Gabe Habash
Gabe Habash is the fiction reviews editor for Publishers Weekly. He holds an MFA from New York University and lives in New York. His novel, Stephen Florida, is described by Coffee House Press as: Foxcatcher meets The Art of Fielding, Stephen Florida follows a college wrestler in his senior season, when every practice, every match, is a step closer to greatness and a step further from sanity. Profane, manic, and tipping into the uncanny, it’s a story of loneliness, obsession, and the drive to leave a mark.
Published 07/31/17 |
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Howl: What is your writing process like?
Habash: I tried to write every day or nearly every day. I would write after work, so early evenings, until I ran out of gas. Sometimes that was 20 minutes, sometimes a few hours. The first draft of the book took about 15 months to write, and I was always thinking about it, and so I'd have sentences or thoughts come to me when I was running or falling asleep and I'd jot them down. The latter half of the book becomes more fragmented, and constructing that aspect was finding ways to work in the little thoughts I had written down as I went along.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Habash: I didn't edit much on the first draft, I mainly just pushed through until I was done. The work of the subsequent drafts was largely cutting. The book went from 155,000 words to about 107,000 or so. I edited out whole plot threads and characters, and I also tightened up my narrator's voice and made it more consistent. In my experience, the longer you stay with a project, the more the extraneous stuff and the stuff that simply isn't working reveals itself. You want it to be cut.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Habash: Oh, wow. If anything I think there's too much writing advice out there, and listening to it can be paralyzing for writers. But I would say that if you find it difficult, which you certainly will, to appreciate it. Writing can be very painful and usually consists of long periods of uncertainty and rejection, with a few scarce moments of clarity and achievement. What makes those good moments so good is how challenging and prevalent the difficult moments are. So when you're going through the bad moments, remind yourself that you're pursuing something that matters, otherwise it wouldn't be worth going through the difficulty. And of course, read as much as you can.
Howl: In your book, Stephen Florida, one of the passages reads: “I dive forward at his right leg. After a few seconds, I have his ankles. Like a small livestock, a slimy thing you’re tasked with bludgeoning for the sake of the farm, because you have two sisters and your dad says you’re the oldest, I have his ankles.” You have a very unique writing style in which you take seemingly disjointed thoughts and weave them together beautifully. Was this style natural for you or was it a very conscious decision?
Habash: I touched on how the disjointed style came together in the earlier answer, but I always wanted to write the novel in this style because I knew it'd keep me on my toes, and that I'd never get bored or slowed down in a scene. There's nothing worse than a boring book, and by having the narrative move around so quickly and unpredictably led it in new and surprising directions, to places I hadn't even predicted. And I don't even mean on a larger story scale, necessarily, I also mean even on a sentence level. To me, Barry Hannah writes the most surprising sentences. Often they will begin in one place and end up in a place you never possibly could've predicted. It's a key to what makes his writing so funny and memorable, and I wanted that to be in my book, as well.
Howl: Who were some of your influences as a writer?
Habash: Roberto Bolaño, Vladimir Nabokov, Iris Murdoch, Janet Malcolm, Fleur Jaeggy, Thomas McGuane, Richard Yates, Lindsay Hill, Tobias Wolff, Richard Brautigan.
Howl: What is a quirk about you, as a writer, most people wouldn’t know?
Habash: I didn't think it was really a quirk, but I've since found out not that many writers exercise and text themselves notes as they do it. A good amount of the book came from thinking about it when I was running.
Howl: Why do you feel that writing is your creative medium of choice?
Habash: I started off thinking film was what I wanted to pursue, but I realized that I don't trust anyone. I trust people to edit my writing, but I wanted to be the only one doing the writing. There are still things I see in films that I wish writing could do, but I think there are just as many things that writing can do that film can't. And it's been a fun process discovering those things and finding ways to incorporate them.
Howl: What kinds of stories inspire you? What do you look for in a good story?
Habash: I love funny books. Not enough books are funny, and not enough even seemingly try to be funny. I love weird, messy books that surprise me. I love books that feel like the life of the author depended on it. I love books where you can feel the author in total control of the work--it's a privilege and a thrill to experience an author knowing exactly what pieces go where, and when to fit them together.
