AO: I think that is true. I've been criticized for having the characters be too passive, but I find it to be true to life. I'm not sure why it can be hard sometimes for women to make decisions and take control of their lives. Maybe because we're more intent on making things work for other people and not for ourselves.
In some of the stories I found myself creating characters whose passivity causes them to do damage. They behave badly and make the wrong decision. Like in "Local News" she ends up sleeping with this scum-baggy guy out of a tangle of emotions that she's not able to act on correctly, so it comes out in the wrong way. That, I think, is also true to life for a lot of people, male and female.
AC: That's true. It's not necessarily about gender.
AO: Yeah, I don't actually think of it in a gendered way. I think of it more as a matter of sensibility. I didn't so much set out to write about women, but about a certain kind of character. It's a character I'm drawn to create, perhaps -- as much as I don't want to admit it -- because I have a lot in common with them.
That was actually one of the biggest editorial comments on the first draft of the novel, actually. My teacher thought that Lynn wasn't willing enough to get into trouble. People would give her a hard time and she wouldn't really react. I had to make her a bit less nice and a bit more willing to make mistakes and get involved with people. Otherwise nothing was going to happen.
AC: That's one of the hardest thing about writing a short story. You have to make something happen, or at least make the reader feel as though something has happened, in a very short period of time. I thought you pulled that off in these stories. Like "Edgewater," for example. I was interested in how both characters, the bartender and the little girl, do in some way take power by the end of the story, albeit through passive-aggressive means.
AO: Again, in a really destructive way, but they do end up coming to action. When I'm writing I often think of the character as being underwater at the beginning of the story, and the action of the story is that character breaking the surface. That's a metaphor I keep in my mind a lot when I think about plot. At what point do they break the surface and either do something or acknowledge their own emotion, which is the first step to taking action? Like in that story "Transcription," the real story is Carl acknowledging the fact that his uncle is going to die. There's going to be pain. There's just no getting around it.
AC: How carefully do you plot out your stories?
AO: I've become much more interested in plot as I've gone on, and you can see that in the stories. The earlier stories, in the beginning of the book, are not necessarily as plot-driven as the later stories. This is something I've worked on because it makes the stories more interesting to read. Now I plot out my stories a lot more and I enjoy thinking of the plots. If I can't think of one, then I'll usually set the story aside. Before I would come up with a character and the plot was just the psychological maneuvering of the character. Now I try to give them more external stimuli to work with.