More and More George Singleton: A Conversation with Daniel Wallace

Daniel Wallace: Can we talk about your book?

George Singleton: Go. I ain't got nothing. Go.

DW: OK.

GS: I just woke up. Glenda woke me up at 2, and she said, “You told me to wake you up at 2.”

And I said, “No, I didn't.”

And she said, "Yeah, you did. You let out the dogs at 1, you let them back in, you came in here, and you said, ‘Wake me up at 2.’”

DW: You sound awake.

GS: More or less. Yeah, I'm awake. 

DW: So, I did want to ask you ... May I ask you about this book, You Want More? It's a collection of selected stories, right?

GS: Yeah. Yeah. That's why it's got the words "selected stories" on the cover.

DW: I saw that, and I didn't want to say it because I didn't want to embarrass you, but in many cases people say —

GS: What?

DW: They say "new and selected" sometimes. By which they’ll mean, "Not only do I have great stories from the past, but guess what, folks? There's something in here that you have not read yet," and it's like bait. Is this because you've stopped writing stories? That you have no new stories to share with us?

GS: No. That's a great question though. Yeah, when I was first approached by Hub City saying, "Hey, we want to do a selected."

And I went, "OK, let me think about it a couple days," and I did, and said,    "Okie dokie."

And then they said, "How about new and selected?"

And I said, "Nope." I knew I had about five or six stories toward a new collection, and I thought, "If I waste all of these five or six stories that had come out in magazines in a new and selected, then what the hell am I going to do for the next whatever?"

And then they said, "OK." So, they just put out the selected, and meanwhile I'm still writing. I have another book ready, except I don't want to do a book tour and I don't want to do anything else, but I got all these other stories that are about characters that work for nonprofit agencies that I made up. So, yeah, you're right, and maybe I should have done "new and selected," but I was hard headed about it and just thought, "No, I'll just pick these 30," and that's how it came out.

DW: Well, I think that's fine. I don't think you ought to beat yourself up about it.

GS: Well, now I've had second thoughts. I mean, I kind of wish I had. As a matter of fact, after the thing's already just selected stories, I think Publishers Weekly contacted Hub City and said, "Are there any new stories in this?" And in a weird way there is one, a new story, but it was part of those bad novels I wrote. 

I was writing Work Shirts For Madmen, and then I thought of this idea and I kind of wrote it and shoved it into the novel, and that novel came out, and then the story that I wrote came out in Atlantic Monthly. But it's quite different than what appears in the novel. It's a chapter in the novel. So, in a weird way, there is a new one in there, but not in my mind.

DW: Well, you brought up something that I actually had a note here that I wanted to ask you about, which is, your characters, almost all of them, but I will say the preponderance of them — and I bet you were hoping to go the whole day without hearing that word.

GS: Preponderance? Yeah.

DW: Preponderance. Yeah. Sorry.

GS: Yeah ... I might hang up on you.

DW: No, no, no, wait, I've got a lot of other words that I want to use with you. The preponderance of your characters have these really interesting jobs.

GS: Huh. Well, I didn't know that. I don't think about it, but I do know this  … I got to the point where I don't even like to read about teachers or professors. There's only been Moo by [Jane] Smiley ... Stoner by John Williams, but those people are kind of boring to me usually. So, I kind of quit writing about them, about teachers or professors. Anyway, I don't know and I can't think of ... Off the top of my head, I don't know what these people of mine do. Do social work or something?

DW: Well, even if you start even from the very first story in here, “Half-Mammals of Dixie,” he's an aquarium salesman.

GS: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a cool job.

DW: It does … I teach, and one of the problems with teaching undergraduates is so many of them have never had a job and don't know that that's such a thing that they're ever going to have to do, but having a character have a job opens up the story in so many ways.

GS: Yeah, I assume it says something about the character, too. If I wrote a story about a character who was a kind of depressed, unsatisfied, greeting card salesman, that's going to be a whole lot more interesting ... I'm not making fun of you. [BS Note: Wallace used to draw and sell greeting cards] That's going to be a whole lot more interesting than someone who's happy as a real estate agent. 

DW: Do you ever do any research?

GS: I don't do much, Danny. Do you? I mean, I just don't. I'm too lazy.

DW: No.

GS: I'm too lazy. I may look up something. I don't know. I'm writing a story right now that takes place in the town of Bluffton, because all of the characters have “-ton” at the end of their name. So, I said, "Well, I should put them in a town with a ‘-ton.’" I knew there's a Bluffton, South Carolina, and I knew this guy who had to go find a motel on a highway, and I didn't want it to be I-95, I wanted it to be a motel. So, I had to look up, but not really. I'm too stupid and lazy for that.

DW: So, with something like “Staff Picks” you didn't do any research on —

GS: RVs and ...

DW: RVs, yeah, or people putting their hands on a car in a contest to win it.

GS: No, I already knew about that. I'll tell you something unfortunate, too. Later on, someone said, "Ah, there's a whole play about that." I didn't know that. There's some kind of Broadway play about people doing a hands-on car thing. Maybe you told me. Did you tell me that?

DW: I don't think I did, but it's called “Hands on a Hardbody,” something like that.

