Seth Greenland is a success wherever he goes, from plays, to television and movies, and novels. Google him and find out he was an original blogger for The Huffington Post or follow him on Twitter to learn he’s just played a gay polygamist at a table reading of Big Love—he writes and produces on this year’s season—or that his third novel, The Angry Buddhist, has just sold in France. His first two books, The Bones (Bloomsbury 2005) and Shining City (Bloomsbury 2008), were both quickly optioned by movie studios. A television writer fed up with the hollow art he is forced to create to survive, an angry comedian trying to fulfill his personal philosophy of burn, burn, burn, a widowed grandmother finding solace in medical marijuana and pole-dancing, and an everyday couple hit hard by economic turbulence to whom luck is granted with inheritance of a prostitution ring are only some of the characters who inhabit Greenland’s literary world. Though some critics deem his fiction satire, Greenland disagrees, and frankly, so do we. His fiction, both timely and relevant, artfully extricates the absurd from the everyday and paints through characters who are almost instantly recognizable while constantly alive. This is not a sales pitch: just read him and you’ll see. Greenland’s wit is unmatched suggesting a personality almost ubiquitously connected to the world in which we all live.
BLACK CLOCK: You have had success as a playwright, a screenwriter for both television and movies, and now novels. Do you see this as an accidental evolution of your artistic career or simply the means of survival for a modern, professional writer? What’s next?
SETH GREENLAND: My career has been largely unplanned but to say it was “accidental” doesn’t quite get it right, either. I started out as a writer of mediocre fiction in college. Probably not much worse than what others were doing, but my work certainly didn’t show vivid promise. I was an English major as an undergraduate and to me there was no higher form of creative expression than the novel. If I thought I had the talent at the time, I would have pursued a career as a novelist, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Since I was a lover of movies (or “films” as we called them in the seventies) and I thought I might like to make them, I earned an MFA from NYU film school and set out to be François Truffaut. Unfortunately, that job was taken. Through happenstance, I found myself writing for television shows in Los Angeles. I didn’t care for the work I was employed to do and hightailed it back to New York where I began getting hired to write screenplays for what were intended to be independent films. These scripts generally wound up in the drawers of the producers who had paid for them since they were often unable to find financing. This was a source of endless consternation. You pour your heart into something and its readership consists of your agent, two producers, eight assistants (all of whom think they could have done it better), and ten financing companies. Since I had always enjoyed going to the theater, I thought I might try writing plays. This worked out well for a while. I began getting higher paid screenwriting work and that subsidized my theater career, although to call what I was doing in theater a “career” would be a slight exaggeration since that implies a certain base income; hobby was more like it. Getting these plays produced on main stages at regional theaters involved an arduous, multi-year process of development, readings, more development, a workshop and then, if the artistic director was having a good day and the moon was in the seventh house, your play might finally get produced. This routine became tiresome to me, and I concluded that the time had come to try my hand at writing a novel. I recently finished my third one, titled The Angry Buddhist, thanks for asking. When I’ve done money gigs, I’ve always simultaneously worked on something I’ve cared deeply about. This is what has allowed me to survive as a writer. That and a willingness to always try something new.
For Shining City you made your own short trailer starring you as you, your aunt as your aunt, and several girls as prostitutes. Clearly you aren’t shy of marketing. What motivated the clip and will you make another for your new novel?
What motivated me to do the video was simple math. Innumerable books are published each year, by authors famous and unknown, all of them vying for limited media oxygen. Anything an author can do to call attention to his or her book, short of self-immolation in front of the Pentagon, is fair game. Your publisher will generally do as little as possible and hope you won’t notice and bother them about it. Hence, the video, which can become a story in itself. The one for Shining City was featured in an NPR piece about book videos and that brought more attention to the book. I attribute most of the sales of Shining City to the video. So will I do one for The Angry Buddhist? Most likely. Either that or I’ll just toss caution to the wind and self-immolate in front of the Pentagon. The era of sitting back and letting the world discover your brilliance on its own is over, alas.
Bloomsbury isn’t to blame for the lack of marketing effort, is it? Will The Angry Buddhist be published by the same company?
