On trying to make something that's beautiful

Hernan Diaz is the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of four books published in thirty-seven languages. He is the recipient of the John Updike award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, given to “a writer whose contributions to American literature have demonstrated consistent excellence.” He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, and a fellowship from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Ply, his latest novel, was released by Riverhead on September 29 of this year.

The last time I interviewed you, you were about to publish your first novel, In the Distance, which Coffee House Press published from a blind, un-agented submission. Now you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize, among untold other awards. You’ve been part of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.” I’m curious for you to reflect on what this wild ascension that your career has experienced over the last near-decade has been like for you?

Look, I don’t think literature is a sport. I don’t think there’s scores, points, rankings. And I think having spent a couple of decades in total obscurity, I also know that being completely neglected is very, very painful. And I know that that is where most writers find themselves, just by sheer statistics. That is the thing that is bound to happen to you. And it happened to me big time for a very, very long time.

I’m not going to lie to you, it feels really good to get this kind of validation and recognition, and to have your work be highlighted in all these ways. It feels really, really great. And I don’t take any of it for granted. I’m not cynical about it. I give it its full weight. Not only because, as I said, it feels good, as simple as that, but also because it makes your job as a writer—I am now a full-time writer because of this—it makes your job as a writer easier, and even possible. I used to have very poorly paid jobs, just to stay afloat. And now I get the luxury of writing novels for a living. So that’s huge.

But I also go back to “this is not a sport.” To the extent that it makes you more confident in your practice and that it allows you the time to really devote yourself as monkishly as possible to your work, it’s great. But if, for some reason, all of this makes anyone think that they are better than someone else, or that this is some kind of objective metric system for art, they’re sorely mistaken.

I’ve been a judge for the Pulitzer Prize, so I know the other side, and I know it’s ultimately five people and their taste. So let’s also remember that… For as wonderful as it is, and I’m profoundly grateful, I still feel this is all a clerical error that will be rectified at some point. I still can’t believe that this happened to me, but I also hope that I have enough perspective to understand how immensely subjective and capricious this process can be.

You mentioned that you held day jobs for a long time. I know you were the managing editor of a scholarly journal, Revista Hispanica Moderna. I think you were there even after the 2022 publication of Trust, is that right?

Yeah, I quit almost two years ago now. That was my last big position.

How did you balance the work of writing with your day jobs, and how did your day jobs feed your writing? What has your work gained or what has it lost from your writing becoming your full-time job?

I think pressure is very important for my process. I need constraints: formal constraints, temporal constraints, material constraints. That works for me. So in that regard, having a full-time job while also being a committed novelist was very good for me, because I made the most of the time that I had.

I worked for 13 years as the editor of this journal, which is probably the highest profile Hispanic Studies journal in the United States, or one of them. It’s over a hundred years old, it’s across disciplines from the Middle Ages to the present: history, philosophy, literature, art. Hardcore academic; it’s not for a general readership. And it’s hard to edit those kinds of texts. I think I developed a keen editorial eye, which I apply to myself now. This has to do with style and grammar, both of which I’m obsessed with—I collect style guides, dorky as that sounds. I love lexicography, and I love understanding how the smallest cogwheels of grammar work. I derive a perverse sense of enjoyment from all of this, which was encouraged by my job as an editor. So that’s one thing: I got to hone those skills in a very serious way.

Also, there is a kind of academic writing that is very prevailing, that fosters a deliberate kind of obfuscation. There is a tendency to mistake obscurity with depth, and over the course of those 13 years, I grew very impatient with that intentional kind of obscurity that is only there to mask a certain kind of intellectual shallowness, that is also a form of superstition—as if by invoking certain words that act as talismans, thought miraculously happens. Just because you’re using these fetishized words, an argument ex nihilo is produced. It’s like magic: when you say hocus pocus, something will happen. So if you say de-territorialization, something will happen. And that’s not necessarily the case. It just shows that you have read the back cover of a Gilles Deleuze book.

So in my own writing, I really strive very hard for lucidity. I strive for transparency. I think so much beauty can be found in a lucid prose. That’s what I want. And that’s something that I think I acquired because of these two things. On the one hand, by really focusing on the material aspect of language and its inner workings—the instrument, how does this instrument work? How is it played? And on the other hand, a healthy skepticism for these rhetorical disguises.

