Kia Corthron: playwright, writer on The Wire, and one of the best US debut novelists of the century

Corthron's answers to our questions on prose style; plus the opening chapter of The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter

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IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘I’m reading a nonfiction book for research—good info that I need for a project—but the writing itself (by an attorney, successful in the courtroom) has me intermittently sighing and rolling my eyes’: Kia Corthron on prose style.

We picked Corthron’s The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter as the best-written previous winner of the Centre for Fiction Prize for debut novels. This is part of our project to identify the best-written books of the century to date.

—’I got the world’: the opening chapter of The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter.

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KIA CORTHRON ON PROSE STYLE

In your early writing career, did you ever consider not working hard on your sentences? Were there writers whose sentences permanently affected the standards of your reading and your own writing aspirations?

I came to writing novels in middle age, after decades of playwriting. On the stage, every word matters. You have only two hours (give or take) to tell the story, so economy is key. That doesn’t mean every play is spare. If a character is a chatterbox, then there may be scores of pointless words because pointlessness is the point.

When I was younger, I was drawn to leaner fiction, to heightened, poetic language: Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent, Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter, Clarence Major’s My Amputations. Or something delightfully wacky like Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey.

I still love those but also came to embrace more prosaic works: Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, Annie Proulx’s Postcards, Edward P. Jones’ short story collections (as well as The Known World), Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story collections, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto, Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Raven Leilani’s Luster, Anna Burns’ Milkman, Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, Matthew Klam’s Who Is Rich?.

During the height of the pandemic, my three favorite reads were Douglas Stuart’s meticulously rendered Shuggie Bain, Deb Olin Unferth’s wildly quirky Barn 8, and Sarah Waters’ The Paying Guests which draws you in with beautifully crafted prose, moving along gently and steadily, until an incident halfway through the book catapults the narrative into a heart-thumping page-turner for the remainder of the novel.

Back in the ’90s, when I read Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love for the first time, I was excited by the language play at the beginning, but then, later in the book, the lyricism is set aside, replaced by an epic narrative in conventional prose. I was initially disappointed by the stylistic turn. And yet: the imagination! My literary snootiness soon faded as I became lost in the delicious storytelling.

Has your tolerance for less polished prose changed over time?

Right now, I’m reading a nonfiction book for research—good info that I need for a project—but the writing itself (by an attorney, successful in the courtroom) has me intermittently sighing and rolling my eyes.

When I was a kid and teen, I remember summer days walking to the county public library. The excitement of all those books that I could have cost-free! (For two weeks!) I didn’t ask friends for recommendations, didn’t consult trusted lit sources for suggestions, didn’t walk in to stare at the stacks and be overwhelmed by Too many books, too little time! anxiety. I felt I had my whole life to read them, all of them if I wished, so I just strolled along the shelves and picked what looked good. Or another novel from that author I discovered last week. Is it a good book? It got published, so it must be!

What do you understand by the term overwritten, and how often do you come across overwritten books?

The research book I mentioned above? Much of my eye rolling was an involuntary physical reflex: Yeah, yeah, got it. I come across such volumes now and again, and will muddle through the journalism when I’m investigating the subject and need the data. Still, give me two nonfiction books on the same topic, and, right or wrong, I’ll trust the one with the more accomplished craftsmanship.

With overwritten fiction, I lose my patience and usually put down the book quickly regardless of compelling subject matter. On the flip side, gorgeous writing, even when there isn’t much happening, can keep me going, as I’ll feel confident that the author is leading me down a path to gratification: I’m in good hands.

When I write a play, I strive to be as minimal as possible in the information I provide, allowing the audience to meet me halfway: to interpret the subtext and thus become active participants in the experience. In drama, the four-letter word is “exposition”: you can’t let a character explain herself any more than a human in real life would in the same situation.

I had been so conditioned to respect that taboo that, when I started writing my first novel, I feared I wouldn’t know how (or would not dare) to provide any interior life for my characters. But I soon realized my playwriting process transferred to fiction: I provide exactly enough information for the reader to grasp what I’m doing, then let them bring the rest.

