by Josh McCall
Q: One of the striking things about Dead Boys is how focused it is for a story collection. As you said elsewhere, the protagonists are all “men who are doing their best to get by and hold it together”—and they’re doing that in a very tough world, often just a few steps away from skid row. It feels at times as if you’re circling these men, each story catching them from a different angle. How did the collection come together? Did you set out to write such a closely related group of stories or did they just naturally end up that way?
A: The stories in Dead Boys were written over a period of eight years or so. I wasn’t thinking of them in terms of a collection—that seemed so far out of reach at that point—I was just teaching myself to write and trying to get published in magazines and journals. It was only when I saw them gathered together in Dead Boys that certain common thematic elements leaped out at me. I thought it was cool that there was actually some consistency. Amazing things happen when you’re not paying attention.
Q: A few of the people who have interviewed you about Dead Boys have commented on the fact that your characters are…well, John Kenyon called them “a pretty desperate bunch” and then went on to ask how you “steeled” yourself to “spend this much time with them?” I get the impression that many of the people who have written about Dead Boys have found your characters pretty unsavory though, really, the protagonists are not such bad people. On the other hand, they don’t feel at all foreign for me, or very different from the guys I grew up. A long introduction for a fairly straightforward question: how did you get to know these characters? Did you go out and find them? Did you already know them? Was it an entirely imaginative endeavor?
A: I’m a bit shocked at how some people process the narrators of the stories. They act like these guys are out there on the edge, living lives and thinking thoughts that are so far from their own. Have they never been desperate? Poor? Alone? Scared? Angry? Sad? Regretful? Crazy? If not, I guess they’re awfully lucky. Or blind. Or lying.
There is a little bit of people I’ve known in the stories and a whole lot of me. Situations are pushed to extremes for dramatic effect, but psychologically, I’m just being truthful.
Q: As a writer, I often have these I-wish-I’d-written-that moments. I had quite a few while reading Dead Boys, but the one that really sticks with me comes at the end of “Fuzzyland.” The narrator is trying so hard to hold it together but life isn’t cooperating—his sister’s been raped and may be becoming a junkie, he has a new job, and it looks like his house is about to be caught up in a forest fire. And what does he do? He says, “I want a baby.” The story leaves him at this tremendously fragile moment. Was this a scene you stumbled upon during the writing process, or did you know it already and more or less write toward it? Or more generally, how do your stories tend to take form?
A: I rarely start a story knowing how it will end. The first line comes, then the second, and the narrative builds gradually. Not a lot happens in most of the stories. It’s more about the voice, language and rhythm than the plot. It’s about moments, and I hope these moments add up to an emotional experience for the reader. When I get to the end of a story, I often have to go back and add passages here and there to tie the disparate events together into a somewhat cohesive whole.
Q: There was a piece in The Atlantic this month discussing the treatment of soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder, and it emphasized how important it is for them to have a community in which they can share their experiences with each other. In that spirit, would you share some of your experiences as a writer during the years leading up to Dead Boys, perhaps something surprising you learned about the business side of the writing life? A “war story”?
A: I’ve never been one for the “community” thing. I don’t like anybody to see me suffering. Too proud, I guess. Even when I talk to other writers—which is rare—I’d rather talk about anything besides writing. It’s a personal struggle for me, a daily test, not some caring, sharing, “Kumbaya” thing.
I started out writing around a day job, mornings and evenings, and sending stories to journals like this one and getting rejected over and over and over. When I finally, after years of trying, got a story published, it was a great victory. I could finally call myself a writer.
It’s true that after you publish one story, it suddenly becomes easier to publish others. Editors follow the herd. In fact, after I’d been published, I sent stories back to magazines that had rejected them when I was unpublished, and they ended up taking them. The stories hadn’t gotten any better in the interim, so you do the math.
After a number of years, an agent wrote asking if I had enough stories for a collection. I did, he shopped it with part of a novel (not the one coming out in June), two publishers bit, there was a bidding war that resulted in a two-book deal with Little, Brown, and here I am. It’s been a completely lovely and painless process so far. Everyone is very nice, nobody’s forced me to change anything I’ve written, and everything has fallen into place. Completely professional, just the way I like it.
Q: Your first novel, This Wicked World, is due out this summer. Would you tell us a little about it?
A: This Wicked World is a fairly straightforward crime novel set in L.A. and the surrounding desert. It starts out as a whodunit and morphs into a kind of revenge thriller. You’re inside the heads of a bunch of different characters - most of them not very nice - so you know everyone’s problems, motivations and neuroses. It’s my first attempt at anything with a plot, with constructed beats, and writing it was the toughest thing I’ve ever done. You don’t want it to seem that way, though. You want it to appear effortless. This book definitely did not just spill out of me.
Q: Name a writer whose work is currently making you jealous.
A: There’s a poet from my neighborhood, John Tottenham. Check him out on YouTube. He’s a good writer and a suave s.o.b. Also, Charles Dickens. I’m reading Bleak House now, and I’m jealous of Charles Dickens.
Q: What kind of child were you?
A: I had an unhappy childhood, but I was not an unhappy child. I learned to fend for myself at an early age.
Q: What’s your relationship with rejection like?
A: After enough of it, it loses its sting.
Q: Do you have a writerly habit you’d like to break?
A: Only a sucker reveals his weaknesses.
Richard Lange
was born in Oakland, CA, in 1961 and spent his childhood in various
small towns in California’s Central Valley. He attended film school at
the University of Southern California. After college, Lange traveled in
Europe and taught English in Barcelona. He did a short stint in New
York City, then returned to L.A., where he began working a series of
jobs in magazine and book publishing. He was a copy editor for Larry Flynt Publications; managing editor of RIP, a heavy-metal music magazine; a text-book production editor; and managing editor of Radio & Records, a radio-industry trade magazine.
Lange published his first short story in 1994, in New Delta Review, and his story “Bank of America” was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories of 2004. His collection Dead Boys was published by Little, Brown in 2007. His novel This Wicked World will be published by Little, Brown in June 2009.
