Interview with Shone Kirkpatrick. Conducted By Douglas Austin Where were you born and raised? I was born in Florida, but my father was in the Navy, so we moved quite a bit, when I was a kid: to Virginia, California, Texas, back to Florida. Do you associate yourself with any sort of heritage or culture? I would say southern. My kids were all born and raised here in Southern California. My wife and I are from Virgina, and [our family] would go back, every year, for a couple weeks, or whatever. And I would always try to tell them, You re Southerners, you re not Southern Californians, you re Southerners. And I don t know if they ve embraced that or not. But my one daughter s going to Auburn University, which is in Alabama. Astrological sign? (laughs) I m a Cancer. Do you think that s appropriate for you? I do, I m very home centered. So how did you start writing? I started writing, actually, when I was in Grammar school. I think the first sentence I ever wrote was about these British soldiers marching, and the sun glinting off their bayonets, or something. But yeah, I started in Grammar school. When I was in college I was an English major of course I wrote a novel, and short stories and all that sort of thing, so I started to really discipline myself as a writer in college. But I always wanted to [write and direct] movies. I did have an agent [for my novel] but the book didn t sell. So, shortly after I got out of school, I met my wife, and we moved out here to California to pursue the movie business. I worked for twenty years or so in the business, and I won an Emmy award, and I got to write and direct my own film. It was an independent, low budget film, starring Rutger Hauer and Virginia Madsen. That was really fun. I never had anything actually released, in theaters. I had five or six movies that I worked on that went straight to video. Did you say you won an Emmy Award? What for? I won for Best Writing in a Children s Special. It was for a documentary on the holocaust called Nothing But Sun: Children Remember the Holocaust. And it wasn t so much writing as it was editing, because I went to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, to the library there and I read every [piece of writing] I could find written by a Jewish kid, under the age of 18. I pulled out excerpts from their experiences, from journals, diaries, or whatever I could find, and sort of fashioned this story about what happened to these kids during the holocaust. It was good work. I actually deserved that Emmy (laughs) Interesting. Obviously, you are a professor here. What degrees do you hold? Five or six or seven years ago, I went back and got my Masters in Creative Writing. It was so much fun, because, well, screen writing is interesting, but it s a certain kind of storytelling, and when I went back to grad school I realized how much I missed reading good literature. It was fun going back and getting into stories I d read as an undergrad, and writing short stories again, and novels. I wrote one novel as my graduate thesis, and then I wrote another one. I have an agent, and they re trying to sell them. Is it difficult, getting published?
The whole problem of getting published is one thing; particularly, trying to do semi serious fiction is very difficult [as far as] making money, and so on. But whatever, we ll see. It s something I really like doing. It s a different discipline [than screen writing], a different craft, but I really enjoy it. Have you written any poetry? Not really. Actually, the way that I started writing seriously, was writing songs, which is sort of like poetry. I got myself a Bob Dylan song book and learned how to play guitar, and, I started writing songs and that s really how I started writing seriously. And then, when I got into college, I started writing fiction. Alright, well on to your story: The Day My Old Man Got Stuck on the Roof: my first question is, is that you, or your father on the roof? That is not me (laughs). When I was in college, that happened to my dad. I was not there but I heard that he had freaked out. He had been up on the roof doing something, and he had a panic attack, and they had to call the fire department and everything, to get him down. So, I always thought that was kind of odd, because he was a fighter pilot, and for him just to freak out like that, I always thought, was kind of strange. How long ago did you write the story? I first wrote the story a couple years ago in one of my creative writing classes at CSUN, and it wasn t quite the same story. The voice was slightly different, and the things that happened were different, but I always thought the idea of juxtaposing the concept of this kid losing his virginity, which would be one of the most fun [parts] of [his] teenage life, with the concept of coming home and finding his father on the roof [would be interesting as to] how those two events would fit together. Would you classify it as a coming of age story? It is a coming of age story. To me, the kid s take on things is very funny, and I like the idea of him prancing around that roof, around his old man who can t move, who is terrified, and the disillusionment, the sadness when you realize that your father s mortal. He really did like his father, and that goes in hand with coming of age. I mean, you can think of coming of age as a sexual experience, or you can think of it as coming to terms with understanding that your parents are not who you thought they were. He does [idealize his dad]. Before that day, he certainly thought his dad was a pretty great guy. He was kind of proud of him. It s funny. You are the sum of who your parents were. And I think he s a good kid, he s not some bad person. And you could argue that We should see more of the dad in [the story], instead of just seeing him at the end, in his reduced state. But if you think of the kid as a product of his mother and father, and [his] upbringing, he s a pretty normal, nice kid, I thought. Are you going to enlighten us as to why the old man was on the roof? I purposely kept it kind of vague because the reason why doesn t really matter. I always thought of it as kind of a panic attack. I mean, my old man was this Navy Pilot but he always was, as a man, very gentle. He wasn t like a badass. I made this guy out to be [more of] a badass than my dad, just because I wanted it to be more dramatic. So the fact that he had a panic attack on top of the roof didn t surprise me, as much as it surprised this kid. I mean, I m scared of heights (laughing), so I would have said something like, You shouldn t have gone up there in the first place. What do you think is going to happen?
