Interviews With Writers for People Who Want to Start Writing – Episode I: Short Stories, With Luciano Lamberti

In my brief experience with literature, one never really wants to write. One writes or one doesn't. That's it. It works like an annoying weight, an unbearable ghost hanging from your ears that forces you to sit down, open a Word document, and start typing. But generalizing what I feel would be irresponsible, a stupid conclusive leap that I'd like to avoid. I suspect, then, that there are indeed people who could use a little push.

That's why I decided to start this series of interviews with writers for people who want to start writing. I contacted people I respect and whose writing, in one way or another, I find inspiring. Perhaps readers will find in their answers, their advice, and their working methods exactly what they needed to finally start putting one word after another. The series begins with Luciano Lamberti, talking about writing short stories.

–You were born in San Francisco, Córdoba, in a house with few books. How and through whom did you discover that there was something powerful in telling a story?

I don't know if there was any kind of oral mentor. I don't know if there were great storytellers in the family; or perhaps they were the more "village-style" stories, like –lowering his voice in imitation– "I'm going to tell you what happened back in my neck of the woods". I asked a lot, but you kind of had to pull the stories out with forceps. It wasn't a family prone to storytelling. I'm not a great storyteller myself, nor a great speaker.

There were some stories, yes. My great-aunt had a theory that the Lamberti family was cursed. Grandma Cavazzi, my grandmother's mother, lived in Arroyito, and one day Grandpa had to take the kids far away to graze the cows. There was a drought, so they went all the way to Mar Chiquita. Grandma was left alone, and that night two indigenous men showed up trying to get into the house. My grandmother stuck the shotgun out the window and shot one of them; the other fled. In the morning the wounded man was still alive, his throat torn to shreds, and he was asking for water. Grandpa Cavazzi arrives and –I have no idea why the hell he did it– grabs him and throws him into the cistern. They sealed the cistern, and from then on, well, my aunt would list all the misfortunes, you know? The usual family misfortunes.

Power appeared with the written word. Gaining access to the written word. That was my initiation ritual. And the first thing I read, I think, was the San Francisco newspaper, because that was the great promise Miss Alejandra had made us: that we would be able to read it. "When you finish the school year", she told us, "you'll be able to read the newspaper". To me that felt like someone had just given me high-speed internet. It was amazing.

–We all feel a certain creative impulse during adolescence. When did you realize that, in fact, you were "writing"?

No, I was writing since I was a little kid, man –primary school, not adolescence. I started writing poetry when I was really young, second grade, I swear to God –it sounds weird, but that's how it was. And then fantastic stories, which I have no fucking idea where they are now.

While I was working I bought my first typewriter –a cheap plastic oneæ but I already knew everything, since childhood. Because I had also won a contest organized by the Police, and the prize was a weekend at the Police hotel, so my whole family went. It was the first time we all went on vacation together. So I thought: this is something. There you go –I'm already doing it, I don't have to wait for anything, I'm already doing it.

–When was the first time something you wrote didn’t embarrass you?

I don't know; we'll have to give time to what I'm writing now to see if it doesn't embarrass me eventually. I try not to reread myself, just in case. Sometimes I find things I like, sometimes I don't –what do I know. Or I find things that could be better.

Embarrassment probably started when I began taking it seriously. Let's say the first book was the one about the flood, which was pretty weak, and then I started writing longer stories, with more structure, although at first I was quite resistant to structure.

–Horror is still considered a "minor genre". There's a huge bibliography explaining why fantasy, horror, and science fiction are irritants to the status quo. Why are you interested in genre literature?

I could give you the most intellectual answer: genre works like the black sunglasses in Carpenter's film –They Live, 1998. Genre is illuminating, subversive, and questions the official narrative.

