-
Larry Brown
- University of Georgia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
89 Larry Brown Larry Brown was the author of six novels and two collections of short stories . Born and raised in Oxford, Mississippi, he served in the U.S. Marines in the early 1970s. Upon his return, he worked as a firefighter and taught himself how to write fiction. In 1987, his soon-to-be editor, Shannon Ravenel, was reading Mississippi Quarterly, looking for stories to include in New Stories from the South, and came upon Brown’s second published story, “Facing the Music.” She included it in the anthology and in 1988 Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill published his first collection of short stories . Brown’s honors include the Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award. Gary Hawkins’s documentary , The Rough South of Larry Brown, premiered at the Double Take Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina, in 2000. Brown lived in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife and children until his death in 2004. Facing the Music, 1988 (stories); Dirty Work, 1989; Big Bad Love, 1990 (stories); Joe, 1991; Father and Son, 1996; Fay, 2000, The Rabbit Factory, 2003; A Miracle of Catfish, 2007 Where does a book begin for you? The way I get a story that’s a keeper is when something comes in my head and won’t leave. If it leaves, then I don’t worry about it. But when I think up a character and I keep thinking about their situation, finally I get motivated enough to put down a few words and see where it goes. That’s how I begin. I don’t really have any kind of a theme and usually not much of a story. It’s always a character and a situation. And there’s always some trouble going on early. Let’s take for example Father and Son, where the first page Glen is going home from three or four years in prison. You find out that his mother has died and he has an illegitimate child. And he hasn’t seen the baby’s mother in four years and he’s going to see her for the 90 the INtervIewS first time. So he’s coming home to a bunch of trouble. And I just proceed from there. I don’t know who any of the other major characters are going to be. People just pop up, and some of them turn out to be minor characters and some of them turn out to be major characters. That’s why I never use an outline. I usually don’t even have any notes. I usually just begin, and then the whole writing of the story of the novel is a process of discovery for me, day by day. Where it might take a reader only a few nights to read a book, it might have taken the writer years to write it. If a book is any good, it almost always took the writer years to write it. You make all these mistakes, and have to go back and fix them. It’s just a big mess until you get about nine-tenths of the way through it. Then you look back and maybe figure out what the story is about. And you know what to go back and emphasize or cut out or strengthen. That’s the way I go about crafting a novel. How do you create plot? I’m the kind of person who believes that character is more important than plot. I believe that if you create interesting enough characters, characters who are real enough, then whatever happens to them is the plot. When you think about it, life doesn’t have a plot. Brother Roy, the fallen preacher in Father and Son, is really the only character in the book that Glen can relate to. How did he make his way into the novel? The lake they were fishing in is an actual impoundment out here at Tula where I was raised. Two of my high school friends, a brother and a sister, each has a big home on either side of it. They have big decks overlooking this twenty-seven-acre lake that’s just full of bass—they will just hit anything you throw in. These people won’t let anybody fish in it, but the guy that built it was a friend of my father’s when they were little boys. So, I had the setting, but I really didn’t...