Piece Together the Rest

Being a directionless twenty-something in my spare time, reading Sasha & The Whale felt akin to brushing hands with a true auteur of Grade A, anomalous, youthful indecision. Charlie Pike’s prose style blended together the haze and dogma of self-determination with some of the most whimsical and memorable scene-writing I’ve had the pleasure of reading since the initial launch of Chatterbox!

I recently had the honor of getting together with Charlie to run little a new-age sermon on Joan Didion, the incremental pursuit of beauty, and the result of not buying into other people’s bullshit.

Connor Harding: Hey Charlie! Thanks so much for joining us today for a little conversation about Sasha & the Whale.

Charlie Pike: Thanks so much for having me.

CH: Let's kick things off by talking a little bit about writing malaise.

As a story, Sasha & the Whale has a particularly steady hand at sewing directionlessness into the fabric of its characters while rendering the world they live in with a loving sense of community and (a lot of times) whimsy. So when you're writing about a person who's going through a funk in life, how do you go about balancing their personal stagnation and loneliness within a narrative that is always striving to find deeper and more meaningful connection?

CP: I think the easiest way to start this conversation is to talk about how I go about writing stories in general. I'm very much inspired by George Saunders' idea of Write one interesting sentence and then try to make the next one equally interesting and exciting. I'm probably butchering that to some degree. Most of my pieces and characters come to life sentence by sentence, and eventually I'll notice something—like there's a pattern here, and when there's a pattern, I immediately want to make it more interesting.

As it relates to malaise, this was the first piece where I really felt my influences (and all the voices that I've read over the years) coalesce into a new voice that became mine. And it really became mine when I started folding in autobiographical information. I lived in San Francisco for a year and went through a bit of a malaise period where I was having a great time and doing a lot of fun things—like learning to surf for the first time, going on runs, living in one of the most beautiful places in the country—but mentally, I was in a haze. The writing I strive to do manages to capture that universal feeling  of in-between: That life goes on, even when you want it to stop. Not in the depressive way (laughter), but the can we just pause for a minute, so I can figure out where I’m at and find my bearings? way.

I found it compelling to write those moments of excitement from the perspective of somebody who was there and present, but not really “buying into it”, because their head was a million miles from Earth. I don't know. That was probably a wandering answer.

CH: First of all, we at Chatterbox! love a wandering answer, especially about a story so engaged with the idea of wandering. I find it fascinating—and upon hearing you say it in retrospective—really spot on, that the idea of the Saunders-esque, find them one sentence at a time philosophy was an inspiration. I think it’s clear from this story’s prose style that each sentence was deeply and thoroughly considered. Exploration of the line as a cohesive unit that builds and builds and builds, like sheaves of paper into something more sturdy, has always been a fascinating element of the craft for me. So I totally relate to the approach.

CP: My big secret is I'm a poet at heart. (Don't tell anyone, you know?). I don't have the type of confidence to map an entire story and hold it in my head with a bunch of connecting and weaving threads. But I do have the confidence to write a cool sentence, and that's what I'm drawn to, and so I start there, where my strength is, and then piece together the rest.

CH: That's a great strength to work from, especially when it comes to long-form fiction. The idea of a quote-unquote tightly plotted narrative oftentimes becomes a little trite if you're pushing and cramming mechanisms paragraph-by-paragraph for 8,000 words straight. When you're able to do more work with image, or string together many sentences into one beautiful long paragraph—like in the beach party scene leading into Tommy's bedroom—I think something particularly special begins to happen in the draft in front of you. It’s granular cohesion and intention at work—and that's absolutely a major part of what makes Sasha & the Whale so exceptionally cool.

CP: Thank you.

CH: Relating back to Sasha—throughout the story, I found the decision to constantly entrench her in massive social/public gatherings to both complement and contrast the distant interior monologue that shapes the disconnected, not-buying-into-it nature of her character in the piece. And within that, I found a lot of adoration for how she takes these busy, chaotic settings and breaks them down into their component elements.

So, for a lack of a better (or more literary) terminology, I just wanted to ask your process when it comes to working the crowd. When writing a character moving through frantic, massive, maximalist environments, how do you make sure the small moments still get rendered precisely through your scenes?

