Clint McCown Interview

Clint McCown is one of five teachers that will be present at the 2014 Nightsun Writers' Conference. He teaches creative writing/fiction at Virginia Commonwealth University. McCown has published three novels (The Member-Guest, War Memorials, and The Weatherman) along with three collections of poems (Sidetracks, Wind Over Water, and Dead Languages). McCown has also done some screenwriting for Warner Bros. He has received numerous awards including the American Fiction Prize, the S. Mariella Gable Prize, the Society of Midland Authors Award, the Bree Book Award, the Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence, and a Barnes and Noble Discover Great Writers designation. McCown will be the fiction teacher at the Nightsun Writers' Conference.



How has your work as a college professor affected your own writing?

I'm not sure that teaching has affected my writing, but it has certainly broadened my appreciation of forms and approaches to writing.  Students come up with some pretty clever concepts, and it has been interesting to see how the world of tweets and reality shows and video games has influenced the subject matter of what younger writers are writing about these days.



Do you have a specific voice you try to commit to while writing?

Ultimately, my voice is comic in the sense that my basic approach is one of uplift.  It's far too easy to bludgeon a reader.  Any hack can have daddy back the car over his three-year old.  Shock value holds no aesthetic interest for me.  I'm far more impressed by a writer who can move me through some everyday human interaction.  Alice Walker's short story, "Everyday Use" is a fine example of the sort of literature that demonstrates the extraordinary power of ordinary people living their lives. I prefer the emotional charge of a quietly closed door to the more standard and predictable emotion of a door that is slammed.  



Could you describe your writing process as a fiction writer? 

My writing process varies, according to the project.  For fiction, I tend to obsess until the project is completed.  This might mean starting out working an hour or two a day to begin with.  After a week or so, my stamina increases--the imagination is like a muscle and takes a little time to build itself back up--and I might be able to work three or four hours at a stretch.  The next week, maybe I can work six hours a day.  Finally, I reach the point where I wake up with the project in mind, begin work at once, and I'll stay with it until I go to bed at night.  Once I reach the point of writing sixteen hours a day, I stay with that until the project is finished.  That's why most of my novels have been written during sabbaticals and summers.  But if I do have to go back to work, the novel stays in my mind and I'll still spend every non-working moment wrestling with it. 



Is there a vision or idea that you'd really like to work on but are restrained from doing?  

I've never had a project that I wanted to write but couldn't.  There have been some that I did badly the first few drafts--primarily because I tried to base the work on something I'd gone through in my life.  Too much biographical closeness to the subject matter can destroy one's editorial distance and make it difficult to separate the real story from the one that needs to be told. 



You have written three plays that have been produced, and you have also done some screenwriting for Warner Bros. How do you think writing scripts has influenced your fiction writing? 

Writing scripts has made me much more aware of structure, for one thing.  Virtually all film scripts are based on the three-act structure, which in turn reflects what Joseph Campbell identified as the monomyth found in all cultures throughout history.  In short, we seem to be hardwired to appreciate one specific storytelling structure.  It's been useful to know that.  

     Also, writing screenplays and scripts has helped me write dialogue in fiction.  I've learned, among other things, to have my characters speak only when there's no way to avoid it.