This Writer of the Week made headlines back in February of 2021 when the Greenville Journal interviewed him about the four books he had published in just seventeen months. Among his awards are the South Carolina Arts Commission Individual Artists Fellowship in Prose and the South Carolina Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship along with a brand new IPPY (Independently Published Book) award just this past summer. Meet Scott Gould.
Scott Gould is originally from Kingstree, South Carolina, a small town he says, “in the Lowcountry of South Carolina, near the coast. (My first book, a collection of linked stories called Strangers to Temptation, is set in Kingstree during the early 1970s. And actually, my second book, a novel titled Whereabouts, has a Kingstree connection, too. I guess you can never truly escape where you come from, especially if you’re a writer.) Now, I live in the Upstate of SC, in Greenville. Truth be told, when folks ask me where I live, I say “Sans Souci,” because that’s the little pocket of Greenville where I’ve lived for almost 15 years. Plus, it sounds a lot cooler to say you’re from a place called Sans Souci. It sounds fancy. Throws folks off a little. I’m not opposed to throwing folks off.”
Greenville, South Carolina is probably best known for being one of the fastest-growing cities in the South, says Gould, “which means a lot of things to me, most of them bad. Lots of people moving in and lots of gentrification and steamrolling over nostalgia and building of condos only the rich can afford. But don’t listen to me. I’m the old guy sitting on his porch, yelling for folks to get off his lawn. But Greenville is a beautiful place, no doubt. Nice river flowing right through it. Cool suspension bridge over the aforementioned river. Greenville sits right at the foot of the mountains. You can be trout fishing in a mountain creek in 45 minutes. My little area, Sans Souci, isn’t known for much. The best barbeque in town is in Sans Souci, at Mike and Jeff’s. That’s something, right?”
Despite believing he is very old, Scott Gould is a middle-aged sixty-two who writes a number of genres. “I’ve published a collection of stories, a novel, and a memoir. I do a fair bit of magazine journalism. I’ve written screenplays. I published a chapbook of poems years ago that I hope no one never, ever finds. I tend to create a narrative thread in everything I write, so I guess a very general genre I feel most comfortable in is storytelling. (If that’s even a genre.) I enjoy finding or inventing characters and getting them into trouble. Sometimes the story is mostly true, sometimes it’s mostly false. But it’s always a good story, I hope.”
Every writer has that moment when they realize they too want to tell stories, and they want to share those stories with the world. For Scott Gould, he says a pair of high school English teachers got him into putting pen to paper. “Miss Sharpe and Mrs. Sullivan worked very hard to help us understand the beauty and power of language. So I suppose that was my introduction to the different ways good writing can touch places way down in the human heart. But I had no intention of being a writer when I left high school for college. I wanted to be another Larry Bird, the famous basketball player. But my knee blew out when I was playing basketball for Wofford College, so I became a full-time student and ex-athlete and dove into becoming an English major. My senior year, I took a creative writing course, and that was sort of the final straw pointing me toward a writing career. I left college and did graduate work with the (in)famous James Dickey because I wanted to be a poet. While I was in grad school, I took some fiction courses with William Price Fox who is a sort of forgotten writer that folks need to recall, and I fell in love with writing short stories. Since then, it’s just been a long haul of bad drafts and good drafts and a crapload of revision.
All writers have that spot, or go-to comfortable place, to write their story for Scott, he says one of those places is definitely not a coffee shop, “I need to have an environment I can control, which is usually my house. (I like to be near the turntable, so I can put on some albums while I write.) This past year, I decided that I’d spent too many years sitting in a chair, slumped over a keyboard, so I decided to buy a stand-up desk for the sake of posture. I put it in my living room, near a window, and that’s where I’ve finished the first draft of a new novel. Let me rephrase that a little: I need to be at home to create the first, ugly draft of something. I can revise almost anywhere I can take a pile of pages and make nasty marks with a pen. Anywhere, that is, except coffee shops. I don’t do coffee. Or shops.”
Ugly first drafts aside, his book Things That Crash, Things That Fly, is about “a husband and wife making plans for an Italian vacation with friends—to visit her family’s Tuscan village—she makes a last-minute addition to the itinerary: she plans to leave him upon their return to the States. And her bombshell includes a strange caveat. He isn’t allowed to mention a word of it to their traveling companions. So begins Things That Crash, Things That Fly, the groundbreaking new memoir. Things That Crash, Things That Fly is about many things: lost love, daughters and fathers, evaporating marriage, Italian sandals, friendship, bad knees, redemption, acrobatic birds, secrecy, oddly placed piercings…but most of all, this inventive memoir is about how it is truly possible to rise and soar, even after you’ve struck the ground.”
