Charis Caputo
Interview with Hannah Tinti
Hannah Tinti is the author of the short story collection Animal Crackers (The Dial Press, 2004) and two best-selling novels: The Good Thief (2008) and The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley (2017). Her fiction has garnered many distinctions, including the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and an Edgar Award nomination for Best Novel. As the co-founder, former editor-in-chief, and current executive editor of the award-winning magazine One Story, Tinti has also received extensive recognition for her editorial work, including the 2009 PEN/Nora Magid award for excellence in editing. She has taught creative writing at NYU, Columbia University, the Sirenland Writer’s Conference—which she co-founded in 2006—and elsewhere.
I first met Tinti when I took her MFA fiction workshop at NYU. She is the only graduate-level professor I have seen teach standing up. She structures her workshops as tightly as her books, but our class was never rote or predictable. We drew floating cities in crayon, studied circus performers’ obituaries, wrote down our fears about writing and burned them on the sidewalk on West Tenth Street. (We looked forward every week to Tinti’s statement pieces—tasteful sequins, embroidered jumpsuits, chunky whale necklaces, but I digress.) My classmates and I found we could never discern whether Tinti liked our submissions; we only knew that she excelled in helping us find and cultivate clarity, novelty, and joy in our work.
As Tinti’s student I felt equally challenged and taken care of. As a reader of her fiction, I feel the same. Elegant, meticulously structured plots account in part for the commercial success and crossover appeal of her novels (with YA and mystery readers, respectively). Her prose is straightforward, crisp, authoritative, and yet it accesses an unsettling intensity, traces a penumbra of the dark and fantastic around ordinary life. Her settings—including but not limited to fabulist renderings of small-town New England—are vividly textured with natural beauty and totemic objects, teeming with animals and quasi-mythical characters.
Precision, tangibility, and an iron stomach for violence allow Tinti to express wonder in surprising, unsentimental ways. Loo, the bullied teenaged protagonist of Samuel Hawley, knocks a bothersome boy unconscious on the beach with a piece of driftwood, then breaks his index finger with her bare hands: “With this snap of bone she sealed her fear away.” It’s a wild scene, rendered even wilder when, a few years later, the same boy tenderly covers Loo’s skin with pen draw- ings of constellations while she lies at the top of a glacial rock, adorning her vertebrae, her neck, her ribs, “until she felt her body come loose beneath his pen,” prompting a mystical vertigo, “spinning upward into the depths of a velvet sky.” First love: one of the most difficult subjects to make new. Yet, with the witchcraft of her own pen, Tinti allegorizes its volatility, grounds it in visceral precision.
I was thrilled to speak with Tinti about her work.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’re often asked about the darkness in your writing, and there is a lot of graphic violence: hit men, domestic abuse, murder, dismemberment. In The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, we watch the protagonist take twelve bullets and dispense many more, we watch his teenage daughter break a boy’s finger, bust a widow’s head open, etc. But there’s also a lot of empathy in your work, for perpetrators of violence as well as for victims (and often these are the same characters). I’m interested in what draws you to violence as a subject, but also how you see the relationship between violence and empathy in fiction. Does the writing of violence ever feel emotionally difficult for you?
HANNAH TINTI: People are always curious about the dark side, and it’s an area of life I’m familiar with. I grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, where it’s pretty much Halloween 365 days a year. One of my first jobs was at a place called the Salem Witch Dungeon, which featured torture devices used on witches. I would dress in rags and a rubber mask and hide in the shadows, then jump out and scare people. I enjoyed this immensely. The mask I wore allowed a shy, quiet girl the opportunity to be someone else. Someone powerful. When I grew up, I learned to do this on the page. Fiction allows space to explore our fears. And that’s how it feels for me when I’m writing and I’m onto something good, like I’m groping through a pitch-black space with my hands, trying to find the walls and the furniture, and there is terror but also excitement in my chest. I don’t find violent scenes difficult to write, but it can sometimes be challenging to read them out loud to an audience. That’s when a sudden emotion can sneak out and surprise me, or the listeners. It’s like a spell being cast when I say the words out loud.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: So how did you make that transition from the Witch Dungeon to the literary spell? That is, how did you figure out that you wanted to be a writer?