Then there's the more personal answer. I used to think "serious literature" had to be realistic, but when I was writing El loro que podía adivinar el futuro (2014) in 2011–2012 –a book later included in the 2022 volume Gente que habla dormida– I felt I was getting everything back. A release, loosening the sphincter. I felt I could let my imagination fly, that I could also reach that place of poetry, that place of silence and epiphany. And the place of adventure, too.

I think realism often falls into a somewhat nihilistic and flat conception of existence where everything is just… "the bad". People think they're opposing grand narratives because there's some guy in slippers staring at his phone. I'm not sure that really opposes grand narratives. It feels a bit automatic. That annoys me a little. On the contrary, in fantasy things happen, characters are mobilized, threatened, they experience great emotions.

–What is a short story? What is its structure?

Now I'm more structured. I've become aesthetically right-wing with my own work (laughs), and I try to give rules in my workshops –rules of structure, deep down. Then someone comes along and presents a piece that doesn't quite fit the structures and it's absolutely brilliant, super personal, and it works.

The structure of a short story is like an inner heartbeat, a kind of impulse that good stories have. How the hell do you teach that, or teach someone to perceive that when a story works it's like an orchestra –because a bunch of factors suddenly come together perfectly?

Lately I'm interested in things making sense. Even though sometimes one might feel or believe that meaning is artificial, that it belongs to a pre-modern era, let's say. For me meaning is good and timeless.

And I'm interested in meaning functioning within a story as an impulse of emotion, because for me the most important thing is emotion –but emotion isn't achieved without meaning. It's a bodily operation, but also intellectual at some point. All at once.

–How do I start writing a short story?

I don't really know how one starts. There are brief sparks of plot ideas that come to me at any time of day. I let them mature a bit; I don't even write them down. If they come back later, it's for a reason. Sometimes I forget them for years and then they return. Sometimes they return transformed, with other layers. Sometimes I write them as soon as I can.

Ideas come to me all the time. If someone can't come up with ideas, I don't know why the hell they think they should write. What's the suffering about? You write because you have ideas. Do they even need help with ideas?

The method depends on each person; you find it along the way. Mine is kind of diving in and vomiting something that, in the best case, reaches an ending, and then seeing how I arrange it, how I direct it so that for me it has the sensation of a slide, of urgency. When I hit the falling rhythm that a good story has, I love it. But sometimes you don't find it at all and you spend your time rewriting, getting nowhere, becoming frustrated, wondering why you're doing this. Then you have a few days of mourning and you get back into the fight.

–What helped you understand how writing is done? Do you have bedside books on creative writing?

When we were young I didn't consult writing books. What helped me most was talking a lot with Federico Falco –we studied Modern Literature together at the National University of Córdoba– having writer friends and talking with them. Being in writing mode, surrounded by people in their twenties who wanted the same thing, who were interested and were readers. That was very stimulating. And reading each other's work and giving feedback too. We didn't attend literary workshops. At most, they were more horizontal workshops. Later I started teaching workshops myself and I learned a bit about what I needed to know more than they did (laughs).

Some things are good. Brandon Sanderson's Creative Writing Course (2022), for example. The Gotham Writers Workshop, compiled by Alexander Steele and translated into Spanish as Escribir ficción: guía práctica de la famosa escuela de escritores de Nueva York, published in 2012, too. Stephen King's On Writing (2000). And then I read a lot of books on how to write screenplays.

To the detriment of workshops, I believe there's no such thing as advice that works and advice that doesn't. No advice works. It's a very personal matter. And it's something that obsesses you so much that the proof is that if you finish, you become a writer. Then whether it's good or bad is relative, it depends on who reads it, but the proof is a book you wrote, that you finished, with all the effort that implies, and that's it –there isn't much more secret to it.

Interviewer's note: Brandon Sanderson is a great teacher who has uploaded many of his creative writing lectures to the internet. For example, for those interested in writing so-called fantasy, here are some classes on worldbuilding:

–Who do you show your progress to? How open are you to third-party reformulations and revisions? Are feedback sessions useful to you?

