Victor LaValle is the author of the short story collection Slapboxing with Jesus, three novels, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, and The Devil in Silver, and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and, most recently, The Ballad of Black Tom. He’s received a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the key to Southeast Queens. He teaches at Columbia University.

When did you first get serious about writing, as in, when did you realize it was something you were good at and wanted to pursue on a full-time basis? What was your earliest work like? Who did you read at the time?

I felt I turned serious when I was about thirteen or fourteen. By that I mean I was reading a lot and decided to try my hand at writing short stories and I even sent two of them out. Both were rejected, but that part doesn’t matter. They deserved to be rejected, but I still had the intent, the fire, you know? That’s what makes anyone a serious writer, in my opinion, producing the pages. And I did dream, even then, of making my entire living from the writing alone. Still dreaming about that part.

My early stuff could be called “horror” if you’re being generous. Generous because most of it wasn’t very scary. Largely I found myself ripping off the much better fiction of the people I’d been reading. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, H.P. Lovecraft, Clive Barker, and many more in that vein.

Have you matured as a writer?

I’ve matured in the sense that I am able to write with a greater sympathy for people, characters, who are nothing like me. I understand that I’m not the center of the universe and that every other human being in the world is as rich with complication and surprising motivation as I am. My early work, like when I was a teenager, often had a “good” person at its center and then a handful of vaguely bad people who acted against him or her. Now I’m more likely to have a cast of characters who all think they’re acting out of understandable, if not always good, motivations. This usually forces my plots to become more complicated and makes my books better.

Your earlier work is very gritty and very dark. A story like “Slave,” for example is incredibly frightening and tragic and I think the tragedy is somewhat fueled by the realism employed there. The Devil in Silver is frightening too, but the fear it evokes is more genre-related. I guess my question is: how does genre affect or inform your work?

“Slave” is the best short story I ever wrote. It’s brutal. I’m very proud of it. It didn’t need me to throw in anything more than the facts of the main character’s life. That was horrific enough. The Devil in Silver is about a mental hospital and the lives of both patients and staff inside a poorly run, if not downright evil, mental health system. The lives of the characters inside, if approached realistically, could easily read as rough as the life of the boy in “Slave.” But what works in a short story might not always work in a novel, at least not for me. I wouldn’t want to write a novel-length version of “Slave,” if only because it would hurt me too much. The reality would tip over from brutal to numbing. So the aspects of the horror genre that filtered into The Devil in Silver were there to carry some of the weight of the lives inside the hospital. Some pretty terrible things happen to those patients and none of that treatment is fiction. But in order to get a reader to really bear witness to those lives, I used a story that would pull them through. I can’t say that’s down to genre but more the difference between writing something short and something long.

When you came to Mills last year you talked about having your wife put a bike lock around your neck to get the feeling right for a scene in a book. Any other method-acting-type things you’ve done for your writing?

Oh, sure. I do almost everything that shows up in my books. Or at least some version of it. Even the story we talked about earlier, “Slave,” was based on some experiences I had witnessed when I ran away from home for a very short time around the age of fourteen. I haunted the Port Authority and Times Square and met a kid who became the inspiration for Rob. When I was writing the story in grad school around age 25 or so, I went back to the Port Authority, back to a specific bathroom where I first met that kid. The beautification of Times Square had already begun by that point (it was about 1996 or 1997) but some of the old grime was still there. Even just walking the old paths, standing in the old places, can be enough to make a place/time/event more vivid.

You said recently on Twitter that your first drafts usually lack an antagonist
— any theories as to why?

Because it’s so damn hard to get everything down in a first draft. It’s hard, even by the fifth or sixth draft! I find that I tend to work in a pretty specific order. My first drafts usually have lots of voice but no antagonist, not much vivid action, no plot, barely any clear settings, and no ending. Each draft I write is then focused on fixing — or just creating — one of these. I do a whole draft just for settings. A draft for vivid actions in the present. A draft for the antagonist. And so on. By the time a story is done, it’ll go through at least seven or eight drafts. Then I’m reasonably sure I’ve got everything in and can start revising for the actual quality of the writing! It’s exhausting, but that’s also the fun. I can never get everything down in one draft and I’ve never seen anyone else do it either. Embracing that, understanding it, helps me from being too hard on myself when I reread the early drafts or show them to others.

You mentioned when you came to Mills last year that you were doing a lot of work at a nearby Dunkin’ Donuts. Are you still doing that? I’m interested in other writers’ methods because I feel like a big part of becoming a writer is figuring out how you work. My question is, I suppose, what does a standard day of work look
like for you?

Before I became a father, I could spend seven hours at the desk and come away with a page of writing. Not even a good page. I took my time, I played music, I might pause to watch something, I’d go down some rabbit hole of research online. Now that I’m a father I don’t have time for all that shit. I write two hours a day, four or five days a week. Never on the weekends because the kids are home from school. To my great surprise, I am infinitely more productive this way.

What I’ve discovered is that I thrive on routine. I can’t wait for inspiration (because of the kids) but I also don’t do well with boredom and downtime. I need to know there’s a task to complete and then I go complete it. I’ve been working this way for about five years (since our oldest was born). At this point, my brain knows to “turn on” when I get down for the two hours. They’re usually in the morning, after I drop the kids off at school, but sometimes it’ll be in the afternoon. That part doesn’t matter.

It’s the routine that matters. Two hours equals about five pages. In a week that’s twenty to twenty-five pages. In a month that’s almost one hundred. In half a year I can write a really loose draft of a novel. Then I spend the next six months rewriting and revising. Again and again like that. In three or four years I can actually have a tight book I’m ready to show others (and to sell).

I accomplish those two hours of work best outside of the house. Inside there’s always too much to do and I could always find something to stream on the computer (or play Fallout 4, my current pleasure). Outside the house, I get deep into business mode, especially if it’s a place that’s not full of other writers. The Dunkin’ Donuts was full of people on break from their jobs or about to start them and it made me feel like I, too, was on the clock. The new book has been written at a coffee shop next to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, so it’s full of doctors and RN’s and interns and medical students and those people are on the clock too. I fit right in.

You recently had a novella come out — The Ballad of Black Tom — can you talk a bit about the writing process/what readers can expect?

The ballad of black tom is a return to one of my great literary loves, H.P. Lovecraft. I devoured that man’s wild, weird work when I was younger. Only when I returned to it as a grown man did I see the rampant racism, sexism, anti-semitism, anti-immigrant bias that seethed through the pages. The man rarely came across a group of non-white men he didn’t hate! The easy thing to do would be to dismiss him entirely. Fuck him and all his work. But I still loved it. In fact, his stories were once the pillars on which I’d built my imagination. So instead of casting him out, I thought I’d like to argue with him. Mess with him.

One of his most famously racist stories is called “The Horror at Red Hook.” Lovecraft was living in Brooklyn for a short time and hated it completely. He hated the immigrants there so much that he’d walk down the middle of the street just to avoid having to share the sidewalks with them. I decided I’d take “The Horror at Red Hook” and turn it on its head. Instead of telling it from the point of view of the Lovecraft-like white police officer, as he did, I retold a version of that same story but from the perspective of one of those dusky masses he so hated. It’s Lovecraft remixed, chopped and screwed, with guest verses by yours truly.

Our theme this year is transcendence. What, if anything, does that mean
to you?

There’s a Nine Inch Nails song I always loved called “The Way Out is Through.” I think that title sums up my idea of transcendence. To progress, to change, but not by leaving anything behind. To be truly in this world and to let this world into you.