Interview with David Wroblewski

I spoke with author David Wroblewski for this story, which ran in January 2010. You can click on the jump or see it on the website of  The Dallas Morning News.



From the Jan. 19, 2010 Dallas Morning News 

Wroblewski reflects on the Austin scene  

By MICHAEL MERSCHEL


AUSTIN - Living in Austin in the late 1980s, David Wroblewski was clearly on the road to success as a writer. But not obviously as a writer of books.

Back then, he was writing computer code and doing artificial-intelligence research. His lab was part of the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp. consortium, and he describes it as "the kind of place where people would bring in sleeping bags and just sleep in their office."

"The talent pool that they drew to Austin for MCC was amazing," he says during a recent visit to the city he called home from 1985 to 1990.

"It was like, well, I don't want to use a sports metaphor because I don't follow sports. But it was like from out of nowhere being drafted into the major leagues. And I was getting to work with people whose textbooks I read. It was phenomenal. And those were boom times in Austin. The parties were lavish."

It's hard to imagine a setting more unlike that of his critically praised 2008 best-seller, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, a story that revolves around the breeding of some extraordinary dogs on a remote Wisconsin farm. And it would be hard for most people to see the connection between the world of software and the world of literature.

But to Wroblewski, who will be in Dallas on Thursday as part of the Dallas Museum of Art's Arts & Letters Live series, it's all related.

"I think most of the lessons I learned about writing I learned about software first," he says. "But I describe software differently from the way most people do.

"The right way to think about a piece of software is as a piece of kinetic sculpture. That's what it really is. It's got a lot of moving parts. And you learn to hold them in your head - which is difficult to do, to keep all the moving parts in your mind at once so that you know if I change this part over here" - he gestures with his right hand - "this part over here" - and then with his left - "is going to go awry.

"That is no different at all from trying to hold an entire novel in your head when you're doing a revision on it. It's exactly the same. And it requires some practice." Another way the disciplines are similar, he says: You rarely get things right on the first try.

"In the software world, they call them revisions. Or releases. Same idea. The idea that you can make a bad version 1, and before anybody has to see it, you can make a good version 2, or a better version 2. And then if you're willing to do enough drafts, or enough versions, you're either going to discover you're doing the wrong thing or you'll converge on something good."

Wroblewski clearly found a way to do something good with Sawtelle. It was declared a best book of the year by multiple publications, and, according to publisher Ecco, has more than 1 million copies in print. But although it was his first novel, it was hardly an overnight success. Asked how long the book took, he replies: "The short version is seven years, long version is 15."

His final result - more or less his 12th rewrite, he estimates - is a blend of classic dog story and family drama, with allusions to Hamlet and The Jungle Book.

"One way to describe this book is as a piece of science fiction," he says. "No one ever describes it that way, and that's fine with me. But it's sort of like genetic science fiction. On the farm."

The book does draw from some of his own background. He grew up the child of dog breeders in Wisconsin. And yes, he does have a dog now. Just don't ask him what kind.

"I get very frustrated with breed generalizations," he says. "I think they're the equivalent of horoscopes."

His appearance in Dallas will be in the winding-down phase of a lengthy tour that has taken him across the country and around the world. He's looking forward to settling down in 2010 and working on a pair of projects.

One is a nonfiction anthology, he says, based on material he studied during his research for Sawtelle: "All these fabulous papers on animal cognition and animal behavior that I think are really interesting and, if they are tied together correctly, would be really interesting for a general readership. But the big thing is the next novel." Which is still in its formative stages.

In all his thinking about craftsmanship, he has not come across a solution to make that process simple. "Kurt Vonnegut said, 'When I write I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in my mouth.' There is no better way to describe that. I do not feel I have a mastery of the medium in any way."

Plan your life

7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood St. $15 to $37 at DallasMuseumofArt.org/ALL or 214-922-1818.