An interview with AD Schweiss
Author of "When Things Get a Little Western"
A few weeks back, I posted a Note suggesting aspiring writers forgo the MFA and get a law degree instead. I was thinking of George V. Higgins at the time, but I could just as easily have been talking about AD Schweiss. A deputy district attorney for more than a decade, Schweiss writes crime fiction with a rare blend of precision, clarity, and personal experience—not to mention a whole lot of heart.
Spoilers ahead, so if you haven’t read When Things Get a Little Western yet, you might want to amend that before you dive into this interview. We talked to Schweiss about writing, his influences, and how he makes time to get the work done.
COLD CALLER: What's your origin story? Have you always wanted to write?
AD SCHWEISS: In college, I got a few things published in undergrad journals and won an award for short fiction. Got me $200. I remember the author who spoke at the ceremony—I think it was Greg Levin—said, "Getting paid to write is like heroin. It's so good, you should never try it." I didn't write much when I was in law school, or I didn't submit much, in any event. I started writing again as soon as I got a job and some stability.
What is it about crime fiction, in particular, that appeals to you?
I've been a deputy district attorney for 14 years. I have a ready stock of material to draw from in writing. Some of my writing borders on confessional or just dumping—processing—bad stuff I've seen or heard people go through. Most of my career has been dealing with crimes of domestic violence, which are always complex and involve people in rough situations telling me heartbreaking stuff. I also had about three years handling sex crimes and heading our office's child abduction unit. I wrote a few stories mirroring what I felt and saw in the work.
Then there are little details that come from years of talking with detectives who'll mention something new in how people are committing crimes—like, "Here's how all the smart professional car thieves are getting rid of their DNA when they steal cars," or "here's how you mill a semiautomatic ghost gun."
I'll hear all this stuff and like when I wrote 'When Things Get a Little Western,' I think: "If I were a professional hitman, I'd totally do X or Y to get away with it." And then I just write a note to myself during my lunch break and use it later.
There's such a great dynamic between the father and daughter in this piece, a loving closeness but also a distance and deep sense of regret. Was that relationship part of the story from the beginning, or something you uncovered as you wrote this piece?
From the outset, I envisioned the daughter as a character begrudgingly taking life lessons from her dad—a guy with a lot of grit and wisdom—and winding her way through a life of crime using what she learned from him.
In the first draft for this story, the narrator encountered the villain of the story when she entered the shipping container, and her dad comes to her rescue. But the draft got mired in details about a broader criminal enterprise and the narrator regurgitating a hundred different details about crime scene investigation.
A good buddy of mine (Colin Alexander, who’s a great working writer in his own right) read the first draft and said, "Honestly, man, the father-daughter part of the story is really what it's about. You need to ditch all the other stuff and just focus on that."
The voice in this story is a big part of what hooked me. The narrator is smart, observant, and funny, but there's never a sense that you're using her as a mouthpiece for clever lines or jokes. How do you find that voice and keep it so dialed in?
Eleven-out-of-ten compliment. Thank you. In the early drafts I went overboard; she was almost cartoonish with the way she was talking to/at the reader about forensics and DNA. I reined in the voice in subsequent drafts. I wanted her humor to create a gap between an urbane, capable woman versus an interiority with flashes of: "Here's a young woman feeling lonely in Los Angeles wishing she could go back to her dad." I started listening to a Neko Case track called "In California" on repeat while I was writing. Melancholy song about a woman who moves to LA and she's homesick for Canada. Got me in the right headspace for this story and influenced a lot of the voice here.
There's a lot of character history implied in this story that isn't ever explicitly stated. How do you, as the author, decide how much to reveal?
So much of what's implied comes from my core value about the economy of language. I.e., in writing short fiction, I have to recognize how easy it is for a reader (or someone picking my work off a slush pile) to walk away from their phone or laptop if I don't get to the point. I need language revealing character and driving plot in one sentence whenever possible.