Audiences avoid music or cinema with amateurish or dated production values. So why is inept or dated technique often welcome in published prose? Why do so few reviewers, critics, interviewers, and writing teachers pay attention to style?

There’ll always be folks (many in the publishing industry) who opt for McDonald’s over Maqluba. For them, pleasure reading is not about the aforementioned more minimalistic offering, but rather being hand-fed juicy plot points. Other than basic comprehension, such a novel doesn’t ask for any participation from the reader. Enthusiasts of this (often bestselling) genre might be as snobbily dismissive of literary fiction as I am of a book full of plot and devoid of craft.

I’m pretty good at applying my elitism to my own work, something I know many writers struggle with. If I look over sentences I’ve created and even remotely feel the impulse to roll my eyes, it’s time to revise. If what I’ve brought forth doesn’t arouse and astonish me, how can I expect it to affect another?

What do you understand by the terms substance and style? How have these understandings influenced your prose in The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter?

My writing is always sparked by social injustice. A lot of that happens in the seventy-year span of The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, but it’s the climactic event, the incident intersecting the two protagonist families, that precipitated the writing of the book. So that’s substance. As for style—well, if I have any, it’s just a matter of what happens when I constantly try to surprise the reader with the next plot point and with the next paragraph and with the next word.

Most rejections of my manuscript were related to its length (or so I was told), but I was surprised by one publisher that claimed the book was too “experimental.” What? It’s not Cloud Atlas!

I could only imagine that the assessment referred to my fluttering among my multiple protagonists, vacillating between first-person to third-, ricocheting from colloquialisms to perfect grammar.

Sometimes I was purposeful: with the section focusing on B.J., who is deaf, I did not want to write the umpteenth story wherein the disabled character exists only in the service of the able-bodied ones (for the record, I’m able-bodied), and I felt first-person would help me embody B.J. as closely as I could.

In other instances, my choices were instinctual: for the attorney chapters, third-person with textbook English, right down to the quotation marks, felt appropriate—factual precision and (seeming) emotional distance.

In general, my writing is a matter of I know the information I need to convey here, but how can I achieve what I want the reader to feel? while avoiding redundancy—Okay, this worked previously, now how do I elicit a similar emotional response without repeating myself?

An example: in an early draft, a chapter ending felt too reminiscent of a preceding one. In revising the repetitious pages, a scene set outdoors in the winter with Christmas carolers nearby, I remembered that the fourth verse of a popular holiday hymn, a somber stanza, communicated exactly what I needed without me having to add anything more, with the bonus advantage of rattling reader expectations—the presumed lightness of a festive choir turned ominous.

Some readers have misunderstood Auraist’s emphasis on style to mean we’re not fussed about substance, when in reality much modern writing lacks both these qualities (e.g. few high-profile writers appear grounded in philosophy). Has your own obvious attention to style ever resulted in equivalent misunderstandings?

No, because I am well known from theatre as a “political writer,” which I used to call myself until one day it occurred to me that that’s a pretty meaningless label. Too broad, applying to anything along the doctrinal left-to-right spectrum, applying to seemingly apolitical work which in fact supports the status quo by its refusal to challenge it. So, as I wrote above, if I were to identify myself, it would be as a writer of social injustice.

I volunteer with an organization that, through community partnerships, leads writing workshops for the incarcerated, undocumented immigrants, the chronically ill, others. During one of these sessions, when the participants were writing incredible stories, imaginative tales of radical resistance, it seemed my co-mentor was only interested in more mundane contributions that were structurally sound. Yeah, craft is essential, exceedingly so, but that can come with revision. At the beginning, the how of the writing doesn’t matter if the what isn’t there.

What ratio between writing and editing would you recommend, and has this ratio changed over time?

With my plays, it differs with each endeavor. For one of my most produced works, the first draft, written in three weeks, was very nearly the final. (Don’t gasp: a play can be written more quickly than a novel! Though that occasion was definitely an anomaly.)

More often it’s several drafts over months. Sometimes I pull something out of the proverbial dusty drawer years later and go to town on it.

