Pleiades Writer Spotlight

“Way Too Much Fun to Do Terrible Things”: An Interview with author Rebecca Makkai

Pleiades student intern Allina Robie recently had the opportunity to interview author Rebecca Makkai about her novel The Hundred-Year House and her upcoming short-story collection Music for Wartime. Rebecca has a story in the current issue of Pleiades 35.1, “Everything We Know About the Bomber,” and another story, “The George Spelvin Players,” in the upcoming issue 35.2.

AR: The Hundred-Year House is told through an interlacing of four distinct stories, though the framework is based on this mystery of Violet. Why did you decide to structure it this way? What effect were you intending to have on your readers?

RM: The four sections go backwards in time, and that’s really the way the story came to me — backwards. I was writing it all in one time period, and I’d spent a lot of time on it that way, seeing this as the whole book. Then one day it occurred to me that I could dig back in time, into the history of this house. And eventually, that digging back became not only structural but thematic. One of the questions the book asks is how well we can ever know what brought us to this point. It also asks whether we’re pushed by the past or pulled by the future, something that this reverse structure helps highlight.

AR: For each of your characters, the house has some kind of supernatural aspect, for some it is positive and for others (poor Case) it is not. Whether it is an act of fate or something darker, the estate definitely impacted the story and at times seemed to be a character of its own. Did you intend this from the beginning, or did it develop during the writing of the book? At the risk of analyzing your own work, would you say the house-as-character is a kind of commentary?

 

RM: I was always interested in the relationship between the main house and coach house, where different auxiliary people have lived throughout the estate’s history. I was quite far into the book, though, before I decided to lead with a ghost story, and to imbue the house with the power to grant good or bad luck. (Although I suppose it’s questionable whether it’s the house doing these things, or the ghost of Violet Devohr, or if the house and Violet are one and the same.) It was great fun to work in a world where the rules are slightly different, where the coincidences and twists of fate that make fiction work could be exaggerated. And I never had to ask if those developments were believable, because they so obviously weren’t — but we’re in a world where the rules of probability don’t apply. So Case can be attacked by bees, and tear his Achilles, and his car can blow up, and his wife can leave him… I have to say, it was way too much fun to do terrible things to Case.

AR: You have said that this book started as a short story. At what point did you realize that it was going to be a novel? Is this the way your novels usually develop, beginning as short stories and growing from there?

RM: No, only this one. (Although I did once think I had a novel and realized it was better as a short story.) It was a tremendously long story, unpublishably long, and that’s the main reason it became what it did. I liked it too much to throw it away, and it lost so much when I tried to shorten it… Expanding it became my only option.

It wasn’t like I was sitting there writing and suddenly realized I had a novel on my hands. Instead I had this too-long story that I put aside for ages, revisiting it every couple of years to try to chop it down. The decision to turn it into a novel was pragmatic, a calculated way of rescuing this thing I cared about.

 

AR: Did you change anything about your writing process from your first novel, The Borrower, to your second, The Hundred-Year House? Was the second novel easier or harder to write? Why?

RM: I didn’t outline much for The Borrower, and this wound up costing me a couple of years in revision. I’ve learned to outline since then, and for The Hundred-Year House I realized, as soon as I knew the story would move backwards, that I had to outline the entire thing in great detail before I could continue writing. I ended up with a sixty-page outline, plus calendars and floor plans. I’m drafting my third novel right now, and although I’m outlining, the outline will be nowhere near as elaborate as it was for THYH. That was a special case.

 

AR: You have a short story collection coming out soon, Music for Wartime, selections from which appear in Pleiades. Many short fiction writers become novelists and never turn back. Given the conventional wisdom that there is no market for short fiction, why have you stuck with the short story? What is it about the form that appeals to you as a writer and a reader?

RM: I so hate it when writers dabble in short stories for a while and then abandon them. It’s like watching someone date your best friend just so he can make some other girl jealous. There are so many things that can be done in twelve pages that can’t be maintained over three hundred — experiments of voice, of perspective, of lyricism, of structure — which is why short stories will always be where you’ll find the avant-garde of fiction. I love both forms. And usually, I start writing something because the plot comes to me (whereas other people might start with character or voice); some plots need to be novels, and others need to be short stories. So as long as I keep getting ideas for both, I’ll keep writing both.