Willem Patrick
Interview with Zach Williams
Zach Williams is a writer adept at extracting poignancy, humor, and tenderness from the surreal. He is a graduate of NYU’s creative writing MFA and currently a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University, where he previously held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern. Originally from
Wilmington, Delaware, he currently resides with his family in San Francisco.
William’s debut collection, Beautiful Days, contains ten short stories that depict scenarios ranging from a family vacation in a remote cabin with inexplicable physics to a man wandering into a Brooklyn hardware store to buy mouse traps. Beautiful Days came out in June 2024 and was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Lit Hub, Electric Lit, Barack Obama, and Percival Everett.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In your craft talk on the strange, mysterious, and unknowable aspects of writing, you quoted Donald Barthelme, who said, “The writer is one who embarking upon a task does not know what to do.” How do you understand Barthelme’s quote, and what role does “not knowing” play in your own writing?
ZACH WILLIAMS: I understand Barthelme’s quote as an articulation of how writing is a process that occurs in real-time and that the act of sitting and doing it is different than thinking about it. While certain things can be planned ahead of time, the writing process invariably involves discovery, and I always think of the phrase that I first heard in Johnathan Safran Foer’s workshop, “thinking through your fingers.” Drafting is a way of thinking through your fingers, which is just a different way, maybe, for some people of getting from the inside to the outside. As you’re drafting, it’s important to understand and acknowledge that there’s space to not know what you’re doing or what’s happening. There’s something a little fantastical about engaging with your own imagination in that way. About sitting down and producing a story out of nothing, out of an impulse, or some idea that you only vaguely understand. Like using the process of drafting and revising to pursue that, to try to realize this thing. To externalize it.
I see Bartheleme’s essay, Not-Knowing, as an acknowledgment that there’s a lot of uncertainty in that and in embracing the uncertainty and treating it a bit like an improvisatory exercise. That gives you some context to understand the moments when you discover something as you’re drafting. Maybe it’s a word or a phrase that comes out. Maybe it’s an enormous event that just wasn’t happening until the moment you typed it. That’s how I think about Barthelme’s words. As far as how it applies to my work, I don’t know. I think of it more as an aspirational thing. Although, I can think of moments in drafting these stories that surprised me. One that stands out is in the story “Ghost Image.” At the end of the story, the narrator winds up in Disney World. It’s this burnt, abandoned, bombed-out version of Disney World. Arriving at that location was a surprise to me. I can remember where I was sitting, how it felt to be writing that scene, and ffeeling surprised by it.
WSR: It was interesting to see how a lot of the characters in your stories begin in a state of disorientation and uncertainty. Although they don’t always reach a place of certainty, their perspective naturally shifts. Can you talk about the kind of organic spontaneity that occurs in the stories?
ZW: Sometimes that kind of spontaneity happens in big ways, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s another way of saying that when you write something that feels good, something that pleases you, keep running in that direction. There’s a moment in the story “Lucca Castle” that I almost cut a bunch of times where a character accidentally rhymes “couch” and “vouch,” and she sort of has this way of commenting on that in the moment of the story that is silly. It’s purely silly. And I almost cut it a bunch of times, but it felt good. It wasn’t something that I had planned out. It’s not the kind of thing you can outline, of course. It’s people talking to each other, and you’re just typing what you think someone would say and how someone else would respond. In that moment, that was something that felt good to me even though it served no practical purpose.
WSR: I’m curious how you maintain that sense of spontaneity in your stories, even though you go through an extensive and methodical process of drafting and revising.
ZW: That’s a great question. I think it’s a case-by-case thing, and I think it was probably different in every story. And there are probably some stories where it might be the case that some organic things were sacrificed to the years-long process of revision. It’s a constant act of calibration to try and get the story to be as successful as possible while also honoring your original impulse.
I think about the story “Wood Sorrel House,” a lot, about its prose and syntax. I probably wouldn’t write a story that sounds quite like it again. I sort of blundered into that sound and feel of the language. And then, as I revised the story, I found that the language felt fussy, stilted, or old-fashioned at various points. I tried to smooth some of that out. But while doing that, I was aware that there was this older idea that I’d been pursuing. I tried to honor that older idea too. There’s a danger that you might just rewrite one story for the rest of your life and apply every new aesthetic concern or philosophical question or whatever that you encounter in your life to it. There are times when you have to limit yourself to the scope of what you feel your original vision was. In terms of your question, when you’re revising something for months or years, if that’s what you’re doing, it’s having some consciousness of that.
