How You Make Something

A conversation with Scott McClanahan on the release of Fights!

I was deep in the midst of editing three new books for Shabby Doll House when I received a galley of Fights! by Scott McClanahan. I opened it, initially intending to read just a few pages and save it for later, but instead two days passed and I’d finished the whole book. A book that seemed to exist in a parallel world where other people lived the same life I was living: making books with their friends, travelling long distances to do readings in unlikely places, having arguments about ‘what makes something beautiful.’

I messaged Scott to tell him how excited I was to see this strange life rendered in art, and I asked if he’d like to talk with me about editing, collaboration, fighting, and small presses.

Lucy K Shaw:

On the second page, you have this line where you write, “For some reason, that spring, I drove nine hours to do a reading in Atlanta, but when I got there, nobody had showed up.” You say for some reason, but I understand what the reason is, though I also can’t quite articulate it.

Scott McClanahan:

Yeah, it’s weird. It’s like, you always think of Ian Curtis and Joy Division, where there’s a line at the end of one of those songs, like, I got the spirit, and so it just feels like you get the spirit, man, and there’s nothing you can do about it, you just follow the spirit, so you drive nine hours.

LK: Yeah, and I feel like sometimes people probably wonder, how do you become a writer? How do you get published? How do you meet your writer friends? And it’s just like that. You have to do humiliating things. And you have to really want to.

SM: Yeah, exactly. You have to say yes to stupid things that you know aren’t probably going to go well, and then all of the yeses compound into a life that you make for yourself.

There’s an American critic, Malcolm Cowley. I remember reading an essay of his talking about writers and he said there are two ways you can go wrong as a writer, which is one: Isolating yourself too much, like late period Mark Twain, where you’re just writing about the devil again and again and again and again and again. Putting all your religious ideas into your work, totally destroying the thing that was wonderful about it. And then the flip side is if you know way too many other writers, so they’re influencing you to do what’s popular at the time, and you have to have a balance between those things, or keep yourself open.

I also think we have to believe in one another, and I think there’s that tendency sometimes to stop believing in one another and just think, oh, that sucks, you know, to have that sort of mindset, which I think is really a negative thing to have when you’re trying to make your own work.

LK: I always think that whenever one of us has any level of success, whether materially or artistically, that’s really great for everybody else. If you write an amazing book, it’s like, okay, cool, now someone else can, because we have seen it happen, or if somebody has a press that’s really innovative, it makes it possible for someone else to try. Even with Zona Motel, I keep saying, why isn’t anyone else doing this? We don’t have to be the only ones.

SM: There’s an old Orson Welles interview that he did in a hotel in Paris in like 1960 and he’s talking about an Elizabethan audience. The reason why so many amazing things came out at that time is because there’s this incredibly open audience that needs these particular things and is wanting these particular things, these particular plays or sonnets, or whatever is being written at the time, and I think there’s something true in that. We think of the writer as being isolated, but I think that’s a trap, because I think you have to have an audience, and you have to have people who are interviewing, you have to have people who are writing about you, you have to have editors, you have to have an infrastructure in order for something to actually get made and presented.

LK: Right, and for example, you drive nine hours to do a reading in Atlanta that gets filmed and put onto HTMLGIANT, and then Gian sees it, and you start working together, and that changes your life, but it also changes a lot of other people’s trajectories as well, right? Because the press becomes something and people are inspired by what you’re doing, and they start working alongside you.

SM: Yeah, exactly. You have to fucking believe, and I think that was true of that little West Virginia boy, in 2009, 2010ish. He believed.

I wish I could get back there, but maybe that’s also just getting older.

LK: I think something that’s really nice about the book is seeing the way your life changes, and there’s that line where Gian wants you and your book to be cooler, and you say, ‘I told him I didn’t want to be cool. I wanted to be warm.’

SM: We used to have that discussion all the time, that disagreement. And what was also funny about Gian: like people talk about him being cool, which is a word that means nothing to me. And I think it was a word that kind of meant nothing to him too. He was a warm person, and that warmth is kind of what I’m talking about, of just wanting to share something, or lay something on somebody, and you have to have that other person looking back at you, or it becomes kind of masturbatory.