CP: Well, for the most part, what is observed is literally what Sasha chooses to see. There's some moments where things get a little omniscient, and whether that's a strength or a weakness, we'll let the readership decide (laughter).

But for me, I really dislike sitting at my desk—this big antique one that either me or a roommate found on the street—and I sit on this really uncomfortable chair. I could invest in a better space, but I don't. And I always cross my legs, and scoot the chair up and bump the desk, and it's super wobbly, and I get super frustrated. Being at the desk without being entertained or fully engaged in what I'm writing is pretty tough.

That’s why I love writing those maximalist scenes—there are certain moments where you arrive at the end of a paragraph, and you're like, Okay, what the heck's gonna happen next? I've gotten us here, but now I have to reread and look for threads that I can return to or pull out further. Getting distracted by various images you introduce, like, somebody doing ketamine off a BPA-free cutting board, and then all of a sudden we're on a beach, and there's a piece of cardboard on fire, and then we're in a bedroom after a one-night stand—for me, that’s where I always return to. At the sentence level of things, I just trust my ear can hear the right thing and follow it, you know?

It's gonna sound weird, but people might understand it if they're like me. I feel I can tell when a sentence is finished, or when it needs to keep going. I kind of listen to it, and the rapture of paragraph-writing goes until it is over. Then I stand up and I'm like How are we gonna turn back to plot again now that we have the moments that we have? In this story, it was really me letting loose with that feeling. I could do that because the story was inherently linked to what Sasha physically observed around her.

CH: I totally feel that. This is a follow-up that popped into mind as you were talking. I love the idea of musicality of a line helping you to notate when a line is finished. When you’re writing, what are some of the things you look for, or what feeling strikes you, when you realize that a line has reached its natural endpoint? What’s the signifier for when a Charlie Pike Line™ has cooked perfectly?

CP: Oh my gosh. I mean I gotta shoutout my English teachers for introducing some meter, you know?

CH: (laughter)

CP: But to a certain extent, it’s just a sense I’ve gathered from reading, and reading, and reading. Like Joan Didion, for example. I’m a sentence-first guy, so I seek out books with good sentences. I care less what the book is about and more about how well it’s written. There's a rhythm to things that people say. To the way that a sentence moves. You can tell when it's not ready to be done yet. I wish I could explain it better. Maybe I should sit down and write an essay about it. What do you think? Do you have a similar experience?

CH: I think I do. I also used to write a lot of poetry. The line has subsequently become the intensive craft focus for a lot of what I do. Like any other thing in the writing process, I believe with the depth of intention comes better translation between what the writer is trying to spiritually process and what the reader is able to pick up from it.

When it comes down to line-by-line, when you break down those blocks into their smallest, most minuscule form—and if the reader is able to follow it from A to B to C to D, and you could feel that while still maintaining…what's the term I'm looking for? That surreal sense you always get when you examine art. Something esoteric. If you manage to reach out through all of that ambiguity and specificity and find the person on the other side, you’ve made a line worth reading.

But at the same time, I couldn't cut it as a poet, so… (laughter)

CP: I think that's spot on. That’s the way it feels when I'm writing a sentence where I'm like, heck yeah, this is absolutely cooking, word for word. Even syllable to syllable. Like that beach scene again. Oh, that reminds me of this sound, and this context reminds me of this context, and all of a sudden these things and plot are happening, and there's this great feeling of stillness inside me as I'm spilling into the line, or something poetic like that, you know?

CH: To scoot along a little bit more from line-by-line, I want to enter a discussion about one of the other most interesting impressive left-field craft moments from the story, which is your inclusion of live sermon.

I feel the average reader encounters a lot of stories where there is a story within a story that ends up crashing the scene and interloping for a few pages, and it’s always an incredibly bold narrative move. In Sasha & the Whale, Sasha not buying-in and ignoring intrusive parables over the sake of eggs and toast adds an additional layer of boldness on top of that. But when the two interact, I felt it formed a nearly subversive form-tackle on the triteness of parable in fiction.

So, as a general question to you, when you were first drafting Sasha & the Whale, what inspirations did you draw from to create the apologue of Blowhole? And what drew you to the concept of a sermon as a means to deepen Sasha's signature aloofness to it?

