Conversations with the Bookless: Fred Snyder

Column, Interviews | Brian | May 7, 2009 at 12:00 pm

A couple of years ago Jeff Vandermeer ran a series of blog posts called Conversations With the Bookless. The Conversations with the Bookless series was designed to showcase those writers who are up and coming, who don’t yet have a collection or a novel out, who are making their names known writing short stories. With Jeff’s blessing I will be continuing the series here at BSC over the next couple of weeks, but with a focus mostly on mystery/crime fiction.

From the first generation successes of Anthony Neil Smith, Victor Gischler and Sean Doolittle that came out of Plots With Guns to the later success of zine author/founders Sandra Ruttan and Russel McLean to a lot of others the online zines have, over the years, proved to be a fairly successful and fertile ground for emerging talents to launch a career, highlight their own work and showcase the work of others.

These writers are the next generation and it will be interesting in the next couple of years to see which of them will make it and which will stand out.

Nothing else to say really except to end with a quote from the original series.

The fact is, if you don’t have a book out, it’s harder to get attention and it’s harder for reader attention to crystallize around you. I hope these interviews introduce readers to some of the great talent that, in the coming years, will be amazingly and bountifully bookful. — Jeff Vandermeer

After spending his formative years in Youngstown, Fred Snyder escaped to greener pastures in central Ohio, where he earns rent money as a software developer. His stories have appeared in Plots with Guns and Hardboiled Magazine.

What do you most value in the fiction you love?

Characters who are distinctly human. If you want to make me come back for more, show me a character I can believe and admire. If I can’t admire the protagonist, sometimes I’ll settle for morbid curiosity.

Philip Marlowe is my favorite hero in crime fiction. He follows complex and commendable ethics. He also drinks too much, lets his pride cloud his judgment, and sometimes stumbles into a darker shade of gray than he intended. Heroes are most interesting when they’re fallible.

The other side of the coin is Humbert Humbert, a despicable guy who somehow manages to be fascinating and sympathetic. A couple of creeps that Joyce Carol Oates has written fall under this category too. She can write characters that make your skin crawl and still keep you reading.

Why do you write?

I like to explore my notions about the human condition in a fictional realm, where it’s easier to make sense of them. I like to entertain people, whether it’s with humor, excitement, anticipation, or dread. I have an obsession with killing hookers, and it’s safer to do it in my imagination than the real world. Sometimes I just want to make myself laugh and hope readers will join me.

What is the value and purpose of short fiction in mystery/crime fiction for you personally and overall for the form and genre?

Fiction’s first purpose should be to entertain. Even tragedy should be
entertaining. The best fiction provokes thought in addition to the
entertainment factor. Crime stories can be puzzles, parables, morality
plays, action sets, or character studies. Hardboiled and noir, in
particular, depict people at their darkest, where tension and conflict are natural consequences. The potential for drama is unfathomable.

What issues or ideas about fiction have been foremost in your mind of late?

From a creative standpoint: redemption as a theme. I’ve been writing a lot about people trying to mitigate their flaws. One of the interesting
aspects, for me, is to see how someone tries to approach the right thing to do when circumstance, experience, and instinct work against him.

From a business standpoint: I’m concerned that the pool of quality outlets for short fiction is shrinking. The Internet creates potential for more, but e-zines are often unstable. Even good ones can disappear suddenly. I’d like to see more e-zines that are professional in terms of content, presentation, and marketing. I’d also like to see more magazines combine a slick print publication with a strong web presence. Too many have one but not both.

Who is the best short story writer that people haven’t gotten hip to yet?

Are people too hip to a guy after he has a few print credits? If not, I
recommend Scott Wolven. Gritty stuff. He has a talent for writing genuine tough guys. They don’t talk about how tough they are. They just are. I’ve seen him compared to Hemingway, and for good reason. Mississippi Review has Eight
Ball online. He’s appeared in several of Houghton Mifflin’s Best
American Mystery Stories. His collection Controlled Burn was published in 2005.

If “not hip” means “completely inaccessible,” I’ll just say I know some guys down south and out west who need to stop procrastinating and publish something. They know who they are.

What do you like most about short fiction?

On one side, it can be a challenge to see how much subtext you can fit into a few thousand words. Sometimes you need to allude to elements in the whitespace. Done right, the results can be stunning. The reader imagines what’s implicit, and that provocation gives it deeper impact.

On the other side, short stories are good vehicles for high concepts. I can think of one author who writes amazing short stories, but most of his novels feel like half a dozen shorts duct-taped together. Some concepts work better when they stand alone in short form. Shaggy dog stories can be fun in five pages, but they’re disappointing after five hundred. Roald Dahl was an author who knew how to engage the potential of both short stories and novels. The difference between them is more than the word count.

When did you start writing short fiction and what prompted you to do so?

I wrote my first short story for a grade school assignment. It was so much fun I got hooked. By high school I knew that I wanted to be a writer. My parents’ subscription to Alfred Hitchcock had already sparked my interest in crime fiction, and my first exposure to Raymond Chandler gave it weight. Even so, writing remained an occasional hobby through my young adulthood. I didn’t start putting serious effort into it until a few years after college.

Of your stories, which is your favorite; the one that showcases best your abilities?

My best published story might be “Loose,” which appeared in Crime and Suspense earlier this year. It hit just about the right note of creepiness. I think my best work overall hasn’t been published yet.

Do you have any short story publications forthcoming?

Nothing definite, but I hope to fix that problem soon. I’ve drastically
increased my submission rate over the past year. A few of my stories have been collecting dust on my hard drive for way too long. By the time I sent “Soundtrack for a Crime
Drama” to Plots with Guns, it was five years old. I don’t know if it’s due to a lack of confidence or just plain laziness, but I don’t push my manuscripts as often as I should.

Right now I’m shopping a story that features the same private detective from Beer Wine Snacks (Plots with Guns May/Jun 2003). It’s 10,000 words long, so it hasn’t been easy to find a home for it.

How do you plan to rectify your booklessness?

I started shopping my first novel in January. It’s about a car thief and
his wayward daughter. I’ve been struggling over a novel about a crooked cop that’s loosely based on Macbeth. I have a few novellas that I might try to push as a collection.

_{Fred Snyder blogs at Valley Bound and his fiction can be found here.}