My dad read, I think, the Perry Mason mysteries and Zane Grey and some humor compendiums... And then at one point, the bookmobile started coming to town. That was really cool. I mean, that was when I read my first Raymond Carver story. I think that was probably 1969 or so. I must have been 13.
Rather than writing about international events, I write about individual lives. There is elation and sadness, death and birth, love and jealousy, co-operation and betrayal. All the great emotional transactions that happen wherever people come together.
I go back to a very specific aspect of the Midwest - small towns surrounded by farmland. They make a good stage for what I like to write about, i.e., roads and houses, bridges and rivers and weather and woods, and people to whom strange or interesting things happen, causing problems they must overcome.
I tend to write about towns because that's what I remember best. You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel.
I don't think of my characters as bumbling. I think that trouble is what drives a novel, both big troubles and small troubles, and whatever people try to do in life, there are a series of stumbling-blocks in the way, and I think that makes for interesting reading. I think of them as doing their best with the roadblocks that they're given.
My life in the town I grew up in was much quieter than 'The End of Vandalism.' Part of the reason I think I wrote it was because it was too damn quiet when I was young, and I wanted people to come out and talk. And they do. There's so much dialogue in 'The End of Vandalism.'