HANNAH TINTI: I started off as a science major and loved that world but soon discovered that my brain was not built for numbers. While I reveled in the periodic table of elements, I could never seem to remember the atomic weight of xenon. Then, on a whim, I took a writing class with the author Blanche Boyd, and she made writing seem like the coolest thing in the universe. I found that I could take subjects that I was interested in, like animals and the natural world, and use them in a place where I had some talent, which was reading and writing. That’s when the spell truly took hold. I’ve been bewitched ever since.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You have a real genius for plot and structure. It’s evident in the suspenseful Samuel Hawley, the episodic Good Thief, the taut stories of Animal Crackers, and in your feedback as a teacher and editor. Do you think this facility is innate? Is it integral to the way you think, or is it something you’ve learned over time, through writing, through editing?
HANNAH TINTI: I look for patterns in everything. And I suppose that’s how I first became interested in narrative structure. When a book or a story moves me, I want to figure out how the author did it. One way to approach this is to put it under an X-ray. Blanche Boyd, my first writing teacher, would have us choose a favorite story and then retype it. I’ve repeated this exercise many times since. It makes me examine a piece, sentence by sentence, down to the commas and semicolons. And then I begin to see the framework. At the same time, when writing my own material, I hardly ever create in a linear fashion in the early drafts. In- stead the experience is more like an octopus, with many arms wriggling at once. I have visions of scenes, I write those scenes, and then I try and figure out how the pieces fit together. For The Good Thief, for example, I wrote the middle of the book first, then the beginning, and then the end. My friend the poet Kate Gray recently told me that this kind of thinking is connected to dyslexia (something I struggle with)—the jumbling of letters and numbers can also train the mind to decode structures and seek outside connections.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: What are some of the stories you’ve retyped, and what did you learn from them
HANNAH TINTI: One of the first I did was “Cathedral” by Raymond Carver. Retyping it taught me a lot about tone and working with an unlikable narrator. Structurally, there’s also a great progression. Step by step the characters move closer. At the beginning, they are strangers. Then they eat together, then they drink, then they get high, then they draw, then they connect on an astral plane. What I enjoy so much about the story is that it focuses on everyday things— watching television, having someone over for dinner—and then slips over into God and the human spirit. Somehow, Carver captures the moment of a closed person opening. It’s magical.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’re a big advocate of exploring your characters off the page—figuring out aspects of their lives and personalities that might not actually end up in the final story but that give you a sense of the characters’ motivations and dimensions as you’re writing. For example, you advise your students to try writing their characters’ obituaries as an exercise. Can you tell us anything about, say, Ren or Hawley or Loo that informed your writing but didn’t end up on the page?
HANNAH TINTI: Out of all the characters I’ve created so far, probably Samuel Hawley has the most happen to him off the page. In Twelve Lives I skip through his life like a stone, from when he’s about fifteen until he’s around fifty, and I had to figure out what happened in between those slices of life. Samuel Hawley is a criminal, and each of his chapters in the novel (twelve in total) chronicles a job gone wrong, where he ends up shot. Sometimes readers say, “Hawley’s not very good at being a criminal, is he?” And I have to remind them that they are only seeing the mistakes. There were hundreds of other crimes that Hawley committed where he finished his job and got away with it. I had to imagine those unseen deeds and how each one added another layer to Hawley’s character. For example, the worst murder I show in the book is the one in Wyoming, where Hawley kills off two witnesses. But there were many other murders. He has a lot of blood on his hands. And knowing that helped me understand him and all of his flaws, so that he felt very full and rich and alive on the page.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: So much of your action and characterization revolve around objects, senses, physical setting. Your writing is often described as “cinematic,” but it’s also very palpable: none of the senses are neglected. How do you nourish an embodied sensibility when writing can be such a cerebral activity?
HANNAH TINTI: I keep a very rigorous journal. This journal isn’t about my thoughts and feelings—it’s about what I noticed each day. The sights, smells, and sounds, the expressions on people’s faces, or an exchange between two strangers on the subway. Often these are brief memories that would be forgotten if I waited a day or two before recording them. Journaling in this way creates an awareness of the world as I’m making my way through it. It forces me to be more present and provides great research when I sit down at my writing desk. I pull one of those sketchbooks down from the shelf and I have the ingredients to start cooking.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you have any particular method for organizing or consulting your journals? Do you ever open one at random when you’re feeling stuck, or do you look for a specific date when you know that something specific happened?