LK: Probably my favorite scene in the book was the whole situation where you go to the bar to have the editorial meeting, and he shows up with the manuscript printed out and loose in a plastic bag. Obviously you’re really shocked by it in the book, but I’m also really shocked about that. [laughter]

SM: That’s kind of a West Virginia thing. I’m still that way with stuff, where it’s like, I need to name that document that’s in my computer, rather than just having it lost somewhere. You know, it’s almost this idea that having a disrespect towards something makes it more important, in some ways. So, yeah, that was hilarious. And I do remember at the time, it was like, oh, he’s got my manuscript in a plastic TJ Maxx bag or something. I was like, what the... it was all loose, so it was like he’d just thrown it in the bag.

It makes me think of the story. I don’t know if you like Gogol Bordello, the Eugene Hutz band. He was at some conference about Romani culture, and his uncle was presenting, and his uncle was talking about the stereotypes of their people, and how awful it is, and how they’ve been persecuted and perceived as these individuals in this culture for so long. And then he goes out to his uncle’s car and his uncle’s car is full of trash, and he’s like, “Uncle, you need to clean your car!” and his uncle’s like, “It’s a Romani car. What are you talking about?” There’s something very West Virginia about that too, where we get stereotyped, and there’s this prejudice against us, but at the same time, there’s this kind of glorious life force, where you can kind of see where the cliché comes from.

But that’s the way we used to edit, and that was unusual that we were face to face, because Gian used to put the manuscript in a manila envelope, take it to the post office with his edits, send it to me, and then I would make those edits in the computer, print it off, make further edits, and then put it in a manila envelope, send it back up to Hell’s Kitchen. So it was this awful way of editing because we weren’t good with technology. We probably could have just had a file, but we had to print off the thing in order to have it in front of us. So the editing process would go on for years, just because we didn’t know anything about technology.

LK: That’s funny. I mean, that was actually my question, how did you edit? Because I thought it clearly can’t have usually been like this:

SM: Sometimes he would, and this is also hilarious, sometimes if we had a confusion, he would have to buy an airline ticket, fly from LaGuardia all the way to Charleston, West Virginia, so that I could drive up to Charleston, West Virginia and we could clear up the confusion about one of the edits that he’d made, so it was this mental sort of way of talking about a manuscript, where typically you’d just talk over the phone, or I guess now you’d do a Zoom.

LK: [laughing] You didn’t talk?!

SM: No, a lot of times we wouldn’t do that. We were emailing all the time, but we wouldn’t talk about books or the writing. Yeah, it’d be like, I sent this to you, you should have it now. And he’s like, okay, cool, I’m coming to Charleston this spring, let’s meet up. And one of the first times I went over, he had an Aunt Evelyn, I think was her name, and she fixed Italian pizza, and it was delicious, and we sat there and ate with his Aunt Evelyn, who was an elderly lady, and talked about Hill William for hours.

LK: I read The Sarah Book recently, and I really felt like, I mean, maybe because I’ve been editing three books for the last year, and whenever I’m reading a book for fun, I’m still always thinking about... what did they do here, how did they put this together, etc. and when I was reading The Sarah Book, I was really struck by the pacing of it, and the way that you use the space and weave all these different storylines together, and that seems like it would be an impossible thing to figure out just by mailing something back and forth. It seems like you would want to be in the room together.

SM: Yeah, I mean, it was totally impossible to figure out, because Gian and I also thought about books differently. He was into that Lishian sentence thing, and I just think all that stuff’s bullshit. I think it’s true bullshit made to get upper middle class children’s money away from those upper middle class children’s parents by taking a workshop or something.

And about what you said, there’s a Mozart quote about the best music being the space in between the notes. I think it’s from one of his letters. And I’ve always thought that’s true about books too. The things that actually make the shape of a book are the spaces not only in between the sentences, but the spaces in between the chapters, the little tiny things that are included. And so, yeah, it was two different styles of working together that always kind of butted heads, and it took forever.

Gian, to be honest with you, I mean, maybe I shouldn’t even say this in an interview: He didn’t even edit that much. And I think that’s what a great editor is. It was more like he would conspire with you to create more freedom inside of yourself, which is weird, that that is an editorial role. But I always say that he was like a hype man. He was like Bez from The Happy Mondays. It was like he was dancing, and then we were like, oh my god, we’re good, right? This song is amazing, because our friend is feeling it enough to dance in front of all these people. And that was kind of Gian to me, you know, where he would conspire with you.