Howl: What sort of plans do you have for future writing projects?
Habash: This is a difficult question, and I don't have an answer for it yet.
Habash: I tried to write every day or nearly every day. I would write after work, so early evenings, until I ran out of gas. Sometimes that was 20 minutes, sometimes a few hours. The first draft of the book took about 15 months to write, and I was always thinking about it, and so I'd have sentences or thoughts come to me when I was running or falling asleep and I'd jot them down. The latter half of the book becomes more fragmented, and constructing that aspect was finding ways to work in the little thoughts I had written down as I went along.
Howl: How do you edit your work?
Habash: I didn't edit much on the first draft, I mainly just pushed through until I was done. The work of the subsequent drafts was largely cutting. The book went from 155,000 words to about 107,000 or so. I edited out whole plot threads and characters, and I also tightened up my narrator's voice and made it more consistent. In my experience, the longer you stay with a project, the more the extraneous stuff and the stuff that simply isn't working reveals itself. You want it to be cut.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Habash: Oh, wow. If anything I think there's too much writing advice out there, and listening to it can be paralyzing for writers. But I would say that if you find it difficult, which you certainly will, to appreciate it. Writing can be very painful and usually consists of long periods of uncertainty and rejection, with a few scarce moments of clarity and achievement. What makes those good moments so good is how challenging and prevalent the difficult moments are. So when you're going through the bad moments, remind yourself that you're pursuing something that matters, otherwise it wouldn't be worth going through the difficulty. And of course, read as much as you can.
Howl: In your book, Stephen Florida, one of the passages reads: “I dive forward at his right leg. After a few seconds, I have his ankles. Like a small livestock, a slimy thing you’re tasked with bludgeoning for the sake of the farm, because you have two sisters and your dad says you’re the oldest, I have his ankles.” You have a very unique writing style in which you take seemingly disjointed thoughts and weave them together beautifully. Was this style natural for you or was it a very conscious decision?
Habash: I touched on how the disjointed style came together in the earlier answer, but I always wanted to write the novel in this style because I knew it'd keep me on my toes, and that I'd never get bored or slowed down in a scene. There's nothing worse than a boring book, and by having the narrative move around so quickly and unpredictably led it in new and surprising directions, to places I hadn't even predicted. And I don't even mean on a larger story scale, necessarily, I also mean even on a sentence level. To me, Barry Hannah writes the most surprising sentences. Often they will begin in one place and end up in a place you never possibly could've predicted. It's a key to what makes his writing so funny and memorable, and I wanted that to be in my book, as well.
Howl: Who were some of your influences as a writer?
Habash: Roberto Bolaño, Vladimir Nabokov, Iris Murdoch, Janet Malcolm, Fleur Jaeggy, Thomas McGuane, Richard Yates, Lindsay Hill, Tobias Wolff, Richard Brautigan.
Howl: What is a quirk about you, as a writer, most people wouldn’t know?
Habash: I didn't think it was really a quirk, but I've since found out not that many writers exercise and text themselves notes as they do it. A good amount of the book came from thinking about it when I was running.
Howl: Why do you feel that writing is your creative medium of choice?
Habash: I started off thinking film was what I wanted to pursue, but I realized that I don't trust anyone. I trust people to edit my writing, but I wanted to be the only one doing the writing. There are still things I see in films that I wish writing could do, but I think there are just as many things that writing can do that film can't. And it's been a fun process discovering those things and finding ways to incorporate them.
Howl: What kinds of stories inspire you? What do you look for in a good story?
Habash: I love funny books. Not enough books are funny, and not enough even seemingly try to be funny. I love weird, messy books that surprise me. I love books that feel like the life of the author depended on it. I love books where you can feel the author in total control of the work--it's a privilege and a thrill to experience an author knowing exactly what pieces go where, and when to fit them together.
Howl: What sort of plans do you have for future writing projects?
Habash: This is a difficult question, and I don't have an answer for it yet.