I Don't Know Keith Ridgway But The Paris Review Does

In the Gaps: An Interview with Keith Ridgway by Christopher Notarnicola from  July 8, 2021 gave me some things to think about.

INTERVIEWER

I’d like to start with the idea of the middle. Your latest novel, A Shock, finds characters trapped in an attic, introduced in medias res, and literally squeezed through a gap between walls. What brings you to write toward these liminal spaces?

RIDGWAY

Well, that’s where we live. In the gaps. In this book there are characters who are trapped or stuck or separated in various ways. Sometimes, as you say, literally. Stuck in a building or in part of a building. But also, there are characters trapped in looped thinking, or in poor housing, terrible work, and the political gap that allows those things. I’m not sure I’m all that interested in the spaces themselves, but I am interested in the people. And among them are others who seem less trapped. Who seem somehow to have more freedom of imaginative movement, based on something in themselves, a sort of ability to walk through things. I was interested in all these people.

That trapped in looped thinking sounds very familiar. 

And this makes me feel better about my own work habits - or the lack thereof!

INTERVIEWER

Fair enough. Your novels weave characters and motifs across places and time—beautiful in their structural complexity—expressing variations on common themes, often incorporating stories within stories. How much plotting takes place away from the page?

RIDGWAY

It’s pretty much all in my head. I do a lot of thinking, but I don’t sketch out plans or plots in advance of writing. At points in the past, I felt it would be a good idea if I did that, and I tried to do it. It’s never worked for me. I need to write my way into things and then I need to write my way out of them, and that seems to be how it works for me. But I do a lot of thinking. I imagine all writers do a lot of thinking, right? I don’t think I’m doing anything unusual there. I feel like I’m working hardest when I’m thinking, and then by the time I get to the page I kind of know what I want to do. So a lot of thinking and then the writing itself goes relatively quickly. Then I have to spend some time fixing it.

INTERVIEWER

When you’re working outside of a conflict-resolution model of storytelling, how do you know when a story is finished?

RIDGWAY

I was going to say that old, hackneyed thing—you don’t finish work, you abandon it—but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. I don’t feel I’m abandoning stuff. I think I get to a point where it feels like everything I wanted to put into the book is there, and I can’t work out a better way of organizing it. At that point it feels like I can’t do anything else, therefore the work must be finished. I think that’s how it works.

Maybe this will help you, too.