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129 Gavriel Savit | Historical Fantasy Author
456 Plays2 years ago
NYT Bestselling historical fantasy, YA & MG author Gavriel Savit is on this episode, telling us all about his latest novel, Come See the Fair. We had a great chat about the philosophy and magic of storytelling.
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Transcript
The Role of Writing in Storytelling
00:00:00
Speaker
Ooh, a spicy question.
00:00:02
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I love it.
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Speaker
Because the writing is sort of everything, right?
00:00:04
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You can fix plot holes, but if the writer... So some readers love that and some readers are like, but I wanted more of this.
00:00:11
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So it's kind of a gamble.
Introduction to Gabriel Savitt
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello and welcome back to the Right and Wrong podcast.
00:00:17
Speaker
Today, I'm delighted to be joined by New York Times bestseller and finalist of the National Book Awards, Gabriel Savitt.
00:00:26
Speaker
Hi, welcome.
00:00:27
Speaker
Hi, thanks for having me.
00:00:28
Speaker
Such a pleasure to have you on.
00:00:30
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Excited to chat with you.
00:00:31
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Let's start off with Come See the Fair, your latest novel, which came out earlier this year.
00:00:38
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Tell us a bit about it.
Inspiration Behind 'Come See the Fair'
00:00:40
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Well, it takes place during the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago World's Fair.
00:00:46
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There actually have been
00:00:47
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a couple, three of Chicago world's fairs.
00:00:50
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But the 1893 one, arguably, with all due deference to the great expositions of London, arguably the most spectacular such undertaking ever mounted, really gargantuan and wild, and really spectacular is the right word.
00:01:10
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Everything in the world seems to have been there in one way or the other.
00:01:14
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And when I started writing the book, I was living in Illinois, and the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition is the single event in Chicago history most written about.
00:01:24
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So I was like, okay, there's plenty of research material here.
00:01:27
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But I was also living in a house at the time that was built in around the 1890s, so sort of suffused in the historical period.
00:01:35
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And around that time, when the book started to kick off in my imagination, I went to a fundraiser for a local cultural institution, which happened to be a seance.
00:01:48
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And I'm
Mixing Reality and Imagination
00:01:49
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not a spiritualist particularly, but I was like, man, this is not a common opportunity here on the cornfields of Illinois.
00:01:56
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So let's go and check it out.
00:01:58
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It was really deeply fascinating because –
00:02:03
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It was transparently fake.
00:02:06
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Okay.
00:02:06
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The medium, you know, he was doing his job well enough, I suppose, but there were some repeat messages from the Great Beyond.
00:02:14
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Bizarrely, two different people in the small audience in the central Illinois town where it was taking place got a message from the Great Beyond that their pet's diet should have less sodium in it, which seemed...
00:02:28
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You know, a little bit coincidental for my lens.
00:02:30
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Also, everyone, every male in the audience seemed to have a troubled relationship with his father, which is fair enough.
00:02:36
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And every female in the audience seemed to have a bad ex.
00:02:40
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Also
Character and Setting in the Novel
00:02:41
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fair enough.
00:02:41
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But, you know, it didn't take a whole lot of detective work to say that like maybe these these messages were coming from a different source.
00:02:50
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But.
00:02:51
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It was still wildly compelling.
00:02:54
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This medium would start talking to an individual audience member, and we'd all sort of sit forward and be really riveted by the way that the guesswork played out.
00:03:04
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It's a very seductive sort of thing sitting in the dark there, trying to work out people's paths and people's needs essentially without any prior information.
00:03:17
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And so it sort of got me thinking about
00:03:20
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the boundaries and the connections between the real and the imaginary, which works well for me.
00:03:27
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I tend to write sort of magically inflected stories and I have a strong background in theater, which strikes me as the ultimate sort of admixture of reality and imagination.
00:03:40
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And so the book sort of came out of there.
00:03:43
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The plot follows a girl, a young girl named Ava Root, who is a spiritualist medium traveling around the country in the 1890s, who is used to, you know, making these sort of fraudulent mediumistic claims to audiences.
00:03:59
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And then one night at a seance, she actually hears a voice in her head, giving her these instructions to come see the fair.
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The fair turns out
00:04:08
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is the World's Columbian Exposition, and there is someone waiting there to meet her.
00:04:12
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I won't put too much down ahead of time so as not to spoil too much, but needless to say, the splendor, the paper-thin splendor of the fair ends up having some real heavy stuff underneath.
00:04:26
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And I say paper-thin splendor of the fair, you know, intentionally, it turns out this massive undertaking with over 200
00:04:36
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glorious buildings in Jackson Park in Chicago, including the largest building on the planet at the time that it was built.
00:04:46
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All those buildings were built out of staff, which is essentially plaster of Paris, with the exception of one building.
00:04:51
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It
Genre and Storytelling
00:04:55
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was called the Palace of Fine Arts at the time.
