Kamila Kinyon: Could you talk about the title of the story you read at the open mic night and about the inspiration for the story?
Blake Sanz: Its called The Baller Creeped the Rock, which is an ethnic way of saying the boy stole my basketball. I named it that because I wanted to evoke a story called The Conjurer Made Off with the Dish by Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize winner from Egypt. What drives that story is the voice Mahfouz gives the kid, and, for American readers, the alien nature of the world he finds himself in. In my story, I tried to imagine how a similar scenario would play out in a culture and place I was familiar withLouisiana. Ultimately, I named the story as I did and included the epigraph that alludes to Mahfouzs title as a way of giving him credit, and as a way of letting readers who are familiar with that story know that there is a tie-in.

There are other similarities which account for my title choice, but I do think my story has a more positive ending. At the end of Mahfouzs story, the kid is alone with a sense of dread, far away from his mother, but at the end of mine, the boy is putting coins in a phone to call home. He has access to home in a way Mahfouzs boy does not. In America, I feel like our childhoods are being extended more and more, and I imagine in Egypt and elsewhere, kids arent really kids very long. This seems important for Mahfouz to get across, and in fact, in my story, I am trying to say the opposite.

For a short story, do you have an idea of the whole plot before you start?
Usually not. The Baller Creeped the Rock is an exception because I knew I was going to model it after the Mahfouz story. Even still, that final image of the boy dialing home came as a result of my own writing, not as a result of knowing so beforehand.

I sometimes start with maybe a sentence, or a character put in some unusual circumstance. Then I think a little about what that character would do, given the situation Ive put him or her in. I cant imagine knowing the whole ending in advance. That would seem too formulaic to me.

How is setting important in your writing?
Setting has always been very important to me. My novel Airbrushed takes place in south Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Mexico, and those settings were all crucial to how Manuel, the main character, comes to see himselfin relation to his own country (Mexico), to the place of his mothers birth (south Louisiana), and to a place like the Caribbean, which is so distinct from both of those. Because of that, I cant imagine the novel working without a proper sense of place against which readers could measure Manuels character. And because I usually think of characters in terms of where they come from, I cant imagine Id ever write much of anything good without taking setting seriously.

Your stories have a great sense of dialogue. Is this generally something that you research, or do you work from imagination and from memory of real dialogues?
I did zero research for the dialogue in The Baller Creeped the Rock because I grew up surrounded by people who talk like the characters in that story. But, for Airbrushed, it was difficult because I was trying to represent the speech of people Id never known beforepeople from the Caribbean. For that, I read a good bit of Caribbean lit with dialect, and also listened to audiotapes to get a sense of it. But even then, I didnt want to just phonetically transcribe the sounds of their words, because I was afraid that my characters might become kind of a caricature of themselves. Its a delicate thing, to both accurately represent speech at the same time that you dont over-emphasize what might seem distorted. Honestly, I still dont feel OK about how Ive done it in Airbrushed. After all, speech is more than just speechits a window into culture too, which is why so much more goes into dialogue writing than just correctly representing unique pronunciations and word choices.

You write both short stories and novels. Do you see yourself primarily as a short story writer or a novelist?
Now, I guess I see myself as both, but I had to grow into writing novels. I was first and foremost a short story writer. I think to write a novel is just excruciating, given the amount of research and second-guessing that you do. Its impossible to even summarize all the work I did for Airbrushedresearch that took me far and away from what was seemingly relevant, conversations that seemingly had nothing to do with my characters that I would later remember and that would become part of the novel. This doesnt happen to me with short stories, where I give myself maybe a two- or three-month period to finish them. Then, theres less chance for experience to enter in, and the writing seems more controlled.

But also, I often dont know whether a piece Ive started is a short story or a novel. After a while, I might find that Im dissatisfied with a short story because I feel that theres more of the story to tell than Id originally thought. For Airbrushed, I first wrote a story about eighteen pages that was complete. Then I wrote a separate, second story that was related to the first. Then I wrote a third story, and then I realized they were connected enough to be a novel, and so then I began to think of it that way.

What is your writing process in the short story versus the novel?
The novel is a marathon. In Airbrushed, it helped to think of each chapter as its own story, so that I wouldnt have to think in the drafting process about what would come next. For the Katrina novel, I havent really decided, but I think itll be different because the possibilities for plot seem more expansive. The first novel was essentially a fleshed-out version of an outline of my fathers life, so I had a sense of what might happen. In this case, I have no such template, which makes this somewhat more daunting. Also, I always knew I wanted to write Airbrushed from the perspective of a third-person omniscient narrator. In this new work, I have fifteen pages in a minor characters voice, thirty pages in another voice, five pages in an omniscient voice, and I have no idea if I will eventually change it into one consistent voice or if there will be multiple voices. Right now, Im leaning toward keeping the fragmentation, toward trying to represent the impossibility of getting at such a traumatic event from a single perspective, I guess toward a more modernist aesthetic, if you want to get literary about it. So, I guess Id have to say that the novel writing process in itself has been varied for me so far.

Writing a short story is more like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. In this genre, I feel more of an obligation to have a tightness to my prose, so I feel the weight of needing each sentence to be just right more immediately than when I write a novel. Also, the possibility for order seems more evident to me from the start. Its painstaking in a different, more chess-like way. Jigsaw puzzles, chess boardsI guess Im mixing metaphors, but each piece you place, each move you make, gets you closer to seeing how you might succeed, how you might envision the thing at its end. You can see what the whole puzzle will look like earlier on in the process than you can when you write a novel.

How do you use narrative time in your new novel?
Ive taken so many notes on possible time lines and I honestly dont know yet how Ill end up confronting this issue. Recently, Ive read books with a critical eye for narrative sequence to get some sense of possibility for my own project. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates follows a fairly strict chronology, which might actually be the most difficult way of writing a story, but strangely, maybe it's the most interesting to me, too. I was also intrigued by The Emperors Children by Claire Messud, which is chronological as well, and is set in Manhattan in the months leading up to 9/11. Right now, I kind of like that idea, where everyone reading knows the big thing thats going to happen, but you read on to see how the characters youve come to care about will be affected by it. The problem for me, though, is that I currently envision Katrina as happening in the middle of the story, not as a climax, which puts a limit on the usefulness of the straight chronological approach. Or at least thats how Im thinking now, in these early stages of writing.

But then, limitations often produce unexpected kinds of creativity. Ilse Aichinger wrote this really bizarre story called Bound Man about a person who wakes to find himself bound up in an intricate pattern of ropes tied in strange knots he cant undo. Over the course of days and weeks, he learns how to walk and move and live that way. He becomes so adapt at movement while bound that hes hired on as a circus freak and makes a living at it. Its really weird and fantastic. Anyway, in the end, facing a moment of peril, his ropes are cut, and hes paralyzed because he cant imagine how to move without the bindings.

I see writing in a similar way. The more you get involved in a project, the more you realize the limitations youve set out for yourself, and suddenly there are all these things you have to confront because of the expectations youve set out for your readers, and theres no getting around that. Slowly, you learn to live with those limitations, and eventually, you realize youve come to depend on them, that the story couldnt have ever been successful without them. Im much more frightened, as the character in Bound Man is, by the paralysis that comes with absolute freedom. So, I guess Im hoping that once I get deep enough into the writing of this novel, the limitations Ive set for myself and my characters in terms of time and chronology will help lead me to see new and interesting options I never wouldve seen otherwise.

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