He was an excellent line editor, I’m not saying he wasn’t, but Gian had a very different philosophy that’s hard to understand. He was like a director who would pick the actors. You know, casting the movie is what makes the movie, and he understood that if you got an interesting person, even if they weren’t a writer, they’d make something interesting, and that naiveté of not really making a book before, would make something really amazing. Like, I didn’t know that I couldn’t do that, so I’m just going to do it.

LK: I think being the writer in that relationship is kind of vulnerable. Or I always feel like I need to be sensitive to the person I’m working with, because it’s their life, it’s their story, or at least, it’s coming from them. When you first started working together with Gian, you just trusted him?

SM: Yeah. It’s kind of weird to think back to that particular time, early on. He was just this weird guy from the internet that contacted me, and you know how it is when you’re starting out. I’d kind of put out some books myself, or with that little press in Pittsburgh, Six Gallery. They published a Noah Cicero book around that same time, and Joshua Cohen, who’s won a Pulitzer since then. So I was just looking for somebody who was going to be able to put out another book of mine, but I could tell that the HTMLGIANT crowd liked Gian, and at that point it was like, ooh HTMLGIANT is so cool and I wanted to be a part of that kind of world. So, with Gian, I think it was a geographical thing. We just got one another. We understood the cultural thing, like having a chip on your shoulder, but being real open-hearted and broad-minded about everything.

I don’t know. It’s like talking about your own religion or something, talking about the geographical things that you have.

At one point in our relationship, I had a book reviewed in the New York Times before Gian had ever put out a book of mine, so it was kind of like I was taking a chance on him too, but it was nice to feel like somebody was courting you. Gian courted you like you were a lady in 1823. It just made you feel good, and I think that’s so necessary, where somebody cares and cares to the point of a little bit of obsession.

And so from him contacting me, I think I sent him something from what was called Hillbilly at the time, for the magazine, New York Tyrant. I think it was volume three or four. And he was like, “Let’s work on a book together,” because he said that I reminded him of guys that he went to high school with, and he was the same for me.

LK: One of the things that really struck me about this new book is that obviously it’s called Fights! and there are a lot of fights in it, but all of the fights get resolved. There’s always reconciliation.

SM: I wanted all the fights to be little set pieces, and also I’ve always had this thing when I’m in the midst of an argument where I just feel like there’s something kind of glorious about life. You realize, I’m so alive right now. I’m such an animal right now. I’m so much of an animal that I can’t even control it. So in some ways that’s maybe just shaping a narrative. Probably a lot of those resolutions came the next day or hours later, but for the sake of the book, I was wanting to kind of move into them. But you have to have that vitriol, I think. You have to fucking go at one another, right? In order for things to alleviate. And I think that’s kind of the way Juliet fights. I think that’s the way I fight. Maybe that’s the reason why my relationship with Juliet has been so successful, that our fighting styles are just so similar. I think there’s something healthy about fights. There’s a Machiavelli book called Discourses that’s all about the Roman historian Livy, and it’s all about how for a functional government or functional culture you have to have incredible disagreements. And especially within a personal relationship, I think fights are healthy and give energy to you.

Also it just presents conflict immediately, which is what a reader craves.

LK: It’s described as being about, ‘The two great love stories of your life.’ I don’t know if you thought that as you were writing it, or if that was decided later for the book description.

SM: This is another marriage book, I guess. I’ve had four marriages in my life. Sarah, Gian, Juliet, and my friend Chris. So I felt like it was a marriage type book, and also a book about how fighting happens, because I think Gian and I were real honest with one another for a long period in the relationship with the way that we fought, like even getting in a knock-down-drag-out in a public drinking place. And then I think also there was a point where our friendship was important enough to us that we kind of had some distance. We became more cordial and friendly to one another. And I don’t know if that’s necessarily always a good thing in a relationship.

