I had an incredible but brief opportunity to speak with Mark Z. Danielewski, best known as the author of the book House of Leaves, but also author of the book Only Revolutions and the upcoming wide release of The Fifty Year Sword (previously only a limited release of 1000 copies each in the US and Holland).
The first question I posed to him was why he chose to break out of the traditional layout of a book’s page as to be visual with his prose. “It was a way of better picturing the way how a story emerges out of the threads of different voices and different influences. In some ways everything is homogenized if it is in the same chunks of paragraphs, the same font, you know, and yet as we all know in our heads we have voices that are bigger and voices that are smaller. Sometimes those voices are aligned and sometimes they talk back to us. And they may be literal voices, that we’re badly damaged or mutating in our minds and heading towards schizophrenia. But all of us have heard on a certain level in this loud voice ‘I’m hungry’ or ‘I’m thirsty’ or ‘I’m really enjoying this movie but I really should have called so and so’ and these little tiny voices… so the question of how to tell this, and how to visualize those, how to render them in a way that speaks to that experience. So, you know, that people tend to tell me when they’re reading books that they do find, as odd as it seems, it sort of feels familiar, they recognize it… they recognize, oh they think that way too sometimes. And then some people don’t, and they’re very frightened, because they discover they can think that way and that can be terrifying for them, and I think that’s one of the things that makes House of Leaves very scary is suddenly you’re thinking in a way you haven’t thought before and the world does change for you, you know. Or you’re hearing a music in Only Revolutions that makes no sense to you, and suddenly 100 pages in you’re like ‘oh wait a minute, I’m beginning to understand this, it’s beginning to make sense and why is that happening ‘. And so I explore those experiences.”
Next I asked about the upcoming wide release of The Fifty Year Sword, of which the publisher was so kind to send me an advance proof copy before the interview, but as I came to learn the edition had been completely revised and expanded since that format to double the length due to a re-imagining of the graphic novel style presentation. I asked why the wider release. “It was one of those things that stuck around,” admitted Mark Z. Danielewski “People liked it. In fact that’s something I haven’t said in even one interview all day. People liked it. They were always going, ‘When do we get to read The Fifty Year Sword? It was like they ran 1,000 copies, and then 1,000 copies in Holland, so there were only 2,000 copies. But everywhere we go people would say ‘When do we get to read The Fifty Year Sword? I want to read it, my friends read it, I read it but now I can’t get my other friend to read it … and then they’d ask about it, and then they’d find it, and then they’d pay absurd amounts of money for it because I think the first edition someone paid over one thousand dollars for one. You know that was just insane. So I knew I wanted to get it back out. I decided with my US publisher for this edition we would explore a graphic novel, it made sense. So we started working on that, but it never quite worked out. I worked with a couple artists, great artists, but it always felt like it was an adaptation of the story… it didn’t integrate with what the text was about. So finally I started to focus in on what I really wanted it to look like. Thread was important because the hero’s a seamstress, and so that led to sewing paper, creating like a little mini etellie where we were endlessly sewing images on paper.” He gestures to a paper birthday hat on the table and indicates the design displayed on it is one of them, the birthday hat being symbolic of a major event inn The Fifty Year Sword. “And then finally was was supposed to be twelve illustrations turned into over eighty and then they were integrated into the text. The whole book was re-typeset. It went from roughly 100 pages to 288 pages. It’s a full book, beautiful cover and spine and everything and I’m extremely happy about it.”
There will also be a limited edition of version of 1,000 copies of this new version of The Fifty Year Sword in addition to the regular version. “It’s going to come in this beautiful little orange box with latches, and then it’s going to have a Neapolise binding, which means the spine is going to be sheared off and it will expose the signatures and the thread, and the thread is going to be red, so you’re actually going to see the thread, and the boards are going to have the glossy white here, so you’re just going to see this white red thing with actual literal threads, so I’m very excited about that.”
For my last question, I asked Mark Z. Danielewski what first got him started into writing. “It’s a great question, it hasn’t been asked. I don’t think it’s a great answer though. It’s something I’ve always been lucky in knowing. I knew very early in my life that I was going to write. I wrote a novel when I was ten. The only thing I wanted to be before a writer was an inventor and I basically understood as a writer I could still invent. And so my whole life the world of words was always spoken to me and spoken through me and it’s given me great satisfaction and terrors and agonies but in that one respect I’ve really been lucky because I’ve just known what I always wanted to do.”
Thank you so much to Mark Z. Danielewski for taking a few moments out of a busy Comic-Con to talk about writing and the upcoming release of The Fifty Year Sword. See what else AmoXcalli has in store for Comic-Con by following our “professional to professional” coverage!
