[p. 3 of 4]

[Means continues]... I thought: what if someone were as obsessed with searching around the house as I am? In "Coitus," I really was thinking about a fishing accident, about what would happen if your waders filled up when you were fly-fishing; and I was thinking about a specific scene, a trip I'd taken up to the Two Hearted River with a buddy of mine—about adultery, and about those two people in bed during a hot summer afternoon. So I always have the story as my main concern, first. If the story happens to go deep into the various interior modes, it still has that narrative drive subsurface.

LRS: Your sentences are some of the best I've read. Do you fine-tune all the way through the drafting process or do you write sloppily and then, in revision, begin tinkering with sentences?

Means: I write the first drafts and then work at the sentence level. Often I do the first draft by hand, put it into the machine, print it out and start editing. Each story, of course, is a new experience, and some come a bit easier than others, but I've never finished a story in less than a couple of months. In a few cases the story came out pretty much full-formed, like an aberration, in one sitting, but that was only the first draft. I try as hard as I can to throw the bad stuff away. You have to say to yourself: do I really want to put my name on that story?

LRS: I think full omniscience is largely absent in published short fiction today, especially in America, and yet a captivating omniscient voice permeates your work. I see it more as a central intelligence that comments on your characters and their situations in ways they cannot, yet also, at moments, closely inhabits these characters (and sometimes multiple viewpoints within a single story—human and animal!). This central consciousness seems to link the stories together thematically, tonally, and syntactically. What effect do you think you achieve with this more distant omniscient voice?

Means: Certainly, writing a story is a balancing act between the various elements that might or might not go into it, and in the end most of the choices you make are intuitive, bouncing off all of the other literature—in that anxiety of influence—and your own moral stances, your own sense of the secret mystery that's buried in the way lives transpire. That includes the choices you make in the revision process, too. Some writers lean on plot more than others; some skimp on story and derive more from poetics; there's that kind of spectrum—with someone like Beckett on one end and someone like Chekhov on the other. I don't think omniscience is missing from short fiction today. What's sometimes missing is that deeper sense of story beneath the surface, and the care it takes to bring it to life completely. If you don't have that, then you just have something that is operating symbolically, and that's not enough.

I don't think that answers your question about omniscience exactly. Maybe I can't answer it. I think the old Hemingway iceberg metaphor still works; there has to be a great deal beneath the surface, and whatever it is down there has to be fully felt. You can do a lot of fancy things, lots of acrobatics on the tip, dancing and spinning around, but you'd better be sure you've got something deep going on, something as warm as blood, or it's all just the tip and nothing else. The reader will examine the story, turn it around, fold it up, and unfold it, bring it up to the light, examine it under a lens, and it has to hold up. I just read the story "Runaway" by Alice Munro and I stand in full amazement at what she did in that story, moving across boundaries of point of view, taking us into one relationship and then another, twisting the neck of the story into a helix; inverting it around and presenting us with an essential mystery, unsolved, and leaving it dangling there forever in the eternal space at the end of the story: a dead goat unseen on the edge of the narrative. And it's a wondrous work of art; it stands perfect and complete. That's the mystery of a good story. All of the parts, in the end, clinch up against each other into something that is finished.

I find it amusing when a writer has to explain something that is virtually impossible to explain. We all talk about our work—as I'm doing here—but we're really building, when we do so, a kind of house of cards around the work itself, and no matter what an author says publicly about how he or she does it, the truth of the matter is that the process is vastly complex. In a way, it's better to turn to critics like Hugh Kenner—I'm thinking

[continues...]