GS: Yeah, I didn't know about this. Also later, that story ends with them crashing into a jewelry store and holding hands and someone said, “That's kind of like the ending of ‘Thelma and Louise,’” and I'd not seen that movie. Golly, it's impossible to think up anything new now. 

DW: Do you ever think about that, whether the thing that you're writing is something that you may have read before or seen before?

GS: Yeah, I think there's a word for it called cryptomnesia. Bet you didn't think you'd hear that word today. Cryptomnesia, C-R-Y-P-T-O-M-N-E-N-S-I-A. 

DW: I do think about it a lot. 

GS: It's hard enough. I'm trying to think of times when I've had stuff published and then someone later said, "Oh, I know. There's a story in that book called ‘Outlaw Head & Tail,’ the story came out in Playboy. It's about a guy taping over his child's sonogram, back when it was a VCR tape. 

DW: Yeah, I read that one. 

GS: Then later someone said, "I did that. I did that, and I told you about it," and I don't remember the guy.

It was my college roommate, and I went, "I don't remember you telling me that." But I'm sure he did, and it just got stuck in the back of my head. 

DW: Do you remember the first time we ever met?

GS: Yeah, in that Sheraton [in Nashville].

DW: Well, you were across the lobby and I’d always wanted to meet you and I knew that you were there.

GS: I don't know if people said it to you, but I'd had 100 people at bookstores say, "Do you know Daniel Wallace? Y'all got to meet. Y'all got to meet." There's like Jamie [Kornegay] from down in Mississippi, all kinds of people said that and I went, "How have I never met him?" I guess because writers don't. Contrary to popular belief, we don't just hang out together I guess. 

DW: We're always inside, too.

GS: Yeah, "I haven't met Daniel because I've not been a cat burglar in his house."

DW: So back to the book. You selected these stories, am I right?

GS: Yeah, I did. You got a problem with that?

DW: Not really. So you selected them from how many stories?

GS: Well, I think about ... let's see, there are 30 stories in the book. Probably picked out of more than 100 that were in books and then more than a couple hundred that were ... A lot of stories that I've had published aren't in books at all, and that earliest story in there was published in 1993. I think some people have said, "After 20 years of stories," but it's actually closer to 30, so there's the answer.

DW: That's the answer, but what was that process like? How long did it take you to do it? What did you actually do to select them?

GS: Most of my stories are in first person, and I thought no one's going to want 30 first-person stories because they all sound kind of alike. I write sometimes in third person, but normally just to do it. It'd be like if I were a baseball player and I played left field all the time, I'm a better left fielder, but every once a while maybe I should go practice playing shortstop. So every once in a while, maybe four or five times a year, I'll write in third person. 

Actually, the editor, Meg [Reid] helped with the order of them so that the first person, second person, and third person stories would be spaced out evenly. The only thing I asked was that the last story be the last story.  It’s a second person story called “What Could Have Been,” and it's a short short. It's a watch-out-for-what-you-wish kind of story because most of the stories are about people either being in a little bitty town and wanting to get out or being away from home and wanting to get back and nothing good happens either way.

DW: Yeah, that's a kind of bittersweet last story to end it on, and really moving, actually. Everything you describe in here, it could apply to a thousand different towns. 

GS: I think so, too. And I don't think it's a Southern story. I think this is anywhere in America. 

DW: Yeah, that's really the sad part of it, isn't it. You drive past a barrage of fast-food restaurants that include Burger King, Hardy's, Dairy Queen, Sonic, Chick-fil-A, and Bojangles, Captain Outback [sic] and then this repetition of them all over again. This is what you see on the edge of every town. We’re being surrounded. 

GS: Yeah. It's good in some ways if I want a chicken sandwich, but also, I think, horrifically bad if I want a place like the Try ME restaurant in Greenwood, where I was brought up. 

DW: Talk a bit about the evolution of your style. Looking at the stories chronologically [although they’re not presented chronologically], I see a big difference.

GS: Yeah? I think I do, too.

DW: How do you see it as changing?

GS: In the beginning, I think I was just trying to be as funny as I could possibly be. It’s like I was watching a lot of “The Three Stooges” or something. And I hope that over time the stories haven’t had to depend on the funny as much. I mean, there’s a big difference between some guy slipping on a piece of ice and falling and a guy slipping on a piece of ice and falling on the way to his mother’s funeral. 

DW: Exactly. And I’m warning you, George, I am about to use a word you would rather not hear. But here goes: your more recent stories have a gravitas the earlier ones do not.

GS: Oh, Jesus Christ! You had to do that, Danny? You had to use that word? And things were going so well. 

DW: I did have to use it.

GS: That was unfortunate.

DW: Your work has changed the way Raymond Carver’s work did over his lifetime, I think. Your stories are still funny, or have that element to them, but the humor is baked into the humanity of the story. I think you and Carver are two of our best story writers and in part that’s because of the way both of you kept, and in your case, keep evolving. 

GS: Oh. Thanks. That’s a nice thing to say, Danny. 

DW: Your stories and his stories both become bigger and better as time went by. Deeper. There’s just so much more there. More … what’s the word I’m looking for … 

GS: Don’t say it. 

DW: I know what it is.

GS: I’m hanging up.

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