6 Important Writerly Questions With… Shawn Carlow
Shawn Carlow has written for a lot of shows you enjoy — Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — and now he’s written a collection of stories you’re going to really like. In People of the Titanic, he tells the stories of 30 doomed malcontents and oddballs who sailed on the ill-fated “Ship of Dreams” back in 1912. They weren’t all industrialists, innocents, and Leonardo DiCaprio, afterall.
While you wait for your copy of these (fictional, by the way) tales to download or to arrive in your mailbox, get to know the great Shawn Carlow, an agile author who pulled off nothing less than a high-wire comedy act.
1. Who are you? What are you doing here?
I’m a writer. I grew up in New Hampshire but I live in .LA. I’ve written a book that interplanetary travelers may one day study the pages of and conclude that the human race was worthy of extinction. Or they might laugh. I hope they laugh, understand why they’re laughing, and are even actually capable of that function.
2. Since “Where do you get your ideas?” is a terrible question, what made you want to write this book?
It went through a few iterations, each becoming longer and longer as time passed. Well over 10 years ago, it started as a standup joke that I told on stage about “the other heroes of the Titanic.” People usually know about the unfortunate captain who stayed at the helm of the ship, the band that kept playing as the ship went down, and the Unsinkable Molly Brown. I just tried imagining what other people could have been on board with them. A mime had to be there. And two brothers who ran a hot dog stand was a must.
Next, I thought of it maybe as a TV project broken into 10 segments.
And then the opportunity from Humorist Books came along to turn it into a book. Perfect.
3. How did you keep writing this book?
It wasn’t that hard. Once I’d started delving into this world, I found I enjoyed it quite a lot. Plus, I enjoy doing historical research and writing imaginative comedy.
4. Who is this book for, anyway?
People who like to laugh and who like history and like how things have changed, but also observing in a lot of ways how we’re very much the same.
And, listen, I don’t want to keep harping on the interplanetary visitors I spoke of earlier, but I would hope to have my consciousness downloaded one day so I could witness their reactions to my book in the distant future. Perhaps I could even win an interstellar prize from them that’s honest in a way that the Miss Universe Pageant is not.
5. Any darlings you had to kill?
Surprisingly few. The great majority of what I wrote is in there. Since it’s not one long novel but rather mini stories of the characters within, and occasionally how they intersect, I mostly just had to kill small bits where characters intersect and it didn’t make sense to the characters we’d already encountered.
6. What are you working on now?
A book of humorous short stories. My favorite story in the collection so far is about a young woman who brings her fiancé to visit her traditional grandmother — the kind who never stops feeding you — and it becomes a test of wills when it turns out the fiancé is a competitive eater.
Also, since that world has been so much fun for me, I’m partway through another 30 stories in the extremely imaginatively titled, More People of the Titanic.
People of the Titanic is now available in print and ebook formats.
The Detmer brothers, Andreas and Stefan, were German businessmen staying in second class who ran a hot dog stand on the First Class promenade deck of Titanic – the only sanctioned food stand on the entire vessel. If you were in first class, most of the grand ship’s food was eaten in the sumptuous café, saloon, or restaurant. A slightly less accommodating but still extravagant eating space awaited those in second; trash chutes served the third-class passengers, delivering the contents of wiped-off plates and leftover soup straight down to the lower decks, where the rabble waited eagerly with their open mouths and collection buckets.
The night of the sinking, the stand had been closed for several hours when the ship struck ice, but when their dark fate seemed certain, Stefan Detmer suggested to his brother that they serve warm hot dogs as comfort food to the worried passengers. And a few survivors later told of how, when the ship was in its final throes and tilting downward, the brothers were seen handing hot dogs to people sliding by and entreating them to “tell all your friends.” The futility in that gesture was obvious, but, still, you have to admire their gumption.