It's been ten years since your first novel, Swimming across the Hudson, was published. What have you been doing in that time?

It's funny, at some point my agent called to ask me the same thing. I think she wanted to make sure I was still alive. A lot of things have happened in the last ten years--I got married and had two children; I've been teaching creative writing; I've published a handful of short stories--but mostly I've been working on Matrimony. Swimming across the Hudson took me three years; Matrimony took me ten. I threw out literally thousands of pages--many of them good pages, they just didn't belong in this book. Looking back now, I can say it was great spending ten years on a novel. I had all the time in the world to get it right. That's the good thing about being a fiction writer. No one cares how long you take. That's true in part because it's rare for a lot of money to be at stake and only a small portion of the population really cares about fiction. A writer friend of mine likes to say that the reward for irrelevance is artistic freedom, and I think there's some truth to that. But beyond that, novelists are writing books that ideally are timeless, so what's good now should be good in twenty years. My hope is my next book will take me less long, but you never know. There are a few good writers who can churn out a book every year or two--Updike and Oates come most readily to mind--but they're exceptions. In general, writing a novel is a very long process.

The novelist Dani Shapiro describes Matrimony as "at once sprawling and economical." The prose and the scenes are very tight, yet the book takes place over the course of twenty years and is set in numerous locations--New York City, western Massachusetts, Ann Arbor, Berkeley, Iowa City. How does a writer cover this amount of territory while keeping a novel's focus? Did you map the book out in advance?

I'm not a map-things-out kind of writer. I believe it was Mary McCarthy who said that she writes in order to find out what will happen, and I'm that way myself. I always start with what I believe is the beginning--it's important to me to be writing forward--even if it turns out that I'm grossly mistaken. In the case of Matrimony, I started with a college reunion because that was where I thought the book began. Now there is a college reunion in the novel, but it comes twenty years and nearly three hundred pages into the book. My next novel I've mapped out a little more, but even that's a very tentative mapping out, and I want to make sure that I allow myself to veer from the path I've staked out for myself. This is a tension that any writer faces--between planning out too little and planning out too much. If you plan out too little, you can end up writing a lot of pretty sentences about mountains and sunsets that don't go anywhere. If you plan out too much, you can end up injecting characters into a preordained plot and you get what a friend of mine calls Lipton-Cup-a-Story. What I try to do is to set my fiction in situations where something important can take place--where there's potential for conflict--but not to know too far in advance how that conflict will play out. That way the imagination can take over.

How would you summarize Matrimony?

Jonathan Franzen once said that the better a novel is, the more difficult it is to summarize. The protagonist in Martin Amis's novel The Information says something similar. He's a writer himself and he's being interviewed about his novel and the interviewer keeps asking him what his novel is about. Amis's protagonist, who, like many Amis protagonists, is a pretty difficult fellow, says something to the effect of, "It's 150,000 words, and if I could have said it in any less I would have." I sympathize. But if I had to describe Matrimony, I'd say it's about the twenty-year history of a marriage (it's about two marriages, actually--arguably three) and that it's about love and friendship, and the pleasures and perils that attend to those things. More generally, the novel is about what it's like to be in your twenties and thirties--even your forties in some cases--when you're waiting for life to begin and you find to your surprise that it already has begun and that the decisions you make have consequences that you're not even aware of yet. This is particularly pronounced in the case of my protagonists, Julian and Mia, since they get married at twenty-two, right out of college, and find themselves a year later living in Ann Arbor among friends for whom marriage is the last thing on their minds. College towns can perpetuate an eternal adolescence--I know; I've lived in a lot of them. And there's a real divide between married people and single people, the way further down the line there's an even bigger divide between people who have children and people who don't. So Julian and Mia have done what seems like the supremely adult act--getting married--even as in other ways they are far from fully formed. This is certainly true professionally. Julian is struggling to finish his novel; Mia is slogging away on her psychology dissertation. In that sense, the book is about what happens when life calls even when you're not ready for it to come calling.

You talk about the relative youth of Julian and Mia and their friends. Yet the older generation in Matrimony is important, too. I'm thinking, in particular, of Julian's and Mia's parents.