The language was, obviously, somewhat profane. Was that a conscious decision, and would you expect it to be offensive to some people? It seemed to me that the language that the kid used was authentic. It didn t seem gratuitous. I don t think it s and untrue portrait, but I do see how some people might be offended by it. How old is the kid, in the story? Is he in High School or College? He s a High School kid. How do you create memorable characters such as this one? Even as a screen writer, I ve always been noted for creating really interesting characters. I think that as a writer, you have to hear a person s voice, and once you hear their voice and how they talk, the language that they use, then you can start to add little details, that make the character memorable. It s all about the details, and the voice. As a screenwriter, I got used to writing in voices. You know, a forty year old woman talks one way, a sixteen year old boy talks another way. I got very comfortable writing in those different voices. I think part of it is just listening to people, I was always a pretty good listener. You listen to how they talk, and their speech patterns. You know, my youngest daughter is seventeen and she and her buddies come over and it s just so fascinating to hear these girls talk. The words that they use and their speech patterns are not terribly dissimilar from the kid in this story. Except they re girls obviously. You listen to them, or you listen to old people, and you just start training your ear to how people talk. And then you just have to practice it. Do you write from personal experience? How much do you draw from your own life? You use bits from your life, or people from your life, and then you do whatever you want with them. Only in pieces though. In other words, I would never write about my life, because it s not that interesting. But, I mean, did I lose my virginity at some point? Yes. Did that happen to my dad? Yes. I wasn t there, but I used that event because it was kind of an interesting thing that happened, and I put the two things together. Both of those things happened in my life, but not in the way that they re told in the story. So you use things from your life, from your friend s life, your girlfriend s life, or whoever s life you want. That s one thing about having a writer for a friend, is you re probably going to show up in a story, sooner or later. But it s never me. Or even myself at sixteen. I was not like that at sixteen. But it s elements. Experiences. You can use people as physical models. When you have a character in mind, you can base their physicality on somebody that you know. So you use whatever parts of your life or anybody else s life, and whatever you need to tell the story. How do you write? Do you sit down and it just comes out? Do you make an outline? I don t normally have an idea of exactly what it is I m trying to do, I just have a vague idea of something that I want to write about. I start writing about it, and then as I m writing it, things start to take shape. Usually I think about stuff a lot. I ll have a vague notion of where I want to go, where I want to wind up, but rarely do I know how I m going to get there, and sometimes it will change, depending on where I go. Like, for instance, for this one story I wrote, I had this image of this kid, who d been horribly burned by this fire (somebody I knew in high school), standing in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, in Memphis, watching this parade of these ducks. [The story is] called The March of the Peabody Ducks. And he s holding this bat in his hand, like he s going to club these ducks. I had that image, and then I built a story based on that defining image. He doesn t kill the ducks, by the way. That s his moment of epiphany. How long did this story take for you to write?
