On a snowy morning this March, I picked up Brandon Taylor from his apartment in Hellโs Kitchen, in New York City, and we drove up the Hudson Valley to Art Omi, an artist residency and cultural community where Guernica hosted โBack Draft Live,โ a writing workshop on revision. Our conversation with the workshopโs fifteen writers focused on Brandonโs new book, The Late Americans, which is set in and around the MFA program in poetry at the University of Iowa. The book โ a sectional, multi-character take on a campus novel โ contains a spectacular examination of the challenges of making art. Our conversation turned toward when art-making demands saying no โ to conventions, to manuscript feedback, to writing itself.
โ Adam Dalva, Guernica senior fiction editor
Guernica: Your latest novel, The Late Americans, had an extreme process of revision. I know that it almost blew up your relationship with writing. Will you tell us about that?
Brandon Taylor: I finished the first draft in 2019, and it ruined my life for three years. I stopped writing in 2021 because the book was giving me so much trouble, and I didnโt write another piece of fiction for a year. So this book has taught me many things about revision โ within the narrative and also within my soul. This book is about a period in your life that doesnโt feel up for revision โ when you have to make those first seemingly permanent decisions about what youโre going to do when school ends, and suddenly you have to make a choice about where to live, how to live, who to live with, in ways that feel permanent.
Guernica: One character in the novel goes through a week of despair trying to write a poem for a workshop. And as we just heard, when you wrote this, you were going through your own kind of despair. Iโm wondering if you could share what happened that let you finally gain access to The Late Americans?
Taylor: I was sure I was never going to write again, so I needed a different creative outlet, because I missed being creative. I took up film photography. And that just created a lot of space in my mind. I made peace with the idea that I was letting go of writing forever.
Then I had a conversation with a friend, Lee Pace, where I was talking about this book, and he asked me, what is giving you so much trouble? And I said that I just feel that I donโt understand this character. Iโm so afraid that readers wonโt care about him because heโs a poet. And my friend said, well, does anybody care about him? Does he care about himself?
I was like: Oh! Does he? Do I? Am I worried about the reader because I donโt care about him? Why donโt I care about him? And I realized itโs because he feels like a fictional character. He doesnโt feel like a person. So what would make him feel like a person? Iโm like, I need to give that boy a job โ so I was very Protestant, but I love when characters have jobs. That changed the whole tenor of the book. His concerns around art and commerce went from being an abstract thing to being a material reality.
Guernica: Is it common in your work that the texture and wholeness of your characters changes from first draft to later drafts? Or was that unique to The Late Americans?
Taylor: My characters come to me as outfits first โ like, literal clothing outfits. An Oxford under a denim jacket, black jeans, scuffed boots. And I ask myself, whoโs wearing this? And where are they wearing it? So, in the first drafts, the characters tend to be quite full in terms of their personalities. In the second or third, I start layering. Letโs say a character, in my first draft, goes to a bar and meets somebody and then they go rob a bank together. Thatโs the first draft. The second draft, he goes to the bar and then he has a conversation. Itโs not just a conversation with the guy heโs going to rob a bank with, but with the bartender who tells him this weird story about a donkey he knew when he was a child. Then a third draft would be the story about that donkey, which comes back again at the end in some way. I like to treat my drafts like an improv machine โ what if this, also?
I also try to do a thing that Colm Tรณibรญn talks about โif you think you know where the scene is going, choose to go in the opposite direction. This forces you to be more reactive, and it forces the scene to feel more alive. I think sometimes we donโt do that because weโre afraid for the beautiful balance of the story. But that is your job, to disturb it. You are really writing when youโre afraid that youโre going to ruin the thing.
Guernica: One thing Lorrie Moore taught me once โI had written an MFA workshop story where characters get in a car and then they drive somewhere else and they get out of the car and she said, โAdam, you can just skip the whole car ride. You can just say, they drove there.โ And I was like, what? It was totally shocking. That is something that still happens a lot in my story drafts โI write two pages, then realize I could have just said: โlater.โ
Taylor: I call it โtrite physicalityโ โ physical details that do nothing for a story at all.
Guernica: Do you have examples?