00:04:57
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It's now the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
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And that was the only building
00:05:02
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that was built really out of brick and stone because they couldn't get the art insured if the building wasn't fireproof.
00:05:11
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Oh, okay.
00:05:13
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Then that's the only reason.
00:05:15
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That's right, exactly.
00:05:16
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Otherwise it all would have been plaster of Paris or whatever.
00:05:18
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That's right, yeah, exactly.
00:05:20
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So the sort of genre of this is historical fiction with fantastical elements?
00:05:27
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Is that about right?
00:05:28
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Yeah, I think that's fair.
00:05:31
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I have something of an allergic reaction to the notion of genre.
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I think it's a marketing tool, which is fine.
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Marketing is important.
00:05:38
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But often I find that readers, myself included, can box themselves in with genre more than is useful.
00:05:46
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Yes, it's set in history.
00:05:47
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Yes, there's magic in it.
00:05:49
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Yes, it's published by young people's imprint.
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But, you know, it's a story, just like any.
00:05:56
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I mean, if you start trying to – what genre is Macbeth?
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right?
00:06:00
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Like that's historical, I suppose there are witches in that, you know, it's a play.
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I don't know.
00:06:07
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It's good.
00:06:10
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It's a cracking good story guys.
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That's right.
00:06:12
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Yeah.
00:06:13
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Just read it.
00:06:13
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Anyone can read it accessible to anyone.
00:06:15
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Well, I was more interested because it's sort of, um, I've had a number of, uh, historical fiction writers on the podcast.
00:06:22
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And I know that with that genre comes, um,
00:06:25
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a lot of research, a lot of, um, background work that you have to put into it outside of like actually writing the prose.
00:06:30
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And then you've combined that also with fantasy, which involves often involves a lot of world building and things like that.
00:06:38
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So writing a novel like this, is there a lot of preparation that goes into it before you even sort of start writing out the story?
00:06:46
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Yeah, absolutely.
00:06:47
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I was really excited about fusing fantasy magic with, uh,
00:06:54
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the historical record and so it's super important to me that basically everything in the book be historically verifiable so everything that's represented as having been at the fair is attested in the historical record if you follow the characters uh journeys around the city of chicago you can track them on a map they are accurate um which of course takes
00:07:19
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a little bit of preparation.
00:07:20
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But the truth of the matter is, in the age of Google Street View and the wonderful digitization of a lot of great old texts, you can get most of the heavy lifting done from your writing desk, which didn't certainly used to be the case.
00:07:42
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So quite a bit of research, but at least comfortably seated for most of it.
00:07:48
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And then in terms of fusing the sort of nitty-gritty detail of the historical record with fantastical details, I, you know, Brandon Sanderson has postulated this sort of taxonomy of magic systems, the hard magic system versus the soft magic system.
00:08:10
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And the hard magic system is, of course, the sort of, I would call it a mechanical magic system.
00:08:16
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Yeah.
00:08:16
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I won't,
00:08:18
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be too explicit, but if you swish and flick and say Wingardium Leviosa, the thing happens the same way every time, right?
00:08:23
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And writing a fantasy set in the 1890s, it struck me very much that this is the moment in which mechanization is coming into individual human lives almost more than any other moment.
00:08:37
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And Arthur C. Clarke, of course, said that any technology sufficiently advanced, excuse me, Arthur C. Clarke said,
00:08:46
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Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
00:08:50
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And so I sort of had to sit there and think, well, for me, what is the distinction between magic and mechanics?
00:08:56
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If you do the exact same thing and get the exact same result, well, what's the, you know, maybe I'm summoning arcane knowledge from across the planet in 1893, but if it's the same as swiping up on TikTok, you know, and you get the same result, I don't know how, how that's magical.
00:09:14
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So for me,
History and Fantasy in Writing
00:09:15
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this is very much a soft magic system.
00:09:17
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It's about experience, it's about subjectivity, it's about sense and sensation, which really actually helps to deepen the experience of reading a historical narrative, because so much of what brings history into relief is that sort of sense and sensation.
00:09:35
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So though it might seem on paper to be a little bit
00:09:40
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in conflict with itself, I found that the two aspects of the story really enriched one another.
00:09:46
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Yeah, no, that's really interesting that you were thinking about.
00:09:49
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I would have just assumed straight away that you would go for a soft magic system because I am all right in thinking sort of part of the construction of this would be you do your research and you're seeing what's happening in the sort of archives of this and wherever there is any kind of gap or sort of like a blank section, that's a bit of leeway for you to be like, maybe there could be something supernatural happening here.
00:10:13
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Yeah, for sure.
Savitt's Writing Journey
00:10:14
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And, you know, again, I don't want to spoil too much of the book, but there was something in the history of the fair, the history of Chicago writ large that really called out to me for a supernatural explanation.
00:10:26
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So you're absolutely right there.
00:10:28
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Okay.
00:10:29
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So this book, you've alluded a bit to where the inspiration for this book came from.
00:10:34
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You were living in a house that was built around the same time and you were reading about this incredible affair, one of the biggest in the world.
