Touré ’89: Tackling the novel, the arena of big storytellers
Nonfiction by Touré ’89 has appeared in Rolling Stone magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Playboy, Village Voice, Vibe magazine and Tennis Magazine. An archive of Touré’s articles is available on his Web site, at www.toure.com/library. In the years following Columbia graduate school, Touré’s work appeared in The Best American Essays of 1999 and The Best American Sports Writing of 2001. His first book is a collection of short stories, The Portable Promised Land, published by Little, Brown and he is working on his first novel, Soul City.

Touré visited Milton Upper School writing classes last fall – as well as his Lower School teacher Carolyn Damp and her fourth-grade class – talking with students about the work of writing. Touré reflects, below, on aspects of his experience as a writer, in response to our questions.

Talk about getting started, moving from nonfiction to writing fiction.
I began writing fiction at Columbia’s graduate creative writing school. I was about 25, 26 years old then, and had been working at magazines like Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. I wanted to get better. I desperately wanted to be a good writer. So I went to grad school. There was a lot of talk, in every class it seemed, about the line between fiction and nonfiction being very thin. That meant that the techniques involved in creating one are shared by the other, so if you know how to write nonfiction you can write fiction. It’s not some magical thing. So I took a class in writing fiction and when we were assigned to write a story I thought, “What can I write about?...What can I write about?...” I had recently read Invisible Man (for probably the third time; Ellison has always been a major influence for me) and somehow I thought, what if you had a black man for whom white people were invisible, as in he alone couldn’t see them. I wrote the story of Sugar Lips Shinehot, who meets the Devil and has the ability to see white people taken from him.

After that, learning how to write fiction became the same as reading. I had an idea of how to write fiction and reading others’ sentences, I could see how they’d dealt with the various problems a writer encounters. Every novel I picked up helped me visualize a little better the boundaries of modern fiction, helped me see what the playing field looks like. Years before, in trying to learn how to write nonfiction I learned a tremendous amount from Joan Didion and the smooth shapes of her sentences and paragraphs and the cool pose of her narrative voice. But now, in my mid-20s, doing fiction, I was more moved by the authors who are stylistically bombastic. In much of my nonfiction writing, I feel I should not be so stylish that my style gets in the way of the reader understanding the subject I’m showing him. In fiction, style is critical because the whole exercise is about entertaining the reader by any means necessary. So style becomes a big factor. It’s not enough to have the characters do interesting things, but the story must be told in an interesting way. The writers who have most moved me and helped me find my own voice are Ralph Ellison (his fiction and nonfiction),Vladimir Nabokov, Salman Rushdie, and David Foster Wallace. Those are very different writers, but they all tend to hyper-text-esque verbosity and lingual pyrotechnics and self-conscious storytelling. They all have a tremendous confidence that comes through in their work. It’s so important to write from a place of confidence. The reader perceives your personality from each choice you make and the under-confident writer is not very inspiring.

Are some genres easier, or more challenging, or more suited to the exploration of certain problems that are important to you?
I have done work in a number of different forms, but as time goes on I am moving toward writing little but novels. The novel is the heavyweight arena, where all the big thinkers and big dreamers and big storytellers go. The novel is also a troubled arena, demanding a tremendous amount of time and thought on the part of the reader, a commitment which many people aren’t willing to make in our modern microwave era. But if I can write some good novels and remind people of the joy of reading great novels then that’s a worthwhile way to spend your time. I was in high school when I read Invisible Man and Richard Wright’s Native Son, but the writer who first got me excited about reading 300-page stories is Toni Morrison. Her stuff is fun and serious and graceful and soulful and makes you fall in love with her. After going through her oeuvre I started looking around at who else could give me the reading pleasure that she gave me. I’d like to be that kind of writer for other people. There’s little in life that’s as much fun as making your way through a great novel.

Is there a personal discipline that you apply to generate the writing?
Not really. Whenever there’s something to get done I get motivated and brainstorm and figure out how I feel about the subject and get some words down. I write early notes, like a painter sketching out the first draft, on a rectangular yellow post-it pad. I prefer newer pads that are still thick. (I buy them in bulk.) When I get to the computer to actually compose the first words I usually need to have a little snack (pretzels, Cheez-Its, something) to get me going and I need to have silence. Once I get focused I usually surprise myself with how quickly the words come. But then I think about a story I once heard about Picasso. Someone asked him to draw a sketch. Picasso pulled out a pen and for 30 seconds drew on a napkin and handed to the man. The man said, “It’s amazing! How much?” Picasso said, “$50,000.” The man was shocked. “Fifty grand? The drawing took you 30 seconds?!” Picasso said, “No. That drawing took me 40 years.” And he’s right. Everything an artist has ever done or seen or thought in his life becomes part of his art. As well, the techniques, mental (and, in his case, physical), that allow you to draw a masterpiece in 30 seconds or to write a great story in 30 minutes, take many years to develop.

I never have anything resembling writer’s block because I have good discipline. I’m known for always making my deadlines. That’s the Milton discipline still in me.

What are the questions and problems that drive your writing? Are they questions that can be resolved in a work, or in a lifetime of work?
The central question of my writing is what interesting thing can I do as a writer today. That’s it. I also enjoy expanding the complexity of the way black people are viewed by both black and white people. But the first challenge is to tell interesting stories in interesting ways. Thus, my novel Soul City introduces you to a world in which people fly at birth, a small group of women can live for hundreds of years because they can smell Death coming and avoid him, and one certain individual can travel to Heaven and talk to God and travel to Hell and talk to the Devil. (But he doesn’t go to Hell very often because the Devil always tries to trick him into staying.) Death himself is a character, albeit a small one and a confused one. He doesn’t truly understand why everyone is scared of him. He doesn’t like pain (she’s a real bitch). Death helps lots of people get to Heaven. What’s wrong with that? He considers hiring a PR agent, but he realizes that no one could possibly improve his image. The book comes out in September. I’m very excited.

When you’re happy with a piece of work, what is it that makes you happy with it?
You know that you’re finished when you look at the piece and you know every word is there for a reason and nothing could be added or subtracted. On another day it might be different, but if all those words fit together and every word accomplishes something different and there are no clichés, then you’re finished.

What role do you see the writer and intellectual playing in the greater society right now?
Well, that could be a book. I was beginning to think that serious fiction was on life-support because so few people are reading serious fiction nowadays. But then Jon Franzen had his big splash with The Corrections reminding me that serious writers can have an impact on millions of people. Novelists and serious fiction writers play an important role in society by providing the great stories that entertain us, teach us, help us see society through another’s eyes. Every civilization needs storytellers to feed the imagination of the people. All I want is to be a proud part of that ancient tradition.

Cathleen Everett