You know, if I did an actual page count, it would seem like the parents aren't that central. That's certainly the case with Julian's parents, and though Mia's mother is fairly important early on in the book, ultimately Mia's parents, too, don't get a lot of page time. Yet all four parents are an important lurking presence throughout the novel. I hope I'm not giving away too much here, but at some point in the book Julian gets a call from his mother saying his father has left her. Julian's in his thirties at this point, he's studying at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and on balance he's not particularly close to his parents; he doesn't think about them much. They're in New York, still living in the apartment he grew up in, and he kind of thinks of them like New York itself--as an island he periodically visits, but essentially they're part of his past. And yet, when he learns that they're separating, he's really shaken up, and he's surprised by how shaken up he is. I had a girlfriend once whose parents got divorced when she was in college and she had a similar reaction. Julian's a good deal older than she was when his parents split up, but for a lot of people you're never a good deal older when it comes to your parents. This is true for Julian and Mia, and I think it may be true for most people in general. I'm in my early forties now, so Julian and Mia are more or less my contemporaries, and I think what happens to a lot of people is that as they get older, if they're lucky enough to have parents who are still alive, they are surprised to discover that they're becoming more involved in their parents' lives, rather than less so. There's a kind of coming back that's brought about in part by grandchildren, and also by the decline of health that comes with old age. My father, who didn't have me until he was forty-six, is approaching ninety now, and his health is worsening. In a way, middle age is about caring for both your parents and your children. And to the extent that Matrimony ends when the characters are approaching middle age, they are brushing up against this phenomenon.

Julian is, among other things, an aspiring novelist. Are there dangers in writing about writing?

Sure, but only in the sense that there are dangers in writing about anything. There's the danger of getting it wrong, of not being honest and true to your material. Since I'm a writer myself, one of the things I had to be careful about, certainly in terms of the sections about writing, was not writing too close to my own experience. You don't want the work to become internal and self-referential. Every writer is faced with the same question: do you write about what you know or what you don't know? Some of my writing students, particularly my undergraduates, err to one extreme or the other. They write simply what they know, which is a transcript of Friday night's keg party, or simply what they don't know, which is Martians. What they need to do--and here I'm quoting a former writing teacher of mine--is write what they know about what they don't know or what they don't know about what they know. In other words, they want the advantages of both closeness and distance. If you're too close to your material, you're likely to be overly concerned about actual truth when fiction is about trying to get at a deeper truth through the imagination. On the other hand, you don't want to be so distant from your subject matter that the work has no heart. I tell my students that if they don't care about their characters, how can they expect their readers to care about them? I'm not saying they have to like their characters; caring about your characters is something entirely different. In the end, the key is to be as direct and as emotionally honest as possible. My graduate students, many of whom are quite talented, are for the most part so afraid of being over the top that they're subtle to the point of obfuscation. They think they're being subtle, but the reader has no idea what they're talking about. I believe writers should risk being over the top. Charles Baxter says something similar in his wonderful book of essays Burning Down the House. You don't want to descend into sentimentality, but it's worse, I would argue, if your work lacks sentiment. And in order to get sentiment, you have to risk sentimentality. I tell my students not to be so afraid of being cheesy. They can always revise. That's the great thing about being a fiction writer. You can keep on revising until you get it right. That's why I think writers are the greatest control freaks in the world.

And you're saying all this is true when it comes to writing about writing?

I'm saying it's true when it comes to writing about anything. As for the question of writing about writing, it's best, as with all things, to attack it head-on. One of the great paradoxes about writing is that in being more direct you end up being more subtle. It's true even on the sentence level. "Show, don't tell," writing students learn the first day of class--and every other day of class, I'm afraid. "Show, don't tell" is one of the great lies of fiction writing (Where would Alice Munro be if she couldn't tell things?), but that's a longer discussion. Showing is important, certainly, but every day I see the perils of student writers hewing too reflexively to that piece of advice. I come across the obligatory and meaningless description that makes readers stop in their tracks and ask why they were told that. You get adjective overdrive--you know, the typing sentence, the one that has every letter of the alphabet in it: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs." When someone writes, "He walked across the room and picked up the black, plastic telephone," the reader immediately wonders why they were told that the phone was black and plastic. Is this important information? If the phone were brown and made out of some other material, would that be any different, even on the important level of sensual apprehension? But just as important as the fact of this information is the way that it's conveyed. The writer is trying to slip the adjectives in unobtrusively, in a kind of oh-by-the-way fashion that, paradoxically, makes the description more obtrusive, not less so. If the writer for whatever reason feels compelled to let the reader know that the phone is black and plastic, it's far better (and more unobtrusive) to say it directly instead of trying to slip it in. "The phone was black and plastic, and hearing it ring, he walked across the room to pick it up." That's not a very good sentence, either, but at least it doesn't pretend it's not doing what it in fact is doing.

