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"It is almost impossible to write a novel any better than the best novel you've read in the three-to-six months before you began your own...Thus, you must read excellent novels regularly."

That's a bit of advice from Samuel R. Delany in the writing handbook, Rebel Yell.

That book was created by University of Utah writing professor, Lance Olsen. He's written nine novels himself, and this week he is our special guest, discussing his new book, Anxious Pleasures and sharing tips for fledgling writers.

Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing. 

Lance Olsen:
Well, in addition to the predictable shameless plug for my own fiction-writing guidebook, Rebel Yell, which provides lots of exercises to get the creative juices flowing, let me also suggest Brian Kiteley's 3 A. M. Epiphany, a remarkable compilation of primers. Continue reading...

There are virtually no fiction-writing textbooks out there that take as their premise that it's essential, as Kiteley says in his excellent collection of uncommon advice, to "search for material that challenges and changes you as a writer," and to "be ambitious—take on complex intellectual, political, and philosophical problems" in your work, thereby at least making a sincere effort to avoid the most damning criticism of workshops: "that they promote mere competence."

His book is the sort of book that makes you want to go out and write, try new things, push narrative's limits.

Also: the film Five Obstructions, directed by Lars von Trier, which investigates the Oulipo notion of freedom in creation through the use of multiple constraints; it's a counter-intuitive idea that delights and excites me.

Whom I read for inspiration changes hourly, but I always keep several books piled by my writing chair and dip into them just before I set out each morning.

I honestly believe Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote and rewrote each sentence of Lolita on an index card before inserting it into his text, never composed an off-tune phrase.

I just finished Melanie Rae Thon's Sweet Hearts.  Ostensibly the story of two Montanan delinquents named Cecile and Flint on a sad downward skid told by a deaf mute, "the daughter of a drowned woman," this unjustly overlooked novel is in fact an investigation into what forgiveness means, if it is possible now, if it ever was, how one struggles with the divine in a world that looks like this, how those on the outside of the dominant culture live, love, find death, remember each other, try to save each other when they can't possibly be saved, come to ask: "Where does grief begin?  Does suffering start when another dies, or only when we hear of it?  Imagine our unfathomable innocence." 

The rhythms and density of the language are stunning. More stunning still is how, like Faulkner, I want to say, Thon has passed what we used to call the Regional Novel through a complex, enriching, breathtaking innovative narratology that allows us to see the genre afresh.

Currently I'm reading Don DeLillo's breathtaking Falling Man, about 9/11, and it is brutal and relentless and beautiful and haunted and beautiful.  I can't recommend it enough.  I'm learning something about writing from every scene.

The rest is simply an angelic chorus:

Samuel Beckett, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, Mark Danielewski, Carole Maso, Shelley Jackson, Brian Evenson, Lidia Yuknavitch, Laird Hunt, Patrik Ourednik, William Gass, Donald Barthelme, David Mitchell, Aimee Bender, James Joyce, Kurt Vonnegut, Kelly Link, J. M. Coetzee, David Markson, Thomas Bernhard, Margaret Atwood, Joe Wenderoth, Jose Saramago, Milan Kundera, Michael Joyce, Ben Marcus . . .

And on and on and on.