00:10:41
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But your previous novels are also set, also historical, but set very much different times, different places.
00:10:49
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You've got World War II for one of them.
00:10:52
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What was it for those two that drew you in for different times and places?
00:10:58
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Well, my first book, Anna and the Swallow Man, I wrote sort of by accident.
00:11:04
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I mentioned earlier that I have a background in theater.
00:11:07
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That's actually what my education is.
00:11:09
Speaker
And I have a BFA in musical theater.
00:11:12
Speaker
And after graduation, I moved out to New York City, which is where in this country you go if you want to work in the commercial theater.
00:11:19
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And I was lucky to have
00:11:21
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a little bit of a career out there, but no matter how lucky you are, there are periods in between the contracts.
00:11:27
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I was sort of looking to keep myself entertained and engaged in a long, long stretch of working processing delivery orders in a Mexican restaurant.
00:11:39
Speaker
So I thought I'd come up with a solo performance piece for myself.
00:11:45
Speaker
At the time, I was doing a lot of
00:11:47
Speaker
listening to podcasts, which as we all know is God's work.
00:11:51
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Um, of course.
00:11:52
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And, uh, reading around as I do.
00:11:55
Speaker
And there were some pieces in the ether.
00:11:57
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I had recently listened to a podcast, um, actually wonderful BBC radio program that is podcasted in our time.
00:12:04
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Um, was talking about, uh, the Robin hood, uh, mythos and how that sort of accreted as, as folk history and folk tale.
00:12:13
Speaker
And another episode about the fraudulent Holocaust memoir fragments by Benjamin Wilkomirsky.
00:12:20
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And, you know, I was sort of thinking about, okay, the, again, this is sort of about the cleavage between subjectivity and objectivity, history and experience.
00:12:33
Speaker
you know, where, where we turn our own experiences and memories into myths and how they sort of grow larger than objective record and what the sort of boundaries are in that interaction.
00:12:50
Speaker
And so I started to come up with this story.
00:12:52
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I thought, you know, for the solo performance piece, the sort of notion could be that I discovered the
00:12:59
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unpublished manuscript of a Holocaust memoir that seemed lightly fantastical in the back of a used bookshop.
00:13:04
Speaker
And then the whole evening would be me sort of interrogating the subjective, objective edges of this story.
00:13:11
Speaker
And in order to do that, the first thing I had to do is sit down and write this unpublished Holocaust memoir manuscript.
00:13:19
Speaker
So I did that.
00:13:22
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I showed it to my then girlfriend, who is now my wife, and she was like, listen, I think you accidentally wrote a novel.
00:13:27
Speaker
And I was like, that's nonsense.
00:13:30
Speaker
I put it away in a drawer.
00:13:31
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I had to perform a gig.
00:13:32
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I went away and did a three-month concert tour in Japan.
00:13:35
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And I came back and I pulled it back out of the drawer.
00:13:37
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And what do you know?
00:13:39
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I had accidentally written a novel.
00:13:42
Speaker
And that ended up being on The Swallow Man, which very much is concerned with that sort of boundary between
00:13:52
Speaker
experience and memory, very much concerned, I would say, with uncertainty, which sometimes can aggravate readers who are looking for a nice bow at the end of the book.
00:14:04
Speaker
I don't do nice bows very often.
00:14:07
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It doesn't seem to me to be my experience of the world.
00:14:12
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But that was Anna and the Swallow Man.
00:14:14
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So that ended up set in the Second World War in Poland.
00:14:19
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My second novel, The Way Back,
00:14:22
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is said in the 19th century in and around a Jewish shtetl that I imagined called Tupik.
00:14:30
Speaker
The implication is that it's in the Russian Empire at the time, but many of the little Russian, or I should say, many of the little Jewish villages in that time and place shifted national possession as the borders in Poland and Belarus and Ukraine and the Russian Empire all sort of
00:14:51
Speaker
ebbed and flowed with various conquests.
00:14:56
Speaker
And that book was, there were a couple of different sort of missions for me in that book.
00:15:02
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Firstly, I grew up as an Orthodox Jew and as a voracious reader of fantasy.
00:15:09
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And I was puzzled by the fact that at that time, this is changing now, but at that time there really wasn't very much
00:15:18
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in fantasy that explored the deeply magical corners and background in my faith and culture.
00:15:29
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I wanted to write a book that was equally accessible and equally true for people with strong Jewish backgrounds and people with strong fantastical backgrounds.
00:15:38
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Okay.
00:15:39
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And so that was sort of one of the major seeds in that book.
00:15:42
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The other one was that around the time I started working on it, I suffered my first sort of major experience personally with death, which happens, of course, eventually to all of us.
00:15:57
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And I wanted to make sense of it.
00:16:02
Speaker
You know, I'm talking about all these books and their component parts as if
00:16:07
Speaker
they're they're discrete sort of puzzle pieces that interlock neatly but my experience has mostly been like a book is made out of the sort of intellectual debris you find around you at any moment and you only really after the fact once it's all packaged and polished begin to understand what it's made of um yeah so you know these impulses
00:16:34
Speaker
very few of them were legible to me when I was writing.
