Writing Process Blog Tour: James Tate Hill

jt-picture copyJames Tate Hill’s fiction has appeared in Story Quarterly, Sonora Review, The South Carolina Review, and other outlets. He has been a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and the Hudson Prize, and in 2012 he was a semifinalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. His book reviews and interviews can be found at Bookslut, and he serves as Reviews Editor for Monkeybicycle. A native of Charleston, West Virginia, he teaches writing at North Carolina A & T State University.

First, let me thank the wonderful Kathy Fish, not only for inviting me to participate in the Writing Process Blog Tour, but for allowing me, blogless and Tumblrless as I am, to post this on her blog. Her own responses from July 17 can and should be read further down the blog.

What are you working on?

I’m turning the last corner of line edits on a novel about child stars with mysterious talents. It charts the stardom and complicated romance between two orphans who grow up in an abandoned movie theater. As teenagers, their talents have faded, and the former stars struggle to pull themselves from downward spirals. Seeing similarities in their stories, they wonder if more than fate and their own bad choices are behind their demise.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?

The novel has speculative elements in the tradition of books like Geek Love and Never Let Me Go, but I don’t—I can’t—write prose like Katherine Dunn or Kazuo Ishiguro. In fact, the novel’s coming-of-age structure might place it as firmly in the category of Young Adult as so-called Literary Fiction. I’m certain the work of writers like Kevin Wilson, Stephen King, and Shirley Jackson, ostensibly writers for an adult audience, helped to shape this novel, and I hope my work has a fraction of the psychological complexity of theirs. But as I forge my own complicated romance with more and more Young Adult fiction, I’m finding complexity is more a function of writer and story than genre.

Why do you write what you do?

All my writing projects, or the ones that work, can be traced to an obsession. Since early childhood, I’ve been obsessed with fame, show business, celebrity of just about any stripe. Why I’ve been so interested in this topic is a question for another day—I have my theories—but as far back as my early twenties, I noticed the stories I enjoyed writing most invariably involved a character, not necessarily the main character, in the public eye. Inevitably any story about fame takes place in the gap, small or large, between perception and reality, a space every writer probably explores on some level.

How does your writing process work?

In the fabled showdown of tortoise v. hare, I’m definitely the tortoise, although I’ve yet to win any races. I began the first, altogether different version of this project eight years ago, a few days after the death of the novel that came before it. I had been fortunate enough to find an agent for a love story set in the wacky world of professional wrestling, a novel whose myriad shortcomings are better left unmentioned. But the rejection of that more traditional narrative led me pretty far in the other direction—a little too far, as it turned out. Fast-forward a few years. I had just completed a mystery and had written twenty-five pages of a new novel that weren’t bad, but sitting down to work on it felt like creating a human being, cell by cell. When I heard a faint heartbeat, it wasn’t coming from the new project; it was coming from the figurative drawer in which I had buried the child stars project years earlier. An idea took shape pretty quickly, a story that ran from page one all the way to the end, which is to say a genuine plot. Only the heartbeat, i.e. the central conceit, of the earlier drafts lives on, but after eight years the book seems to be what it wanted to be all along.

The following writers have generously agreed to continue the tour next Thursday:

Valerie Nieman is the author of three novels, the most recent being Blood Clay, winner of the Eric Hoffer Award in General Fiction and a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Prize. Her 1988 novel Neena Gathering was returned to print last year by Permuted Press as a classic in the post-apocalyptic genre. Currently a North Carolina Arts Council Fellow, she has received an NEA creative writing fellowship as well as grants in West Virginia and Kentucky. Her debut poetry collection, Wake Wake Wake, will be joined by a new book, Hotel Worthy, forthcoming in 2015. Her poetry has been honored with the Greg Grummer Prize and the Nazim Hikmet Prize. A graduate of West Virginia University and Queens University of Charlotte, she was a newspaper reporter and editor for many years. She now teaches creative writing at North Carolina A&T State University and is the poetry editor of Prime Number magazine.
Find out more at www.valnieman.com

Ariell Cacciola is a writer based in New York City. Her writing has appeared in various magazines, journals, and anthologies. She also translates from German to English and is finishing her first novel. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from Florida State University and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, where she received a merit fellowship and a literary translation fellowship in 2011-2012 to Leipzig, Germany.
Find out more at www.ariellcacciola.com

Robert Long Foreman is from Wheeling, West Virginia. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared most recently in Hobart, Fourth Genre, the 2014 Pushcart Anthology, and Another Chicago Magazine. He teaches creative writing and literature at Rhode Island College.
Find out more at www.robertlongforeman.tumblr.com

6 thoughts on “Writing Process Blog Tour: James Tate Hill”

  1. That novel sounds fascinating, JT! Can’t wait to see it out into the world. Thanks for guest posting and sharing your process on my blog today.(p.s. I, too, am a tortoise.)

  2. Really enjoyed reading this and glad to get to know JTH whom I have to confess, I do not know. Thanks Kathy for all you do to enhance and promote writers and our online writing community.

    1. Thanks for the kind words, Gay! I love knowing that I’ve “introduced” you to writer you weren’t familiar with before. Thanks for reading. : )

      1. Thanks for reading, Gay. And Kathy, it’s been a pleasure crashing on your sofa, as it were. To all the writing tortoises: may we write slow and prosper.

  3. Same here — I did not know this author until now. Great blog tour, and I like how he so honestly writes about his obsession and his tortoise status.

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