I don't show anything until I have a decent first draft, which is actually a second or third draft that has already been reshaped in the process of writing. I have the categories "showable" and "not showable". Reaching "showable" takes several layers. And then you have to choose who you show it to. Some can be writers, others don't have to be. Never people who praise you excessively, but not overly destructive people either, because it's not about destroying the guy.

–Do you work on several projects in parallel or do you prefer to focus on a single thing? And why?

Yes. I write something very quickly and let it rest while I write something else. I jump from one thing to another, to see what itches. It's like reading several things at the same time and having one stand out and beat the others.

I have a file where all the ideas go. I work on my desktop computer and write there because it's more comfortable, faster. When I travel I do take a laptop: there I touch things up, revise.

–How many hours a day do you write? How do you balance work hours with writing hours?

I write two or three hours a day. In the morning I drop the kids off at school, then around 9 I sit down and around 1 I get up. The morning without little creatures around. Of course I'm not writing the whole time. In the afternoon I teach workshops and it becomes impossible then.

–All of us who try to write steal. Where do you steal from? Why is stealing important?

Stealing is important because it's always about paying homage. Literature is a kind of relay race where very great people resign themselves to passing you the baton. Or even people who aren't great at all give you a beating. Inspiration can come from very strange places. Sometimes you read a pulp science-fiction novel where ideas appear that blow your mind, and the same thing doesn't happen when you read Goethe or Racine.

But literature is always a process –Borges shows it very well: modernizing a single voice. Borges said: there are no writers, there is literature. It's almost independent of the person who embodies it. A half-holy-spirit, half-Catholic concept.

Steal, don't steal –as long as you translate it into your own mental structure, it's perfect. I've had thefts of two kinds: conscious and unconscious. Once I sent a story to Martín Felipe Castagnet and he told me "this is Ray Bradbury's The Third Expedition" and it was Ray Bradbury's The Third Expedition, but I liked it so much I left it –referring to the story "Los caminos internos", the first story in La casa de los eucaliptus (2017).

Then conscious thefts, like "I want to rewrite such-and-such", thousands of them. Everybody does that. Dracula in 1980s America is Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1975). Especially in the genre field, where monsters are institutional. So I like to think, for example, what do I do with zombies, what do I do with vampires.

–If you had to choose three short-story collections, which would they be?

Many. I dream of someday putting together a "Selected Stories", anthologizing a volume with stories of different styles. Although a good story collection always has many styles inside, like Julio Cortázar's Bestiary (1951). Or Borges's Fictions (1944). The third, I don't know –Ted Chiang's Stories of Your Life (1998), or Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles (1950), or The October Country/Remedies for the Melancholic (1959).

–What do I have to do if I want to start writing?

Nothing. To start writing you don't have to do anything. You have to write.

–Why should I dare to write?

Because you're not going to ask anyone's permission. If you really love it, you'll do it, even if it means someone gets angry because you close the door to write, or because someone demands your presence, or because your dog wants to play with you. It's something that requires a lot of time alone. Most of the time you have to be alone and nobody should bother you, and it's a job that takes a long time, as if it were an office job.

I know very few people who can write surrounded by others. The myth is that Manuel Puig could write while watching soap operas with his mother. I don't know, I don't believe it. And even if he could, I don't know at what stage of the writing he was. That's what Piglia says –he went to visit him and Puig was doing exactly that: writing and watching TV with the old lady (laughs).

Then, in terms of results, everything is very relative. What you can do to start writing is not to look for any benefit from literature other than the act of writing itself. That's the only thing I could highlight, my only advice. Don't seek to publish, don't seek fame. Nowadays everything revolves around becoming famous and existing in that sense, and it's very difficult.

Even if not even my aunt had published me, I would keep writing because it's what I love to do. I finish the day and say: "I built an imaginary wall today; tomorrow I'll build another one". Then I sleep peacefully.