00:16:37
Speaker
And I honestly, I think that's better.
00:16:40
Speaker
You know, there's, of course, as I'm sure you're aware, this sort of dichotomous philosophical question of, you know, do you plan the panthers versus the planters, right?
00:16:50
Speaker
Do you plan everything out ahead of time or do you just sort of roll along and see what happens?
00:16:55
Speaker
And of course,
00:16:56
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as is often the case, the best answer has to be a little bit of a happy medium, but I'm very, very resistant to overplanning.
00:17:04
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I think, you know, all art necessarily is a vessel for some sort of living impulse.
00:17:11
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And if, if you make the architecture too tight, then there's no space for the impulse to live inside.
00:17:18
Speaker
You know, you gotta, you gotta let yourself be surprised by yourself or else what are you doing?
00:17:23
Speaker
You know, going,
Planning vs. Spontaneity in Writing
00:17:24
Speaker
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
00:17:25
Speaker
I've always thought that the planner versus pantser thing is actually like the two things are much closer than I think people often say.
00:17:35
Speaker
Because I kind of believe that if you're planning it, you're planning it anyway, if you're in quotes, pantsing it, but your plan is not sort of like bullet points in like note form.
00:17:46
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Your plan is just to write the whole thing as prose and then you're going to rewrite a lot of that anyway.
00:17:51
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Yeah, for sure.
00:17:52
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No, I think you're absolutely right.
00:17:53
Speaker
I mean, it's, it's, it's a question of, of identification more than practically.
00:17:58
Speaker
I mean, also, I mean, I don't know, I don't know many strict planners, but I can't imagine, even if you do like plan everything out to the last detail, that you wouldn't meet the paper and want to change something once in a while.
00:18:10
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And in that case, you're pantsing it, you know what I mean?
00:18:12
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And certainly you can't just sit down at your writing surface of choice and start without any kind of
00:18:19
Speaker
daydreaming.
00:18:20
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Like there's no, that doesn't, you know, and so the daydreaming is a certain kind of architecture in and of itself.
00:18:25
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Yeah, I think you're right.
00:18:27
Speaker
I think you're right for sure.
00:18:28
Speaker
You're planning it at some, some, whether it's on the paper in your head or like somewhere in the ether, like the plan is forming.
00:18:34
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Ideas are taking shape and then you are translating them onto the paper.
00:18:38
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For sure.
00:18:39
Speaker
At some point like that.
00:18:41
Speaker
Getting back onto you and off whatever tangent we've ended up on here.
00:18:46
Speaker
All of your novels so far, historical fiction with fantastical elements.
00:18:50
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I have a sort of two-part question.
00:18:52
Speaker
Would you, would you ever write something contemporary or would you ever write something without fantastical elements?
00:18:59
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Certainly, I would love to write something contemporary.
00:19:03
Speaker
I think about this all the time because you tie one hand behind your back when you write in history, right?
00:19:10
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There's a certain kind of relatability gap that makes it difficult for people to immediately plug into characters from history.
00:19:20
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Now, I say that as if it's a liability, and it is to a certain extent.
00:19:23
Speaker
degree.
Magic and Subjective Experiences
00:19:25
Speaker
But my fiction is also a little bit weird, which is to say, it's not novelistic, really.
00:19:31
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It's not about psychological portraiture.
00:19:33
Speaker
It's much more akin to folktale and weirdly enough, I think, kind of to like narrative computer games.
00:19:43
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Okay.
00:19:44
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My protagonists rarely are, you know, the sort of
00:19:50
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person that you sort of stand two steps behind and watch them go through like moral dilemmas and like you know figure out their foibles in general my protagonists are empty suits of clothes that you get to step into and you get to sort of follow these decisions and feel these senses and sensations as you go along and the truth is historical distance helps bridge that gap a little bit right because if you meet someone on the street you expect them to be
00:20:19
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the psychologically textured human being.
00:20:21
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Whereas if you're looking at a sepia tone photograph of someone, well, there's already a little bit of a sort of alienation from that person's particular human experience.
00:20:32
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And, you know, that can be a useful gap to exploit.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, that's so true.
00:20:37
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So it works both ways.
00:20:39
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Yeah, yeah.
00:20:40
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Because there's a kind of fascination with it where you're like, oh, this is something that this is sort of did happen.
00:20:45
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And like, this is how people did live and this is how the world was.
00:20:48
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And it's kind of interesting to look back at that.
00:20:50
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And I guess the other side of that coin with contemporary is some people are like, I'm living this.
00:20:56
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I don't want to read about it.
00:20:58
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Right, yeah, no, for sure.
00:20:59
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Exactly how it is.
00:21:00
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:21:00
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Particularly given the period of history that we've all just hopefully come through.
00:21:05
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Yeah, fingers crossed.
