8. Hemingway wrote that a story’s end must be inevitable but unpredictable. Does the ending of Two Days Gone achieve those qualities?
9. In a review of Silvis’s novel The Boy Who Shoots Crows, New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart wrote that “Randall Silvis gets to the hearts and souls of his characters like few other, if any, novelists.” Did the author succeed in getting to the hearts and souls of his major characters in Two Days Gone?
10. Randall Silvis tells his writing students that the two most important pages in a story are the first and the last. He says, “The first page brings the reader in, and the last page brings the reader back.” Does Two Days Gone succeed in doing that?
A Conversation with the Author
What are your influences as a writer?
There are many. More, probably, than I’m even aware of. I’ll start with my next-door neighbor when I was a boy, Sara McNaughton. I have no idea how old she was when I was little, but she looked ancient to me, a small, shriveled, hunched over, and hooked-nosed spinster—very Wicked Witch of the West–like, for those who chose to see her that way, as did most of the older boys in the village, especially when an errant softball flew into her yard, was grabbed by her, and was tossed under her porch. Summer or winter she wore long gingham dresses and a wide-brimmed sunbonnet. She lived in a tiny white cottage with an ivy-covered front porch, almost never had visitors, and seldom volunteered to talk to anybody. She had no television, maybe no radio, and, as far as I could tell, spent her days baking bread, making jams, gardening, and tossing errant balls under her porch.
For some reason I found myself knocking on her door nearly every day, especially before I was old enough for school. She would look out at me and scowl through her screen, and I would ask, “Got any jelly bread?” She always did. Thick, yeasty, crusty, homemade bread spread with homemade strawberry or plum preserves. And we would sit at her little kitchen table playing Old Maid until my mother started calling for me.
When I was seven or so, Sara gave me my first hardcover book. An illustrated copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. I can still see the bright greens and yellows of the cover art. I felt like a millionaire. And I was hooked. Sara and books and jelly bread. To a lonely little boy in a hardscrabble village, they were the closest thing to comfort and salvation I had back then.
Later there was Hemingway with his deceptive simplicity and masterful subtext. Faulkner with his lush prolixity and steamy, shadow-shrouded settings. Garcia Marquez with his ghosts and bedraggled angels and his startling, idiosyncratic way of seeing a world that seemed so like my own.
And I continue to be influenced and taught: by my sons’ openness and tolerance and big-hearted love; by the many brilliant women and men who write so beautifully and insightfully; by my eager and determined students; by my dreams, the music I love, the night sky at three a.m., a smile from a stranger. Everywhere I look there’s another inspiration.
If you hadn’t become a writer, what would you be doing now?
Before I decided to become a writer, around the age of twenty-one, what I really wanted was to be a songwriter. I wanted to be the next Paul Simon. When I wasn’t reading I was banging away on the family piano, writing song after song after song. I taught myself to play piano and guitar and to do musical notation, but I was too shy and insecure to ever share the songs with anyone.
During my first two years in college, where, for lack of any semblance of true ambition, I was studying to be an accountant, I spent all my spare time hanging out in the music rooms, sometimes tinkling away at a piano but mostly just sitting there with the door open so I could eavesdrop on all the real student musicians. I envied them and was intimidated by their talent and technical knowledge. I ached to be a music major. Music has the power, like no other force on earth, to fill us with emotion and to connect us with one another in some mysterious alchemical transcendence of even our basest human shortcomings.
Fortunately, in my junior year, two professors, during the same week, took me aside to comment positively on a couple of writing assignments. Both told me I had talent and asked if I had ever considered being a writer. I grabbed that suggestion like a drowning man grabbing a chunk of Styrofoam. And so began my self-education as a writer. And I learned, through Hemingway and others, that the written word can possess music too.
So, in answer to the question What would I be doing if I hadn’t become a writer? I honestly don’t know. I only know that everything I’ve done of any importance derives from two activities—trying to be the best father I can, and trying to be the best writer I can.