Q&A: William Lychack

by Barbara Hoffert -- Library Journal, 6/15/2004

Houghton's lead August title, The Wasp Eater (see review, p. 59, this issue) is the affecting story of a young boy trying to hold his family together. Short fiction by author William Lychack has appeared in The Best American Short Stories.etc.

You have written short stories, but this is your first novel. What is it like to move to a longer form?

There's a lot more uncertainty in a novel, but it's a healthy kind of uncertainty. I could never really hold the entire novel in my mind, whereas I often feel I can get a certain grip on a short story. I can picture it sitting there on the table, like a paperweight or a telephone. A novel—at least this one—always felt so much more desperate and stormy and life-or-death to me, as if my very existence depended on finishing it.

How did you manage to write so successfully in the voice of a ten-year-old child?

I struggled and worried about getting Daniel's voice and energy right. I talk to my judo kids [Lychack is currently a judo instructor], who are all around ten, but I think I probably just worked a long time on this book, more than ten years, actually. I never really knew my father—I met him a couple of times before he died—so I wanted to help this boy save his family and share a time with his father. I still hope for him.

Your writing is so vivid and lyrical. How conscious are you of style?

I hope I'm conscious enough now to stay out of my own way and trust the story. As a reader, I don't want to be distracted by the writing, only enchanted. Whatever style I might have is really just the way I hear and see the words and pictures in my head. Also, I came to the conclusion that the only way I could show how deeply I felt about this novel was to lavish the writing with as much work and love and time as I could. If I strayed into preciousness, I could count on both my wife and my editor to thump me back to reality with their industrial-strength BS detectors.

You've worked at everything from ice cream man to bartender. Do all these different experiences help your writing?

Absolutely. Aside from the obvious all-walks-of-life aspects of these jobs, I think they all served to steer me back to writing. Whether I hated the job or loved it, I always felt compelled to figure out my novel, to lay my father to rest, so to speak. Then again, not a day goes by that I don't think I should give up my writing life and go back to driving that Softee truck… truly the happiest job I ever had… cruising my little route…families waiting outside in the dusk…that song playing all day long over you….well, okay, maybe I could do without that song….