And what you're saying applies not just on the level of language but on other levels, too?

Exactly. My students get into trouble when they write a story that has absolutely nothing to do with writing and then there will be a reference to a short story that the character is writing. The reader recognizes a failure of imagination: the writing student has writing on the brain, and so he drops into the story the first thing that comes to his mind. If, on the other hand, the character is a writer and that's part what the book is about, then great--write about it, embrace it. Do it, say, the way Francine Prose does in her terrific novel Blue Angel. In the end, though, I don't think subject matter makes that much difference. For me, fiction is about character and the ways that narrative and language contribute to a deeper understanding of character. And that's true whether you're writing about a writer, a psychologist, a mobster, or a taxidermist. If someone said to me, "How would you like to read a novel about war?" I'd probably say "No, thanks." But Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is one of the great contemporary novels, not because it's a novel about war but because it's a great novel. If you're looking for subject matter, then you should read history or anthropology or political science. The pleasures of fiction are principally about something else.

You studied fiction writing at the University of Michigan, and now you teach writing at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College. What do you think of MFA programs?

They're not perfect, but I think they're way over-criticized. The criticism often comes from older writers who grew up before writing was so wed to the university and who didn't get MFAs themselves, though many of them now teach in MFA programs. It's born from a Look-Ma-No-Hands attitude--that writing is art, it's gift, and to turn it into a trade is to demean it. Well, writing is art, it is gift, but it's other things, too. Craft, revision, sweat, learning to listen to criticism. People complain that MFA programs churn out a lot of competent, even mediocre, writers, but law schools churn out a lot of competent, even mediocre, lawyers, and no one complains about that. And the consequences of mediocre lawyers are more obviously detrimental than the consequences of mediocre writers. With writers, if you don't like their work, you don't have to read it. It's certainly true that you can't teach talent and not everyone who goes to an MFA program is going to be Fitzgerald. But there aren't a lot of Fitzgeralds out there, and there never have been, not before there were MFA programs and not since. I've never seen an MFA program take someone who was gifted and make him or her mediocre. On the other hand, I've seen a lot of student writers really benefit from an MFA--from the attention paid to their work, from the careful instruction of professors and peers--and I've seen people learn how to get out of the way of their mistakes so that they reach their potential much more quickly. And no matter what kind of writer an MFA program produces, that person graduates as a better, more discerning reader--someone who knows how to appreciate the pleasures of good fiction. That's no small thing, and it's often underappreciated.

What, then, are the pitfalls of the MFA?

A bad, insensitive teacher can do real damage to a writer who's just starting out, and there are certainly personality types that don't do well in writing workshops. Principal among them is the person who's too defensive and won't listen to criticism, who has come to graduate school simply to be told how great they are. Then there's the other extreme--the pleaser, the person who's so eager to listen to everyone that they take the pile of written comments at the end of workshop and try to adhere to them all, no matter how contradictory they are. What you get, then, is a kind of writing by committee, which can be very dangerous for a writer. The key is to be receptive to what people say but not so receptive that you have your finger to the wind. Someone considering an MFA should remember it's not a professional degree. I would never promise someone that they're going to get a book contract when they graduate. Too much luck is involved. But if you treat an MFA like what it is--art school--then by all means. No one says to a child, "What's the point of taking piano lessons, you're not going to be Schubert." Well, I feel the same way about MFA programs. Holding someone to the Schubert standard, to the Fitzgerald standard, is, to my mind, silliness, and it ignores the pleasure someone can get from producing art even if it doesn't ultimately hold up to the strictest aesthetic scrutiny.

There are some very funny scenes in Matrimony that take place in writing workshops. Is it safe to say that some of the material is borrowed from your own experiences as a writing student and writing professor?