I’m working on my third novel. I wrote the first because I had a story, or the idea of a story, which I knew would take longer than two hours of stage time. (When I started, I had no idea just how longass it would turn out to be, especially since I write my first drafts longhand.) And of course the story that didn’t fit on the stage became a whole other thing in narrative form.

It was terrifying to suddenly be writing in a new genre. (All right, “terrifying” might be hyperbolic since I could have stopped at any time—I had no advance, no one waiting for the manuscript—but I really wanted to tell that story.) So to prevent my nervous edit-brain from kicking in early—which is to say, to keep me from doing nothing more than rewriting Chapter 1 for years—I committed to getting to the last word of the book before looking back, and I stuck to my pledge for a good 99% of that spontaneous initial draft.

After taking seven months to reach THE END, it was terrifying (less hyperbole this time) to go back to Page 1. But I did and, as had happened with those ancient play drafts, it was not the humiliating experience I’d braced myself for but rather a discovery of great moments I’d totally forgotten about and not so great moments that, with distance, I suddenly knew how to fix, or at least improve upon. So I revised and revised and nitpickingly revised.

At the beginning of that journey, I set out just to finish a book. At some point in the rewriting I thought, Oh, this is a pretty good book. And later: Oh, this is a really good book—one that I’d like to read even if I hadn’t written it.

All that hampered the writing of my sophomore a bit. There was a delay between the first and second novels (theatre and other distractions), and then a moment when I began to ask myself: Do I have a second book in me? And, if so, will it be as good as the first? I was about to attend a month-long artists’ residency and decided that in those four weeks I needed to answer both questions or just set aside novel writing for the time being.

The answer to the first question came to be Yes. The answer to the second: I don’t know if it will be as good as the first, but every novel’s its own thing, and it’ll be what it’ll be.

Scratching out the third has proven to be murder. This past year alone my attention was diverted by two new play productions that kept me busy the first quarter, followed by a necessity to find a new place to live, then the moving itself, and all along being emotionally caught up in, and on the streets demonstrating against a genocide in Occupied Palestine being bankrolled by my American taxes.

A September residency (yep, I love them) put me back on track with the writing. I’m moving forward but at the present the entire project seems a scattered, sloppy mess. So, for the foreseeable future, I’ll just be reaching for that last word. And, after that, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and rewriting and then maybe it will click. Maybe I’ll have produced something worthy enough that’ll feel like I just casually spat it out on the first try.

Kia Corthron is the author of numerous plays, which have been produced in New York, across the U.S., and internationally. Awards for her body of work for the stage include the Windham Campbell Prize for Drama, the Horton Foote Award, the Flora Roberts Award, the United States Artists Jane Addams Fellowship, the Otto Award for Political Theatre, the Simon Great Plains Playwright Award, and the Lee Reynolds Award. She has also written a little television: for David Simon's The Wire (Edgar and Writers Guild Outstanding Series awards) and Tom Fontana's The Jury.

In 2016, Kia's debut novel, The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter, was published by Seven Stories Press. It was named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and was awarded The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her second novel, Moon and the Mars, was released in 2021.

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RANDALL

1

I got the world.

My family and the trees, the library, picture shows, history and geography and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Longfellow and in the advanced class Mr. Faulkner. I got Prayer Ridge and Lefferd County and the state of Alabama and the United States of America. I got the future: college, law school, med school. Or businessman, choices. And ocean liners to Europe, China: all waiting.

B.J.’s world is smaller. The family, and the trees. Some days it’s smaller still, all inside himself. He’s my little brother. He’s eighteen. I’m thirteen.

I sit with him on the rug between our twin beds. A’s a fist, B.J., see? And B’s four fingers up. And let’s see, C, you just cup your hand like C, see? Then D oh wait. S is the fist, A’s sort of a fist but thumb points up. Then E—wait, that’s trickier. Shoot, I missed D. Guess if I were a better teacher, I’d’ve learned em myself before trying to teach him but I’m short on time, algebra exam tomorrow. I come across the drawings at the front of this book I borrowed from the school library, the “Manual-Finger Alphabet.” The book is The Story of My Life by Miss Helen Keller, which she wrote while still at Radcliffe. Barely anything been translated into Braille back then, yet Helen at fourteen knew Latin, devouring books in German and French and I don’t mean “See Jack run.” Grown-up books, literature!