My job as an academic, which I was for about 30 years, made me welcome a certain viscosity in prose, which is not the same as obscurity. It’s just a lower gear that I’m very interested in, and that’s obvious in my novels. I like things to slow down. I’m not afraid of that. I don’t think fiction ought to be propulsive or page-turny all the time. I enjoy that too, don’t get me wrong. I love a Dickensian form of acceleration, and forgetting that I’m reading. That’s a great feeling. We all love that. But I also like a Beckettian slowing down, and experiencing language itself, and this asthmatic punctuation, and experiencing the sentence as a syntactic event. It’s just a beautiful thing as well. So I want all those things.

When we spoke about In the Distance, you told me that you “tried very hard to make the novel not feel researched.” In terms of process, is the preparatory research a distinct part of the process, or are you doing that while you’re also writing the novel?

Both is the answer. There is a gestation period during which I’m reading about the American West, or Wall Street in the ‘20s, or the no-wave scene in New York, and particle physics. This is not just a couple of months. This is a couple of years, or more. And there’s normally an overlap. I started reading toward Trust while I was editing In the Distance; I started reading toward Ply as I was editing Trust. And so on and so forth. So it’s long. It’s not a spur of the moment. This doesn’t speak to the quality of the work, please don’t get me wrong, but it’s a serious process, and it’s a big gamble, because now I’m fully invested in this, and I become a student of this. And it’s many hours a day of reading about this. And you only hope that this will pay off, that it will become a novel.

When I know enough about these worlds—and knowing enough, it is not just topically or thematically, it’s also mostly, for me, linguistically… When I’m acquainted with the rhetoric of these worlds, with the genres that orbit around them, with the kind of language that defines their tone—then, only then, do the myriad notes that I’ve been taking during those years start becoming tentative sentences of a novel. And then I’m off at some point—with great trepidation, but off. But the other process keeps going until the very end. I’m still reading about the west, about finance, about punk music, about physics, through the editorial process, until the last editorial pass. And editors have great patience with me, so there are many passes, because that’s the way I work. It’s really beautiful when the writing, and the reading, or the archival work and all of that, move in tandem. That’s the best feeling.

Have you had an experience where you’ve been deep down a particular pathway and you come to the realization that this wasn’t going to work for a novel, or this wasn’t going to work for a story? If so, how did you know that it was time to step away and invest that time and research effort in something else?

Yeah, I can tell you, and it involves The Atlantic [magazine]. Ply initially was a very different kind of book in my head. There were many elements of what the novel is today, what it became, but it was extremely different. And I was doing the final editorial passes… I think we were on the fourth pass for Trust. I was at Yaddo, and the end was there. And I still had a lot of residency time left. So I thought, “I’m going to start with this novel.” And it involved an interstellar spaceship, this first idea for the novel. It sounds so weird to say this, but it did.

It sounds like a different book.

Yeah, it was a totally different book. Again, with lots of components from this one. There would be a relationship between Earth and this ship… It takes radio waves years to reach, so the back and forth, and the lags, and all of that. So 12 hours a day, which is what I do at residencies because that’s what I’m there for, working on this, and no. Just no. It did not work. I can’t tell you why. It’s just something very visceral. You’re not feeling it. It’s not working. It’s not rational, but you have to listen to that. It’s so visceral that still, today, I can tell you the whole novel. I can walk you through it. So obviously on a sort of diegetic level, or plot-wise, it worked to some extent because I’m able to relay it, but it doesn’t work.

I was bummed because I had invested already quite some time on this. And what I did was something I’ve never done before or since, which is, “Okay, I’m going to scale this down and write a short story, and see how that feels. Something that I can hold in my hand, have a few scenes and characters, and that will give me a sense.” So I wrote the story. It’s called “The Generations,” and it came out in The Atlantic. And I’m fond of the story. There’s so many things about it that I believe in. But it taught me that there wasn’t a novel there.

So I was depressed, despondent, and in despair for a few months, but I realized that I was still very much invested in this idea of science, madness—I’m very interested in mad scientists, in technology, especially within the American experience, what that means. And gradually this setting of a very lo-fi, low-tech world, in conjunction with this outrageous machine… That’s kind of when [Ply] started taking off.

From where you find yourself today, what advice would you give to writers in the position that you were in a decade or so ago, submitting manuscripts in open submission periods, looking for a publisher who will take a chance on you?

I am the same writer that I was when nobody was publishing me. Of course, I’ve changed, as we all do through time. But it’s not that I decided to adapt to some kind of expectations from an abstract entity—be it the market, or a general readership, or literary journals, or agents. All of these are chimeras and abstractions, right? Because they’re generalizations. They don’t exist. I kept writing my own stuff, and I thought that Trust, for all its experimentation, would be… I was glad that it sold to a big publishing house, but that was all. I thought that was the lucky strike right there. So I mean, I wouldn’t presume to have advice. I can just speak to how I have dealt and still keep dealing with this, because I know all of it is precarious, too. All this can go away, and it probably will.