I don’t want it to sound too much like I just made all of it up as I went along and didn’t know anything that was going to happen. It wasn’t like that either. Sometimes there are things—just in conversations with people about the book— there are moments that feel surprising or disorienting to a reader that weren’t to me as I was writing the story. Or a thing that seems like it comes out of left field was something that I’d always been planning in the story, that was part of the original impulse. I’ve had conversations like that where things appear loose to others, but in my mind, they were firm.
WSR: That’s interesting. In thinking about staying true to the original vision, how do you know when you’re done with a story?
ZW: That question you’re asking was the question I was asking myself. That was the question I was really obsessed with while I was a student at NYU. How do you really know when something is done? What I sort of arrived at eventually was that if you have to ask, it might just not be done yet. You know what I mean? It might just need more time.
But I felt very vexed by that question. Like, “I’ve worked really, really hard on this, is it done?” In a sense, that question has to do with what a reader might say about it. For example, a writer might ask themselves, “How could I get a certain kind of approving set of comments on this from a professor?” or, “If someone I really admire might tell me they like this, does it mean that it’s done?” And then, there are times when a reader might suggest that your story is in pretty good shape, but you, as the writer, know that it’s not and that there’s something that you just didn’t quite get yet. When I first started asking that question, another year passed before certain things finally started to feel done.
I would say, too, that it’s a group effort. It’s so important to have readers and help. You get to a point where everything in a story is rough in some way, but at least it’s intentional or the way you want it to be. There’s nothing in the story that’s broken in a way that you don’t understand. Although I have a sense, too, with certain stories, they are broken in certain ways, but they’re just as good as I could possibly get them. I don’t have one in mind when I say that, but I’ve had that thought while I’m working on something: “I don’t know how good this actually is, but I think it’s as good as I could possibly make it at this point.” You get a sense of equanimity.
But when I was at NYU and I was trying to figure out the answer to that question, it always took me a very long time. I was very, very grateful for sympa- thetic readers and for the remarks of all my professors when they were positive and negative. All of those conversations and exchanges were really valuable to me. And then, later on, going through the same process with my agent, Claudia Ballard, and my editor at Double Day, Thomas Gebremedhin. I always found it really valuable for people to point out where the story was broken for them in big ways and small ways. Over a long time, after that process of calibration, something feels done.
WSR: That makes a lot of sense. Perhaps just pouring enough time into something combined with effort could eventually create something that’s finished.
ZW: Yeah, there’s this quality of emergence in revision. You just keep doing it, and it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t go well, it doesn’t go well, and then eventually, it starts to go a little better. Or the times you didn’t think were going well actually produced some good results. You make enough incremental progress that it adds up to something that hopefully feels greater than the sum of all those individual parts, those individual work days, work sessions, whatever.
WSR: I came across an interview in which you said, “Writing is like getting to know a part of yourself that you would otherwise never get to know.” Could you talk more about what you mean by that and what it means to get to know yourself through writing?
ZW: For me, I think it has to do with “thinking through your fingers,” solitude, and ambient music. I have this particular relationship to the process, where I think without realizing I was doing it, but in hindsight, I think I was inadvertently ritualizing the practice in a way. Creating a kind of ritualized state that, for me, had to do with my desk, the internet blocked, ambient music, and this blank page. Over time, I started to associate specific ambient records with specific stories. If I knew I was going to work on a certain story that day, I would queue up one of several records. Stories started to have their own feel to me in terms of what it was like to work on them and to participate in them imaginatively. It’s like you build this designated space in your mind for the story, and then you start thinking about it when you’re not at the desk. That space stays active, so then there are things, for example, like waking up in the middle of the night with an idea and going to write it down. It’s like a background process. Sometimes even when you’re not aware of it.
There was a sense for me, after having set this process in motion, that it was more complicated than I had thought previously. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that you’re opening yourself up to a dialogue with your subconscious in a way. It hadn’t occurred to me that part of it is getting to know what your mind is like in silence. I found that it’s probably a little like a meditation practice. That was what it was like for me, anyway. It might be that you’re encouraging dissociative tendencies in yourself when you shift to spending that much time deep in your imagination, deep in this process of putting words on the page and making sure every bit of punctuation is in the right place. It feels like a familiar state to me now, and it can be kind of weird.
