Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz’s first novel, Therapy, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Selection and a finalist for the Harold U. Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine. His second novel, A Good’s Doctor’s Son, won the Colorado Book Award for the Novel. His stories, collected in four volumes, have received two O.Henry Prize Story Awards, the Nelson Algren Award from the Chicago Tribune, the Cohen Award from Ploughshares, the Foreword Review Gold Medal, the Sherwood Anderson Prize, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Twitter: @SchwartzBooks
Are there particular films that have influenced your writing?
When I was twelve years old, I had a friend who was a film buff. We formed a two-person club. We saw over a hundred movies in theaters that year, a lot for twelve-year-olds who were supposed to be playing outside. That’s when I saw West Side Story for the first time (and subsequently three more times). I was stunned by the music, the singing, the choreography, the action sequences, the racial, cultural, and class themes. I think that’s when I realized I wanted to be a writer and understood, if only dimly, how dynamic a story had to be, how much it had to come alive on the screen or the page, and how richly synthesized the elements had to occur for it to deserve the designation as a work of art. Years later, Truffaut’s films, The 400-blows, Jules and Jim, would update that impression in terms of the thrilling possibilities of what you could do with structure, time, and the exquisite control and presentation of emotion on screen. I wanted to aim for that in my own writing.
What period of history do you wish you knew more about?
World War 2. Though I am a voracious reader of fiction and nonfiction about it, I can never quench my thirst, my understanding really, of how the Holocaust could happen. And unfortunately, I see many parallels from the events of that time with the threat to our democracy today. So, I keep reading.
Favorite non-reading activity?
If only it was something dramatic like wingsuit flying, but, sigh, it’s just walking. I envy the French for the term flâneur. I wish there was a comparable term in English. Something that gave “walker” a little more panache.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
Do writers ever get over this? I’ve just published my seventh book and wonder if this is the one that will finally out me. On the other hand, cognitively speaking, you can’t be an imposter if you’re actually doing the work. I think IS (yes, let’s call it that) is always lurking. When I was young, I imagined that getting a story published in a reputable place would inoculate me against any feelings of fraud. Then it was winning a national prize, getting a first book published, etc. In the face of such accomplishments the ante goes up. I’ve come to accept that doing the work requires managing a lifelong dialectic between confidence and self-doubt, detachment and judgment, spontaneity and second-guessing. But that’s what I signed up for.
What’s the difference (at least for you!) between being a writer and an author? How do you shift gears between the two?
I rarely use the term author about myself. Though honestly, I don’t admit to “writer” much either, because it leads to those pesky questions of “Have I read anything by you?” No. But anyhow, “author” feels static vs. “writer.” “Author” includes all that striving for publication and recognition, all the parts out of the writer’s control, all the ego involvement and worries and hits of dopamine, too, when recognition does come. Writer is just that guy or gal, him, her or they, sitting in a room doing the job, with the solace of the right word.