00:21:07
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Something new seems to happen every year as soon as we think we're in the clear.
00:21:10
Speaker
Yeah, that's right.
00:21:12
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But I want to answer the other half of your question, which is whether or not I'd write something without magic.
00:21:16
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And the truth of the matter is, I'm not sure that's possible.
00:21:23
Speaker
This is hard, right?
00:21:24
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Because the sort of term of art, people sometimes ask one
00:21:29
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in magic.
00:21:30
Speaker
I'm not quite sure what people mean when they use the word believe there.
00:21:37
Speaker
I think it's about whether or not people validate the authenticity of subjective experience.
00:21:46
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Because that's the thing, right?
00:21:47
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We've gotten ourselves, we were all born into a post-enlightenment philosophical setting, right?
00:21:52
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Where we understand the importance of
00:21:55
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rationality and generally speaking, govern our lives on the basis of rational rules, right?
00:22:02
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Routine, repeatability, you know, analyzability.
00:22:07
Speaker
And that's great.
00:22:08
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That's tremendous.
00:22:09
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You know, I'm very, very glad to be living in the age of penicillin, for example.
00:22:14
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Yeah.
00:22:15
Speaker
And also human beings are not
00:22:19
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exclusively rational creatures.
00:22:20
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We have a rational capability.
00:22:22
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We also have a lot of other capabilities and modes of being, um, and our experiences are never reproducible and, uh, they're all deeply, deeply personal.
00:22:34
Speaker
And I keep on using this word, uh, I should talk to my therapist subjective, right?
00:22:38
Speaker
Um, uh, and I don't, I think when people talk about magical experience, again, this is sort of a reflection of my, uh, uh,
00:22:48
Speaker
attachment to soft magic systems as opposed to hard magic systems.
00:22:51
Speaker
But my experience or my own life is dotted with these moments of particular subjective transcendence, right?
00:22:58
Speaker
These moments where it seems like the whole universe is conspiring to shine a spotlight on some tiny symbolic detail of my own life.
00:23:09
Speaker
And so I am pretty persuaded that
00:23:13
Speaker
That that's what narrative art does.
00:23:17
Speaker
I mean, even, you know, your most high realism kinds of novels, they're all geared towards surrounding these moments of particular personal transcendence, which strike me as like the cornerstone of magical experience.
00:23:33
Speaker
You know, I joked before about like, what, what's the genre of Macbeth?
00:23:39
Speaker
Well, you know, that's a little, that's a little bit of a cheat, right?
00:23:41
Speaker
Because there's, there's witches in it, but like think of almost any major canonical narrative work and you'd be hard pressed not to find one that can, you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't contain one of these moments of, you know, subjective transcendence.
00:24:03
Speaker
So I'm not sure that there's such thing as narrative art without magic is what I'm saying.
00:24:08
Speaker
which is maybe a semantic objection.
00:24:10
Speaker
I mean, like, uh, but I think it's an important one.
00:24:14
Speaker
Uh, semantics, uh, carry weight, certainly in writing.
00:24:18
Speaker
I guess it also comes down to how you, and like what a lot of that was your kind of how you define magic.
00:24:25
Speaker
Um, so like the, the definition of magic obviously comes a lot into that conversation because someone might just say, no, magic is someone who holds a wand and casts a spell.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, but again, I mean, I don't know.
00:24:36
Speaker
Sure, you can say magic is someone who holds a wand and casts a spell.
00:24:39
Speaker
You can also say music is Elton John exclusively.
00:24:43
Speaker
Like, sure,
Publishing Insights and Personal Enjoyment
00:24:44
Speaker
like Elton John is music, like a dude with a wand is magic, but like, you know, there are more vegetables than just cucumbers.
00:24:54
Speaker
Yes, that's, thank God that's true.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah.
00:24:59
Speaker
Let's get onto a bit more of the, um, we've talked a lot about the art and the creative process and things like that.
00:25:05
Speaker
And it's been great.
00:25:06
Speaker
I'd love to talk to you a little bit about your, your kind of publishing experience and like how, um, you kind of found your way into publishing Anna and the Swallow Man.
00:25:15
Speaker
Um, your debut came out 2016.
00:25:16
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:19
Speaker
How long, and we kind of know this, it was a great kind of story is how it came to be, but how long after you kind of realized that you'd accidentally written a novel and decided sort of, well, maybe I can actually, you know, take this further and get it published.
00:25:33
Speaker
How long was that kind of process before you had sort of found an agent?
00:25:37
Speaker
That's a great question.
00:25:38
Speaker
I'm not going to be great with timelines.
00:25:41
Speaker
I will say sort of
00:25:44
Speaker
qualitatively.
00:25:45
Speaker
I showed it to a friend of mine who was sort of publishing adjacent at the time, much more plugged into the publishing world than I was.
00:25:53
Speaker
And she was like, listen, I think the next thing you need is an agent.
00:25:56
Speaker
And I was like, okay.
00:25:59
Speaker
So I went to the internet.