CP: I honestly arrived at a kind of cliff's edge. Early on, I wrote the first pages (before they head off to Ratcliffe’s recital), and then for three months, I was just writing other things. When I eventually came back to Sasha, I was like, okay, what can I do now? I wanted to take Sasha somewhere that's not the apartment. And so the recital became a scene. And then I was suddenly back to another cliff's edge. So I pushed for more to happen. Eventually she's tried to find redemption in all these different places, and it's still not working. But I don't know where to go next, so I finally went back to what I’d already written (and lived).

In the first few paragraphs of the story, and where I lived in San Francisco, I stayed right next door to this church, (which in real life was closed permanently). So that's a little bit of Easter Egg autobiography in there. And so then Sasha lived next to this church too, and I thought maybe her and her roommates would play this game where they make fun of the sermons, but sometimes believe them. When somebody's desperately seeking something, they'll look at what’s right in front of them. So I thought it would be natural for her to want to go over there, maybe to be saved.

However, the most interesting fiction never gives you what you want when you're supposed to have it. And I didn't want to have a sermon be the answer. At that point I didn't know what the eventual solution would be for her, but I knew she can't be invested in whatever she’s about to hear there. Maybe she'll go skydiving or something—I didn’t know until I knew. Then I went on a walk, and I was looking up. Thinking about stuff. I was raised Methodist. Stopped going in middle school. But Bible stories always came off funny, and cool, and important, and rich as texts.

I wanted the church to be New Age, even though everybody that goes there is old. so I wondered, what would be a New Age hip-to-the-kids sermon that's still biblical, but more immediately entertaining? Well—what if it's the whale that swallowed Jonah from the whale's perspective. (laughter)

Pretty much every decision in this story was arrived at incrementally through a bunch of smaller decisions, made somewhat on a whim, because I thought they were exciting, or, made sense of semi-senseless craziness, or pushed the narrative closer to that excitement I was talking about before.

CH: I absolutely pictured the church being New Age. I could picture a youth pastor stepping up to bat, like, cracking his shoulders and going in with a subversive Jonah story. I think there's something to be said about the rewriting of those stories, creating facsimiles of the original feelings spurred by them. It drives home that feeling of un-investment, because you still feel like you're chasing the ghost of something.

CP: No yeah, like is this guy for real?

CH: As real as fiction gets. Changing gears from there, I wanted to ask about what you mentioned before—about points of narrative omniscience from Sasha's character. Specifically about the future of the fiddle instructor upon leaving the concert and never returning, and then Sasha’s premonition of the salt on the air in the final paragraphs.

This story is filled with moments of walking along that proverbial, uncertain cliff's edge. So, when tempering the role of the narrator in your fiction, how do you work to integrate moments of surprise into what is an otherwise consistently uncertain and textured voice?

CP: Excellent question. To a certain degree, life's realizations arrive outside of our control. We don't get to decide when the world looks beautiful to us. I mean, talk to me a month from now and I'll say something equally gravitas that contradicts myself, but…there's a line in this story where Sasha is searching for beauty so much that it hurts, and she sees beauty, but she can't find salvation in it. We can set the scene for them, we can set the table and ring the dinner bell, but people show up on their own time. When it comes to writing fiction, I do it a lot like I live. One sentence at a time. You're typing out a series of syllables that has taken you on a rocket ship somewhere, and then you arrive, and it feels like a moment of clarity. Or maybe you find a beat where it’s like dang, I really have been talking a lot in this story. Maybe we should  throw the readers a bone (laughter). Here's a piece of information that will make sure that you're still with me, and we'll move the story along.

It’s either that or the inherent beauty of the world just rains down upon the fiction writer. Like they have been touched by the muse or whatever.

CH: (laughter) It's just for us. The beauty of the world. Nobody else gets to have any.

CP: Yeah, sorry about it. Start writing fiction, if you want the beauty of the world.

CH: But I totally feel that. Surprise, I think, doesn’t come when it's called for. Only when it needs to be there. Even if it's unspoken. There’s incremental processing for that. A healthy way to present surprise allots you space to explore and give it definition at the point it feels most necessary. 

