About Drew Ferguson

Drew Ferguson received his MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College, Chicago. His work has appeared in Blithe House Quarterly, The James White Review, Hair Trigger, The Great Lawn and other publications. He lives in Chicago.

Short Stories by Drew Ferguson:

• These-present absent
• Erase
• Burial

A Q&A with Drew

How much of Charlie is based on real life?

It depends. If you mean, how much of what happens in the book happened to me, then probably not a lot.

There’s some stuff that’s obviously “real,” like the high school and the Pit, the restaurants that Charlie and Rob go to, Bethany Lutheran Church, The Crosstown Classic (I didn’t participate).

Then there’s other stuff in the book that I tend to think of as a gloss of sorts—basically stuff from my life that I stole and changed. I grew up in Crystal Lake, went to South High School, I hate driving (but I passed my driver’s test on the first try—only to total the family station wagon later that day), I did get both of my corneas scratched at the same time (but not from square dancing), my mom did use “goes intos” to teach me division, some of the cars people drive in the book I’ve either driven or been in, and a few of the teachers in the book are similar to teachers I’ve had throughout my life. That said, Charlie’s something of an opposite. There’s a lot of stuff that Charlie does that I never would.

As for the plot and the characters, they’re almost entirely made up. Sure, there are probably parts of me in Charlie, but he’s entirely his own. So are the other characters. Of course, someone will probably tell me otherwise.

Were you a geek in high school?

Oh yeah. Band, debate, speech, drama, the school newspaper.

Sports?

Nope. I’m about as coordinated as a drunk toddler with a sugar buzz.

What was the inspiration for The Screwed-up Life of Charlie the Second?

Charlie began life in a short story called, “Star,” that was written and published while I was in grad school. In “Star,” Charlie and Dana were basically secondary characters and the story, which centered on the homecoming dance and was told through Bink’s point of view. Both Charlie and Bink were very different than they are in the novel, but one of my professors was convinced that Charlie was an asshole. For whatever reason—“paternal” feelings maybe—I didn’t see Charlie as being an unredeemable jerk, and I had this notion that if he told his own story, he’d come across as more likeable. About the same time, a writer friend of mine was on this campaign to convince anyone who’d listen that The Catcher in the Rye wasn’t the great book a lot of people say it is. His main point was: here you have, Holden, this teenaged guy, who never mentions being horny, masturbating, or almost anything else that a guy his age would normally be thinking about.

Somehow, these two ideas coalesced, and I ended up with a whole new vision of Charlie, the other characters, and the story.

Why did you choose to write the book as Charlie’s diary?

I had a couple of reasons for using the diary form. In the early stages of writing, I played around a little with point of view, and I tried writing parts of the book in third person. Although third person opened up the story—in the sense that I wasn’t tied to just Charlie’s point of view and what Charlie knew first- or second-hand—the story didn’t quite gel. If a section was being told close to Charlie’s internal point of view, it seemed to slow down the pace of the story in a way that didn’t happen in first person. Also, as I wrote, I found that Charlie’s voice was so strong, the diary seemed like an ideal way to “carry” that voice.

Another aspect of the diary form is that it’s closer to the roots of first-person tellings. If you look back at early novels, most first-person narratives are rooted in the concept that the narrator is telling his or her story to a specific person. In Richardson’s Pamela, she’s writing letters and, then later, her letters act almost as a stand-in for a diary. In Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Tristram is—not so successfully—writing his autobiography. More recently, Humbert’s writing his confessions in Lolita. Heck, even Holden is telling his story to someone—his shrink.

How did you find Charlie’s voice and keep it authentic?

It may sound unusual, but Charlie’s voice came through “seeing”—seeing what Charlie experiences through his eyes, his background, his opinions, his emotions. In some early drafts, where Charlie’s background wasn’t fully fleshed out, his voice was different, but as I put him through the paces—introducing him to different people, strange places, awkward situations—I saw a much clearer picture of how he would react. Even his facial expressions and gestures told me what Charlie’s voice was. If I was writing and Charlie’s voice was getting a little wobbly, I knew I had to slow down and see what I wanted to tell more clearly.

There’s a lot of sex in the novel. Were you ever worried it was too much?

Yes and no. I wanted Charlie to come across as being real and authentic, which meant not shying away from the fact that, at seventeen, Charlie was going to be thinking about sex on an almost constant basis and that he’d be desperate to get off—by himself or with someone else. And since the novel is set up as if it were Charlie’s diary, there’s no reason why he’d censor himself about sex, especially when he wasn’t censoring the way he wrote about his friends and family. I wanted the sex in the book to be explicit—in the sense that the reader actually knew who was doing what to whom; not that, “and then we made love” garbage—but it also had to be more than just a graphic how-to (“insert slot A into hole B”).

Ultimately, if the sex didn’t reveal something about a character or change a character, it ended up getting cut. Some of Charlie’s fantasies got trimmed down, because they just seemed to keep going on and on. In an early version, which nobody saw—thankfully—there was a whole American Pie-type scene involving an ice cube tray. I thought it was funny, but it didn’t go anywhere.

Were there any novels, movies, short stories that you read or watched that influenced the novel?

I’ve heard it attributed to T.S. Eliot that “good poets steal, bad poets plagiarize,” and I think that’s a fairly accurate description of the writing process. I re-read a lot of novels told in first person to see what techniques I could steal or to see how other writers handled some of the challenges of first person. In other cases, and I’m thinking of the party scene in the first chapter, I can remember re-reading the killing of Quilty section in Lolita and the end of “Tralala” in Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, because there was a certain surreal-ness in how they were told that I wanted to capture and make my own.

That said, I avoided coming-of-age novels like Catcher in the Rye and Portnoy’s Complaint, because I didn’t want to be too heavily influenced by their content.

Is this a coming-of-age or a coming-out story?

It’s definitely a coming-of-age novel. While Charlie’s sexuality plays a role in the story, I think it’s minor one. Charlie’s already out when the story begins so he’s not struggling with his “burgeoning sexuality”—whatever that awful phrase means—Charlie’s struggling with growing up. In Charlie’s case, that mostly means moving from seeing the world in black and white extremes, to realizing that there are shades of gray.

How long did it take to write?

After a few false starts and kicking the story around for a while, it took about two years to write.

How do you write? What’s your process?

My writing process seems to change with each thing I’m working on. Normally, I’m one of those painfully slow, write a sentence, rewrite it, write a new sentence, then rewrite the last two sentences people. It’s probably the worst way to write and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. For the most part, with Charlie, I tried to get down as much as I could in one full draft and just kept pounding away at the keyboard. When it came to the rewrites, those were all done by hand.

Since I have a full-time job, most of my writing was done nights and weekends. Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a morning person. I don’t think I’m even human before noon.

What are you working on now?

I’m juggling a few projects and waiting to see which one most takes my attention. I have to admit that I’m sort of drawn to the loveable loser, screw-up type. You have to be if you like the Chicago Cubs.

Will we see more of Charlie?

We’ll see.