00:26:01
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:26:02
Speaker
I went to my friend, Dr. Google.
00:26:04
Speaker
Um,
00:26:06
Speaker
and you know this is again one of the wonderful things about the age of the internet you can find out what you need to know wherever you are uh and so i you know i just looked up some examples of query letters uh and started querying um which is i i got tremendously lucky to land with my agent so it was a wonderful wonderful wonderful advocate um and
00:26:30
Speaker
I will say this.
00:26:31
Speaker
I know there are a lot of people out there who are querying and have been querying on any number of projects and are probably feeling pretty deflated about the whole issue.
00:26:41
Speaker
Here's a little bit of, I don't know if this is comforting or terrible, but here's a little story for you.
00:26:47
Speaker
I sent out many query letters.
00:26:49
Speaker
when I was trying to get myself hooked up with an agent, I got a form rejection from one of those query letters after the book had been published and had landed on the New York Times bestseller list.
00:27:02
Speaker
No way.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yep.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah.
00:27:04
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:27:05
Speaker
I mean, it's terrible.
00:27:06
Speaker
I mean, that's the terrible, terrible truth, right, is that, like, a lot of folks aren't paying attention to query letters or aren't paying attention to the New York Times bestseller list, or both.
00:27:16
Speaker
I mean, you know, there's –
00:27:20
Speaker
we give a lot as artists.
00:27:22
Speaker
I think we give a lot of authority to gatekeepers in ways that we really shouldn't, you know, we're all looking for the imprimatur, like you're good enough.
00:27:32
Speaker
You're talented enough.
00:27:33
Speaker
This is worthwhile what you're spending time doing, but none of us gets into art because we want to be validated.
00:27:44
Speaker
We get into art because it's fun.
00:27:46
Speaker
And then once we're in the art,
00:27:49
Speaker
we're like, oh, I guess I want to understand how well I stack up against others, which is a natural impulse.
00:27:54
Speaker
There's nothing morally wrong with that.
00:27:56
Speaker
But we can sometimes lose track of the fact that, you know, why are you making up stories?
00:28:02
Speaker
Because it's fun.
00:28:03
Speaker
Why do you read books?
00:28:04
Speaker
Because it's transporting.
00:28:05
Speaker
You know, why do you listen to music?
00:28:06
Speaker
Because it's great.
00:28:08
Speaker
You don't need someone to put the rubber stamp on you and say, ah, this is something worthy of publication.
00:28:14
Speaker
If you're enjoying making it, if other people are getting things out of it when they consume it, that's the whole game.
00:28:20
Speaker
And I know that that sounds Pyrrhic, and I know that it's super easy to say that from my particular seat, but from my particular seat, having received rubber stamps and accolades,
00:28:33
Speaker
they don't make you feel the way that you imagine that they're going to make you feel.
00:28:37
Speaker
They're great.
00:28:38
Speaker
I mean, they're tremendously flattering.
00:28:41
Speaker
Really, really wonderful.
00:28:43
Speaker
And if you're well psychologically adjusted, then you can internalize them, you know, and appreciate them.
00:28:49
Speaker
But the truth of the matter is very few people are properly...
00:28:53
Speaker
psychologically adjusted to do that it's just one more you know well but I can't actually be good right no you're good if you're enjoying it that's the whole game
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah, I've spoken to plenty of authors who have been doing this for decades, have dozens of books out, and they still say, every time they sit down to write a new book, the imposter syndrome comes back and they think, oh my God, can I do it again?
00:29:17
Speaker
I've already done it a lot of times, but I don't know if maybe I was just lucky all of those other times.
00:29:21
Speaker
That's absolutely right.
00:29:22
Speaker
And the thing of it is, too, if you can...
00:29:27
Speaker
do whatever it is you need to do to shift the goal posts away from the rubber stamps and the accolades and towards the actual work the actual work's going to be so much better so much better when you're worried about proving yourself what comes through in the writing is look how good i am which sometimes look honestly sometimes that's impressive right a virtuoso is a virtuoso but virtuosic performance
00:29:55
Speaker
is rarely, it rarely doesn't have much staying power, right?
00:29:59
Speaker
Fireworks are cool for 20 minutes.
00:30:01
Speaker
After 20 minutes, it gets pretty loud.
00:30:03
Speaker
You know what I mean?
00:30:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:06
Speaker
It's much better, I think, just to focus on your heart and who you want to give the story to and what's exciting to you and your imagination.
00:30:13
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:14
Speaker
I'm working on that.
00:30:15
Speaker
I hope it's something that I can achieve.
00:30:17
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's true.
00:30:19
Speaker
And also, even you speak to authors who have, like yourself, received some really good critical acclaim and, as you say, got the stamps and the thumbs up and things.
00:30:31
Speaker
And the thing you hear a lot is that the real validation that they find if they're looking for external validation, the most validating thing is when they meet a fan of the novel who comes up and says, look, this was such a great novel.