Juliet and I learned how to fight. We figured out how to have these knock-down-drag-out things. And I think with Gian and I, we kind of never learned that, but maybe it was just because we were so inside of one another. Gian was inside of me in a way that probably most people aren’t. An artistic relationship is such a strange relationship to have because with Gian, we had our friendship, which was the most important thing, and that we maintained throughout our life, minus when we’d have little blow-ups here and there. We had the artistic relationship of me performing for him on the page, like the Scott character from The Sarah Book. That’s Gian! That’s not even really me. That’s me performing a guy that Gian would love. That first line, I was the best drunk driver in the world, that’s Gian’s line. I’m putting Gian’s lines in the Scott character’s mouth. So we had that, and then we also had the business aspect, where it wasn’t like we were dealing with millions of dollars, but we were dealing with enough money that people get upset about things, or start feeling sensitive. And that’s where our real big fight came about. I was going bankrupt, and I tried to drink myself to death, or expand my consciousness to death, and I was just gonna kill myself. I had all this credit card debt, because I was needing money, and then Gian from the opposite view, I don’t think he necessarily had that money to give me concerning the contract that we’d signed, and so yeah, it was just a lot of pressure to put upon two West Virginia gals.

LK: When I sent you those messages about the book when I first read it,

SM: That meant a lot to me that you took the time to do that, Lucy.

LK: I was excited. I mean, it’s exciting when you’ve read a book and you realise, I can talk to this person. It wouldn’t be weird. Because a lot of people will read it and probably feel like they want to say something, but they don’t have a connection to you, and so it might feel like a strange thing.

I mean, it happens to us when we read books by people we don’t know.

SM: Of course, you can’t always set up a noon Zoom. [laughter]

LK: I think when you write something really personal, sometimes it makes people want to reach out and say, hey! I can see you.

SM: Also, I think there are different artistic philosophies. Like, with the pop song, you want to make it broad and general, so that people attach themselves to it. Whereas I think what we’ve both done in our work is try to make it so personal and specific that somebody can then attach themselves to it as well, which is almost a flip from the way that most artistic creations work in the year 2026.

LK: We definitely have this thing in common where we’re just like, [miming weaving a tapestry] well, this is my life...

SM: And it seems like people knock that sort of idea, which always makes me angry, because that’s all literature’s been anyway. Like, show me the great imaginative work. I follow the John Berger definition of imagination, where it’s not invention, it’s defining what is there. It’s the ability to define what is present, which I think is an incredible talent. And I mean, my god. Your life is enough. What are you but your life, right? What are you but your subjective experience of life? What is Don Quixote but the subjective feelings, thoughts, and emotions that this shriveled-armed Spaniard is gonna put into the book. I feel like life is enough.

LK: And if it’s not, change your life!

SM: Usually these arguments feel very literary. A painter’s just painting what they see, but a writer is expected to make it up in their heads? I don’t think that is true about literature at all. You can find in Ancient literature the very things that wouldn’t have felt out of place being posted on a blog in 2010. And even when they talk about great works of the imagination, I don’t know, Anna Karenina? The Levin character’s obviously Tolstoy! He’s putting himself in the book. It’s an autofiction... I hate that term, but you know what I’m saying.

LK: I’m with you.

But yeah, another thing that really struck me as I was reading Fights! was that it kept reminding me of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and I thought, can I say that? Because maybe you’ll be like, oh god, I don’t want to be associated with that. But the intense male friendship, and the mirroring of the quieter, writerly Jack character, and the wild conman cowboy, Neal. Even down to what you just said about as you get older and friendships change. There’s a recording of Kerouac reading on The Steve Allen Show over the piano, and he reads that last passage from the book, and so I always remember it, because he says it in a really specific tone.

‘We’re still great friends, but we have to go into later phases of our lives.’

It’s not a fashionable comparison, by any means, but it is a book that made writing seem possible for a lot of people.

SM: You found me out. I was thinking of the structure of those books. I mean, I was never... I read On the Road, I think, when I was in 10th grade or 11th grade. I found out about all this stuff from a biography of Jim Morrison that was popular in the ‘90s, called No One Gets Out of Here Alive that you could buy at the mall. And it was one of those kind of shitty biographies that had a little bit of scandal attached to it, and I found out about Artaud and Rimbaud and Tennessee Williams from it. I started getting into Bob Dylan around that time. I think I bought this book when I was in ninth grade. And one of the things it mentioned, of course, was On the Road. I remember not really connecting with it as much, but then later on when I was in college, I was able to find all these other things, like Dr Sax is a Kerouac that I absolutely love still, though there’s something about his sentences I can’t stand now.