I wrote four separate version of [The Day My Old Man Got Stuck On the Roof]. And the basics were always the same, kid losing his virginity and finding his Dad [on the roof], but the voice was constantly changing, who he lost his virginity to was changing, how his dad reacted. I had it sitting on my computer for two years before I went back to it, and wrote this [version.] How important is rewriting? Writing is rewriting. That s really what separates writers from amateurs, is the ability to face this thing that you ve been struggling with and struggling with. Writing itself is a very disciplined thing. You need to be disciplined to be a writer. That s something you have to learn to do, or you won t write. Because when you re in the middle of something, and it s going well, [writing is] really fun. You know, because you re creating this world, and you can see it and hear it and taste it and all of that sort of thing. That s fun. But when you re stuck, or you know [that] what you re writing is not quite working, that s painful, and you just have to slog through it. And that s how I learned to be a writer, is that you don t quit, you just keep going forward. You can always go back, but I ve learned to just keep going forward. And I think I m a very fast writer, because I do a lot of the thinking in my head, and I also write in longhand at night, and then, in the morning, I ll type up what I wrote the night before. So it s almost like a second draft already, because I m editing what I wrote the night before. In writing a novel, do you just go through it and edit afterwards, or do you edit as you go? I go through it. I write until I come to the end. And then I ll go back and go through it again. There are some times when I might go back and fix this or that chapter, but normally, I don t stop, I keep on going. It s so easy to get worried about this sentence, or this paragraph, or this chapter, and it s just a way of not finishing the project. I don t think my students, in my creative writing class, rewrote as much as I wanted them to, because it s not as much fun, but that s where the real work comes in. Is criticism important for writers to seek out? Absolutely. I have a few people whose opinion I trust, and respect. Because if you don t respect someone s opinion, it doesn t matter. But there are people whose literary values are similar to mine, or better than mine, or different from mine, but I understand what they are. And I totally respect their opinions, and look to them for feedback. It s critical. Can writing be difficult for you? No, it s not difficult. I struggle with the same things everybody else struggles with. But, being a screenwriter, I did map everything out, I knew exactly where the story was going, because I d pitch it to people, before I sat down and actually committed myself to [writing it]. I always knew what the story was, and it would rarely change when I sat down to write the actual screenplay. I acquired the ability to always write, and move forward. It translates well into writing fiction, I think, because you know that you can finish [one] draft, take a couple weeks off, and go through it again. And in those weeks, give it to someone else, get their opinion, think about it yourself. I hate reading my own work, but I have to just keep going, and keep moving forward. And you can t be afraid to abandon things that aren t working. Writing is hard. How often do you read? I read all the time. I think that s the second best thing you can do. Read things you like, read things you don t like, read different kinds of fiction. You get to be a better writer by reading, certainly. By reading good fiction, by osmosis, you will get to be a better writer. Can reading be a problem, for you as a writer, in terms of staying original, or anything else?
No. When I was writing screenplays, I didn t read fiction, because I didn t want to subconsciously steal things from people. But as a fiction writer, I don t really see that problem. The only bad thing about it is that it might be intimidating, because you re reading all these great [writers] like Flannery O Connor, Adrienne Rich, or whoever, and you say, God, I could never write like that. That true. That could be a problem with reading so much. But the more you write, the more you kind of find your own voice. That s what I was telling my students in my creative writing class, is that it will take you years to find your voice as a writer, and your voice will change over time. And by that, I mean, the type of writer you are, what you re interested in writing about [will change]. We all develop a sort of a voice. If you keep at it, if you keep writing, you will eventually find your own voice, and that s always fun. But it takes years. So do you have a favorite book? My all time favorite book would probably be either The Catcher in the Rye or The Great Gatsby. As a screenwriter, you must have a favorite movie. I have a lot of favorites. Sunset Boulevard is a terrific film. The movie that made me want to become a screenwriter, or a film maker was Who s Afraid of Virginia Wolff? Which is a play. Great play, great film. I thought No Country For Old Men was quite good. Would you encourage writers to submit to the Moorpark Review? Absolutely. I think it s a terrific venue, and why not? The idea of some people being afraid to have their work judged, I mean, if you can t stand people liking or not liking your work, then you shouldn t be a writer. If you want to write stuff and put it in your desk, then have at it, you know. I guess you re still a writer, but to me, part of writing is putting it out there. Anything else you want to say, bits of advice for your fellow writers? For writers, you have to keep at it. You can t not rewrite. If you want to be a writer, it s totally up to you. I mean, obviously, you have to have some talent, but you just have to learn the discipline of the craft, and then you have to learn the craft. I mean, you can learn how to write a really descriptive paragraph about a sunset, you can learn how to write different voices. That s all very learnable stuff. Inspiration, and creativity, that s a little different, but hopefully you ve got it. The main thing, is learning the discipline of writing. You have to write, and you have to keep writing. I m a fairly regimented person, and you have to be, if you re a writer, because there s nobody else waiting for you to do it, so you just have to teach yourself how to do it, and to keep at it, and all of that sort of thing.