A few verses of Omar Khayyám’s poetry have just been read to me, and I feel as if I had spent the last half-hour in a magnificent sepulcher. Yes, it is a tomb in which hope, joy and the power of acting nobly lie buried. Every beautiful description, every deep thought glides insensibly into the same mournful chant of the brevity of life, of the slow decay and dissolution of all earthly things.

Essay she wrote, and only a freshman! Well here’s my point: If Helen Keller could do all that in a world of total darkness and silence, why can’t B.J. read when all he is is deaf?

Next day I breeze through the test, 3y + 34 = 2y + 89 easy, finish five minutes early and turn it over in the avoidance of copycats which provokes a few glares in my general direction. Late September, the year barely begun but my reputation’s long been sealed: smartest in the class which is not exactly the golden path to eighth-grade popularity. Lunch I always eat alone which is fine—gives me good time to think. And today what crosses my mind: How’m I supposed to teach B.J. letters when he can’t hear the sound they make, words when he doesn’t understand what language is? Suddenly this whole teaching thing seems way too big, I better just return that Helen Keller book. Then again Helen had her breakthrough, right? Didn’t her teacher help her into the social world? Then again Helen was toddling, already a vocabulary when the sickness stole her senses, so was it that foundation of speech what sprungboard her into communal consciousness? I sip my milk pondering it all as Earl Mattingly pulls my seat out from under me, sticky white all over my shirt, my ass on the floor and half the school laughing.

When I get home the book is not top drawer of my dresser where I know damn well I left it, where the hell? Now B.J. at the doorway holding it, looking at me all eager for the next drill. I take lesson time down to the kitchen, ginger snaps my mother baked, and usually B.J.’d indulge with me but today too raring to learn. Or play, a game to him, like it was to Miss Keller at first.

Two Saturdays back he threw a fit. My mother: “This mighta been cute when you were a baby, but it is not cute anymore,” like he would have any idea, like her trying to reason with a cat. He only pulls that stuff when my father’s not home because Pa’d take the belt to him, “I don’t care how big you are,” though long ago he’d stopped whooping me and Benja. B.J.’s tantrum all about I wasn’t taking him to the park with me. Used to every couple weeks but then, July, there we are, the blanket all laid out, food my mother made for us and I saw em. Kids from my class, coming out the woods and spy B.J. and me. Even with the distance I can make out their smirks.

So lately when I go to the park I go alone, and here’s B.J. home by himself, nobody to play with, and this I think is related to how he’s such an attentive student now: got his playmate back. I dip cookie into milk and say the letters real exaggerated as I hand-show em. He’s all delighted with cross-fingers R, and when I accidentally confuse G for Q he looks in the book and corrects me. I I show him, J. He stares at J, making that hook with his pinkie over and over, then he big-time catches me unawares. B he spells and speaks it, pretty distorted but not out of the ballpark, then J, then points to himself. I smile. He figured that out without me telling him, my big little brother B.J. got his Helen-eureka fast. I spell him the rest of the family: Mother, Father, Benja, Randall and, smart again, he knows with the last one to point to me. When the lesson’s over I close the book. He snatches it and takes it back with him to our room. Oh Lord, how’m I gonna explain to him it’s borrowed and due back less than a week?

The next day’s Friday and by some miracle Mrs. Goodman’s already checked the algebra tests, and I’m pleased and unsurprised at my big fat A though perturbed her nitpicking brought me down to 96 even if it’s still the class high. When I get home B.J. and Ma are all into it. She doesn’t understand what kind of game he’s playing with his hands, with her hands, is beside herself with his frustrated conniptions. I give her the news flash: B.J.’s spelling “Mother.” She gets this dazed look like she can’t hardly believe it, and B.J. looks at me grinning, spelling “Randall” over and over so fast, faster even than fourth-period Madame Everhart’s spoken French so takes me till the third time before I get it.