Virtual Memories Show 577:
Scott Guild
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“I wish I could’ve understood the book I wanted to write and written it in one go, but here we are, 10 years later.”
With his fantastic debut novel, PLASTIC (Pantheon), Scott Guild brings us a dystopian future of eco-terrorism, meta-reality, and . . . a world populated by plastic figurines who break out in song? We talk about the 10-year process of writing the book, how he found the stylistic elements that made it work, and why making the lead characters plastic let him bring comedy into his apocalyptic vision of the future. We get into Scott’s history as a musician and how songwriting differs from fiction, the album he made (with all sorts of great artists) to accompany the novel, why he’d love to do live performances of it, and how the songs changed genre from the ones in the novel. We also discuss his writing influences, esp. Kafka & Plath, why he dedicated PLASTIC to his high school English teacher, how he accidentally created his own Barbenheimer (the Barbie movie created a conceptual entry point for readers, but the characters are under the Oppenheimer-esque shadow of a nuclear war), why he didn’t show his novel to his wife until 3-4 months before their wedding, whether he played with dolls as a kid (spolier: we both did), who wins in the Dostoevsky-Tolstoy Steel Cage Match, and a lot more. Give it a listen! And go read PLASTIC!
“Part of what drove me back to writing from music was that you had to take everything you wrote through a five-person gauntlet.”
“If you want your characters to have some depth on the page, you have to take them out of their isolation.”
“The way I read & connect to authors is so personal. I’ll read everything they wrote and biographies of them. It gets voyeuristic & weird. I almost wanted to understand what it was like to see the world through their eyes.”
Enjoy the conversation! Then check out the archives for more great episodes!
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About our Guest
Scott Guild received his MFA from the New Writers Project at the University of Texas at Austin, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He served for years as assistant director of Pen City Writers, a prison writing initiative for incarcerated students. He is currently an assistant professor at Marian University in Indianapolis, where he teaches literature and creative writing. Before his degrees, Scott was the songwriter and lead guitarist for the new wave band New Collisions, which toured with the B-52s and opened for Blondie. PLASTIC is his debut novel.
Follow Scott on Twitter and Instagram.
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded remotely via Zencastr. I used a Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Microphone feeding into a Zoom PodTrak P4. All processing and editing done in Adobe Audition CC. Photo of Scott by Michael Lionstar. It’s on my instagram.