Dissecting the Craft of Writing

Sam Ashworth is one of the first writers I met when I moved to the DMV in 2017. Since then, he’s been one of the people I talk with most about the writing life. He’s published magazine features and essays, ghostwritten bestsellers, and now I’m excited to add “novelist” to his list of accomplishments. He was kind enough to share his thoughts on the craft of writing, and how The Death and Life of August Sweeney came to be.

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ZP: This novel is told, in part, through the autopsy of one of its main characters. First, how did this premise come to you? Second, what does this mode of storytelling open up for you that might not have been available in a “default” narrative form?

SA: The book actually began with the premise. I was sitting in a bar in Boston in 2011, talking to someone about dead bodies. Very normal, very regular bar conversation. But out of my mouth fell the words, “it would be interesting to tell a person’s life story by dissecting their body.” And then I stared into the middle distance for what felt, at least, like whole minutes. Because the entire book assembled itself in that instant. Not the characters and the drama and sex scenes, but the book itself – the work it would take, the learning I’d have to do, the pull of the story. It all cohered in that moment. Then the person I was with told me about Mary Roach’s Stiff, which is all about “the curious lives of human cadavers,” and that was pretty much it.

For the next 10 or so years it took to write it, I never deviated from that premise. The only question was who the dead body was, and who was telling his story by dissecting him. The big decision that happened—and really made the book possible—was that initially the plan was to have the dissector be a first-year med student in Gross Anatomy, so the cadaver they’re dissecting is pretty long-dead and preserved. But when I really started writing I realized a medical student didn’t have the knowledge that I needed to tell the story. So she became a proper doctor, which meant the body changed. Now he’s a man who died the night before. And in the end, the book took the form of an autopsy report.

If anything, I have learned I can’t really write without a premise like this—something to legitimize the delusional act of writing a whole book about something that never happened.

You spent time in both restaurant kitchens and autopsy rooms to research the novel. Can you you share a bit about your research process, especially these more immersive types of research? And how do you integrate the facts discovered through research into the story?

I profoundly envy movie actors who get to prep for roles by getting paid to go to a five-week fencing bootcamps or train in tap dance or sew a ball gown or whatever. As a novelist, I see my job as a less-subsidized version of that.

My hero on this was Ian McEwan. When he was writing Saturday, he spent two years shadowing neurosurgeons. At one point, he was observing a surgery, when two young residents mistook him for a doctor and asked him to explain what was happening. To his astonishment, he could. That was the level I felt I had to hit with Maya Zhu. I had to make her not only knowledgeable, I had to make her brilliant.

But I didn’t have two years, I had the summer of 2017. Fortunately, I was still a graduate student, and people are a lot more willing to let grad students observe them than journalists. Also, I didn’t have kids yet. That summer, my friend Nick was doing his residency in pathology at Pitt, and he happened to be doing his autopsy rotation under basically the one guy in America who was cool with letting some shmuck spend two weeks in his lab, observing and even helping out. (They didn’t let me cut anything, which was for the best.) I had actually written a few chapters of the pathologist’s story, and within ten minutes in the lab I knew I’d have to throw every word of it out. If I hadn’t had that experience, I’d never have finished the book. I’d been basing my imagination of an autopsy lab on what I’d seen on TV. You might as well base a novel about astronauts on Star Trek.

For the cooking side, I’d worked in restaurants and bars since I was 18, but always in the front of house. I knew the world much better, but had little concept of what it was like to work a line. I was given a grant by the Alan Cheuse International Writers Center at George Mason University to go be a stagiaire, or trainee, at a Michelin-starred restaurant in a little town in the south of France. I’ve written about this experience at some length, but the short version is that it was invaluable to the book, and I’d also take the dead bodies any day of the week. I still don’t know how to work a line. I can concasse the shit out of some tomatoes, though.

However you do it, the real trouble with research isn’t doing or organizing it, it’s deploying it. Early versions of the book (maybe even the final version, I don’t know) suffered from Maya Zhu going into such detail on human anatomy and physiology that it overwhelmed the reader. When you write characters who are experts in something, you have to remember that expertise manifests not in knowing all the things, but in being able to immediately extract the thing that actually matters to them in that moment.

The novel is told in alternating sections: flashbacks to August’s life and scenes in the autopsy room with Maya. How do you manage the two narrative threads so that they communicate with each other across the chapter break? In other words, what makes two threads one story?

The thing that makes the two threads one story is that they’ve been laid out, printed, bound, shipped, and sold as one story. Publication does amazing things for an author’s credibility. The reader assumes that because they bought this book with money I must know what I’m doing. Therefore they trust subconsciously that somehow these two disconnected stories will cohere into one—and if, in the end, they don’t, they will want to punch me.

Fortunately, they do cohere (and it doesn’t even take that long). The structure is simply that the book covers August’s entire life, plus one day. The point being that there is still life left in the body, as long as we know how to look for it. Maya’s story begins right where August’s ends, and it’s her job to give him that ending. What I like most about the interlaced structure is that it allows me to mix up the time signature of the book. Maya’s story takes one day, but is paced slowly, with the scenes building to a crescendo; August’s story covers 52 years, so decades can happen at a gallop.

