Holes in our Characters

a conversation with Whitney Collins

“The Problem” by Whitney Collins is both mathematically precise and wonderfully zany, full of tragic absurdity, fascinating characters, and ever-rising stakes. The author’s ability to develop and, ultimately, to complicate the characters over the course of the narrative, all while continually surprising the reader, is a pleasure to read. 

I had the opportunity to speak with Whitney about “The Problem” over a video call. It had just snowed in both of our respective cities, so we enjoyed a cozy day indoors chatting about writing. What follows is a slightly cleaned-up version of our live conversation. Enjoy! 

Kara Crawford: There is so much I want to talk to you about, so let’s get into it! The first question I want to ask is what is your relationship to math and word problems? What made you want to write a story with mathematical word problems as such a central part of the plot?

Whitney Collins: Okay, so this is bewildering to me, because math is really hard for me, and word problems were the bane of my existence in school. I struggled with them. I loved the idea that they were a story, but they got more complicated for me when they were put in that story format. So, I did not intend, initially, for this to be a story about math. Originally someone had told me a story about a, guy who was very, very wealthy, but he tracked his gas mileage down to the penny.” he tracked the weight of his car, and the wind of the day, and how cheap the gas is in town, and I was just fascinated. It was like, this story is amazing to me, this man who has unlimited wealth, basically, and is so stingy and obsessive about the math behind his gas mileage. So, I was like, oh, I'm gonna write a story about someone who is outrageously wealthy, and yet obsessive about every nickel that is spent. And so, I started it with that, and then I realized, oh, I'm gonna have to do math, and then the math got more complicated.

I wrote this story before AI and ChatGPT, so I was actually doing all the math. now I probably would speak into, like, some sort of formulaic thing and ask it to help me with this. But it became this crazy story that was very math-driven, and that was unexpected, but I backed myself into a corner. And then I had kind of a thrill that I was actually able to do the math.

I think there's something interesting about putting a math formula into a story because it makes the reader assume that there's going to be a set resolution or solution. And the fact that the main character actually isn't very good at math kind of gives this tension about, will he be able to solve the problem? So, it's a long way of explaining it, yeah.

KC: Yeah, that totally makes sense, though, thank you! That's really interesting. I think, too, that because the main character is bad at math, I imagine it gave you a little bit more leeway sometimes when writing the story, since you didn’t have to write from the perspective of someone who always understands.

WC: I was imagining if I was in Wendell's position, and there was something I really, really wanted, and my parents had said, okay, you can have that if you can do this in math, I would have been like, oh, let's pick something else. Let's pick a history test. So, I really empathized with him. 

KC: So, moving on from math, I'd really like to hear more about the way you created, specifically, a fictitious historical figure. When I looked him up, I couldn't find any record of Bear Lang, and that surprised me because of how specific you rendered this person. So I was wondering about the experience of inventing not only a fictitious historical figure, but a fictitious Holocaust survivor specifically. What was that like? 

WC: So, it was interesting. I had Wendell in the carpool situation reading a book, and I was like, I'm gonna make it a book about tennis because he's obsessed with it, and Thurston's obsessed with it, and it's gonna be this little tension between them. And so I was like, I'll create a fictitious tennis player, and then I was like, this character has to have really high stakes. And the fact that Thurston and his family, especially his mother, are so outrageously offensive and racist, I was like, oh, let's up the stakes and have this be someone that was negatively affected by World War II. But after I made that general decision, it was almost like I felt like I channeled this fictional character. I just could see him having to make up these makeshift ways to practice tennis. And this character came to life in my brain in a way that no character ever has, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna write it, and then I'm gonna go back and make it historically accurate.

So, he came to life as a fictional character, and then I went back and I did historical research to make sure that these things existed during his time. And then with the Mauthausen concentration camp, I wanted that to be very accurate. So, there was later research, but initially he just kind of came into being as this underdog historical figure.

KC: That's really interesting.

WC: Yeah, thank you. I feel like I just channeled it, I don't know, or, like, he appeared, and I'm like, okay, I'm gonna write this story, and then I'll make sure it's correct later.

KC: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think this is an aspect of really good fiction, but I think the fact that I was shocked that he wasn't real really means something, and I imagine that readers of the story will also be surprised that he's not real. Yeah. Because I fully believed that he was when I was reading it, you know? Just because why wouldn't I? It felt so seamless.

WC: Thank you. Well, it was… he appeared almost like a gift. I would say occasionally that happens in the writing of fiction. Sometimes we get these gifts of where we just see a character, or we see a scenario, or we see a setting, and I just riffed with it, and then did the research later to make sure that it fit in. But occasionally we just are gifted with these little aha moments, and he was wonderful. And so, I was like, I'm going with it. I'm gonna, you know, make it accurate afterward, after the fact.