It was a process that I undertook really seriously in my thirties when I had been a middle and high school teacher for a long time. And that’s like a totally different way of being. That experience for me was noisy and chaotic. There are a lot of people. You have a really hard and fast relationship with time. A class might start at 8:05 am, and there’s not a lot of flexibility involved. It’s a very ex- troverted thing. I am, in some ways, a very introverted person. So the experience of being able to sit and work on something felt very much like something that I might have gone through my whole life without having done, having opened up that dialogue with my imagination. It’s interesting and weird. To go back to the “not knowing” thing, if you’re just obeying the impulse of your ideas, there are times when your ideas are dark or unpleasant or don’t make for something that you’d want to show your parents, for example. All of that is kind of weird.
WSR: That’s fascinating. It reminds me somewhat of the minor obsessions your characters have in Beautiful Days. Like the guy who is really into The Grateful Dead and pixel art. How do you infuse those kinds of traits into characters?
ZW: The Grateful Dead thing is easy. I love the Grateful Dead. I don’t know exactly how it came to be that those guys were listening to the Grateful Dead in that story. It just felt natural to me. The pixel art thing came from looking at a lot of pixel art on Twitter back in the day. The artist that I think of has the name “Waneella.” They make these super beautiful animated gifs. But as far as how it got into the story, that narrator is sort of an aspiring creative in some way but doesn’t really have a handle on the practical aspects of how to engage with it. I suppose there’s some autobiography there of me when I was younger.
But how did pixel art come into the story? It was just something that felt right to do. It felt like that would be a fun thing, a cool thing, an interesting thing to put into a story, and I felt that I knew just enough about it to pull it off. I will say that a thing that’s occurred to me outside of consideration of these stories, the thing that I started thinking about over the last year or two, is how extraordinarily powerful it is for me, as a reader, when there are characters who are really convincingly or compellingly just hanging out, people who love each other especially.
One thing that helped me put my finger on that was Adventure Time, the Cartoon Network series. Growing up, I was also a big reader of comic strips in the newspaper. In the 90s, I read Calvin and Hobbes, which I now read with my kids, and it strikes me that it’s exactly the same thing. It’s like, what’s so powerful about Calvin and Hobbes, that makes it so beloved, is that Calvin and Hobbes really love each other. The love is complicated, and they disagree, argue, and fight, but the love between them is represented in this really simple but vibrant way.
Friendship isn’t something I set out explicitly to do in that story ahead of time. It was the thing that, after I kind of got to the end of that story, it was when I was in the process of editing the book, it occurred to me that that is why I liked that story. They just talk about music that they like. I also wanted to have the two brothers in that story explicitly say to each other, “I love you,” at the end.
That was a decision I made after thinking about that aspect of Adventure Time and Calvin and Hobbes.
WSR: That’s interesting because, and I’m particularly thinking of your story “Trial Run,” the inverse of what you’re describing is important to your work too. The kind of deep disconnection and hostility we can feel with those around us, like coworkers, friends, and family.
ZW: It’s very true. I wasn’t really intending to write something dark. Some people use “horror” to talk about some of the stories’ aesthetic or genre sensibility. And that’s kind of a disconnect for me because I didn’t grow up as a reader of horror. For the most part, I never really thought about the book that way. But you’re super right to point that out. A lot of the book is about isolated people stuck in their own heads or dealing, as you said earlier, with some kind of obsessive fixation. You brought up the Grateful Dead as a thing those guys fixate on, which is a happy one, but a lot of the obsessions are negative.
The stories were all drafted between 2015 and 2021, and so I think they’re very reflective of that. To me, it’s a big factor. I’ve said this elsewhere, but I got my first smartphone around the time I started working on the stories. And I don’t mean to sound inflammatory or to reduce it to something overly simple, but I think I’ve kind of experienced that as more or less an evil presence in my life. There’s a lot of good that comes out of it, too, but the constant connectivity generates a state of perpetual interruption.
I can remember very, very vividly when this change happened among my group of friends. We’d always hang out, sit on couches, drink beers, or whatever. But then there came this moment where we would all sit on the same couches, but we’d all be on our phones, and there’d be these extended silences. I was one of the last people to get an iPhone.
When I was new to my phone, so almost like 10 years ago now, I remember standing in line at the grocery store and having an impulse to check my phone. Anytime that I was able to disobey that impulse or ignore it, it felt like time travel. There would be this particular moment when I would not reach for my phone while looking at the cash register or something meaningless, and I had a sense that this is what it used to be like when I was a kid. This is what it was like when I was a teenager. This is what it was like when I was an undergraduate. I don’t think it’s been a helpful change for me. And so I think a lot of what the book is about, in a very oblique way, is the internet.