I think this will sound perhaps a little trite and naive, but it’s the joy of a beautiful sentence. That’s why I do it, every day and every hour. How wonderful that this sentence that never existed, that I don’t dislike, now is here. And look at what it’s doing! It’s not only conveying meaning, but maybe it’s mimicking what it’s saying in its own structure, or contradicting what it’s saying. Listen to its music. Look at the beautiful architecture of subordination that takes place here. And oh, let’s make another one!

I told you it would sound a little trite, but I promise you, this is what it is for me. This is the job for me: to try to make something that is beautiful and full of feeling, but also elegant and controlled. And that is what keeps me going.

And look, I know it’s very hard when nobody reads you, when it’s only your friend or your partner, and that’s it. You have four readers. And I had four readers for many years—not a figure of speech, four readers. In order to be able to keep going, you become a bit of a solipsist, which is a very, very dangerous thing. Because you have to convince yourself of the fact that what you’re doing has some worth, at least for yourself, despite the fact that the world is telling you that it doesn’t. And that can lead to very dangerous places. It did to me. You become resentful, you become angry, and you feel a little bit crazy because you feel that you’re seeing something that nobody else is seeing. And because that something refers to you yourself, it becomes really, really tricky. And I’m not being hyperbolic here. It gets weird after a long time spinning in this void.

So I feel for my colleagues who are in this place. My heart breaks for all the masterpieces we will never read because they will never be published. That is sad, infuriating, and crushing. But there is no reason to do this other than love of language. There’s no other reason. It’s not a good business proposition. It’s not a secure job. There’s way too much emotional exposure—if you do it right, you’re stark naked in front of a lot of people. The risk is high. So if you take it seriously, it’s not immediately rewarding, if ever, unless you experience this transcendence in the materiality of language. That is, for me, the only reason, and the only thing that will sustain you.

I would imagine that’s something that would keep you grounded as you are experiencing the type of success that you’ve experienced. The job is the same for you as it was 10 years ago, and the joy is the same for you as it was 10 years ago. Is that correct?

Exactly. It’s exactly the same, with new pressures—which are pressures that are only natural, if this is now your main source of income and your job. Anyone who has a job and needs to support a family experiences those pressures. So it’s not unlike anyone else. I didn’t have those attached to writing before. I had other kinds of pressures. I want to be read by more than four people—not out of vanity, but I want to have interlocutors. And I don’t want to feel crazy anymore. So that was a kind of pressure, but not the material kind that maybe I’m experiencing now, which I welcome because, again, it’s my job, so it’s reasonable.

You seem to really commit to and value the relational aspect of your work, with the people that are supporting your work and that you’re working with. I’m curious what advice you would give to writers about building the types of relationships that foster a career as a writer?

Don’t be cynical, a careerist, and a networker. I think that is just a bummer. But if you are fervent, sincere, and open-hearted in reaching out to people, I think that is wonderful. I spoke of my lonely, angry, kind of crazy years, and I think the mistake that I made looking back, the one major thing that I would change, is that I was alone. I don’t come from the MFA world, I come from a full-throttled academic, hardcore comp-lit kind of background, so I didn’t have friends in creative writing. I didn’t have friends in publishing. I didn’t have friends in the magazine world. I didn’t have writer friends, really. And for fuck’s sake, I live in Brooklyn. It wasn’t that hard to make that happen. But honestly, it never occurred to me. And I don’t know, I just didn’t do it. I look back, and I think it was so crazy to go about it the way I did.

So I would definitely, definitely encourage the people who are in that situation to reach out, again, in a sincere way, with passion and love and respect to fellow writers, or to more established writers. Everyone likes to get a fan letter. I have reached out to writers cold to let them know how much I admire their work, and sometimes they have replied, sometimes not, but I’ve always felt good doing it. And I didn’t expect anything. It wasn’t transactional. But sometimes that led to great conversations and to a sincere desire to help each other out. And I do that. I receive a lot of unsolicited emails all the time, and I respond to all of them. Obviously I can’t read everything that everyone sends me because I’m mortal, but I engage.

Writing is a very, very solitary occupation because it relies, to an enormous extent, on reading. You have to do a lot of reading if you want to be a decent writer. So that’s super lonely. And then you actually have to put pen to paper—also super lonely—and edit, which is also super lonely. So I think nurturing this other communal side in a sincere way is so important.