Charlie: Yeah.

CH: That was our last goofy, craft-intensive question. The others are lighter, I promise. We talked a little bit before about writing malaise and about writing through a funk (or about a funk). Now  I wanted to dive into the opposite end of pedestrian living. Those beautiful, deeply interior, and specific moments that can be drawn out by adhering to the simplicity of the daily living that we do.

I think immediately of the animals and the people interacting in the park, and the shuffling awkwardness of the crowd that precedes the fiddle recital. Those scenes read with that one golden word—idiosyncrasy, and it feels deeply personal, to the point that it does that good job of bridging the gap of enticement between fiction and lived experience. Do you find it important for writers of fiction to engage deeply with their moments of quiet, daily living? And what do you think a story truly has to gain by stopping to examine the daisies as they break over the grass?

CP: I don't want to be prescriptive and say every fiction writer must turn ordinary into the extraordinary with their writing, because everybody has their different strengths. My particular desire to do that stems from a nonfiction creative writing class I took in college, and being equal parts lazy and interested in how every day can be a source of creative inspiration. So I started writing, or transcribing, moments as they occurred. And wouldn't you know it? All these metaphors for living populated the page.

For me—I bring my characters somewhere. And then all there is to do is keep writing. You gotta keep writing. Until it’s done. I take what I observe, and I translate it into something engaging and lyrical, and I think what’s gained is pure interiority expressed through the character’s way of seeing. Just on another level, it reminds us that we’re all living in a narrative right now.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We write to find out more. Insert some Joan Didion quotes here to bookend what I said at the start (laughter).

CH: This interview is sponsored by Joan, by the way.

CP: No absolutely. But I really love to find meaning in things, and finding ways to say what we all know in a way that nobody has heard before. It unlocks an understanding at the core of the thing. Like, if you can describe the absurdity of logging onto a laptop and Zooming with a person 800-miles away and talking about words that you've written, it lets people into a crazy cool and beautiful interior place.

CH: I like to imagine all fiction is a search for beauty in one capacity or another. Whether it’s an indulgence of it or an examination of it, or even some subversive meaning-making surrounding it. It all comes back to the understanding.

CP: When I’m writing, and I sit down at my uncomfortable desk, I start toward a feeling of stillness, which I think exists in all of us, and I think, at the end of the day, that's all that literature really ends up seeking out. The stillness in you that you can help others discover.

CH: Absolutely—just write it down, somebody else might find it with you. Like you said, if you’ve felt something, we've probably all felt it. There's what, a couple billion of us around these days?

CP: Something like that.

CH: Maybe there's a way to have people be able to look into that trick mirror and see a little bit of themselves. That's a meaningful pursuit in my book.

And that leads us to our last, and most perilous question.

CP: Oh boy.

CH: I'd like to end today's interview off by having an exclusive question dedicated to our friends and official magazine affiliates—Gutter and Ratcliffe.

CP: (Laughter)

CH: We at Chatterbox! collectively adore bizarre roommate culture, so I can’t let you go before you spill the beans about when the names dawned on you, when they were actualized in your drafting process—as you wrote those lines one after another— and if (and we can only hope if) they are based on people you have met in real life. So, from piss stains to PBR's, how did you go about writing Sasha's ultimate broskis?

CP: They were a product of those first few paragraphs I mentioned earlier. In the whole Let's be maximalists! Let's figure out what we can include in here that’s exciting and weird and strange! phase. I arrived at Sasha sitting in her room, and it was time for something new to happen. What can happen? She lives in an apartment. Who does she live with? A roommate. What's his name? We'll call him Gutter. No sense to it. But once they were Gutter, it became a funny name for a funny vibe. Completely parenthetical character-building . I like doing that with my characters.

Then with Ratcliffe, I wanted the two to talk and interact the way I talk and interact with people sometimes. Because I felt so generally fed up of writing literary dialogue. The pair of them were born when I gave myself permission for him to just say yo, slime. Then, suddenly, I knew exactly who these people were. I went to college with them. I went to high school with them. I, to a certain degree, am them. My friends in San Francisco are them.

It’s how we always talked, when we were tired and surrounded by nothing but friends.