00:30:46
Speaker
I really attached with this character and it really helps me through the
00:30:49
Speaker
processing a certain information or an experience that I was going through.
00:30:52
Speaker
That's the real validation.
00:30:55
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:30:55
Speaker
I mean, that's the thing about particularly writing necessarily, even if you're listening to an audio book, even if you're in a group listening to a narrative being read out loud, the experience of narrative art is entirely individual.
00:31:13
Speaker
It's all happening inside your own head.
00:31:17
Speaker
And we live in an era of data aggregation, right?
00:31:21
Speaker
So the feedback that writers often get about their work is corporate, very, very literally, right?
00:31:29
Speaker
It's a conglomerate, which is not the experience of the art ever.
00:31:33
Speaker
The experience of the art is always deeply individual and personal.
00:31:37
Speaker
And so you're absolutely right.
00:31:39
Speaker
The real validation, the real moments where you're like, I am glad that this is the way I'm spending my life.
00:31:44
Speaker
is when you're standing with one other person, right?
00:31:47
Speaker
And you get these sort of dreams and visions in your mind of like a vast audience, a vast public consuming your work.
00:31:55
Speaker
And like, sure, but they're only valuable as a vast public insofar as they reflect a vast number of individual experiences.
00:32:05
Speaker
And I want to say also, in the era of data aggregation, there is...
00:32:13
Speaker
An impression created that it is possible for any particular piece of art to suit all people.
00:32:20
Speaker
This is not off-the-rack clothing that we're talking about here.
00:32:24
Speaker
No piece of art...
00:32:27
Speaker
is good for every audience member.
00:32:32
Speaker
You can't expect your work to please everyone.
00:32:36
Speaker
That's not what it's for.
00:32:38
Speaker
That's not why we're here.
00:32:39
Speaker
It's all about individual, weird connections across space and time through paper and ink.
00:32:45
Speaker
Yes.
Art and Emotional Impact
00:32:46
Speaker
It's almost, it's not, but it's like, it's close to, it's failure adjacent, I think, if you've created something that pleases everyone.
00:32:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:55
Speaker
I think that's absolutely right.
00:32:56
Speaker
I mean, it's, it's interesting.
00:32:58
Speaker
I, you know, I certainly, I don't have any particular project in mind, but it's notable to me that mega sellers, you know, the massive, massive quote unquote successes are often decried as a kind of thin literary value, thin artistic value.
00:33:16
Speaker
Right.
00:33:16
Speaker
Because if it's really, if it fits all, then it doesn't have very much specific tailoring to it.
00:33:22
Speaker
Does it?
00:33:23
Speaker
It's,
00:33:24
Speaker
kind of general by definition.
00:33:26
Speaker
What does it have to say?
00:33:28
Speaker
What's the statement that's being made?
00:33:29
Speaker
I mean, the easiest thing for me to point out is Hollywood.
00:33:33
Speaker
And you see, you know, movies are designed basically to be like the middle of the road, the most inoffensive to everyone so that everyone will see it and be like, yeah, it's fine.
00:33:43
Speaker
Right, exactly.
00:33:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:45
Speaker
Not exactly the response you want as a writer trying to create inspiring emotional journeys.
00:33:51
Speaker
Right, right.
00:33:52
Speaker
Yeah, it's fine is not the goal.
00:33:55
Speaker
In fact, I would venture to say I might prefer I loathe to this over a yeah, it's fine.
00:34:02
Speaker
And believe me, I've had plenty of my fair share of I loathe to this.
00:34:06
Speaker
I think, actually...
00:34:08
Speaker
When someone loathes a piece of art, it's because it has been effective in a certain way, right?
00:34:14
Speaker
You've touched a nerve.
00:34:16
Speaker
And so obviously that can be really challenging to receive that sort of feedback to see that someone has had a really negative experience with something that you've worked to try and provide a positive experience with.
00:34:26
Speaker
But it's important to remember that art is not all about feeling good.
00:34:31
Speaker
Art is not all about being comfortable.
00:34:33
Speaker
If you made someone uncomfortable enough that they want to talk about it, you probably did something right.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yes.
00:34:39
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:34:40
Speaker
I think for me that there's like a stark example of that is The Last of Us Part 2.
00:34:47
Speaker
A lot of people know The Last of Us Part 1 now from the television series, but just wait till you get Part 2.
00:34:52
Speaker
That stayed with me for months.
00:34:54
Speaker
And I kept changing my mind on it.
00:34:56
Speaker
And I was like, I don't know how I feel about this.
00:34:58
Speaker
And I wrestled with it long after I'd finished playing it, since I'd finished the experience.
00:35:03
Speaker
I was like, this is unequivocally like...
00:35:07
Speaker
triggering amazing emotional reactions and internal discussions within me.
00:35:12
Speaker
That's the good stuff.
00:35:13
Speaker
That's art, right?
Literary Value of Religious Texts
00:35:14
Speaker
For sure.
00:35:16
Speaker
We're already running over time, so let's get into what is always the final question.
