Charles Baxter on the Realm of Possibility

First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.

In this episode, Mitzi talks to Charles Baxter about his new novel, Blood Test.

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From the episode:

Mitzi Rapkin: I’m curious if you do any mapping out to ensure you have a few scenes written that you want to definitely get into the book?

Charles Baxter: This will sound weird, maybe not. I mean, who knows? I thought if I outlined this book, it would ruin the surprise for me, it and it would put a damper on my imagination, that it would all be pre-imagined, so that when I sat down to write it, I would have to follow the map that I had painstakingly written down. Now I know a lot of writers feel that they have to outline their books, and I’ve done that.  My second novel, Shadow Play, I completely outlined that book before I sat down to write it. It was my second novel. I thought that was something I had to do.  But I thought with this one I wanted the pleasure of sitting down in that chair and thinking of, well, what’s going to happen now?  The danger there is that you can take a terrible left turn, and you can make a mistake and have the character do something that’s completely implausible just because you thought of it that particular morning. And you write for a week or two or a month, and you realize that you have made a mistake, and you have to throw away all those pages, or at least put them into the computer’s trash file. So, I would think for a while, and think about what I wanted the characters to do, and then I would think, is this at least within the realm of plausibility?

And then I would write whatever I thought of. I have to say that when I’ve talked to classes about plausibility and about the likability of their characters or my characters, I have nearly always said that interest trumps likeability and maybe even plausibility. If what the characters are doing is interesting, they’ll follow you, and it isn’t until later that they’ll say, well, maybe that wouldn’t happen. And so here and there in in this novel, I have events that are nearly impossible, but I put them there because I thought they were funny. A character slips, for example, on a banana peel, and that’s me winking at the reader, but nobody told me to take that banana peel out of the scene.

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Charles Baxter is the author of the novels The Feast of Love, nominated for the National Book Award, First Light, Saul and Patsy, Shadow Play, The Soul Thief, and The Sun Collective, and the story collections Believers, Gryphon, Harmony of the World, A Relative Stranger, There’s Something I Want You to Do, and Through the Safety Net. His stories have appeared in several anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize Anthology, and The O. Henry Prize Story Anthology. He has won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story. Baxter lives in Minneapolis.  His new novel is Blood Test.