"In One Second...": Andy Mozina on TANDEM, His New Novel

To outline, or not to outline--that is (one of) the question(s)

Oct 18, 2023

A glance ahead to the next few weeks: an interview with Anthony Varallo, whose new story collection, What Did You Do Today?, won the Katherine Anne Porter Prize and is out in November. (The title story appeared in the New Yorker’s Daily Shouts column - you can read it here—humor, friends, humor! Good god/goddess/guru do we need it.)

And an interview with Garnett Kilberg Cohen (her new short story collection, Cravings, is out on Halloween), along with Agent List XII, a post on literary puns (“I just love hot dogs!” he said with relish) & je ne sais quoi d’autre, chers amis. 📗

Today’s post features author and Kalamazoo College professor Andy Mozina, whose new novel, Tandem, is out on October 24 from Chicago-based indie press Tortoise Books (founding editor Jerry Brennan contributed his insider’s POV to an early July post on starting an indie press. Jerry is also a novelist—his most recent book is Alone on the Moon.)

I’ll leave you now with Andy, who shares insights about balancing the complexities of plot, morality, and decision-making in novel-writing.

AM1: What inspired you to write Tandem and how did you conceive of your twin protagonists?

Andy Mozina: Within the span of a few weeks, I accidentally ran a red light, stopping only inches from t-boning someone, and then heard a story about drunk driving crashes on NPR. I wasn’t drunk when I ran that red light, but I was wildly distracted by my own thoughts and an unfamiliar driving situation, and I was stunned by how quickly a life could change for both victim and perpetrator. My mother had a way of trying to scare us out of doing dangerous things that she eventually boiled down into the ominous phrase “in one second…” This novel is a way of finishing her sentence.

As I started drafting the story in 2016, events in certain quarters of our political world made me just a little obsessed with accountability and frustrated by our maddening capacity for rationalizing bad behavior. I thought of a drunk-driving hit-and-run where Mike, the perpetrator, was not blithely irresponsible but actually desperate to make up for his moment of abject weakness, and I wanted an imperfect victim, Claire, struggling with the weight of her grief.

I made Mike an economics professor because economists are great at rationalizing motivations, and I made Claire a TED-talk-loving, liberal museum curator who finds her own capacity for bad behavior awakened. Then I made them neighbors. And I decided that Mike would try to “make up for” his crime while continually postponing the moment of confession.

AM2: Is there a place for humor in a story that begins with a tragedy?

AM: I think so, mostly in the “if I didn’t laugh, I’d cry” sense. Humor can do a lot of different things. As satire, it attacks the attitudes and behaviors that cause our problems. As irony, it exposes our pretensions and lies and instructs us to do better. As absurdity, it notices the punishing prevalence of unintended outcomes and the relentless spiraling of consequences. And in all of its forms it provides an emotional release, which tragedies eventually demand. Threading it into this novel involved realizing when some moments might be funny while assuming others definitely weren’t.

Novelists have always used dark humor, and I think the Coen brothers and TV shows like Dead to Me and Barry have pushed the envelope, and my sensibility tends to live in those spaces.

AM3: Did you outline the plot or did you figure it out as you went along?

AM: I think moments of decision are crucial in stories for character development and for suspense, so I feel the need to structure plot around them. But in real life and in writing, I find decisions more or less always terrifying.

I was not surprised when I learned that the cide in decide, which comes from the Latin for “to cut,” is the same root word that puts the killing in “homicide,” “regicide,” “insecticide,” etc. This helped explain why decisions are so dramatic and so terrifying: they kill possibilities.

When you’re writing a story, you’re always creating and killing possibilities. To both accentuate and manage my terror about choosing, I like to keep possibilities open as long as possible, and to do that I find I need to equalize the opposing motivations as carefully as possible. In other words, I try to create moments in the story when things could truly go either way.

So I didn’t outline, but I did write toward moments that I thought would present big decisions for the characters. I’d say there are four or five major forks in the road in this story, and as I drafted the novel I originally chose differently at several of those forks. I drafted down one path and then realized I had to go back to that fork and take the other way, which led to other forks. This is not an efficient way to write a novel! Jerry Brennan, my wonderful editor at Tortoise Books, kept talking me into taking the more difficult fork, and, by god, it made all the difference.

AM4: How do you feel about redemption and happy endings?

AM: Without revealing what sort of ending Tandem has, I’ll say I take a broad view. I’m more oriented toward what the novel makes me think about and feel at the end than whether the outcome directly means things have turned out well for the main character or whether there have been lessons learned, etc.

I think that the “good guy won and/or lessons have been learned” type of ending can work and is what you might think of as a more conventionally gratifying ending, and I think a book can end in a less happy place but still imply what redemption might look like or give you an understanding of why the ending is not conventionally happy. In other words, I like for a book’s perspective to be larger than the raw outcome and to encompass what the book has exposed or made understandable.

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AM5: What are you working on now?

AM: Fiction-wise, that is a secret, even from myself. I have started a blog in which I analyze short stories from The New Yorker called “How It Works (I Think) Story Blog,” https://andymozina.com/how-it-works-i-think-story-blog/ which has been fun.

Andy Mozina is the author of four books of fiction and a winner of the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. His fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere. His stories have received special citations in Best American Short Stories, Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the Midwest. A law school drop-out, Mozina is professor of English at Kalamazoo College.

Recommendations:

David’s Lists 2.0
- Novelist David Long’s Substack is always excellent—David is a true bibliophile and a generous soul.
TaraShea Nesbit
’s
TODAY YOU WILL WRITE
—she will be sending daily writing posts aimed at inspiring and energizing fellow writers during November. She wrote her bestselling novel The Wives of Los Alamos during NaNoWriMo ten years ago!