But it was also part of a tradition that I started realizing, the pure wild products of America going crazy, you know, whether it was the Transcendentalists all the way back to Emerson and Hawthorne and Melville, and these kind of romantic movements that I guess grow up out of the Lake Poets, then it jumps across the ocean to us, and you all got it from Germany, and they keep appearing time and time again, and it popped up in the 1950s with the Beats, and I think it popped up for us in some way on the internet.

So yeah, I was thinking of the structure of that book, for sure, especially the end of that book, the way that friendships change. The sadness of the fact that you changed, and maybe the other person didn’t even change, but you changed for whatever reason.

Another kind of bad reference, and one book that I did flip over was Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. I’m just gonna out myself and admit that that was a book for 15 year old Scott, like that was a 15 year old Scott book that he absolutely adored.

LK: I actually looked at it again a couple of years ago because I had a student who came to Paris and we read a few of the stories together, and I mean, I had read it before, and liked it then, and I think there’s an eyeroll thing here [in Paris] because they sell it in all the bookshops, and they sell it more than any contemporary literature, but it’s popular for a reason. It’s just a book of short essays about hanging out with your friends.

SM: Exactly, which is my ideal literature. That’s what I love. And that’s also like the New Testament too, and then you decide that one of your friends is like the son of God.

LK: Something that’s missing from an On the Road, or any book from that period, from that type of writer, and something that you have, is Juliet as an equal person in your life. You have a person who wants to take care of you, you want to take care of her, and you work together on your lives, and on the writing. And this is a big thing I want to talk about, is that you decide, oh, I want to make her laugh, and you start to use her reaction as a barometer for the work. You write about working on The Sarah Book, ‘I’d let her edit my life.’

And so I think there’s another really significant editorial relationship there that isn’t discussed.

SM: It’s weird because I’ve done quite a few of these, and nobody mentions the Juliet character, and then I start thinking, that was the whole point! It’s not a book about Gian. It’s not a book about Juliet. It’s not a book about me. It’s a book about how you make something, and the elements that you have to have in order to make something, whether it’s the person who’s helping you edit your life, whether it’s the person who’s telling you, don’t poison yourself, or just trying to make you survive, whether it’s the person who’s giving you guidance.

There’s a Spanish novelist, Javier Marias, who wrote a book called Dark Back of Time, which is a novel about the novel he published before, called All Souls, and Dark Back of Time is kind of a masterpiece. It should have won the Nobel, at least from my perspective. Of course, he died before that could happen. But I thought it was funny to write a book about another book, or the writing of these other books, and to include all the things that writers always cut out, like having someone who supports you, having someone who’s editing you at the same time that your editor is editing you. And maybe I started doing that too, where I started performing for Juliet within these books, because my god, how could you get a woman like that?

LK: I thought this was something really heartwarming and surprising to read in a book, because it feels like your life, or at least the story, goes in the direction it’s gone in because you make these efforts to protect yourself, and you have this kind of self-preservation.

SM: Yeah, because there were times in my life when you would have been having this conversation with Gian, maybe about me. There were moments or years even, where... I always feel like, and maybe it sounds stupid to say, but the Greek philosopher Epictetus said that life is a play, and you and I, we must play our role until the end, whether our role is king, slave, peasant, etc. We must play our role to the end. We must play it well. It’s our role, but our role is always chosen by another, and I think that’s true of life, because Gian was a kind of little angel man that came into my life and saved me from the ground and the worms for a period of time. I think that maybe I was a little bit of that in his life. I wish I could have been more of that, for a longer period of time. And even with Juliet, how did that happen? How does someone come in and... we save one another. We do save one another. It’s ridiculous, and someone would say, “Well, that’s codependency.” But what do you think a relationship is? I was blind on Thursday¹, and this woman, who was born in Australia of all places, drove me to the emergency room and told me I wasn’t going to go blind, and held my hand. She probably didn’t want to do that. She had other shit she could do on a Thursday evening, but yeah, those angel people who come in your life and do those things for you for a period of time.

LK: I think it’s really interesting that you have these emotionally significant people in your life, your friend and your wife, and they both have this editorial role. And there’s an element of you performing something and wanting to write for them, but the reason why it works is that you let them both in.

