By Shelbie Janocha
Scott Navicky’s debut novel Humboldt, or the Power of Positive Thinking, follows Humboldt’s rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory — from dirt poor son of a soybean farmer to performance artist, to CEO, to prison inmate.
Hypertext Magazine sat down with Scott to find out the pros and cons of writing at a bar, what makes the ideal protagonist, and what it’s like to publish a debut novel.
Hypertext: Humboldt, or The Power of Positive Thinking, is your debut novel and is published through CCLaP. What was the publication process like for you? What steps in your career have you taken to get to this point?
Scott Navicky: Well, the steps I’ve taken so far are mainly figuring out ways to deal with failure over and over and over again. Which is tricky, but now I am very well versed at it. After I wrote the novel, I started querying agents. I never thought of myself as a novelist, but I started writing and it went pretty quick. So, I put together a long list of agents and queried them all and they all shot it down. Then I started sending query’s to small presses that I found online and they all shot it down. CCLaP was literally the last publisher I had queried and I sent them something different because their word count was a third of what Humboldt was.
CCLaP responded and said he didn’t want to publish what I sent him, but when I had something new, send it to him first. I said, “Well, I have something new, but it’s longer than what you’re looking for…” And it sort of went from there. It was unexpected and had he said no, it was time for the novel to go back in the closet with everything else. It’s a pretty amazing story and I ask myself, Do I sound like Jonah Lehrer, like I’m just making stuff up? Literally, though, that’s how it happened. I was looking at another publisher in Columbus and I just happened to write down CCLaP…and the Columbus publisher still hasn’t gotten back to me. That was two-and-a-half years ago.
HT: It’s good that CCLaP wanted you then.
SN: It’s such a good feeling. It was a year from being offered the publication to when the book came out. So, it was a year of editing. I think I did a line-by-line four times, twice with them and twice on my own. Then sort of managing what was gonna happen, what it was gonna look like. It was a very long process.
HT: You just released an annotated version, didn’t you?
SN: I packed a lot in. The funny thing about writing humor is, I knew that the denser it was, the funnier it would be. I’m a fan of James Joyce and I think he got the same thing. You read it once and you get the humor of it, but when you go back you can really delve into the people and the places and the casual references. The annotated version actually took longer to write than the novel did. It felt like every little annotation was a book report by an eighth grader. I had to go back, over and over again, to review and thought, Man this sounds awful. I finished it on New Years Eve and it was a great feeling to tell people about it.
HT: Tell us about your writing process. What did you learn or change it as you were writing Humboldt?
SN: Humboldt was the longest piece I had ever written. I thought it was going to be about a 100 pages. Then it was 150, and then 200. Harold Bloom said something like, Every abyss he stares into he sees another abyss. I was able to just clear my schedule and do what I considered a total war technique of writing. I was writing for 10 hours a day.
When I started Humboldt, I had the structure and characters in my head from Candide. As for the writing itself, I picked up things as I went along. The more things I picked up, the more the characters grew. What was fascinating about the writing process was the discovery that my attention could maintain the necessary allotment of time, as well as the realization that I could train myself not to worry about the story going in directions where I didn’t see it going originally: I let the writing lead the way.
HT: As the book progresses, Humboldt transforms from poor Amish soybean farmer to murderer to CEO to prison inmate through a series of fantastic, unreal events. How much did Candide influence Humboldt?
SN: I tell everyone I’m a ‘magpie’ thinker and I get a lot of my ideas from other stories and other artists. Something about Candide just struck me… the structure seemed very easy to replicate. The idea of this ingénue who doesn’t know anything in these different situations resonated just because it could be used so easily. I did a lot of work in the beginning to make Humboldt a blank slate; and once this was accomplished, it was easier to pass him through the different stages of life.
HT: I think Humboldt’s fascination with Elle really resonated, especially with how drastically she changes by the end of the book. That’s what made me realize this was taking place over what seems to be at least a decade.
SN: A lot of Elle’s transformation at the end is from Candide. He does that to Cunégonde and it’s just awful. What Voltaire does to Cunégonde is just a shock. There’s just this cruel trick where you lead the reader on to think this is the perfect woman and at the end it’s just, No…this woman sucks. That really affected me. Even when I was writing it I thought, This is such a dirty trick to do to Elle. But it had to be part of the novel.
HT: Out of the all the characters Humboldt encounters throughout his travels, who is your favorite and why?
SN: A lot of people like Marty and there is a lot of his philosophy that I relate to where all I want to do is lay around and read books, but he has a pretty unsupportable view of women. He’s my wife’s favorite character and I’m like, Marty? He says such terrible things.
Fergus has always been a favorite just because everyone loves an egregious drunk and people who talk in fake accents. I’m actually going to read that section next week and I think I’m going to do it in that accent, even though I have a really bad fake Irish accent. I’ll tell them it’s in the book. It’s supposed to be that bad!
I wanted the main character to be a guy the reader might spend the night drinking with at the bar. You don‘t want too many ideals; don’t want to be too heavy-handed.
HT: I really enjoyed the chapter while Humbolt was in prison.
SN: That was a difficult section to write. There’s a pause in the narrative between Humboldt getting arrested (which is a section straight out of Dostoevsky) to the prison section. How do I make prison funny? I mean, it’s one of the most humorless aspects of American society and here I am trying to put it into a humor book. It took me a while to mull that over and get the scene and the characters going without being a total downer.
As for some of the crazier ideas in the novel, I tell people, ‘If something they read sounds like something a person sitting next to them at their local bar might say, it’s probably because I thought of it while sitting at my local bar!’ Right around the midpoint of the novel, I started going to the bar where I would write for a couple of hours. The next morning, I would use what I had written the night before to start a new section. This might explain why the novel gets weirder as it progresses.