Some of the things I've witnessed in writing workshops wouldn't have worked in my book--no one would have believed them. As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction workshops are weird social laboratories. In the case of undergraduates, you're taking a bunch of 18 to 22 year olds and telling them to write about whatever they want to write about, to be creative, and that's bound to inspire a certain amount of self-indulgence. At Sarah Lawrence, in particular, there's an artsy gestalt. It's the kind of place where students like to come barefoot to class. Graymont, the college in Matrimony, is believed to be based on Hampshire College, and geographically speaking, I suppose it is. But since I've never set foot on Hampshire, and since Sarah Lawrence is in some ways the Hampshire of New York, I'd say it's based more on Sarah Lawrence. So, yes, you're going to find students doing some outrageous things, often for no reason other than to be outrageous--like dropping random letters into words or writing about what seem to be people when, lo and behold, they turn out to be cats. But this isn't unique to Sarah Lawrence, or to Graymont. We're talking about college kids, so there's a tendency for some of them to have an attitude of, "Hey, dude, it's supposed to be creative writing, so I can do whatever I want."

And you believe they can't.

Well, they can, certainly; it just has to work. And that turns out to be a pretty severe constraint. At the end of every semester, I have a number of students say to me, "I never realized writing fiction was so hard." This is music to my ears, because it tells me the students learned something.

What would you most like your students to learn?

To read widely and deeply. I encourage them to imitate the people they admire. When I was a graduate student, there was a course on imitation. One day you wrote like Hemingway; the next day you wrote like Woolf. Everyone found it very helpful. It's through imitation that you develop your own voice. With undergraduates, I'd say the biggest thing you need to convince them of is that being obscure is different from being deep. They think if they're incomprehensible they're being smart, and while some of them are very smart, if they write incomprehensibly no one's going to read them. There's already enough that's incomprehensible in the world, and fiction is about making order out of disorder. What I try to convince my students is that a story is not a Rubik's cube. There's some limited fun to solving a puzzle, but good fiction aspires to something deeper than that.

At the same time, it's easy to make fun. I didn't start to write fiction until I was older, but if I'd written in college I'm sure what I produced would make me cringe now. And even after college. No one likes to go back and read their earlier work, no matter how good or how celebrated it was. And there isn't a published writer in the world who doesn't wish they could take back at least a few sentences they wrote. When writing professors poke fun at their students, even if in the privacy of the faculty dining hall, what they're really saying is, "There but for the grace of God go I." And whatever the quality of the writing, it's important to remember that a human being wrote this. When I was living in Ann Arbor, Richard Ford came to speak to the MFA students. He had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day, and he said two things that really struck me. The first was that no matter how well you've done in the past, the next time you sit down to write, the page is just as blank and you have no idea if you can pull it off. The second thing was that even writing a bad novel is an accomplishment. I hadn't yet finished Swimming Across the Hudson and I hadn't even begun Matrimony, so a great deal of hard work still lay ahead of me. But it struck me as true then, and it still strikes me as true. It's a lot of pages and a lot of hard work. It humbles you, which I think is important, and makes you a more humane writer and a more humane teacher, which is of course essential in the classroom.

Do you prefer teaching undergraduates or MFAs?

On balance, the MFAs. I've always been that way. In summer camp, I wanted to be the counselor for the older kids.

What are the differences, aside from age?

The frustration with undergraduates is that in many cases you take their work more seriously than they do. With MFAs, you have the opposite problem. For them, there's so much at stake, they want to be writers so badly. There's nothing worse than having an MFA student who just isn't any good and who doesn't look like they ever will be. I've had a few of those over the years and every time it really pains me. If writing gives them pleasure you don't want to stop them, but a lot of times they think they're going to succeed as writers and though you of course can't be sure, you suspect it's unlikely. I have colleagues who have had students ask them point-blank whether they are going to make it, and my colleagues have said, "No." I could never say something like that. I hide behind the fact that you can never know, which of course is true, but I think it may just be cowardice. Sometimes telling a young writer to pursue something else is doing them a favor. But I just I don't think I'm constitutionally capable of saying something like that.

What's the biggest problem you see in MFA writing?

Hands-down, the inability to tell a story--in some cases, the resistance to telling a story. If I had a dollar for every MFA story that was well written and with at least some serious attention paid to character but where nothing happens, I could quit my day job. M.J. Rose has a great blog about publishing called "Buzz, Balls, and Hype," and she was kind enough to let me guest blog for a few days. I wrote something called Letter to an MFA, Part Two, Part Three, which was about MFAs and story-telling. In brief, I had a friend in college who wrote her psychology thesis on the difference between how adults group objects and how children group objects. Adults group the apple with the banana, whereas children group the monkey with the banana. Another way of putting it is that children are more natural storytellers than adults. One of my jobs, then, is to get my students to think more like children. Extremely sophisticated children, but children nonetheless. Flannery O'Connor says much the same thing in her great book of essays Mystery and Manners. She says that a writer can ill-afford to do without a certain amount of stupidity.

