds of selves it took to write a novel but the tens of thousands it took to make a career. I'm excited to write enough to get to see that someday. There might be no better autobiography I could hope to make. 

Hayden Casey is a writer, musician, and MFA candidate at Arizona State University, and an Associate Editor at Hayden’s Ferry Review.