David Guterson with Wendy Hinman

David Guterson is best known for his smash hit, Snow Falling on Cedars, which won the 1995 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, one of the highest honors in American letters, and was made into a successful Hollywood film. But this man has done so much more. He has written poetry, short stories, essays, and journalistic pieces, as well as several other well-received novels and a non-fiction book about homeschooling. He is active in the community and, in 2001, co-founded Field's End, a writing resource on Bainbridge Island. Welcome, David.

Looking back over your experiences as a writer so far, is there anything you wish you'd learned sooner or wish you'd done differently?

Nothing.  It has been a wonderful and rewarding exploration, full of necessary grievous errors.  I don't think there is a way to cut corners--you gotta break a few bones along the way and there's no way out of that.

What has contributed most to your evolution as a writer?

Anything that contributes to my evolution as a human being contributes to my evolution as a writer.  I can't become a better writer without becoming a better person.

Have you found working with writing groups to be helpful to your writing? If so, how?

Any situation that calls for working with others has the potential to be fruitful.  If that work demands hands-on, specific efforts to improve as a writer then the quality of the rewards will be contingent on the people immersed in the work together.  If that work demands collaboration on providing service to other writers, well, there's a lot to be gained there, too, in the way of learning and growth.

No matter who you're working with, there is always a way to learn from them, and an opportunity for self-reflection.

Could you share with our readers how you evolved into a professional writer: from wanting to write, to teaching English to high school students, to bestselling author? 

There was a point along the way in my life when I discovered that I liked to write and so I started doing it.  There was another point when I started teaching but it didn't seem to me that it had evolved out of the desire to write or that the desire to write subsided or was replaced by it.  There was a third point in my life when I could look at a newspaper and see the title of a book I wrote on a list of bestsellers, but so what?  That never meant anything to me, and it still doesn't.

How did your years spent teaching contribute to your path as a writer? 

Being a teacher meant I had to know something.  I had to learn about the stuff I was teaching and about people and about myself.  All valuable.

What has been most helpful to you on your path to writing full time?

I just kept attending to what was in front of me as faithfully as possible, whether it was teaching or writing or anything else.

Your work spans poetry, short fiction, essay, novel and non-fiction. How do you juggle the vastly different demands of each genre? 

By not looking at them as demands.  By embracing the beautiful opportunity every act of writing presents.  Juggling demands is a wonderful image, though.  I can see myself with all of these flaming swords in the air, desperate not to burn or cut myself, on edge, completely rapt.  It sounds like dangerous fun, and it might produce some good work, but I just don't do it that way myself.

How do you decide what to work on each day?

Usually it's pretty straightforward.  This morning I have to go down to the bottom of the field and replace a piece of domestic water supply line on the uphill side of a booster pump.  The pump has a lot of thrust and the thin-walled black plastic pipe directly in front of it makes a graceful loop so the thrust of water directly strikes plastic under pressure and over the years this stressed it until it cracked along a seam of manufacture otherwise never revealed.  This gushing split happened last winter and, under duress (rain, dark, no water, a huge bill adding up),  I jury-rigged a solution that I have carried in the back of my mind ever since and which I am this morning determined to improve upon.  It has to be done and every day that goes by means I risk another emergency situation of no water and a big bill.  So now it's on the calendar and I am not going to put it off any longer.  And in all of this there might be a story or a poem or something else but I won't know until I've done it.  Also, I decided to work today on answers to these questions, so I'm writing at this moment.  And then this afternoon I am going for a walk with a poet with whom I'm working on a project and who knows what will come of that?

Can you describe your work process for us?

This would be hard.  I don't feel like I really have a process.  I think that I'm just always sort of trying to figure out what I'm doing, and that I've never come up with an answer that works tomorrow.  I can look back and see that I've done things a different way on everything I've written and that every day has been a new day with a new exploration that is unique to it.  Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't, but even when it doesn't, you stow that away and hopefully get a little wiser.

Could you please take us from idea to finished product on one of your favorite projects? 