Taylor: There are some things that, if you find yourself describing them, just take them out. Take them out! Like drinking, the experience of drinking. Unless itโs going to burn their mouth so badly that theyโll never forget it. Sweat. Even sweat dripping down a cold glass of water โ any sweat. Sex sweat โ we donโt need to know, unless itโs doing something. Like, if the sweat has an odor, thatโs cool. Descriptions of light.
Guernica: Any light? Not any light at all?
Taylor: No. Unless youโre recreating a Hopper painting in your work. Light dancing on a lake? No. What else? Place settings. โHe lifted the forkโฆโ No. Rummaging in bags, fishing things out of pockets, padding across floors. Never going upstairs, never going downstairs, unless the person is falling to their death from the stairs.
Guernica: Has your work as an acquiring editor at Unnamed Press affected your approach to revising things like stairs and light?
Taylor: I often think my revision process as an editor is to help the writer be brave enough to make the choice that they know they need to make when they donโt yet feel courageous enough to do it. And a lot of my own revision work is just that โ โyou know what you need to do. Itโs staring you, staring at you from the corner. How can we work our way up to being brave enough to face it?โ
Guernica: Has there been a time when you had to be courageous about a big scary thing?
Taylor: In one of my stories, the guy who the main character is in love with sexually assaulted someone. And I just kept sort of circling that โ maybe he did something. Maybe not. And I realized: Iโm trying to protect that character. But the girl he assaults is also a character, and Iโm not protecting her. Iโm not doing her story any favors. Like, the story canโt be so loyal to one character that it betrays another. The characters can betray each other all they want, but the story itself has to be truthful. Otherwise, Iโm just exploiting a gross harm done to a young woman character. I canโt just be out here trafficking in really horrible ideas about violence. So I had to pull up my big boy pants and say, okay, he assaulted that girl. And I have to be honest about that. I have to be as honest and clear about that as I am honest and clear about the other kinds of violence that happened in the story.
So that took a lot of โ shadow work, is what my friend calls it. The shadow work of confronting yourself. A lot of the revision for that story was just realizing the ways that I was being dishonest and trying to wring out all the dishonesty I could. You have to say: okay, Iโm afraid of that. Why am I afraid of it? The question that always helps me defeat that villain is: am I being truthful? Dishonesty is not kindness. Itโs not generosity; itโs not moral. You just confront the thing and let it be the thing. Itโs what Trilling calls moral realism and what D.H. Lawrence calls moral fiction: fiction that preserves the true relation between things and doesnโt put its finger on the scale.
Guernica: Where else does fear interfere with good writing?
Taylor: I think about it with dialogue. Dialogue is this rare moment where a character is able to say to another person exactly what theyโre thinking, without the trappings of narrative. Itโs the one true relation between characters. The one irrefutable act. They said that thing they said, and they canโt take it back. And I think that irrevocability leads us to write bad dialogue, because weโre afraid that the character canโt take it back.
One of my teachers said that good dialogue is like two characters standing on other sides of a field blasting cannons past each other. Thatโs the way it should feel. Like people shooting cannon balls that are just missing and landing off to the side and blowing up the world behind you. So one thing I like to do is go back and pick out random lines of dialogue and delete them and then see what is changed about the contour. By plucking out these three random lines of dialogue from anywhere in the scene, from any character, have I destabilized the meaning of the scene? And very often what youโll find in the first draft is that you havenโt, because you havenโt written any actual dialogue. You just put stuff between quotes.
Guernica: Iโve been thinking about how The Late Americans also explores the difficulties of writing while taking writing classes. What advice do you give to writers to try to withstand that intensity?
Taylor: In my most dire moments at Iowa, I would always ask myself: Why am I upset? Nobody gets to tell you what your work is. Nobody gets to tell you what to do. MFA workshops can be really helpful. All workshops can be helpful, but at the end of the day, itโs you and the page. That is the thing that matters the most. I would leave my MFA workshops and throw the feedback into the trash. I wouldnโt even let it into my house. Because it was not helpful to me. You get to decide whatโs helpful to you. Youโre a grownup. You have agency. I have agency. I can just ignore this. And so I would doodle while I was being workshopped; I would just make these anxiety doodles. Be present. Be respectful. But if thereโs something that doesnโt feel useful, itโs okay. This too shall pass.