KC: So my next question is about research, which you already touched on. I was really interested in the fact that you had all these macro-level historical facts (annexation of Austria by the Nazi party in 1938, for instance), but also minute world-building details about life in the early 80s, such as mentions of  Donald Duck orange juice, and there’s some necessary knowledge about tennis. What was your research process like for this story? How much did you have to do, and how did you find it all coalescing into this narrative? 

WC: This story just had a life of its own, and it led me down paths that I did not expect to go down, one of which was math. The other one was, the history of the annexation of Austria, and then the Malthausen concentration camp, and so I wanted to make sure that was accurate. But then I have a love of the 80s, and so I knew those little things to put in, but I also wanted to make sure… For example, the Renault Sportswagon, the car that I chose, that was a car that some of my friend's parents had. And I found myself, like, having to research, can you drill through the gas tank of a Renault Sports Wagon? And the answer is yes, but you're probably going to explode something if you're not really careful. And then Wendell has a cordless drill, and I was like, well, did people have cordless drills in 1981, or did they have to plug them in? So there were weird fact-checking things that I had to do, and I think I got them right. 

But I definitely have an obsession with the 80s. I came of age in the 80s, so I loved all that. But, the tennis thing… I played tennis growing up, and I found that it was such an interesting mix of cultural backgrounds. So, I got that pretty accurate, because I spent a lot of time in a tennis club, and I feel like I accurately described a lot of the men that I observed–their behavior, and their influence. So, there were a lot of things going on: Math, tennis, history, and the 80s.

KC: Totally. Yeah, I mean, it's funny, when you think of historical short stories, you would imagine that even if there's the historical aspect, that the present narrative would be happening in the present. But that isn’t the case here.

WC: Right, so there's two historical periods going on, And the crazy thing is, and maybe frustratingly so, is that we see how little has changed. Like, from World War II, from the 80s. It's weird, because it's a story that I feel is still kind of sadly relevant. I mean, even though it was taking place in the 80s, there's things that haven’t changed–this exorbitant wealth, and how it affects people in ways that continue to happen.

KC: That's actually a great segue to my next question. It seems to me that a major theme of “The Problem” is how forces beyond one's control can take away agency, especially in children. Thurston's experience of deprivation because of his parents' decision-making and their frugality, obviously the things that happened to Bear Lang, and even Wendell is at the whims of his parents. So, as you wrote this story, how much, if at all, were you thinking about the relationships between autonomy and external forces?

WC: I definitely was thinking about them in terms of, well, for Bear Lang, it's clearly a historical situation that is causing his deprivations on certain levels. And I found it fascinating that Thurston was this extremely wealthy child–and this tied into the anecdotal story that someone had told me about the gas tanks and the gas mileage–where the family that they were describing had this immense amount of wealth, and yet the children weren't experiencing their wealth. And in fact, in many ways, Thurston becomes this victim of the wealth. And he almost has this impoverished childhood. There's that one line where he had never owned a pair of shoes that he hadn’t stolen. And so I put the reader in this awkward position of having empathy for this character that is such a jerk. He's stealing stuff, he's cheating. And so it's kind of this making of a monster, so we see how parenting can lead to this, like, disastrous human. And you don't want to have compassion for them, but you kind of do.

KC: Especially by the end. I think Wendell even starts to feel that way by the end.

WC: Yes, and at the end, Wendell is really torn. He's starting to make comparisons between Thurston and his hero at the end, which is this very awkward position of, oh my gosh, now we're feeling for the villain. But then it's also this ambiguity of, will this villain die just like my hero did?

I think there are some interesting things going on in the story in terms of children and parents, and it's very benign with Wendell. His parents are kind of like, “oh, we're gonna motivate you to get a good grade in math so you can go take tennis lessons.” But, still, you see how the parenting influences these children to behave the way they do, and in the end, Wendell ends up committing this major crime. He was supposedly the good guy in the story. It's like pushing people to their extremes through the way that they've been parented.

KC: On another note, what was your decision behind adding almost the red herring of Wendell's heart condition?

WC: Yeah, you know, I'm trying to remember how that came up. I think when I was writing about Bear Lang, and he's in his final match, and he has that heart condition–I think that it just, on a whim, was like, okay, that's gonna be their connecting story there, that maybe Wendell has something going on there, too. And then, also, I like the idea of something that is unnamed, but dangerous. So, we don't know what it is, and it's never really diagnosed, and it's always in the background as this other shoe that's gonna drop. I like that as a literary device, where it's like, “oh yeah, that's right, he has this heart condition.” And I had kind of forgotten about it when I originally conceived of it, and then I had it come back into play when he realizes the shoes have been stolen. And so then, I was like, oh, wait, this is a good time to bring it back in, because it's going to up the tension. So, it doesn't completely play out plot-wise, but it's just always there as this looming possibility. I like that idea of scaring the reader a little bit with the potential of him dropping dead.