00:35:21
Speaker
Gabriel, if you were stranded on a desert island with a single book, which book would you take with you?
00:35:27
Speaker
Okay, I went back and forth on this so, so much.
00:35:32
Speaker
And I think here's what I'm going to do.
00:35:34
Speaker
This may be the most boring answer.
00:35:36
Speaker
Okay.
00:35:37
Speaker
I hope it's not for the most boring reason.
00:35:39
Speaker
I think my answer is the Hebrew Bible, and I'll tell you why for two reasons.
00:35:43
Speaker
Firstly, most editions of the Hebrew Bible contain both the Hebrew text and an English translation, so I feel like I've sort of hacked the system there in getting myself two separate texts.
00:35:56
Speaker
Also, of course, the Bible is composed of a tremendous amount of discrete, episodic, and wildly various narrative and non-narrative material poetry,
00:36:08
Speaker
history, obviously.
00:36:09
Speaker
So plenty of different things to work on.
00:36:14
Speaker
But for me, it maybe all comes down to the book of Genesis, which is just, it's sometimes hard to remember or noticed even that
00:36:31
Speaker
What an incredible literary construction, if you can call it that without offending too many people.
00:36:38
Speaker
The book of Genesis really is, there's a broad arc over the book.
00:36:44
Speaker
There are incredible individual character arcs over the course of the book.
00:36:48
Speaker
The writing, both in Hebrew and also in the King James translation, incredibly beautiful use of language and in some ways, important ways,
00:37:00
Speaker
really ambiguous and open to interpretation.
00:37:04
Speaker
We have seen over the course of thousands of years of religious history that the book bears repeated reading.
00:37:11
Speaker
So I can be pretty certain I won't get bored with it.
00:37:15
Speaker
So this is all to say that while, of course,
00:37:19
Speaker
taking the Bible to the desert island as a religious valence to it, it's not an exclusively religious choice.
00:37:26
Speaker
It's also very deeply a literary choice.
00:37:29
Speaker
And within the larger Bible, certainly the book of Genesis, I mean, I was rereading the book of Job recently.
00:37:35
Speaker
Some of the best poetry I know of in the English language is the King James translation of the book of Job.
00:37:40
Speaker
It's wildly good.
00:37:43
Speaker
All to say, worth reading, even if you're not particularly interested in religion, there's a lot of incredible writing in that book.
00:37:52
Speaker
Yeah, no, I totally agree.
00:37:53
Speaker
And obviously that's, you know, we're talking about what is probably one of the most influential pieces of like art on the human race.
00:38:02
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:38:03
Speaker
As a group.
00:38:04
Speaker
Without question.
00:38:05
Speaker
I have to imagine it's a pretty common answer though, right?
00:38:08
Speaker
You'd be surprised actually, it's not.
00:38:10
Speaker
Really?
00:38:10
Speaker
Well, then I'm lucky.
00:38:12
Speaker
Yeah, usually the Bible gets outdone by Jane Austen.
00:38:18
Speaker
Another strong, strong contender.
00:38:20
Speaker
Probably more laughs than the Jane Austen.
00:38:24
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
00:38:24
Speaker
A bit more fun, a bit more.
00:38:25
Speaker
People go for the cozy option with the Jane Austen.
00:38:28
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:29
Speaker
A great choice nonetheless.
00:38:30
Speaker
And I know exactly what you're talking about as well, because I read The Alchemist.
00:38:34
Speaker
And as someone who is not particularly religious, that book has a very religious backbone to it, but I read it completely non-religiously.
00:38:42
Speaker
And the philosophy of it and the kind of beauty of the way that it's written and the message that he's putting out is just, I loved it.
00:38:51
Speaker
I absolutely loved it.
00:38:52
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:38:52
Speaker
Yeah.
00:38:53
Speaker
Fantastic book.
00:38:54
Speaker
Even though the religion was not something that kind of reached me on that level, that reached me in a different way.
00:38:59
Speaker
Sure.
Conclusion and Social Media
00:39:00
Speaker
But anyway, thank you so much, Gavriel, for coming on the podcast and telling us all about your writing and your publishing journey and everything that you've been up to.
00:39:11
Speaker
It's really awesome chatting with you.
00:39:12
Speaker
My pleasure.
00:39:13
Speaker
Thanks so much for inviting me.
00:39:15
Speaker
And for anyone listening, if you want to keep up with what Gabriel is doing, you can follow him on Instagram and Twitter at Gabriel Savitt.
00:39:22
Speaker
You can also find him on the website www.gabrielsavitt.com.
00:39:27
Speaker
And to make sure you don't miss the episode of this podcast, follow along on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.
00:39:31
Speaker
You can support the show on Patreon.
00:39:33
Speaker
And for more bookish chat, check out my other podcasts, The Chosen Ones and Other Tropes.
00:39:38
Speaker
Thanks again to Gabriel and thanks to everyone listening.
00:39:40
Speaker
We'll catch you on the next episode.