Bipartisan Values: Envy and Greed
A conversation with Grant Ginder, a young writer whose new book has been pegged by some as a “morality tale.”
By Kay Steiger
July 8, 2009
This is author Grant Ginder’s first novel.Writing a coming-of-age story based in Washington, D.C. isn’t exactly an original idea. Ana Marie Cox, Kristin Gore, and, perhaps most scandalously, Jessica Cutler have all contributed to a newly emerging work-in-D.C.-and-write-a-lightly-fictionalized-book-about-it genre. Add one more to the pile. Grant Ginder, who currently resides in New York City and works as a speechwriter at The Center for American Progress, wrote This is How It Starts. Some have called the novel a “morality tale,” although it’s hard for the reader to interpret exactly what that moral is, other than perhaps sleeping with a congressman’s wife is likely to get you fired. Still, Ginder has done something that few other twentysomethings have done: Write and publish a work of fiction. He sat down to talk about that process with Campus Progress.
Campus Progress: What inspired you to write this novel?
Grant Ginder: I always knew that I wanted to write fiction and I wanted to write particularly about Washington, D.C. just because I thought there was an interesting story to be told with young people coming to [the city] and how the city changes their morals and their ethics. I wrote it after living in the city for I guess two years. The book starts off with that horse dying at the Gold Cup, and I was at the gold cup [in 2006]; it wasn’t a race horse, it was a police horse. I didn’t know if it fainted or if it in fact died. I remember people being completely unfazed by the situation, which I thought was pretty incredible. From there I sat down and sketched out these characters and went through the process of developing a plot arch—a beginning middle and end—and filling it in from there.
Did you study fiction writing in college or anything like that?
No, at Penn, I took one class in creative nonfiction. It was a travel writing class, we workshopped our writing, it wasn’t fiction also I edited our humor and culture magazine at Penn, but that wasn’t fiction.
How did you get your book deal?
I still find the process intimidating; I got it really honestly through an unprecedented amount of luck. I finished the book in October 2007, and from there, I knew nothing about the publishing process, so I sat back and said, I suppose I should find an agent to go out and sell this. I researched who the top agents were who were selling manuscripts, what agent had recently sold something that was in the same vein as my work, so I found the top ten who I met my criteria, so I sent them blind query letters. Richard Hines, who’s my agent, ended up picking it up. I went through three rounds with him and he sold it relatively quickly, in like six weeks, to Simon & Shuster.
What is it like as a young author promoting a book like this?
It’s been really fun [and] certainly interesting. The promotional stuff has been nerve wracking; I glue myself to Amazon to check customer ratings all the time. But it’s been fun and exciting, I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t rush and it was a cool feeling to walk into Barnes & Noble and see it sitting on a table. I still think it looks fake compared to all the other books; it looks like an eight grader’s report.
Other authors have written similar coming-of-age-in-Washington, D.C. books. What makes yours different?
When I went into this and I was looking at Washington fiction that wasn’t like your David Baldacci political thrillers, [and was] more focused on the people, as opposed to the politics. From what I could tell, the majority were written by female authors. You have Jessica Cutler, Kristin Gore, [and] Ana Marie Cox. They had all written very good coming of age stories but from a female’s perspective. There wasn’t anything I saw, there weren’t any compelling stories told from a young man’s perspective, not that the perspectives have to be that much different, but that was a literary void that hadn’t been fulfilled yet.
I’ve heard this book described as a morality tale; what message readers are readers supposed to get from the book?
The morality concept that I went in with, everyone thinks that especially in regard to Washington, that our morality is formed through decisions like “are we waterboarding” or “should we be waterboarding,” but really I think that process starts much earlier on with these small moral decisions we make that eventually snowball to the larger decisions. I wanted to explore that particular era of a young man’s life when he’s confronted with those smaller decisions that really lay the groundwork for the decisions he’s going to make later on. I suppose the message there is that those decisions do matter, when you’re out fucking around town, the decisions you make at that point do matter.
This book is definitely from the Bush era. How does the perception of this book change now that there’s a different power structure in Washington?
We’re not talking about 20 years ago in Washington; we’re talking about eight months ago in Washington when Republicans were still relatively prominent on the national scene. I think that Washington is Washington. Just because Democrats are in power versus Republicans, it doesn’t mean that the kind of scene that are described in the book aren’t still going on. It’s not like the social dynamics of the town are going to change. Greed and envy are bipartisan values. It’s not like those things are characteristic of one party. I think the story will hold up regardless of who’s in power in Washington.
Anything else? Do you have any advice for younger writers?
You have wonderful smaller presses that publish great and innovative work, but the huge names in the publishing industry have become so protective that it’s become such a daunting task to get something progress. I would hope that your readers, Campus Progress readers, are still writing and are pursuing those avenues. I’m certainly no [F. Scott] Fitzgerald, and I was able to get something published.
Kay Steiger is the associate editor at Campus Progress.
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