HANNAH TINTI: I do sometimes use my journals as stepping-off points, but more often I return to them for research. My novel The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley crisscrosses America, and, to write those chapters, I used my old travel journals. It helped enormously with creating setting and capturing the mood of a specific place. For example, in 2011, when I visited Alaska, I wrote this while watching Childs Glacier calve into the Copper River:
Saw pieces fall off the glacier—there was a sound of thunder cracking and rumbling like thunder, even though the sky was blue. The chunks seemed to fall in slow motion, like a building collapsing, and then the crash into the river sent giant waves and sprays of ice toward the beach. Reminded me of 9/11, watching the windows explode and shimmer as the floors collapsed, a feeling of disaster that can’t be stopped.
When I recreated the scene in my novel Twelve Lives, I put the character Samuel Hawley in the same physical place, and used those details from my journal to write this:
Time slowed as the hunk of ice traveled, and when it finally smashed into the river, a ripple went back up the side of the glacier, and then the whole face of the shelf came loose and started sliding down. It was as if the earth were collapsing. A skyscraper thrown over a cliff. The sight made Hawley ill, like some part of himself was falling with the ice. Everything that ancient, frozen water had seen, the passing of millennia, the formation of the continents, and now, here it was—the end of the road. When the slab finally hit, the river exploded in a spray of brown and white, shooting columns of ice and water so high into the air they transformed into clouds of smoke and sparkled like glass, splintering and shimmering and shooting directly for the beach.
My journals have become an essential resource for my creative writing. Not only do they provide facts, details and emotions to weave into my stories, they offer new directions when my writing gets stuck. They are my own personal time travel machines.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Your novels both seem extensively researched and wield impressively detailed knowledge about everything from firearms to antique timepieces to nineteenth-century New England. What are some of your research methods for material that’s historical or that falls outside of your personal experience?
HANNAH TINTI: Research is a pleasure if you choose to write about subjects that interest you. To educate myself, I always start with other books. For The Good Thief I studied resurrection men and the history of medical institutions and factory towns. For Twelve Lives I read about pocket watches and whales and the solar system and Greek myths. Hands-on research can be fun, too, and it gives a writer sensory details that make a scene feel more alive and authentic. For Twelve Lives, I went on whale watches and learned how to shoot guns and hotwire a car. For Good Thief I spent time in old graveyards and in the Mütter Museum of Philadelphia, studying organs in jars and a wall of phrenology skulls. Writing a book is like making a soup—it all goes in the stewpot and then simmers.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You’ve published three books, you’re the executive editor of One Story, you’re an incredibly active and generous teacher, and you seem to have several other irons in the fire at any given time. How do you manage your time and stay inspired?
HANNAH TINTI: I keep calendars. I make task lists and then cross things off. I’ve mastered the apology email for all the things I mess up or don’t get to. And I put blinders on. Whatever is happening in the next 24 hours is where my attention is focused. When I think too far ahead, I get overwhelmed. It works that way with creative projects like One Story and with my own writing, too. If I sat down at my desk and told myself to write a novel, I would fail. But I can put my fingers on the keyboard and tell myself, “Try to write one sentence.” And when I have that sentence, I can write another. And then another. And sooner or later, I’ll have a story.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: As an editor, what do you most look for in a submission? What excites you the most?
HANNAH TINTI: Have you ever been in a car with a bad driver? The experience of being a passenger in that situation is never pleasant—you’re nervous, scared, nauseous, and often have to give directions. Compare that to being in a car with an expert driver, where you don’t have to second-guess them or worry they are lost. You relax, you enjoy the scenery, your mind can drift and go deeper. A good writer is like a good driver. They’ve revised their piece so that the opening makes it clear they are in control and know exactly where these characters are headed, they build trust quickly by showing off their language skills in an engaging way, and finally, they give a hint that the reader is about to be taken somewhere new and exciting. If those things are in place, I want to turn the page and keep reading. So that’s what I’m looking for in a story: good drivers.