Oregonian interviews Mr. Fight Club

Q. You had a background in actual physical labor before you became a writer. Did that give you an advantage somehow over someone who takes a purely academic path to writing?

A. In American culture, writers come from one of two schools: They either come from academia, where they have a fairly limited amount of personal experience and exceptional writing skills -- they can write beautiful prose about very little -- or they come from journalism, where they have an enormous wealth of experience and exposure to people and events, but their writing tends to be kind of pedestrian, very plain. So they tend to write very plain-language stories about very important events. So it's either fancy writing about nothing or it's plain writing about huge things.

Q. Your own writing style is very direct. I'd be curious to know what you make of some of the overwriting in literary fiction.

A. Some of it annoys the hell out of me. [laughs] More