Ryan Turner

In my moleskine about a year ago I jotted these notes: “I don’t so much get into the minds of my characters. I look to reveal them through stripped-down actions and words. I prefer to reach depth by offering a carefully-constructed surface.”

At Xmas this year I picked up a gift from my father, John Metcalf’s An Aesthetic Underground, which I found mesmerizing and read all in one day. In that book I underlined the following section: “I wanted a story propelled by a series of emotional jolts. This, in turn, implied a close observation of surface and detail. In acutely observed surfaces are depths. To deliver emotion the language had to be utterly clean and sharp, cuttingly precise. Dialogue, too, had to make demands on the reader. It had to be fast, full of implied tone, utterly lacking in “stage directions”; I brief, the dialogue had to be a performance in which the reader took part.” For whatever reason, finding this made me very happy.

In the months that followed I was emailing back and forth with an editor from TNQ who informed me of an Annie Dillard book called Living By Fiction that mentions this. The editor wrote that the book conveys “how realism tries to mine the depths in the surfaces and post-modernism draws the depth up *into* the surfaces. Something like that.”