Scott shared with the blog that it was hard to answer how long it took him to write and then publish this particular story. “You know, that’s a tough question to answer. I probably first thought this would make a good story when I was trying to get over the whole heartbreak of it. I always had this little voice in my head saying, “This really sucks, but if you ever get over it, it might make a pretty interesting book.” I think I wrote the first ugly, therapeutic draft probably a dozen years ago, but I wasn’t ready then to really write the story, either emotionally or intellectually. So those early drafts looked a LOT different than the ones that became the book. Also, those early drafts had the wrong tone. It was too harsh or too ego-centric. So, over the years, I kept refining the tone and the structure. Then, after I read Sonja Livingston’s amazing memoir, Ghostbread, I had an epiphany. I wanted to write in short chapters like her, so I completely tore the structure apart and started over, with super short chapters. (And I re-read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying at that time, to get another sense of structuring a narrative with short chapters.) I’ve lost count of the number of drafts it took to get to this point. Hell, at one point, an agent told me to rewrite the memoir as a novel, so I took a stab at that. It was a terribly misguided stab. And a complete waste of everyone's time. But to answer your question? Off and on, probably 10-12 years. During that period, I also wrote a bunch of stories and a couple of novels, so I wasn’t only dealing with the memoir. There was a lot going on.”
When we caught up with him, this IPPy award-winning writer was reading viewbooks, “On the nightstand, I’ve got a couple of books I need to read because I’m doing in-conversations with the authors. One of them is Fight Songs: A Story of Love and Sports in a Complicated South by Ed Southern. It’s about to be published. Got to say, it’s pretty damn fascinating. And I just did an in-conversation with Maris Lawyer, who won the 2020 SC Novel Prize for The Blue Line Down, so I finished her book just a few days ago. I’m also rereading one of my favorite novels, Edisto by Padgett Powell. The book I’m working on right now is a pretty short novel, so I’ve been reading things like Edisto to keep my brain in Short Novel Mode. I’ve always got four or five things within reach.”
And yes, we know that Scott is not a fan of the genre stamps on books, yet we asked if he did have a particular category or storytelling style he tended to drift towards and his response was one of the best we have had yet! He told us, “I value good wordsmithing and a good story, so as long as a book accomplishes those two things, I’m all in. I honestly can’t tell you if I read more fiction than nonfiction. And I like to read poetry, so I can wallow in the noise and rhythm in the language. I love rich languages. I love writers who surprise me on the page with how they put the words together. Can I make that a genre? The Surprising Rich Language genre. Wait! My favorite genre to read is Southern Swamp Gothic Paranormal Romance. I always go to that section in the bookstore. Awesome stuff. Check it out.”
Although he has never belonged to a formal writing group, Scott did tell us that he had a “few folks I’ve come to trust over the years that I share my work with, but working within a group of people has never been anything that has appealed to me. Those friends who read my stuff are really sharp critics, who would never BS me if I’m taking an incorrect path or writing something that would confuse a reader. I’m sure there are people like that within a writing group, but a lot of what I’ve heard come out of those groups seems to be more confidence-building than constructive criticism. I never want to hear somebody tell me everything right about my work. I want to hear everything that’s gone wrong. But who knows? Maybe I’ve been missing out on something all these years.”
In his spare time, Scott enjoys fly fishing and visiting his daughters or “going see my 89-year-old father down on Lake Murray. Play guitar. Watch sports. See some live music. Hang out with Shannon. Sip a cocktail on the porch. Walk Fraizer, the anxious rescue dog.”
If you enjoyed Things that Crash, Things that Fly, give his new novel a look in February “called The Hammerhead Chronicles. I have another novel I’m shopping around, looking for the elusive agent or publisher. It’s called Beneath a Fallen Sky. And I’ve written the ugly first draft of a brand new novel. It’s actually sort of a sequel to that collection of stories, Strangers to Temptation. It catches up with the narrator of those stories fifty years hence, back in that same small town of Kingstree. I’m pretty excited about it so far. I don’t have a title yet. Actually, that’s a lie. The computer file is called Sons and Shadows, but I’m not sure that title will stick. Sounds like a ghost story. That’s a genre, right?”
Like most of us, Scott also has a favorite author quote by Ernest Hemingway, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” The words are both fitting and true for everyone starting out or continuing on the path that is writing. When we inquired if he had any words of wisdom to pass down to writers who would like to publish in the future he offered this advice;
“Writing is the fine art of getting your butt in the chair.
Don’t trust inspiration; trust the work. Hope is not a craft element. Read. And read widely. Only trouble is interesting. Write the ugly first draft. Then fix it. Be brave enough to fail. Don’t write what you know. Rather, write what you know well enough to lie about. (This is for fiction writers.)”
Tune in to the Writing Wall Podcast Saturday, September 25th at 6 p.m. EST for our interview with Scott Gould about his books, writing process, and more. Please visit our LinkTree URL for all the platforms to listen in. You can follow him on social media at the links below or visit his website www.scottgouldwriter.com for more information.
Author Bio
Scott Gould is the author of four books: two story collections, Strangers to Temptation and Idiot Men; Whereabouts, a novel; and the memoir, Things That Crash, Things That Fly. His newest novel, The Hammerhead Chronicles, will be published in early 2022. He is a multiple winner of the S.C. Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship in Prose and a recipient of the S.C. Academy of Authors Fiction Fellowship. His work has appeared in Kenyon Review, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, New Madrid Journal, New Ohio Review, Crazyhorse, Pithead Chapel, BULL, New Stories from the South, and others. He lives in Sans Souci, S.C.
Follow Scott across Social Media:
Website: http://www.scottgouldwriter.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scott.gould.56
Facebook Author Page: @authorscottgould
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottgould/
Twitter: @scott_gould
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