Fiction author Justin Taylor finds inspiration in real-world experiences

Justin Taylor is one of those young writers who's managed with his dry and somehow simultaneously earnest voice to be considered "hip." But with his back-breaking, palpable settings and characters, we'd be more likely to glimpse in our own bathroom mirrors than in popular fiction, he's also managed to be considered "good."

Taylor's debut novel "The Gospel of Anarchy" was released earlier this year to great critical acclaim and it experienced the prestige of the New York Times Editor's Choice list. The novel came on the heels of Taylor's notable collection of short stories, "Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever." With his penchant for wayward characters bouncing off the sometimes unforgiving walls of their settings, Taylor has become a favorite in recent years for lovers of rich fiction wrought with imperfect human beings.

The Daily Nebraskan caught up with Taylor to discuss his writing habits and retrospective feelings for his own stories.

Daily Nebraskan: I've always sort of thought of your characters as being profoundly impacted by your settings, but I'm curious how you conceptualize the relationship. Is it symbiotic? Are they symbiotic at conception or is their intertwining a gradual process?

Justin Taylor: I agree with you completely. When I was putting my story collection together, I thought of it very much as a book about place. "The Gospel of Anarchy" is as much "about" Gainesville, Fla., as it is "about" anything else. I'm fascinated by the ways people interact with and/or think about the places they live or used to live, or are visiting. The house in "Gospel" is a house I really lived in and several of the houses in "Everything Here" are the homes of childhood friends of mine. Whether it's a floor plan or a neighborhood or a whole city, I like to set invented people loose in places I know well. It keeps the work charged with the personal, but without forcing me into straight confessional writing.

DN: In both "Everything" and "Gospel" the weight of the Florida settings came through rather palpably, presumably because you're so familiar with it. In the course of getting to know a place, like Brooklyn or Hong Kong, do you stow away specific setting details for future use or is it more of an immersion process and you dig for the details when you sit down to write?

JT: Certain places, Florida, for example, I know pretty much by heart, though I did supplemental research on Gainesville when I was writing "Gospel," including a trip back down there to visit and photograph the Devil's Millhopper. Other places where I've spent less time I know less about, but writing those places can be a way of getting to know them. Sometimes it's a mix. There's also something to be said for distance (in space, time and emotion) because it gives you critical perspective. You get far enough away from the thing to see it whole. I wrote big chunks of "Gospel" while in Hong Kong, but couldn't figure out how to write about Hong Kong itself. After four years of visiting and maybe 10,000 junk words of attempted fictions, I've managed to produce a few nonfiction pieces and exactly one short story which is partially set there. But now that the cousins I was going to Hong Kong to visit have moved to Singapore, I'm probably not going back there anytime soon, so can hopefully begin to think of my experience there as something finite and complete.

DN: This may a cheap way to ask a question, but I wanted to run a quote by you from the late Gerry Shapiro (a fiction writer and professor at UNL).

"I think we find our humanity most profoundly in our moments of failure ... I hope my characters are interesting failures, because I think that's the best that most of us can hope for."

I've read some of your characters described as everything from "aimless" to "unfulfilled" to "desperate." Can you relate to Shapiro's idea at all in your crafting of characters?

JT: I can definitely relate to the idea as an idea – I agree with the first part of the quote entirely. The second part, too, I suppose, but with less enthusiasm. In his song "We Are Real" David Berman asks, "Is the problem that we can't see or is it that the problem is beautiful to me?" That's maybe the way I'd prefer to put it: I can't resist the beauty of a great problem.

DN: In my feeling, at least, David would have fit right in with some of the characters in "Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever." Did "Gospel of Anarchy" start in a similar place as some of those short stories?

JT: Yes and no. "Gospel" has its roots in the two "anarchist stories" ("Estrellas y Rascacielos" and "Go Down Swinging") in the collection, but after I wrote them I felt that I hadn't gone deep enough into that world. The two stories are very barebones and they are essentially satirical: a kind of insider's critique of a certain type of lifestyle radicalism. The novel tries to put flesh on the bones of that world, give it a functioning nervous system and a beating heart and to imagine it in the terms that imagines itself. It is emphatically not a satire, though the insider-critique returns in a modified form in the character of Thomas. Relentless self-critique really is a part of anarchist culture. Just as the most pious Christians put the greatest emphasis on sin, the hardest-core anarchists will always be the ones most cognizant of how they could be better anarchists.

DN: I typically pose this question to any first-time novelists I speak with: What's one part of the novel-writing process that you couldn't have or didn't predict when you started out?