Marshall Fine

Minneapolis native Marshall Fine’s career as an award-winning journalist, critic, and filmmaker has spanned fifty years. He has written biographies of filmmakers John Cassavetes and Sam Peckinpah, directed documentaries about film critic Rex Reed and comedian Robert Klein, conducted the Playboy interview with Howard Stern, and chaired the New York Film Critics Circle four times. The author currently lives in Ossining, New York.

Fine's first published novel is The Autumn of Ruth Winters. My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

Hopefully, quite a bit, at least in terms of inciting curiosity. Once I had settled on the character name of Ruth Winters and a story about a moment of transition in her life, the combination of her name and the word “autumn”—both the name of a season—seemed to hit a certain sweet spot. It felt a lot more on-target than my first seasonal impulse, which was “The Fall of Ruth Winters.” Oops, too many unintended meanings possible with that one.

What's in a name?

Again, quite a bit, more than I even initially thought. Ruth struck me as an old-fashioned name with a no-nonsense feel. It wasn’t until later, when another character tells her to be “ruthless,” that I stopped to think about the meaning of the name itself and realized I was on to something. I wanted a last name that implied someone later in life and “Winters” helped impart several things including a feeling of chilliness and a season that symbolizes the end of the life cycle.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

Flabbergasted. During my career as a movie critic, my default mode was the wisecrack. But I made a pointed effort to avoid sarcasm or irony in writing this novel. When I started the book, it was with the goal of writing a novel about a woman that didn’t sound like it was written by a man, something I don’t think I could have imagined doing as a teen.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

It’s less a question of difficulty in writing, than one about editing and choosing. With this novel, I wrote the current ending and thought I was finished—then woke up the next morning and wrote another chapter that spelled out an ending for everything that happened in each plot thread. Then, the next morning, rereading what I’d written, I realized I got it right the first time and excised that chapter.

As for beginnings, with this novel, I found that, as I wrote and discovered what I was writing about, it changed what I wanted or needed the beginning to be. But that’s easy enough—to go back to rework the beginning to match the rest of the book. My motto: All writing is rewriting.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There is an autobiographical element to the character of Martin in this novel, but generally, these characters are a world apart from me. Mainly, with this novel and my next one, while I have based the characters on people I know, I haven’t drawn from the details of their lives as much as their personalities. If I see myself in the characters, it’s only insofar as I use my imagination (and a lifetime of memory of different emotions) to explore their feelings and what those feelings propel the characters to do.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

I would say that a career as a movie critic—and a lifetime of excessive movie-going—instilled a certain cinematic quality to my approach to storytelling. Often when stuck for what comes next, I think, Well, if you were watching this as a movie, what would happen? And, at a certain point when trying to figure out the structure of the plot, I thought, If this were a miniseries on TV, what would happen at the end of the first episode to make people tune in to the second one?

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My Book, The Movie: The Autumn of Ruth Winters.

--Marshal Zeringue