Rob Dinsmoor

RS:

You've said that a few of the stories in your new collection Toxic Cookout were based on events that happened to you. Are you more comfortable writing from real life or creating fiction? Is it a very different process?

 

RD:

Until about five years ago, I felt more comfortable writing stories based on real events that happened to me.  Before Toxic Cookout, I wrote two memoirs, Tales of the Troupe, about writing for a popular and edgy New York comedy troupe in the 1980s, and You Can Leave Anytime, about my longer-than-expected stay at a drug and alcohol rehab facility in Florida—and how I got there.  The beauty of this type of writing is that the story's already there and I just have to get it down on paper.  People told me they liked the books for their humor and emotional honesty.  With Tales, part of the fun for me was writing in the voice of me in my 20s—shy, naive, arrogant, repressed, angry, and often drunk.  Likewise, in the rehab book, I enjoyed recreating the twisted mental processes of someone with an addiction, in terms of rationalizing my own crazy and self-destructive behavior.  I found that people actually liked the narrator because he wasn't afraid to show his flaws.  The downside is often having to disguise characters based who are based on other people.

 

When I was in my teens and publishing short stories in the school newspaper, I enjoyed writing satire, horror, and science fiction.  (I was in high school and needed the escape!). I dabbled in fiction in college but among my creative writing professors, story-telling was less interesting than novel literary approaches, so I turned to screenwriting and playwriting.  I returned to outright fiction only in the last five years or so.   A lot of the skills I honed in my memoirs in terms of establishing character, setting up a scene, and building suspense served me well in my fiction.  

 

RS:
I’m a novelist who has trouble NOT writing in the first person, but you excel at both first person and third person. Tell me a little bit about how you make the decision about which way to go with a story. Have you ever written something one way, then went back and changed it? 

 

RD:

First of all, thank you!  I’m rarely aware of why I choose one or the other, but I tend to gravitate toward first-person narrative, especially when I want to explore the point of view of a narrator who is different from me, such as the snarky teenage girls in “Selfies” and “Surf’s Up” and the world-weary gun-toting truck driver in “Truck Stop.”  Like acting, it gives me a chance to step outside myself and experience being someone else.  

 

On the other hand, sometimes I use first person when I’m plunging someone like me into a weird situation.  I based “The GENEration Pyramid” on an actual pyramid scheme I fell for involving dietary supplements.  I started with a straight reality-based account, but didn’t really like it--and then took it into the realm science fiction.  (Some of the aggressive marketers  approached my friend Helen, who told them selling vitamins was not in her “DNA.”   Soon afterwards, I had a nightmare that the vitamins were hatching in my stomach, altering my DNA, and turning me into a monster—and there was my story!)  In “Kundalini Yoga at the Arkham YMCA,” I identified with the yoga teacher but I wanted to have fun with the fact that he has no idea he’s in the Neo-Gothic world of H.P. Lovecraft.   (The creepy old Arkham YMCA is actually based on a nearby YMCA where I’ve taught.)

 

RS:

Do you have any ideas you’re sitting on that for some reason you can’t get right, no matter how many times you write it? What’s the longest amount of time you’ve spent tweaking a story?

 

RD:

I’m still tweaking some of my stories that I can’t seem to get right, and I’ve been working on some of them for over 6 months.  There are several stories I’ll never probably never finish because there’s something fundamentally flawed about them. I’m still working on an overly ambitious novel that I started back in 2015, and I’m just now smoothing out a chapter I’ve been obsessing over for a couple of years.  But the fact I’m still working on this thing after 5 years tells me it’s more than a passing fancy.

 

RS:

Favorite tip for writing short stories?  

 

RD:

I’ll give you several that are interrelated.  First, keep rewriting and don’t get too attached to your first draft.  (Or as Faulkner and others have said, “Kill your darlings.”)  I took a wonderful screenwriting class from Professor Maury Rapf at Dartmouth in which he really delved into the mechanics of storytelling.  As we had a sit-down about my short screenplay, which he really liked, he puffed away on his pipe and suggested all kinds of changes to add conflict and suspense.  My first reaction was “don't mess with my creation!” (not out loud, of course!), but looking back, those changes really drove the story forward.  So, rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.  The second suggestion is to show your story to people you trust.  It really helps to have others tell you their reactions--what works, what doesn’t. what’s confusing, and how they feel about the story and the characters--and that is why I’ve been in a writers group for nearly 20 years.  Having said that, feel free to ignore their comments!  You’ll find that everyone has a different opinion and, rather than changing the story back and forth to please everyone, you have to decide which criticisms make sense to you.  Never forget it’s your story!