Pleiades Interview Series: Michael Kardos

 

Michael Kardos is the author of two novels, Before He Finds Her (2015) and The Three-Day Affair, as well as the short story collection One Last Good Time. Kardos’ most recent novel, Before He Finds Her, explores the adventure of a 17 year-old named Melanie who has lived the hidden life of someone in the Witness Protection program. That is, until insight into her circumstances lead her to leave the life she knows and go after the man who made her life the way it was—her father who escaped after murdering her mother (and her, as far as the public knows).

Kardos has also published the textbook The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer’s Guide. He is a professor and co-director of the Creative Writing Department at the Mississippi State University. Michael Kardos also spoke as a guest speaker at the Creative Writing and Innovative Pedagogies Conference hosted by the University of Central Missouri and Pleiades, where intern Julia Landrum had the experience of meeting and talking to the author.

 

The following is an interview with Michael Kardos discussing several of his recent endeavors.

 

In Before He Finds Her, you tell the story through multiple perspectives without giving away the ending of the book. When you were writing, did you have the ending of the book in mind or did it develop as you continued working on it? Did you have a way to organize your ideas, characters, and plot while writing the book?

 

I developed a very brief outline (a couple of pages) for the novel before writing very much of it as a way to keep my thoughts in one place. So there was a basic structure that I’d considered, though this structure changed somewhat as I wrote. The ending changed as I went along, though not in drastic ways. My first novel, The Three-Day Affair, was told from the perspective of one first-person narrator, and Before He Finds Her was more complicated to write because of the weaving of various third-person perspectives. In that way, it felt important to have a rough sense of the book’s structure at the outset.

 

In an interview with My Bookish Ways you discussed the character of Ramsey, a man who believes the world will end on one specific night in September and keep him from having to deal with his marital problems. You said that he was “in your head for a number of years.” What first inspired you to write his character?

 

I’ve known people—smart people—who hang on to beliefs that are just obviously wrong. (I suppose we all do that to some extent, but with some people the self-deception is more obvious and more dangerous.) I’m always intrigued by the religious doomsdayers who believe the world is going to end. They can’t all be mentally ill. They just really, really believe a thing. They need to believe it. I’m sure there are many reasons. In Before He Finds Her, I was interested in a character who isn’t religious, but who nonetheless believes something important about the fate of the world that we know has to be false. The question that stuck with me was what happens to a person like that, someone who needs the apocalypse to happen, when it doesn’t? What then? What might he do?

 

Melanie’s character, her safety, and her curiosity are a huge part of what drive the reader to seek the truth of her situation along with her. Do you think she could keep the readers just as interested if her situation was different (for instance, if she was older and no longer saw her experiences as new)?

 

Well, that’s an interesting question, and I don’t know the answer to it. In my mind, Melanie was always seventeen and sheltered enough that the kinds of experiences that would be ordinary to many of us are new and strange to her—and the kinds of experiences that would be strange and frightening to us would be terrifying to her.

 

In your writer’s guide, The Art and Craft of Fiction, you mention that your number one piece of advice to your classes is for students to use only relevant details in their work and what type of details they should focus on (13, 20). Why do you think writers are compelled to add too many sensory details and unnecessary events into their stories?

 

Actually, the typical thing that newer writers do, in my experience, is to provide too few details—they often write in generalities and abstractions rather than in sensory detail. The effect is to keep the reader from fully experiencing the story along with its characters. Too many details is something I see less often and is a lot easier to fix, since that writer already understands the importance of creating a full fictional world. The key is to make the details relevant so that they contribute to the story’s overall effect.

 

At the CWIPS Conference set up by Pleiades Magazine at the University of Central Missouri, you discussed the importance of keeping an open mind while teaching Creative Writing. One comment you made was how teaching styles that focus on a goal of publishing can be distracting for some students. Could you elaborate on this point?

 

This is a tricky subject, which is why, in discussion at the CWIPS conference, I said that I change my mind almost weekly about these matters. To paraphrase my conference talk, there are some days when I think my students need to professionalize, and that for me to withhold such information is unnecessarily gatekeeping, while other days I think that agents and editors and magazine submissions can be a real distraction to a writer who isn’t ready yet for those things, and is a classic example of putting the cart before the horse.

 

I’m all for teaching about publishing and other kinds of professionalization when the time is right—but often that occurs outside of class. As much as possible, I like to keep my workshop focused on the work itself, because—and I really believe this—the single best way to professionalize is to work on the writing. The other stuff isn’t nearly as hard to learn.