It’s the classic writer’s dream: publish a book, win an award, write the screenplay, and then walk the red carpet at the film version’s premiere. During 2025, Ben Shattuck’s creative life appeared to reflect that dream exactly: his first work of fiction, The History of Sound, won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature prize and the film version — for which Shattuck wrote the screenplay — debuted at Cannes.
A prize-winning book makes for a great year—but the reception for the film version was equally good. And while the film’s stars — Josh O’Connor and Paul Mescal — have had hits before and since, they’re “hugely proud” of Shattuck’s film. Signed when they were far less known, they stayed attached to the project for years while money was being raised to make it. “I loved the process of making [Gladiator II] but The History of Sound felt like home to me,” Mescal told a Guardian reporter recently.
Shattuck, the son of a painter and a gallery owner, seems predestined for success in the arts. But appearances aside, his path has been anything but straightforward. Recently, Shattuck sat down to discuss how his creative path has actually unfolded and the unexpected place he’s ended up.
You went to Cornell University—is that where you began writing fiction?
No; I majored in fine art and spent a lot of time in the lab of ornithology and worked in a research station. After college, I faced that true black hole that is post-college life, when you’re twenty-something and you realize nobody is going to tell you to read certain books and you don’t have a built-in social network. Everything that happens after college can feel like the mouth of hell.
I was thrashing around for what to do. I had a painting studio in Bushwick [but] it felt like my life was the end of a piece of rope, where all the fibers were spread. I had a friend who was going to visit a painter who I admired my whole life, Odd Nerdrum. I sent a letter with my friend, and he said, Yes, I could come study with him.
That was on his estate on the North Sea. He ran an old-fashioned atelier … it’s completely secluded … maybe three months in this dark Norwegian winter.
It was a small library in this town called Larvik that I found an Andrea Barrett book. I read [her story] “The Littoral Zone” that is set at the research station where I worked. It felt very fateful: There is this one book in English in this tiny town in Norway, and I was reading a story about a research station I had worked at.
After encountering Andrea Barrett’s exquisite historical fiction, Shattuck decided to try writing short stories himself. He returned from Norway and entered the Iowa Writers Workshop.
It surprises me that after writing stories at Iowa, your first published book was a work of nonfiction — Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau. How did that happen?
I graduated from Iowa with an MFA in 2012. The last year there, I’d written “History of Sound,” but only published it in The Common in 2018. I had other short stories, had them rejected everywhere. I didn’t have any success with publishing fiction.
It’s hard when you’re writing fiction without a grad program or a writing group or a publisher. It can feel like you’re fighting in the ether of your own imagination, and it can be really defeating.
At that point, I’d cut off the top half of my finger in a boating accident, and I’d gone through this terrible breakup. It was the coldest winter… My dad gave me Thoreau’s journal for Christmas, and I read that, and it struck me as such an important piece of writing that fiction quickly receded.
But after publishing Six Walks, you did return to writing fiction.
Shattuck: All the while, fiction was embers burning somewhere in the back of the fire of my mind. And that story [“The History of Sound”] was published in 2018 and then won a Pushcart—and then got a wider audience and was read by a producer in Hollywood.
And then I wrote the screenplay and these brilliant actors were attached.
I called my agent and said, “I think this might, might, might get made into a film. (Because—I forgot who said it first—the most natural state of a film is it not being made.) So I said to my agent, I would really be sad if this came out as a film and I didn’t have the short story with others. That was a galvanizing force that got me to write: I wrote the screenplay [for “The History of Sound”] and then I returned to fiction.
So, the progression was: painting, then writing short stories and then a non-fiction book. And then a screenplay, and then you published a book of fiction? It seems like yours hasn’t been a linear career—but more of a weave.
It’s a weave. “The History of Sound”—the film—is a combination of the first and last stories [in the book], but I wrote that last story after I wrote the screenplay.
So, the last story is almost an adaptation of the movie adaptation.
When I sold the book [the story collection], I had in my mind that this would be a paired collection—I had to write many more stories to create that balance of six and six.
The short story collection has an innovative structure, with its 12 stories set in pairs. Each pair of stories shares a common element—a character or an object, perhaps—but are set in completely different eras and with protagonists. For example, the stories “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” and “The Silver Clip” feature the same location and small painting but take place centuries apart. This structure Shattuck calls “hook-and-chain,” a definition of which serves as the book’s epigraph.
Where did the original idea for the title story—“The History of Sound”—come from?
From reading about Edison’s wax cylinders. For thousands of years there was no recorded sound and then lightning strikes the mind of Thomas Edison and from then on there is recorded sound. It’s a silly thought experiment, but wouldn’t it have been wonderful to hear an Egyptian pharaoh talking?
Did all the stories come easily? Did any give you a hard time?
Good question. [He pauses, thinking, then picks up the copy of the book on the table]. “Tundra Swan” was very difficult — because I didn’t know if I had the authority to write about the opioid epidemic. I felt uncomfortable writing about a very real, devastating problem. I didn’t have authority over it like I had over “The Silver Clip,” which is so close to my life.
A story that was hard to write until I wrote its pair is “Introduction to the Dietzens.” That story I wrote years ago, at Iowa. I didn’t know what the emotional question or heart of it was. And then I wrote “The Children of New Eden” and … the story snapped into place.
You can have a great character, a compelling plot, a really interesting setting and time—but unless it has that final element, that makes it meaningful for the reader, it can just fall flat or become genre.
About turning your short story into a movie — you wrote the screenplay — you’ve compared in other interviews writing a screenplay with writing a recipe.
I’ve described screenwriting in so many metaphors. I don’t know if it’s a recipe or architectural plans for a hallucination or if it’s like playing a guitar with one string.
Movies are magic, in a way. It takes so many people to build—but it also takes a singularity of vision that shouldn’t be flattened by too many perspectives. And the screenplay is just the foundational material.
What goes into a screenplay?
Pacing, scene selection. But dialogue is the most important—that’s all these characters have. There’s no interiority. Everything has to be shown through their reactions, in speech. The dialogue has to be almost physical.
What I’ve really learned in screenwriting is so much exists between the words you’re writing [and what] actors and directors might bring to the space.
When you’re writing a screenplay, do you envision the writers and the directors?
It’s a lot of guesswork. What’s in your head might not be the final product, unless you’re writing and directing. And that’s why so many writers turn into directors. The vision is always misaligned in some way—not necessarily in a bad way but in some way.
It’s clear you enjoy screenwriting — because you’re doing more.
It’s the best part of writing — it’s all the fun stuff, which is swimming in your own imagination. It’s like I picked up an instrument I always wanted to play.
I wrote a screenplay that will be filmed next year, a World War II French Resistance film about an American crossing the Pyrenees in 1944; it’s an adaptation, And I wrote the adaptation for The Wind in the Willows.
You’ve gone from short stories to a nonfiction book, back to fiction and now screenplays — that’s a lot of change in an entire writing career, much less for someone mid-career.
I always thought, in my twenties, that a writing career is alpine: you climb to the top. “I’ll get into Iowa. And then I’ll publish a story… And then…”
But a career in the arts is more river-like. You flow this way (“I’m writing nonfiction about Thoreau”) and then you flow back (I’m writing a screenplay…and then there’s a story collection.”)
It’s more like a lazy river ride. I’m just trying to stay afloat.
The film “The History of Sound” is currently playing internationally; the book is available from the publisher and bookstores everywhere.
Photo: Andreas Burgess