SM: They’re totally different too. Gian hated all my Sos and my Ands and my biblical style. Juliet is like the grammar police, a comma placement type person, which you know, who cares about commas most of the time? But I think you have to have that as a writer. I think a book is a communal object. It’s part of a community, and it’s part of a family, and you have to have somebody telling you, don’t do that. You have to keep open to those things.

I want to leave behind, for whatever indie lit is, whatever remains of it, to leave behind something for these younger people coming into it: you don’t need this other junk that we thought we needed. I thought I needed to have a book reviewed in a big publication. I felt like I needed to eventually get on a big press or something. These fake sort of ideas that I had when I was twenty-five, that I realize are so wrong now, and they’ve been wrong for a long time, and that’s never really been the history of writing.

LK: So you’re doing this one on Rose Books with Chelsea Hodson.

SM: I wanted to work with Chelsea. She and I did a reading in Baltimore in 2022 and as soon as she had Rose Books, it was like, ooh, I can fit there, right? Because I believe you want to put out things with your friends. You know that thing where it’s like, “They just publish their friends!” Who wouldn’t want their friends to put out their stuff?

LK: Right? I always say, if you were friends with my friends...

SM: Exactly. There’s a Jean-Luc Godard quote where he’s like, I cannot make a film without a producer who is my best friend, and yeah, I get that. And so it got sent around, but I was always trying to position it so that I could go to Chelsea, and it worked out because, I don’t want to sound metaphysical or anything, but I think books are like vortexes of energy, and I think books either work or they don’t work because of the energy that’s inside of them. It’s not sentences or symbols or subject matter or any of these other things. And I wasn’t able to put my grief, I mean, I was seeing two psychiatrists at the time to try to figure out what I was doing with his death, and I didn’t get it worked out, but then I realized, I can go meet him in a book. If I put enough energy into this, he’s going to appear to me eventually, and we’re going to be able to talk again, even if it’s just something that’s in my head. But I also knew that that’s kind of dangerous, right? And that you want to be careful with ghosts. And so I knew that I wanted to honor that ghost and that missing thing from my life, with someone who was connected deeply to the story.

The only real names in the book are Chelsea, Scott, and Gian. Everybody else has a different name in it.

So I knew that I was going to have to have somebody, because it wasn’t enough just to write the book. I could have written the book and just put it away, because I’ve become really disillusioned and publishing is such a masochistic sort of activity. But I knew I wanted to publish it, because I know that boy, and that boy would have told me, a book’s not a book until it’s published, and that was his philosophy.

I could work on stuff for twenty years and not ever put it out, but you do have to share it with people, and I knew that I would be in safe hands with Chelsea, and I know that he loved her deeply and respected her deeply, and so it’s just been nice to see somebody who’s thinking about the world in a very different way. It’s nice to see somebody that’s running their own shop in the same way that Gian was kind of running his own shop. And then, I don’t know, Dorothy, and Two Dollar Radio, for a period of time. Those small presses that were unaffiliated. I just want to remain as unaffiliated as I possibly can.

LK: Did the book change after you started working together?

SM: This is maybe the first book where it feels like what I have in my brain. The emotional effects are sometimes created just by turning the page. And one of the greatest things she did was move all the text to the top of the page. Once she did that, the book felt like it clicked finally for me, and it was just like, okay, I get it. And she did things like Gian, she cut out a lot of my pictures, which was the right decision. She tweaked a lot of my endings because I have those cacophonies, which is a little bit of a crutch, I think probably, but I love chapters that have a big cacophony at the end. A big climax.

She just made the book better. She made it cleaner. I’d already worked on it long enough. And one of the things that she did is just give me confidence. There were some things that I would highlight in red in the manuscript that she read where I’d say, I don’t know if I want to include that, and Chelsea would basically be like, stop. You have to include that. Things Gian said to me at the end, like that little joke he makes. Chelsea was like, “Is that what you heard?” And I was like, “That’s what I heard,” and I think that is Gian. I think there was, you know, a spirit. I sound insane talking about this, but I think that is what he told me, and I need to stand by that, because he also said things to me that I know, that.. yeah, that I just know.

We all meet in a book, don’t we?

1. The previous week Scott had removed his contacts and somehow created an ulceration/deep abrasion of the cornea in his right eye, but don’t worry, he’s fine now.

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P.S. We’re having a shabby doll reading/party tomorrow in Belleville. RSVP if you want to come <3