Gina Nutt: This story is told in reverse. How did you approach reverse chronology? What pleasant surprises and challenges arose as you structured this story?
Taylor Thornburg: I approached the reverse chronology in Nicole the way that I approach all of my fiction: with a rigorous outline. I like to know what I’m doing every 500 words or so, every 250 words for shorter fiction. Like most of my stories, I knew where to start and where I wanted to finish. Outlining my stories helps me find what I call the path of least resistance between these two points, aesthetic sensibilities and goals considered. In this respect, I approached this story as usual in anticipation of turning the outline on its head at the end. However, outlining as usual never elicited the emotional response that I anticipated. The intended emotion doesn’t translate in the opposite direction. To achieve the affect that I desired, I outlined the story in reverse after a few failed drafts. Then I began writing, and as I wrote, the most difficult part of the prose to manage was my dialogue. Usually, my dialogue follows the same principle that leads my outline: find the path of least resistance. Reversing the path of least resistance in dialogue was an unusual challenge in Nicole.

GN: I’m also curious if you could share how the retrograde telling shaped the narrator’s voice? Did you notice reverse chronology bringing more or less of Nicole’s sensibility to the surface as you wrote?
TT: As a matter of fact, I tried two new devices in Nicole. Writing in reverse chronology is the obvious device in play. The second device was the first person present tense. I don’t usually write in that voice, nor do I usually enjoy reading in that voice. I much prefer playing the voyeur when I’m involved in art in any capacity. I’ve never psychoanalyzed that preference, but I’ve observed it. It could be because I’m like many misguided men. I’m afraid to get too close because my first instinct is to save the woman in trouble, and Nicole is in trouble. As the story recedes, she becomes less aware of what’s about to happen, but it happens. She begins doomed. I can’t do anything about it. Writing in reverse helped me confront this instinct. It helped me leave Nicole alone, to let her be herself and speak for herself, and I think the voice and tense help me let her be herself better as well as the framing.

GN: The narrator spends much of the story pedaling along on her bicycle. How did this sense of motion, with brief stops along the way, influence pacing?
TT: Nicole was always going to be in motion. I conceptualized this story as a stream: perception, thought, movement, and energy. Outlining as I do, I try to chart an easy course for my characters even through the most adverse circumstances. The bicycle was an easy device to sustain the intended energy. On the bicycle, Nicole moves faster than anyone naturally moves on their own, but it’s still a relatable pace. It’s still a relatable energy. Fast but real.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
TT: I’m a wretched curmudgeon about anything postmodern or post-postmodern for that matter. I’ve neither been particularly ironic nor sarcastic as a person, and I make few allowances in the art that I enjoy. The likes of Thomas Pynchon or David Lynch may be able to deploy irony as an armament for sincerity, but artists like them are the exception to the rule. Most of the kindling for my creativity comes from the brief period of time between 1920 and 1970: Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, and Bill Burroughs in literature, Frank O’Hara, John Berryman, and Dylan Thomas in poetry, Looney Tunes, the Marx Brothers, and Fran Lebowitz in entertainment, brutalism, De Stijl, and art deco in architecture, Alain Resnais, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ingmar Bergman in film, Franz Kline, Frank Stella, and Mark Rothko in painting, and Alice Coltrane, Bob Dylan, and Little Richard in my music. I’m a terrible pedant about these things.