WSR: That reminds me of how writing also requires delving into this deep, separate state of consciousness. I don’t want to equate writing and using the internet or make the claim that they’re the inverse of each other, but I think there might be a worthwhile comparison to be made. With writing, as you said, you’re examining different parts of yourself, and with going on your phone, maybe you’re becoming more distanced from those parts.
ZW: Yeah. It’s like an entranced state in both cases. But in the case of mindlessly scrolling, it’s a superficial trance or a surface-level engagement. You can scroll mindlessly on the internet for hours and come out of it and not have any idea what you just did, what you observed, or what you read. It kind of amounts to nothing, sometimes. It has a kind of ungrounding effect. That’s a really good, interesting question.
WSR: It also fascinates me that you wrote your story collection during that time period. They’re all kind of set in an America that we’re familiar with but with a kind of heightened sense of eeriness and an intangible presence, which makes sense for that span of years and even today. I’m curious how you create a simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar setting and cultivate the surreal nature of your stories.
ZW: It’s just the kind of the most natural thing for me to reach for. I think it comes out of a lot of the influences that I absorbed. Like in elementary school and middle school, I loved Ray Bradbury. In particular, I loved the Martian Chronicles. It was the only book that I reread at that age. I grew up in the 90s. I loved The X-Files. Science fiction and the surreal have always been there as an agent of attraction for me. The other kind of massive influences on me were UFO books and UFO documentaries. And that continues to be something that is a source of creative generativity to me. In elementary school, there was a shelf that had all of those books on it, the books about UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, and the Bermuda Triangle.
I would always watch documentaries on what was at the time the Learning Channel, Discovery, and the History Channel about UFOs, featuring interviews with witnesses and recreations. To me, it was like I experienced it as “true fic- tion,” the whole conceit of the genre being that it might be real. There might be something happening that only a minority of people are aware of because it reveals itself to you. There are all these people who have had experiences—walking around, in their cars, in airplanes, seeing something behave in ways they’ve never seen before or since, and they can’t explain it. There are intimations that the government knows more than it’s letting on.
There’s a rich culture of conspiracy theories, and the stories that grow out of that field are amazing. There are very complex mythologies around events like the Roswell crash or the formation of the supposed Majestic 12 group. There’s a lot of good critical thinking around it too. As far as my own impulse towards surrealism, I think that is really at the heart of it. Even though I never had para- normal experiences, I was steeped in accounts through books and television, and it was transformative.
In sixth grade, I read Whitley Strieber for the first time. He writes about his experiences as an alien abductee. He’s the great alien abduction memoirist, a wonderful writer. His books continue to be thrilling, and they challenge the definition of “true.” The way he tells his stories about experiences he claims to have had is incredible. The stories are far stranger than anything you’d expect from someone inventing a story about abduction by a flying saucer. They’re utterly bizarre and have a lot in common with David Lynch films that are full of dream logic. They’re beautiful books.
This whole field of UFO literature is rich and fascinating. For example, John Mack, a psychologist at Harvard, studied alien abduction phenomena and coined the term “ontological shock” to describe what some patients experienced. These encounters unseat people’s realities, giving them a glimpse behind the veil and changing their understanding of the world. There’s a lot of overlap between UFO phenomena and mysticism.
In my stories, characters often confront something they don’t understand and must assimilate it. Several stories follow this pattern, ending in an indeterminate space where the characters are figuring out their next steps. The occult adjacent or mystical This influence from UFO literature clearly shapes my work, though it wasn’t intentional. Looking back, I see how much it inspired certain patterns in my writing.
The occult-adjacent or mystical quality in my work wasn’t something I did on purpose. I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I want to write a bunch of stories that are kind of patterned off of American paranormal folklore’ or something. It’s a pattern that I see in hindsight. That must be, that must be this influence coming through.
WSR: That’s cool to be able to look back and be able to identify those patterns and influences. Lastly, what has been the most rewarding part of writing and publishing your first book so far?
ZW: I want to think about that for a second because that’s a good question, and it’s been such a long process. There have been a lot of different kinds of rewards. There are a lot of different ways I might answer that question, but I guess I’ll just say the very first thing that pops into my head.
On Saturday, I was with my kids, and we went into a bookstore to look at the kid’s section, but Beautiful Days was there, and I was like, “Oh, hey, that’s my book.” I have a six-year-old and a three-year-old. And, you know, they both thought it was funny and weird to see my picture in the back of the book. My three-year-old was like, “That’s daddy!” And that was a really rewarding moment.