HT: I like the idea of writing at a bar.
SN: It really forces you to work because otherwise you’re the lonely guy with no friends staring up at the TV that you’re not interested in and you’re like, I’m not working. I shouldn’t be here. It helps to walk there, too, because then you get a little bit of a warm up. You can sit down with a couple ideas and really let the writing go.
HT: There are a lot of stylistic choices that make this novel stand out, like using em dashes instead of quotation marks. And one of my favorite chapters was “What Marty, Chester, Henriette Burton, Humboldt, and the Ghost of Hal Spoke of during their respective drives from Connecticut to Boston, as told through the postmodern narrative device of theatrical dispersion.” What made you switch up the format of the standard novel.
SN: A lot of that comes from Ulysses. Each chapter is written in a different style. It makes the reading experience different. As a novelist, I’m aware of my limitations. Every time I read something like Dostoevsky, I am very aware of my limitations. Everyone is working within the parameters of these great books and I wanted it to be playful and be very quick and I didn’t want the readers to fall down and be bored with one section or feel like they didn’t know where it was going next.
I had this idea in my head that everyone is talking about the publishing industry and books and how all that is changing, but when you get right down to it that feeling of reading a book is something we all know. You go page to page and you work in these techniques and tricks to let the reader know that you know what they’re expecting and how you can play with that. I wanted to tackle all the old cliché’s and subject matters that everyone else is tackling (like love) but I also wanted to write about friendship, New Orleans, and aging, and death. At the same time, I wanted to engage these acts and things that no one had ever heard of or never experienced. That was the push and pull.
The easy way of doing that is to make it up like theatrical dispersion. Even though it sounds like a real technique, I’m pretty sure ‘theatrical dispersion’ is something I just made up. I’m not sure if anyone has ever written a scavenger hunt into a novel, but the directions are in the footnotes. If you drive down a certain highway in Ohio you can find twenty things hidden in the novel. To my knowledge, no author has written a chapter in French when they don’t speak it, probably because it’s a bad idea. But Google Translate helped me out.
HT: The titles were probably my favorite part of the novel. They can be two to twenty pages — with an intro that’s almost longer then the actual chapter.
SN: That’s a trick that I took from Voltaire because that’s how he titled chapters. It was a lot of fun. One of the last edits was just of the titles. If you just read the titles you get a pretty funny display of the book. You’re telling the reader exactly what to expect within the chapter, but then you can also hide things and use them to get into it.
Once I got more comfortable, then the long ones come in, which just look ridiculous. You flip the page and then there’s a thirty word chapter introduction. You get used to thinking, This is what’s gonna happen in the chapter, but then you read it and you think, Wait a minute. I had to be really careful when I brought back characters for their second creative birth — when I wanted the chapters to reveal who they were.
HT: It sounds like you have a lot of fun when you write. When did you realize that you wanted to be a writer?
SN: Very early on. I date it around age eight. I can remember driving with my family to see my grandparents in Cleveland and thinking that, when I get drafted into the NBA, I would politely refuse because it would take time away from my writing. Which shows how young I was. I grew up in a small town in rural Ohio. As an aspiring writer, I didn’t have many mentors, so it took me a long time to figure out how to be a writer.
I never went to school for writing because I didn’t understand how I could be taught to write. Now I understand that it teaches you the professional side of it, not the craft of it. Education becomes different when you look back on it. If someone had told me to get a MFA because it would help my career in writing, I wouldn’t have listened. But now I look back and I think, How did I miss that? It’s so obvious now.
HT: When you’re not writing, what are you reading?
SN: I read a lot. I’m pretty compulsive in reading the New Yorker and then bullying people into talking about it. Whenever I find out someone has a subscription, I hammer them about what articles they’ve read. I read a lot of poetry. I’m always reading, but I’m a slow reader. So I never feel like I’m reading the same volume of books that other people are reading. Because of my slowness, the books I choose to read have to be substantial enough to sustain a lot of contemplation and critical analysis. I’ll read the works of Dante or Shakespeare and then read books about those books.
HT: Are you working on any new projects?
SN: I’m back at stage one of querying agents for a project that I wrote during the 12 months Humboldt was getting published. I went to see Christian Marclay’s movie The Clock — which is a 24 hour video where he pulls clips from movies that reference time and puts them back together in real time. I saw 30 hours of it, not all at once. I planned it out, getting up in the middle of the night and being in a museum at 4 a.m.. It was a strange experience. I wrote a manuscript of the experience. This was a chance to use my art history background and my skills as a novelist to share the experience of watching this artwork. I’m trying to pass that along.
When you’re working within art history, you’re trying to sell that you’re not a novelist, you’re actually an art historian that likes to tell jokes. It’s hard to convince people that this is a serious project and that it would sell. I think it’s doable but it’s gonna take another long slog of rejections. Which now I know is something you can survive.
Read an excerpt of Humboldt here.
Scott Navicky has an Honors Master’s Degree in art history with a focus on photography theory from the University of Auckland. He has lived in New York City, Auckland, Boston, Brooklyn, and Portland, Maine. He currently lives in Columbus, Ohio. Humboldt, or The Power of Positive Thinking is his first novel.
Buy The Power of Positive Thinking at CCLaP Publishing.
Shelbie Janocha is a Chicago writer from a part of New York that is basically Canada. In May 2014, she graduated with a BFA in Creative Writing and Publishing from Columbia College Chicago. She has performed her fiction and non-fiction at Come Alive After Five, Printer’s Row Lit Fest, and Manifest 2014. Her work can be found in Hypertext Magazine.