As coincidence would have it, for art that employs the idea of the subconscious, Berry and Nolan were working on the idea of dream detection simultaneously without knowledge of each other’s works. When Berry came out with The Manual of Detection, his agent sent a copy to Nolan who said he was working on a film along similar lines. Berry hasn’t yet watched Inception but speaks enthusiastically about artists exploring crosscurrents of ideas.
Berry himself is a believer in turning to other art forms for inspiration, insight, and understanding. While he was researching for The Manual of Detection, he watched film noir and detective movies for visual cues and studied the iconography that exists in them. He admits to watching a lot of Humphrey Bogart films to learn the attitudes and mannerisms that worked its way into Sivart or Unwin. “It gave me an idea about how things were in my grandfather’s age. I’d take what resonated and rearrange them, keen to listen to the rhythm of dialogue, the tough guy talk and what makes him vulnerable,” says Berry.
The novel needed a lot of research, and Berry kept a notebook with a lot of messy notes and drafting. He found out that the name Pinkerton Detective Agency he’d picked out for his fictional organization was in existence already and had to make sure that the imaginary outfit was set in a time and space free from particulars of an identifiable age.
Novel writing is a solitary, grueling activity, and one that Berry committed to at an early age. Even when he was home for the holidays, he would isolate himself and write.
“There was family time but I’d shut myself in a room and mostly write. Once I finished a novel in a year. I’ve never produced so much work so quickly since,” he says. That fast-written novel will probably never see the light of day, according to Berry, even though one chapter has been published as a short story.
The Manual of Detection is Berry’s first published novel but it certainly isn’t the first novel he’s written. Brought up in New York, in the Catskills Mountains, Berry’s first novel was co-written with a friend during his undergraduate years at Bard College. “It was about clockwork people and magicians,” he says. For his senior year project as a Language and Literature major, he wrote a novel. Later, inspired by Christina Rossetti’s poem, Goblin Market, he wrote another and finished it.
“I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember,” says Berry. “When I was much younger, my friends and I wrote skits and had games with story-telling elements. I began writing seriously when I was 16, things with a proper beginning, middle, and end.”
Berry attended the Bennington College, a low-residency MFA program. Wanting to be a part of a community of writers, he applied and got into University of Massachusetts-Amherst where, in 2010, he taught as Visiting Writer. He read a lot of poetry and hung out with poets while working for Jubilat, a poetry review. He met many likeminded people, fellow students and teachers who treated writing and craft with genuine seriousness. “They are people who I still look to first when it comes to questions about writing,” says Berry.
It was in his second semester of the MFA program that he wrote the first chapters of The Manual of Detection. He knew it was going to be a novel, a long-term commitment.
“I like short stories, to experiment with voice and form. It allows the freshness with which one can express each story. But I lived with novels, and the strange thing is that it exists as that one thing even though you and your writing changes with time and experience. It’s a curious thing. The story very naturally encapsulates all the persons you’ve become over time,” says Berry.
It took him nearly four years to write the first draft of The Manual of Detection and another eighteen months to revise it. He wrote short stories in between and published them. During the second year when he was in the middle of the novel, he talks of the frustrating time he had trying to organize things chronologically. He kept writing the book for a long time before he realized that something important needed to happen, something that was inherently human and valuable. This something was dreams, and the idea changed the course of the book. The detective agency’s power now lay in its ability to peer into other people’s subconscious.
“While you’re working on a novel, you’re constantly reinventing what you’re doing. I dislike how dreams are used in fiction. Writers often offload symbols through dreams and I generally find that very dull. The standard realist mode encapsulates the story in the dream and it lands heavily. I wanted to create a dream where it would have a degree of slippage and exist in the fabric of the story elegantly,” says Berry.
Even through numerous revisions, the first chapter of The Manual of Detection has barely changed. Berry had been holding on to the beginning’s image and the name Unwin for 10 years. “The image and characters evolved with time, and once you realize who the good and bad characters are, you need another working against them, which is where the idea of Penelope grew. There’s a version in my head where she’s the main character,” he says.
The summer before graduation from UMass, Berry managed to get an agent but he hadn’t finished the book yet and had no good backup plan after college. He plunged into writing, taking up part-time jobs. He moved in with his little brother, freelancing for journals and book reviews, and test-scoring standardized essays. His personal life had become complicated, and his family life had changed drastically during his last year of grad school.
“I was lucky that my agent asked for the next revision. It created pressure and set a deadline for me,” says Berry.
Between working as editor of Small Beer Press, teaching, and giving readings, Berry says he’s learned to compartmentalize. “I don’t write everyday anymore. It’s about balancing editing, teaching and writing. A certain amount of it is tricking yourself into doing the work almost every time. You need to build a myth about it and write in the moment,” he says.
Berry is now working on a new novel and says he doesn’t talk about something new because it might let the steam out if it too early. “I send out stories every four or five months but I switch between novel and story and back to novel. I like to have something pretty complete before I share it.” But his latest venture is practicing the ukulele, which he’s been learning for almost six months.
“I’d like to be a board game designer really. I have a lot of ideas but it’s a mostly ignored hobby,” says Berry, “The ukulele now, that’s a form of escape for me, and it’s completely unrelated to words.”
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