How do you teach narrative?

It's hard to summarize or give a blueprint. You have the students for a whole semester, so there's a lot of time for reading, writing, and reflection. But in a nutshell, you want your students to think in terms of the Passover Seder. Why is this night different from all other nights? Every story has to answer that question. Why is this story, why is this novel, being told today? What's urgent about it? Because if a piece of fiction isn't urgent, it has no life. Someone once said there are only two kinds of stories--Stranger Comes to Town and Person Goes on a Trip. Which is really just one kind of story, since Stranger Comes to Town is simply Person Goes on a Trip from a different point of view. So that's what I do. I send my characters on trips, and I encourage my students to do the same.

What are your writing habits?

Ah, the million-dollar question. Fran Lebowitz once did this really funny interview in which she said that what people really want to know about writers isn't what they're writing about, but how many words they write a day, whether they write by hand or computer, that kind of thing. As for me, I like to get my writing out of the way early so it's not hanging over my head for the rest of the day. I'm the same way about exercise. I try to write five or six days a week, though that's not always possible, especially now that I'm a parent. But in general, I think more frequent writing for shorter bursts beats less frequent writing for longer bursts. That way you're constantly living with your characters. I hate first drafts. They're unavoidable, but I wish I could get straight to the business of revision, which is what I like best. I can revise for eight, nine, even ten hours a day, but when I'm doing a first draft, if I make it to three hours I consider myself lucky. What I love about writing is having the skeleton and filling in the flesh. Much of my revision is so significant it isn't fair to call it revision; it's really a complete rewriting. Still, it feels different if you already have words in front of you. I usually write on computer, though early on in Matrimony my computer broke down and I was forced to write by hand for a month. And I found that really liberating because it freed up my writing in important ways. I'm a compulsive reviser--I can literally spend hours just changing a few words of dialogue, adding a comma here, taking one away there, adding or deleting a dialogue tag. This is really important, but the key is not to do it too early. I tend to revise before I should. To my mind, the best way to write a novel is to churn out a first draft and only then go back to revise. With a short story, it may be easier to revise as you go along because you can see the whole more easily, but with a novel you're too busy figuring out what the whole is. My problem is I have trouble resisting revision. I see the words on the screen and they look clean and neat and I want to make them clean and neat in deeper ways. But writing by hand freed me of that. Particularly since I have bad handwriting, there was no illusion that what I was writing was anything but a mess, and so that freed me to move on without looking back.

Who are your favorite authors?

That's the kind of question that prompts me to wake up in the middle of the night and think, I can't believe I forgot to mention him or her. So I won't tell you favorites, but I'll give you a haphazard, non-all-inclusive list of writers I really admire. Alice Munro, William Trevor, John Cheever, Richard Yates, Lorrie Moore, Amy Bloom, Ian McEwan, Charles Baxter, Saul Bellow. And I'll tell you what books are on my bedside table now. Helen Schulman's A Day at the Beach, Meg Wolitzer's The Position, Charles D'Ambrosio's The Dead Fish Museum, and The collected stories of Leonard Michaels. Lenny was my first writing teacher, and he gave me a lot of encouragement. His work was celebrated early in his career, but it was treated quite badly and unfairly late in his life. Now he's getting a well-deserved, posthumous revival. His short stories, in particular--there's little that's quite like them, certainly on the level of their energy. I'm not sure I've ever read anyone who writes about violence, both physical and emotional, quite the way he does. I can also name some books I've loved that in some cases didn't get as much attention as they deserved. Robert Boswell's Mystery Ride, Robert Cohen's Inspired Sleep, Max Phillips's Snakebite Sonnet, David Gates's Preston Falls, Mark Costello's Big If.

What are you working on now?

My next novel, tentatively titled The World Without You, is due at the publisher next spring. I'm about 150 pages into it. It takes place over a much shorter period of time than Matrimony--a single weekend, in fact--and it's about a family reunion, the occasion for which is the anniversary of the son's death--he was a journalist killed in Iraq. More than that, I'm not saying. I'm also working on a some short stories. I love short stories. You'd think with people's short attention spans, they'd be the ideal art form, but most people treat them like the plague. Why don't people read short stories anymore?