No, it’s not Bloomsbury’s fault. It’s endemic to the business. I will restrain myself from boring you with why this is so. As for who will publish The Angry Buddhist in North America, that is still to be determined since we will not be offering the rights for sale until after the summer.
You’ve mentioned before that you had quick success finding your publisher, and both of your earlier books were also quickly picked-up by movie companies—The Bones by Sony and Shining City by Warner Brothers. Did that stem from more hustle on your part? What’s the status on both screenplays?
My novels being optioned by movie studios had very little to do with my “hustle.” Getting movie people interested in my books is not one of my superpowers. I have good representation and that is their area. As for the status of the screenplays, The Bones is in turnaround (translation: Sony is not going to make it), and Shining City is in active development at Warner Brothers.
Your involvement with screenwriting and novels has given you a curious position. Do you see any sort of influence that one medium has on the other or any other connections between contemporary fiction and film? Do you see any elements of either bleed from one to the other in your own writing?
Movies boil the idea of what a novel is to its essence: a coherent, forward-moving narrative where you want to find out what happens next. Each medium has an impact upon the other. Novels have always influenced filmmaking since they’ve provided story fodder since the beginning of the medium. The balance of action and reflection that is built into movies is borrowed from novels as well. And today you can see the influence of movies on novels, particularly in genre works where the stripped down storytelling is highly filmic and especially in graphic novels, which use film grammar and are like storyboards for movies. You can see the influence of the novel in television, too, particularly on cable series, where each season of a show will often have a novel-like arc. The one quality I notice from my career as a dramatist that bleeds into my novels is my liberal employment of dialogue which I try to use to advance the plot as often as I can.
What advice would you give young writers struggling to write good dialogue?
In writing novels, where I am generally attempting some version of naturalism, what I try to do is approximate real speech without imitating it. Real speech, with its stops, starts, and stutter steps, repetitions, tics, and digressions is easy enough to mimic but lacks urgency on the page. So the trick is to capture something that sounds like real speech but actually isn’t entirely real, by virtue of being more economical and focused. Another thing I try to get right is the rhythm between my characters. It’s the rare writer who can sustain an aria from one character while another just stands there and listens. For a dialogue-driven scene to be interesting it helps to have characters interrupt, ask questions, augment what someone else is saying, argue their point, anything to make the scene feel more alive. Finally, the characters should not sound alike. Try to give each of the characters a unique voice so that—even if the line doesn’t end with “John said” or “Mary said”—the reader will have a pretty good idea of who spoke it. A final note on this subject: There’s a terrific crime novel written by George V. Higgins called The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Writing students will benefit from taking a look at this book because the story is told almost entirely in dialogue and Higgins is a master.
Does a short piece like “Al Agonistes,” from Black Clock 9, which is written entirely in Al Gore’s interior monologue, develop from a single piece of dialogue? To that end, how do you pick what you write about?
During the run-up to the 2008 election I wrote a series of satirical monologues in the voice of John McCain for The Huffington Post. When the chance to do a political piece for Black Clock came up, I wanted to do an interior monologue in another politician’s voice. The “Al Agonistes” piece came from wanting to write in the voice of an individual whom the chattering class no longer deemed relevant, someone who felt ill-used. Gore is fascinating to me because he’s a guy who was elected President but never allowed to serve. Not to be too heavy, but his tragedy is our collective tragedy. I thought he was a great subject and worthy of a much longer piece. The man is a walking novel. I tip my hat to him.
Insofar as your question as to how I choose what I write about pertains to novels. I write about what interests me, what I think I can go on about at some length. If I have a strong opinion on the subject or an aspect of the characters or the world, that helps. And if I have a certain degree of passion about it, that can help, too. In terms of how I choose what to write about among the variegated ideas vying for my attention at any given time, that’s a process of elimination. Most of the time, I have a number of ideas whirling around in my head, some with great potential, some with less potential, still others that I would never mention out loud. They wax and wane individually over time, some gaining more heft, others diminishing. When one of them begins to feel substantial enough that I can begin writing with a good head of steam, that’s when I know I’m ready to get to work on it.
What inspired the Smart Tarts in Shining City? And is it too early to ask about The Angry Buddhist?
