GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY #14: on Davey Davis

Bad Gay and David sit down for an interview

GOOD ADVICE/BAD GAY is an advice series from an anonymous gay therapist¹ who’s not afraid to hurt your feelings with the truth.

This month, instead of doling out their sage advice, my old friend Bad Gay fixed that enigmatic gaze on ~*me*~, in an interview about my forthcoming novel, X, which will be in stores on June 28 (you can preorder here, if you want).

This interview is quite long, but the juicy stuff is behind the paywall. Subscribe to read about X’s cinematic influences, true crime, incest porn, surveillance, New York, and why I call this book my love letter to sadists. Don’t miss it.

BG: As someone who’s watched you work over the years, I can say that you’re very devoted and structured. Not one lazy brunch or hangover has deterred you from putting your little backpack on and heading home and churning out pages. I’ve always been curious about whether this feels like a glorious, languid, and satisfying process, or more like a What’s he building down there, Tom Waits-type scenario. Or is it a combination? Or is that a question only a non-writer would ask?

DD: Well, first of all, I think you’re a writer, so jot that down. But it’s funny, I was just talking about this with McKenzie Wark, another compulsive writer, about how when you go on hormones all of a sudden you wanna do stuff other than the thing you’re used to grinding away at. So true, bestie. 

Post-hormones, writing has gotten a little less compulsive for me. But I also love doing it. It’s fun. And the more I do it, the more fun it gets. People talk about how much work it is, which is true. When you’re younger and less focused, it is harder, because you don’t feel like you have a purpose or a direction yet, or at least I didn’t. Once I figured that out, I didn’t want to do anything else. Writing is also how I think. I can’t think if I’m not doing that.

BG: I think it’s interesting, though, when you read writers on writing, the thing that comes up a lot is, How do you habitualize the writing? Often it’s presented as if 80% of the issue is getting your system down and doing your pages in the morning. As someone who’s been adjacent to other writers in my life, that’s something that I’ve never heard from you about your writing. Like you’ve never struggled with that part of it. 

DD: That’s just because I’m kind of embarrassed to talk about it. Because it’s very personal. 

BG: The process is?

DD: Yeah…I hate to be like, It’s my favorite thing and it’s so easy, because that’s not exactly true. There are a lot of hangovers where you’re writing through it and it feels like shit (well, fewer hangovers, these days). But what has actually helped me become a better writer was being less private about it. You talk to other writers, and learn things from them. Torrey Peters is one of those writers who seems to experiment, who will be like, I have a new thing I’m gonna do to get in my writing today. I think she approaches it like an athlete, which is a great model. Only by talking to other writers and sharing our processes have I been able to make my process work in the long-run.

BG: Do you write through and then edit? What’s your editing process?

DD: Editing is the fun and easy part. You have all the Content. Ugh, I hate that word, content. Getting the material and then working with it, that’s the fun part. That’s your little reward.

BG: Editing is the reward.

DD: Editing is the reward. Editing is an art and there’s a lot of pleasure in editing a book and sifting through it and kind of finding what it is that you’re looking for. I don’t want to say that the artistry of creating material is unconscious, but when you’re writing, that’s when you’re having a certain kind of conversation with yourself. In Alex Chee’s How To Write An Autobiographical Novel, and he writes, “The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do—I think it is even what fiction is for.” If I was like, This is Bad Gay’s life, and then related all the things that have happened to you, that’s not really gonna tell me what you got out of it or why you’ve made the choices that you’ve made. That’s kind of what a novel is for, or what it does, is Alex’s take. I kind of think that the writing process—just the writing, not the editing—is reaching out to an unconscious intelligence (without making the claim that the writing is unconscious, if that makes sense). 

BG: I would say though, just to push back mildly, I don’t think that every author—and most especially not every author that’s getting published in 2022—is a built-in copy editor for themselves. I feel like you and I could list off six novels that could have used a heavy edit. And maybe the artistry would have emerged, but I think you’re talking about your process as having two parts in a way that I don’t think everybody does.

DD: I should add to that by saying that for me, becoming a more mature writer has been recognizing that I can’t just unthinkingly go into a fugue state where things come out. I never thought I’d be this person, but I plot, I graph, I color-coordinate. I use these tactics that are not very romantic, but then again, I’m a workhorse. Like, does the painter just stand in front of the canvas and wait for something to happen? I’m sure that’s not true. For a sustainable writing practice, you have to become more structured, but that’s where the spontaneity is. 

BG: I wanna talk about your influences. For me, anyway, it’s not a stretch to say that you can hear Dennis Cooper in this book. Not to brag, but I read it when it was printed on printer paper and bulldog-clipped, and I thought of it as queer noir or kink noir. I hear The Maltese Falcon in it. Were you in conversation with any authors or novels as you were writing?

DD: Not Hammett, but James M. Cain, for sure. And that was a writer that I sought out because of Old Hollywood, which is a big part of X also. Yes, Dennis Cooper, of course. Manuel Puig, forever. Sarah Schulman and Vera Caspary’s Laura, on which the Preminger film is based—that was big for me. When I was younger, I actually had a very strong suspicion of genre, which I think was ignorance and snobbishness, but queer pulp has a very strong, old history, and I didn’t know that. It took me a while to recognize it as a really interesting, useful structure for playing with archetype, which is not something I had done a lot of before. 

BG: You mean with the earthquake room?

DD: Yeah, ter is embryonic. This book, X, was intentional. I had specific things that I wanted to do with it, so I had to research. I hadn’t read Cain before I started writing this book. The kernel was Sarah Schulman, as it is for everybody, or for a lot of people, or for dyke literature, at least. But that was my jumping-off point. Nabokov is always going to be there. I don’t think it comes through in the book at all, but he’s not ever far from my mind. 

BG: Do you have a favorite?