Profiles in Craft: Jack Smith

About the instructor: Jack Smith’s MA is in creative writing, his PhD in English. He has published six novels and four nonfiction books. His novels include: If Winter Comes (2020), RUN (2020), Miss Manners for War Criminals (2017), Being (2016), Icon (2014), and Hog to Hog, which won the 2007 George Garrett Fiction Prize and was published by Texas Review Press in 2008. He has published stories in a number of literary magazines, including Southern Review, North American Review, Texas Review, Xconnect, In Posse Review, and Night Train. His reviews have appeared widely in such publications as California Review of Books, Ploughshares, Georgia Review, American Book Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Pleiades, the Missouri Review, Xconnect, and Environment magazine. He has published several dozen articles in both Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market and The Writer magazine.  His creative writing book, Write and Revise for Publication: A 6-Month Plan for Crafting an Exceptional Novel and Other Works of Fiction, was published in 2013 by Writer’s Digest Books. A collection of his articles—Inventing the World: The Fiction Writer’s Guidebook to Craft and Process—was published by Serving House Books in 2018. His latest nonfiction book is Contributions to Literature: A Tribute to Small Press Books. His coauthored nonfiction environmental book entitled Killing Me Softly was published by Monthly Review Press in 2002. Besides his writing, Smith was fiction editor of The Green Hills Literary Lantern, an online literary magazine published by Truman State University, for 25 years.

For you, what defines good writing?

I particularly go for writing that’s stylistically brilliant, both prose and scene–writing with no dead spaces. Dialogue must move. Chop out the deadwood. I’m really taken by powerful lyrical passages. It’s a rare writer who can manage that. I’m especially impressed by the short stories of Robert Garner McBrearty, winner of the Sherwood Anderson Foundation Fiction Award. I go for stories and novels with levels, ones that take us above and beyond the literal level. Use of various figurative devices, including irony, symbolism, and allegory are some methods of achieving that.

What craft advice is most useful to you in your writing?

Early on, I was encouraged to show, don’t tell. Of course you can’t show everything, nor should you. But it’s important to make your work visual. I learned that a while back and am still working at it.

What craft advice do you feel your students most need to hear?

Look for ways to make the conflict interesting, engaging, suspenseful. One way is to thicken up the character, and one way to do this is through dramatic irony. You can create a multidimensional character if the character has faults s/he isn’t aware of—but we as readers are. Work on your prose style. Read good prose. Be attentive to riveting exposition and description. Study the masters for dialogue. Dull dialogue can wreck a story or novel.

What are your favorite craft books, and what did you learn from them?

I haven’t read craft books in years. I wrote a craft book for Writer’s Digest a number of years ago, and I’ve appreciated the craft ideas I’ve picked up from the many writers I’ve interviewed for The Writer magazine, but most of my understanding of craft comes from seeing it in action. I’m into dark humor. Whether or not my works are humorous—and I do go for farce at times—generally speaking, I want my works to veer on the dark side. I’ve gained a lot, I’m sure, from the grim elements in Richard Bausch’s, Russell Banks’, and Raymond Carver’s work. In lesser known writers, I’ve appreciated the dark elements in the work of Geoffrey Clark and Dennis Must. The latter two writers often combine the dark with the absurd, which is my cup of tea.

What, to you, are the most challenging elements of writing craft, and how do you work with that challenge?

Being sure your story is finished is sometimes very difficult. Right now I’m working on a historical novel—on Nietzsche—and it will be difficult to know how much of his life I should use and how many liberties I can take with biographical elements in order to tell a good story. I faced this with my novel If Winter Comes. With this novel I was taking off in a completely different direction. My work up to that point had been satire and farce. I found it really difficult to write straight realism. I don’t feel that’s a problem now; with my Nietzsche novel, I’m wondering how much of his philosophy I need to include. Probably I’ll work it in at various points and then cut as needed during the revision stage.

What pieces of writing most inspire you, or do you most hold as models or inspirations?

I have no models, exactly, but I’ve certainly been influenced by satirists like Twain, Vonnegut, Terry Southern, and Jerzy Kosinski—in the case of the latter, Being There. I’ve been told more than once that my humor sounds like it’s been influenced by the work of Nathaniel West. I’ve also been influenced by the farcical elements in Robert Garner McBrearty’s work. Often his work is laugh out loud funny, but at the same time there is that underlying sense of the dark.

What life experiences (events, relationships, personal pursuits…) have most impacted your writing craft, and how?

I generally don’t write from personal experience. But I have been influenced by certain events—for instance, undesirable land uses in a rural area, in my novel Hog to Hog. In Icon, I satirized Bernard Goldberg’s statement “I suggest that we build a big bronze and granite monument, a statue to honor some truly American heroes, unsung American heroes…the rich.” I ran with that one. In other works, I’ve also let my imagination run to satire and farce. For instance, in Being, my character faces various absurd challenges, as does my character in Run. I discovered as I wrote both novels that I would be able to layer both with philosophical ideas—in the first, bringing in Kierkegaard and in the second Schopenhauer. These novels aren’t heavily weighted with these philosophers’ ideas, but they pop up here and there, giving the works another lens on the world of the characters. Neither of these two novels is based on my own life experiences, not directly at least.