Fantastic Metropolis

David Soyka: American Graveyards is actually more novella in length than novel. Given the popularity of “fat books”—both in terms of single volumes of 500 pages or more as well as multi-volume sets—do you think that is a drawback from a commercial standpoint? Or is commercial success even a consideration for you?

Ray Nayler: I think it might be a drawback for this particular book, from a commercial standpoint. It’s certainly the trend these days to write longer novels. But at the same time, I think there is a market out there for almost everything. I trust the reader to recognize a good book when they read one, no matter the length. Not everyone out there is looking for the same thing, thank goodness. Also, I feel that I would have been doing myself a great disservice by writing American Graveyards at any other length. The length fit exactly what I wanted to do. My next book, Empty Horse, is almost twice as long as American Graveyards. It’s entirely different, and its length fits it well, I think. I really believe in not padding anything. Padding isn’t fair to the reader, either. It breaks the focus of a novel, it distracts, and it is disingenuous. Maybe it will be a slight commercial drawback, but I’m not writing for commercial gain. I would like to make a living doing what I love. I just hope that there are people out there who respect that and support it. I believe there are.

David Soyka: American Graveyards is your first published novel, but not the first you’ve written. Is your first effort something you intend to ever publish?

Ray Nayler: I’m not really sure. I go back and forth with that first book. It was a detective novel as well, and I feel that it was an exercise in learning how to write a book, more than a complete novel. As I went along through the book, I felt like I was getting better at writing. So I feel that the beginning is much weaker, and that as the book goes along it gets stronger. That isn’t such a great thing for a manuscript. I would have to do a lot of rewriting, I believe, in order to save that book. I’m not sure it’s worth it. It seems better just to move forward, to write other books and build on the experience I gained with the first one. Writing the first novel definitely allowed me to write American Graveyards well. By the time I started American Graveyards, I had a much better idea of what I wanted to do and how to get there.

David Soyka: It seems more the rule than the exception for writers to go through the process of creating a novel—sometimes more than one—as a way to learn how to do it, then discard it to move on to something else. But while on the one hand that’s a valuable “learning experience,” to use the term, it must be frustrating to invest all that time and effort into a project without a pay-off—both literally in the sense of making money for your work and developing a readership. Which leads to the whole question of how anyone can hope to earn a living as a fiction writer. Do you?

Ray Nayler: Writing that first novel was not at all a frustrating experience for me. It was a huge challenge. It took over a year to get the first draft done, and longer than that to revise it, but while I was doing it I was very happy to have a focal point in my life. The magic of a novel is that it protects the writer from some of life’s bumps and bangs. You always have the novel to come back to, you always feel like you have a purpose. The length of the process, I believe, is one of its joys. And at the time, I wasn’t thinking too much about making a living as a fiction writer. I was still an undergrad. I just wanted to see if I could do it. I had written so many short stories, and had a few out there. I wanted to see if I could write novels too–or if I would always be a short story author. In the end, I was very happy with the result. My friends, whom I used as test subjects, loved the book. I just felt that it had a few major flaws. It isn’t until recently that I entertained an idea of making money in this market–that is, I hadn’t made any before, and it isn’t until recently that the money has started to trickle in. I still read parts of that first book, and it reads well to me, most of the time. The problem is that I can’t really put my finger on how to “fix” whatever it is I don’t like about it. And so I move on to other things. There’s a definite limit to how much an author can dwell on past writings. And there’s a definite limit to how much an author can worry about the money side of the business. I try not to worry too much about that. I just try to write, and not get rusty sitting around worrying about when I’ll be able to quit my job and write full time. I’m still not sure that writing full time would be healthy, or possible.