Interview with Tod Goldberg

It’s like what Bruce Springsteen says in ‘No Surrender’: “We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school.” – Tod Goldberg

Well known for his novels Fake Liar Cheat (Pocket Books/MTV), Living Dead Girl (Soho Press) and the short story collection Simplify (OV Books), Tod Goldberg’s works have received notable reviews in numerous publications, including the Chicago Tribune, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

Goldberg is also the author of original novels based on the USA Network TV series Burn Notice. The novels to date are The Fix and The End Game.

His success doesn’t stop there. Living Dead Girl was a finalist for the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best mystery and was featured as one of January Magazine’s top novels of 2002.

Goldberg’s next book of short stories, Other Resort Cities, will be released in October 2009 (OV Books).

I had the privilege of interviewing Goldberg about his career as a writer and teacher – and, as with all interviewees, his advice to writers.

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Laura Cococcia: Did you always know you wanted to be a writer?

Tod Goldberg: Oh, probably not. Or at least not initially as I had a rather significant case of dyslexia which made writing a pretty unenjoyable task, though I was always telling stories. I come from a family of writers (my mother was a print journalist, my father a television journalist, and all three of my siblings have published multiple books) but it was never something I was pushed towards exactly, though reading was always a very important part of our lives.

For a time, I thought I’d go into advertising…and then I worked in advertising and quickly disabused myself of that notion permanently. I guess I always knew I’d be doing something creative as anything that wasn’t creative — be it in school or professionally — generally drove me to the brink of murder.

Laura Cococcia: Your novels have received national acclaim. Did you ever imagine that you’d achieve such success?

Tod Goldberg: I was never the kind of writer who kept his stuff in a drawer and hoped no one saw it, so in one respect, yes, I did expect that at least my work would be published at some point. The acclaim for Living Dead Girl and Simplify and my two Burn Notice books has been lovely, though honestly Fake Liar Cheat didn’t get much, and probably deservedly so as I made some mistakes in that book that are owed mostly to ego and youth.

I was stung by the criticism of that book initially, because I thought I’d written a brilliant first novel, because that’s what every 27 year old thinks about their first novel. Eleven years after finishing the book, however, I see so many things that I would do differently, but that’s the curse of all failed first dates. But that book has been very special to me in that it has given me a career, certainly, and gave me some financial freedom to write books that people would later acclaim, which is nice since you can’t always eat acclaim.
Laura Cococcia: Your next book of short stories, Other Resort Cities, will be released in October 2009. Can you give us a sneak peek?

Tod Goldberg: Whereas my last collection, Simplify, was culled from a decade’s worth of work, Other Resort Cities comes from a very brief period, comparatively. After I finished touring for Simplify — so, about the spring of 2006 — I found myself itching to write more stories, which wasn’t something I’d done a lot of in the previous couple of years while I worked on Living Dead Girl and then a novel I didn’t sell — it wasn’t very good, so no one has missed anything — apart from the two new ones I wrote for Simplify (“Myths of our Time” and “Rise, John Wayne, and Rebuke Them”, both of which I wrote in 2005).

But I’d had such a great experience with Simplify and with OV Books that I decided that in lieu of starting another novel, I’d spend the next two years writing stories, which is precisely what I did. I think I wrote 15 new stories during that time, some good, some not so good, and by the end of the process I found I’d written a collection that loosely ended up being about people in resort cities doing nefarious deeds.

Unlike Simplify, which had a large sum of surreal stories, most of the stories in Other Resort Cities are fairly realistic (or at least as realistic as my stories can be, I suppose). No bleeding pictures of Elvis this time, I’m exceptionally excited about this book as I simply love the short story form. If I had to write only one thing for the rest of my life, it would be short stories.

Laura Cococcia: In 2005, you were named “Teacher of the Year” by the UCLA Extension program. What advice do you consistently give to your writing students?

Tod Goldberg: To be accurate, I was actually given that award by the administration of the Writers’ Program, which felt fantastic. I now direct the MFA program in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts at UC-Riverside’s campus in Palm Desert, which is a job I really enjoy, because, frankly, there’s no advice you can give a student that will make or break them. It’s a series of suggestions over time, as their writing grows, that perhaps makes them see something different in their work, some other angle to take towards drama, or just provides them insight into their own work that they are blind to.

But, if pressed, I’d say that great writing comes from great reading, that beginning writers should immerse themselves in literature. It doesn’t have to be the classics. You don’t need to love Middlemarch in order to be a great writer (though it probably doesn’t hurt), but you need to love something enough to get obsessive about the construction, the word choice, the writer him or herself.

It’s like what Bruce Springsteen says in ‘No Surrender’: “We learned more from a three minute record than we ever learned in school.”

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Many thanks to Tod for sharing his time and thoughts with us. He reminds us of the ever important connection between reading and writing and that, even if you haven’t always thought of yourself as a writer, you certainly can get there.

I also encourage you to visit Tod’s blog for his latest and greatest.

Tagged as: Interviews, Laura Cococcia, Writing