You’re a bestselling ghostwriter and you’ve had pieces in top-tier publications, but this is your first novel. How are the various aspects of your writing life connected? What from your other experiences influenced the novel? Conversely, have you found anything to be unique to novel-writing?

What’s funny (not ha-ha) about this is that the novel was finished before most of those other things. Which is another way of saying I am very tired.

The answer is that as a writer I’m remarkably boring: the thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is solving writing problems. I think a lot of writers are motivated by a love of storytelling, which, sure, but what I love specifically is figuring out how to give that story the kind of galvanic jolt that will make it jump off the page. And I don’t really give a hoot whether that story is mine or someone else’s. As a journalist or ghostwriter, I get to take really interesting stories and figure out how to apply that voltage to it, while subtracting all the anxieties that most authors feel about publication, reception, and sales. That last thing matters, to be clear. I consider writing my own work to be my job. If you want to take me away from that work, you have to pay me enough money to make that hiatus worth it. Because when I’m ghostwriting, I’m not just giving the client my time, I’m also renting them all my creative energy for a few months. And I think writers should put a serious price tag on that.

The other thing I like is that journalism and ghostwriting expose me to worlds I might not ever explore otherwise, like politics, business, and PTSD recovery. I see my job as a novelist similarly. I am not ever going to be the kind of person who writes intimate relationship dramas, or generational sagas, or (God forbid) novels about writers. I’m just not emotionally interesting enough for that. I like to write about work. I like to write about people who do extraordinary things for so long that those things have become routine, and then the book begins on the day that it ceases to be routine. Ghostwriting allows me to plunge in my clients’ worlds, which (if they’re of a stature that justifies hiring a ghost) are usually pretty rad.

I’m being completely serious when I say that I think one of the great American books is Andre Agassi’s Open, by JR Moehringer (who also wrote Prince Harry’s Spare). It can go toe-to-toe with any literary memoir out there. I want to write that kind of book every bit as much as I want to write fancy fiction. I desperately want to write the memoir of a baseball player, or a member of the USWNT. I could have gotten a goddamn masterpiece out of, like, Snooki

When we host author Q&As at the Center, we almost always get a question about an author’s process: how and where and when they write. You and I just chatted about this category of question the other day, and you had some interesting thoughts. Would you care to share?

I understand the process question, I really do. The problem is that it’s worthless.

There is an old George Price New Yorker cartoon that my father used to keep in his office. It was a painter in his garret, impoverished-looking, with his harried wife behind him. And the painter says, “I haven’t suffered enough. Why don’t you go whip up some of your curried pork balls and refried rice for dinner?” I feel like the process question is really asking “how much did you suffer to make this book?”, as if a book’s quality is proportional to its Suffering Quotient. (If it helps sales, I suffered plenty for this one. You try deep-cleaning a walk-in fridge while it’s still running.)

The problem is, writers love to talk about their process, since it’s often the one element of the writing life over which we have any real control. Most of our lives are about enabling ourselves to have and maintain any semblance of consistency. Despite the fact that there is a pretty colossal industry devoted to marketing writer’s processes as if they were dietary supplements, learning how one writer writes so will never be of any value to anyone else. Knowing that Balzac drank enough coffee to kill God every day, or that  Haruki Murakami runs a daily 10k, or that Lauren Groff writes everything longhand, does nothing but make us feel bad about ourselves. Because there are no answers out there. The only answers are [taps chest] in here. There is no Joe Manganiello’s Workout Regimen for writers; there are no efficiency hacks or Jedi mind tricks. A writer’s process consists of whatever it takes to make ourselves do the only three things writing requires: sitting, typing, and deleting. Sitzfleisch and words on the page. The rest is commentary.

People want to know how the writer pulled it off in the same way they want to know how the magician got out of those handcuffs. They imagine that the question will give them some kind of deeper insight into the text. It won’t, because writing is such a black box—even to the writer. The difference between a writer and a magician is that the magician could tell you how they got out of the handcuffs, but they won’t, while a writer would love to tell you how they wrote the book, but they can’t. My book feels like mine, but it also feels like it was written by someone else. And I have no idea how that guy did it.

Finally, what’s one piece of advice you’d give to an author just starting out?

There are so many more ways to be a writer than you think. I grew up imagining that to be a writer meant you wrote a book, sold a book, then wrote another book, then sold that, and so on until you died. I knew that not all books were bestsellers so I would have to teach, too. That was what I thought I was supposed to do.

Today, I am a novelist, a screenwriter, a ghostwriter, a journalist, an essayist, an editor, and a professor. My job is words and stories and I make pretty good money doing it. But the thing I’m most proud of in my career is that I’ve reached a point where when an opportunity arises to do something I’ve never done before, I never say, “I don’t know how to do that.” I say yes, the picture of confidence, and then as soon as the other person is out of earshot I call a friend and say, “Oh, God, help me.”