The Smart Tarts were inspired by an article I read in the Los Angeles Times sometime around 2005. A middle class couple in the South Bay with two young kids had been busted for running a prostitution ring out of the kitchen of their suburban home. On the surface they had this normal, bourgeois life, but of course there was far more going on than met the eye. Their plight struck me as a resonant metaphor for what was going on economically in the country and an indication of the extent to which people would go in order to survive (and this was before the economic meltdown). And, needless to say, I thought the whole thing was darkly funny.
The Angry Buddhist came about because I wanted to write about the political climate without telling a straightforward political story. The book is set during the week leading up to a Congressional election. A Congressman is running for re-election and something goes spectacularly wrong for him. The novel is about what people will do in order to survive in a world where morals are situational. All three of my books have been about that, actually.
What draws you to this theme?
I’m interested in the idea of situational morals because it’s a remarkably rich, relatable area. And it’s something people deal with in their lives every day. When someone reads a book about an ordinary person who finds themselves in a moral gray area, it’s natural to ask what you—the reader—would do in a similar situation. How would you react, would you make the same decisions, or different ones, and what lines would you be willing to cross? Do I think morals are situational, per se? I probably do, actually. An example: Do I believe in stealing? Or course not. Would I, like Jean Valjean in Les Miserables, steal to feed my family if they were starving? Absolutely. But would I become a pimp, like Marcus Ripps in order to feed them? Probably not. A psychiatrist would have to weigh in on the distinction, but there it is. I’m interested in exploring the idea of right and wrong, the idea of where these notions spring from, and the price paid for the decisions we make. To me, there is nothing more fascinating.
Your novels juxtapose dark humor with very human, very real concerns. One example that comes to mind is in Shining City when your characters find themselves with a dead body and a serious need to dispose of it; as the scenario plays out, the experience is highly-bonding for the two characters. How do you find the balance between, as one review put it, “the preposterous and the plausible,” and, further than that, the satirical and the soulful?
Finding the balance is tricky because the slightest misstep can take a scene from “playing as inspired” to “playing as implausible.” What I try to do is ground my characters in genuine human emotions, and let those emotions play out in the wilder situations. I often place myself in the center of the action and try to imagine what I would do were I to find myself in similar circumstances. In the case of Marcus Ripps, his wife Jan, and the dead body in Shining City, I don’t think anything they do either behaviorally or emotionally is implausible or inconsistent with who they are as characters. Surprising, perhaps, but not inconsistent. Some critics have called my books satires but I consider myself more of a realist than a satirist. Reality, truth be told, has caught up to satire but some people still haven’t noticed.
How so?
The notion that reality has caught up to satire, all you have to do is look around. The television show Jersey Shore, the mainstreaming of pornography, Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, The Birthers, the absurd things believed by conspiracy theorists on both the right and the left…great swaths of the country have accepted greatly exaggerated ideas, ideas that are completely ridiculous in some cases (Obama is a Muslim? Really?), as real and this leaves little room in which the satirist can maneuver. As I mentioned earlier, Shining City was actually inspired by a middle class couple with two kids in suburban Los Angeles who were running a call girl ring out of their kitchen. Yes, there are embellishments in the book, but the basic story is as real as the economic environment that inspired the couple to get into the sex business. So when people write that it’s a satire, I lift an eyebrow.
Do you see anything new, in art in general and in your writing, burgeoning from this?
I think that these things, while on one level horribly depressing, are all terrific fodder for fiction (at least it’s good for something). So, yes, I do see valuable art emerging from it. It’s the artists’ role to comment on this stuff and there is no shortage of craziness on which to comment, to explicate, and–not to be pedantic, but–to draw lessons from.
The mentioned NPR interview, “In a World…Where Books Are Hyped Like Movies” by Jesse Baker, may be found at www.npr.org. Seth Greenland’s trailer, and other videos, may be found on his website, www.sethgreenland.com, along with a list of upcoming events he will be attending.
by Justus Caudell
an MFA Writing candidate at CalArts
One Response
What a fantastic interview, both the questions asked and the responses provided. Can’t believe I haven’t heard of Mr. Greeland before. Looking forward to reading his books.
Kurt Brindley