I drew on my own experience as a huge gear junkie. Knives, boots, outdoor gear. A lot of gear can tell a story: does a white gas stove still have the tag on it, or is it dented and scratched but still working perfectly? This detail could set up a character in space and plot (someone cooking lunch) and reveal their history (inexperienced versus experienced).
So when it comes to our narrator's gear, she's patterned her modern/updated "go bag" after her father's old rugby bag. One paragraph giving the reader a grist of material to imagine the narrator; her father; and her father's influence on her. And, of course, the two guns we see are an unserialized semiautomatic pistol and a lever-action rifle—who she is now and where she came from.
Who are your biggest influences? And what are you reading right now?
Honest to God, I'd be remiss if I didn't say my biggest influence as a writer was a guy named Dick Kelsey. I was in college and somehow got a job writing the drive-time news for an AM radio station in Denver one summer. My job was to take news from the AP wire and edit it down to something the news guy, Dick Kelsey, could read on the air. On my first day, he comes by my desk and says, "What you wrote here is unusable. You gave me a seven-line story. That takes seventy seconds to read. It's got to be two and a half lines max per story." He takes out a pen and cuts out 90% of the story as I'd written it. "Cut this, cut this. Change this word." Same information; a third of the space.
The most valuable 30 seconds of my life as a writer. I owe him big time.
But in terms of reading people's writing and thinking "I want to sound like them," I'd say: Harlan Coben; James Lee Burke; John Grisham; Jordan Harper.
In terms of what I'm reading: I've always got two or three books going at once. Currently bouncing between "The Bright Sword" by Lev Grossman and "The Hunter" by Tana French. I also just wrapped up the seventh Jack Carr novel in the "Terminal List" series.
Tell me about your writing habits. Do you have a set routine? How do you balance writing fiction with having a day job?
Being a trial lawyer of any kind is stressful and mentally taxing, requiring lots of writing compared to other jobs. And I've got kids and a wife and I also try to do challenging physical stuff too. What works for me: I set my coffee pot to auto-brew at 5am, which gets me out of bed so I can write from 5 to 6, ideally. Then I work out. Then the day goes off the rails.
I remember reading an interview with Frank Bill, who wrote "Crimes in Southern Indiana." He was being interviewed in The Rumpus in 2013. He brought up working a day job, having a family, and trying to be physically active—he was really into martial arts, if I remember right. His interview was huge for me because he took away the mystique that being a success as a writer means being in some rarified air in which I won't have a job or bills and I'll have all the time I want to get my writing done. The more I find myself talking with working writers—even ones I think of as having "made it"—I realize we're all taxed for time and most of us are writing at the kitchen table when the kids are asleep.
The other thing I learned a few years ago: I stopped thinking, "Oh, I’ve got a good idea. I'll definitely remember it." No, sir, you will not. I'll think of a good line for a story mid-day or while I'm waiting around in court. If I write it down, then even if my morning’s writing was unproductive, I can sit down later with whatever the seed was—the one good sentence I wrote down—and get some valuable 300 or 500 words that night. Sometimes even a whole story.
I could tell, as I was reading, that you were having fun with this story. What do you love most about writing? What keeps you coming back to the page every day?
I thrive on external validation, so getting my work published is rewarding for me. There are a few places I have as goals—i.e., "some day I'm getting published in X, Y, or Z magazine."
If someone knew me and my life story, and then measured my experiences against the things I've written, that person would definitely recognize the path of my writing as a person processing difficult or complicated stuff in my life.
So with “When Things Get a Little Western,” my own dad is this super-sharp guy with tons of grit. Tough act to follow. And then I've got two daughters, and most of the time I am way too tough on my oldest. She carries all her swim team stuff in my old rugby bag. I definitely wrote this story for the three of us.
AD Schweiss has worked as a prosecutor in California for 14 years. His recent short fiction has appeared in Rock and a Hard Place, Molotov Cocktail, and BULL. He lives in Northern California with his troublesome kids, his troublesome wife, and a well-behaved dog.