The Lit Hub Author Questionnaire is a monthly interview featuring seven questions for five authors with new books. This month we talk to:
John August (Scriptnotes: A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters)
Nadia Davids (Cape Fever)
Matt Greene (The Definitions)
Tarpley Hitt (Barbieland: The Unauthorized History)
Elizabeth McCracken (A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction)
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Without summarizing it in any way, what would you say your book is about?
Tarpley Hitt: Postwar miscreants, several perverts (value-neutral), corporate consolidation, lawsuits, copyright law, knockoffs/fakes, America, lying, dolls.
Matt Greene: The importance of stories in defining who we are… our best available hope of forming meaningful human connections.
Nadia Davids: Women, domestic servitude, empire, classism, racism, colonialism, creativity, writing, Islam, Cape Town, psychic intrusions, ghosts, the longue durée, war-trauma, the porous line between the past and the present, the domestic arena as political battlefield, survival.
John August: The craft and business of screenwriting.
Elizabeth McCracken: The junk drawer of thirty-plus years of teaching fiction… a crank talking in her sleep.
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Without explaining why and without naming other authors or books, can you discuss the various influences on your book?
Elizabeth McCracken: Fourth-grade punishments; tenth-grade sentence diagramming; my grandfather; card catalogs; teachers; libraries.
John August: Weekly podcasting about screenwriting for 14 years; decades of professional work.
Matt Greene: A lifelong feeling of vague to moderate dysphoria… late-’90s ambient techno.
Tarpley Hitt: Alt-weeklies. Zelig (1983). Internet Archive. A view of toys as a microcosm of adult objects.
Nadia Davids: 19th-century Gothic literature written by women. Cape Town, where I was born and raised. An over-exposure to BBC class and historical dramas as a child. Post-colonial and post-memory theory. An obsessive interest in my family’s history and trying to make sense of it. Growing up surrounded by women who seemed so very powerful whenever they told a story—even an ordinary one.
*
Without using complete sentences, can you describe what was going on in your life as you wrote this book?
Matt Greene: First child starting school; second child starting life; investigations into probable neurodivergence; gums receding; ghosts of liberal democracy balling up their sandwich wrappers and going home.
Tarpley Hitt: A dog with chronic diarrhea. Protests. Several forms of nicotine delivery. COBRA. The acquisition of a Homer Simpson wall clock.
Elizabeth McCracken: Lockdown (societal and later personal). Pondering the end of my teaching career. A black cat crossing my path.
Nadia Davids: Emigration. Parenting. Theatre. COVID. Crippling self-doubt followed by wild flashes of self-belief (a continuous cycle). Political grief and witness-horror. Landscapes of California and Cape Town merging in unexpected ways.
John August: A thousand competing projects, several movies, a TV series, the WGA strike.
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What are some words you despise that have been used to describe your writing by readers and/or reviewers?
John August: Earnest, sappy, Burtonesque, silly.
Elizabeth McCracken: Quirky, whimsical, witty, wise, warm.
Tarpley Hitt: I’d rather avoid reviews, but I wouldn’t enjoy “moronic,” “bad,” or “snarky.”
Matt Greene: I’m grateful anyone reads it, though misuse of “stream-of-consciousness” does annoy me.
Nadia Davids: “Despise” is a strong word, but I’ve been told more than once that no one outside of Cape Town would ever be particularly interested in the lives I wrote about.
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If you could choose a career besides writing (irrespective of schooling requirements and/or talent) what would it be?
Nadia Davids: I’d run an independent theater that would miraculously never have to apply for funding.
Tarpley Hitt: Private eye or primatologist.
Matt Greene: Tugboat captain/toll booth attendant/box-to-box midfielder.
John August: Architecture.
Elizabeth McCracken: I have always wanted to be a museum guard.
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What craft elements do you think are your strong suit, and what would you like to be better at?
Matt Greene: I can usually trust myself to land a simile… want to feel more confident balancing multiple perspectives.
Elizabeth McCracken: I’m vain about my figurative language; wish I were better at bending time in strange ways.
Nadia Davids: I think my background in theater helps with writing dialogue in novels; I struggle with third-person narration.
John August: I’m good at visualizing complete worlds; want to improve my ear for accents.
Tarpley Hitt: Strong suit: last sentence of a paragraph. Room for improvement: brevity.
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How do you contend with the hubris of thinking anyone has or should have any interest in what you have to say about anything?
Tarpley Hitt: Paralysis but then rent comes due.
John August: Readers aren’t required, but contributing to world knowledge has value.
Nadia Davids: I’m interested in what other people have to say and I know I’m not alone in that.
Matt Greene: I don’t expect anyone ever to read it; I do it for the process.
Elizabeth McCracken: I don’t think much about it; I write in a state of happy ignorance.