Wow.  Tough question.  Sometimes I read interviews wherein this question is asked and I am amazed at what good memories some people have.  Or I wonder if they kept a kind of daily journal in which they noted matters pertinent to a question like this one.  For me, I can't remember.  Or I feel like not very much that is definitive can be said.  Take the first piece here--idea.  Who really knows where an idea comes from?  In my case I just notice that I am ruminating on something that has no identifiable source.  I didn't ask for it, I didn't exert conscious thought, I didn't look for anything, it just floated up and stayed on the surface, demanding my attention.  

How do you decide when the work is ready to share?

There is a feeling of rightness that can't be put into words.  Maybe I am weeping, or feel aesthetic closure, or feel that an intellectual circle has been made--hopefully all 3 together.

Do you find writing a book-length manuscript to be more difficult than writing short stories, essays or poems? 

If the poems, short stories, or essays are not meant to be part of a book-length manuscript then they are free of the associated larger considerations.  I don't have to think about how they might fit together.  That's okay and can be pleasing.  I also enjoy thinking about the connections and writing with them in mind.  Degree of difficulty seems to me the same every day when it comes to writing.  Huge joy can be taken in whatever composite factors are searching out an organic whole inside your heart and mind on a daily basis.

How do you alter your writing techniques to adjust to longer works? 

Writing engages you on multiple levels simultaneously.  At one level it's like you have this bag of tools you've put together and, having worked with all of them a lot, you feel okay pulling any combination of them out of the bag and going to work.  But for me, the tool bag isn't central.  What matters when something is asking to be longer rather than shorter is that your disposition needs to be calibrated to that, in the same way that someone setting out to run a marathon calibrates for that instead of for a sprint of 100 meters.  You have to get steady and patient and tell yourself that every step matters.

You once mentioned reaching an impasse related to character development in a book you were writing (Ed King?). Can you share with us the struggle you are referring to and how/whether you worked through it?

That sounds like something I probably recounted in an interview.  At this moment in time, I have no memory of the interview and no memory of the struggle and couldn't even tell you which character in which book I was referring to.  Usually in an interview I have to say something, by the very nature of the beast, that I will regret later because it never really gets at the actual fullness and complexity of things.  I mean, I'm pretty sure I reach impasses with character development all of the time, and I'm inclined to believe that without them I wouldn't get very far.  Those big abysses always mean either finding another route or figuring out how to vault, leap, fly, or build a bridge of some kind.

After reading your short stories and poems, I am amazed by how much you can convey in such a short space. How have you honed your skill to draw the reader in and communicate complex human problems in such a short space? (For example in a story about father, son and grandfather hunting together, you convey the pain of aging.)

I think I've probably honed this skill by writing copious amounts of material that I don't feel good about and then trying to learn from it.  After a long time I began to notice that I only liked what I was writing when there was a sense of the organic, of things working together, of everything doing more than one thing and connecting to everything else, all in the service of a central vision, which does yield a kind of compression.  That sense of compression, when noted by a reader, can have aesthetic satisfactions.

What advice would you give to other writers who want to pursue a similar path of writing stories, poems and books?

I am really loathe to give advice and find it suspect.  But, to venture a bit of it--insofar as you can, know yourself.

I notice you are doing more with poetry lately and even have a book length poem coming out this year. Is that your current focus or are you balancing poetry with prose? Are you working on another book length manuscript? Please tell us about what you are working on next.

I don't think my book-length poem is going to make it out this year--we'll see.  I'm learning that poetry publishers have backlogs.  Not doing any work on it at the moment.  Could end up with an editor on it sometime this year and find myself inspired to reengage.  In the meantime I'm working on a foreword to a new edition of Robert Michael Pyle's Wintergreen.  And in general trying to control the compulsive urge to work on a book-length manuscript.  Trying to understand why I have long felt that I need to be working on one, and hoping to free myself from that need.  Sort of a hard thing because after about 35 years of those neural pathways getting laid down and deepened other routes don't just casually present themselves.  I would rather work on a book-length manuscript without needing to, if possible.