And then it switches in the end, because then Thurston comes in, and he looks like he's on the verge of collapse. So it's like, oh, wait, maybe the whole story's gonna flip, because he starts to play like Bear, and Bear's the one that died. That surprised me. I didn't really imagine that flip, and that's what I love about writing a really long story, is that you get into a position where the writer is surprised. If you can write yourself to that point where you personally are surprised, you're like, oh, I don't think this would have happened if I had written an 8-page story.

KC: Yeah, yeah. Even the potential of a protagonist shift (though I think that’s too simple a description for what happens in the story). But the idea of the reader's allegiance changing, of thinking, “wait, who is the central character?” I think sometimes those transitions can only happen when you have room for them to happen.

WC: I agree. This moral arc plays out longer, and we start to see the holes in our characters, where people can only be so good for so long, and people can only be bad for so long. I think that the joy of a longer story, or writing a novel, is that we see where people are broken, and where people have room for redemption. And that shocked me about this story, because I did not like Thurston while I wrote him; I did not expect to have any glimmer of compassion for him, and then I wrote that scene where he comes in, and he makes it to the tennis match, and I'm like, oh, am I starting to root for this despicable character a little bit? I think that's the joy of a longer story, and I only have a few longer stories in my repertoire, and weird things have happened in them like that.

KC: Thank you! This next question is very long, but I really want to talk about it: An authorial choice that fascinated me was the way you described Thurston’s head and face. It seems like every time he appears in the story, his head is described, even when the rest of him isn’t. That gives us amazing lines like “Thurston’s face is like a bowling ball, inhumanly round, with two eyes and a nose squeezed tight in the middle—three holes Wendell could poke his fingers into and throw down a greased alley,” “His white spheric head bobs like a balloon brought home from the store,” and “From afar, Thurston’s head seems rounder and lighter than ever before, an orb gliding into the night.” This consistent description of his head, with such a focus on its roundness and movement–was it something you intentionally decided to do? If so, could you talk about why? 

WC: So, I think originally, there's an opening scene, I think this is maybe the first time it's described, I could be wrong. But, when the car pulls up and Wendell can see Thurston from a distance, he's like this looming character. He's not featureless, but he's almost inhuman. He's almost like this cartoon, or this ghost, or this specter, or like the human form of the heart problem that's just kind of always looming. I liked the idea that he just had this kind of detestable, I hate to say this, but it's kind of like this punch-able face, just a bully. He's like the big, white, looming bully. And I felt like that metaphorically played into a little bit of the political undertones of the story, which is the overt whiteness. Yeah, so there's probably some metaphor there involved with that, but it's also just that I didn't want to make him seem as human as the other characters. There's something a little more animated and fake about him.

Sometimes these things just happen, and I visualize what it would look like to have that person pulling up in your driveway, and you're like, “creepy–I'm being stared at!” So, yeah, he doesn't really have a whole lot of other distinguishing qualities other than that.  

KC: Exactly, and Thurston’s kind of unknowable, too, in a way that I think maybe this description emphasizes, because it others him in very specific ways. I think there's still a lot that, by the end of the story, we do not fully understand about him. 

WC: Right. He doesn't have a lot of human qualities about him, so I kind of make him not human. And then, the first time we see him as human is when he comes in late to that match. And it's like, that was the first time that I felt like I actually saw him as a person. Like, everything else was a persona. So, there could be some of that at play, too. It's like, he wasn't quite human until the end, and so his description wasn't quite human either.

KC: We're now on to my final question, but it might take you a little bit of time to think about. I wanted to ask, if you were going to spend a ton of money and countless hours locating the memorabilia of one sports player, dead or alive, who would it be, and why?

WC: Oh, that's a great one! Well, I am a tennis fan… that's really hard. I would probably go with one of the early women tennis players, like Billie Jean King, and see if I could get one of their original wooden rackets, the kind that, you look at and you're like, that's not a tennis racket, that's a snowshoe! That's probably what I would do, go back to get Billy Jean King’s tennis racquet from her match against Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes” competition in 1973. She beat him handily and did more for women’s tennis than anyone who came before her. Her racquet for that match was a wooden Wilson that ended up selling for $125,000.

KC: Wow! Do you still play tennis?

WC: I do! I haven't played this past year, but I do still play. I love it, and I love that it requires such focus. As a writer, I spend so much time in my brain with a million scenarios. But when I’m playing tennis, it requires all my focus. It's very good for an ADHD-leaning brain to just go do something that's single-minded, especially in our, like we said [before the interview officially began], our TikTok culture, you know?