This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Rickey Fayne, whose novel The Devil Three Times is out today from Little, Brown. The Devil Three Times spans eight generations of a Black family in West Tennessee as they are repeatedly visited by the Devil. Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her, Yetunde finds solace in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. Seeking a way to reenter heaven, the Devil attempts to prove himself to an apathetic God by protecting Yetunde and giving her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice. Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde’s mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits Yetunde’s descendants in their darkest hours, offering each of them his own version of salvation, and wondering whether he can save himself, too. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune called the novel “ambitious, rollicking, heartbreaking, [and] multi-vocal,” adding, “In Fayne’s witchy, earthy rural Black Southern genealogy of struggle, the past is as real as the now.” Rickey Fayne is a fiction writer from rural West Tennessee whose work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Guernica, the Sewanee Review, and the Kenyon Review, among other magazines. He holds an MA in English from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. His writing embodies his Black, Southern upbringing in order to reimagine and honor his ancestors’ experiences.
1. How long did it take you to write The Devil Three Times?
All in all, it took me five years to write but the ideas behind the book developed while I was writing a dissertation on spirit possession in African American literature. The Devil Three Times started out as a short story that had nothing to do with my research. I worked on it for over a year, but I couldn’t find the right ending for it and so, as an exercise, I tried writing some of the side characters’ backstories. It took me another year or so of playing around with these backstories to realize that the story I wanted to tell was much bigger and, as I started to shape what I’d written into a novel, my old research bled into my fiction. I think once I got out of the mindset of trying to “prove” something about spirit possession, it freed my mind up to experiment with what it would mean for someone not to think they owned their self but was rather “possessed” by someone or something else. Each character in The Devil Three Times, including the Devil, is struggling to figure out whether or not they belong to themselves or to who or what they love.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
I had this idea that I wanted the novel to be in reverse chronological order, to start the story in the present (modern day West Tennessee) and write my way into the past (colonial West Africa at the height of the slave trade). Everyone I showed it to told me it might be better to put everything in chronological order but I didn’t want to listen and so I spent a long time trying to make the reverse chronology make sense. Once I finally let go of that idea things came much easier, but I lost a lot of time trying to make that work. So really the most challenging thing about writing this book was figuring out how to get out of my own way and realizing that the very smart, capable people who were generous enough to take the time read my work might have some good ideas too.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
When I first started the novel, I was teaching high school and so I would wake up at four or five in the morning to try to fit in a few hours of writing before school started. On the advice of one the very smart capable people I mentioned earlier, Adam O. Davis, I wrote by hand and then went to a coffee shop on the weekends to type it all up. Now I find that when I’m starting something new, it’s easier for me to brainstorm and write out first drafts of scenes in a coffee shop and then later refine them at home so my process has kind of reversed itself. I try to write every day when I can, and when I can’t, I at least try to think about writing.
4. What are you reading right now?
Right now, I’m working my way through all the books I’m embarrassed not to have already read so a lot of classics. I just finished The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton and next up is Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy. After those I plan on turning to Big Chief (Simon & Schuster, 2025) by Jon Hickey and Make Your Way Home (Tin House, 2025) by Carrie R. Moore.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
It’s hard for me to think of any one person. I feel like writers who are just starting out could use a lot more support though. All the funding is for people who have already figured how and what they want to write. I wish there were more resources for people who really want to write but didn’t take any classes in school and don’t really know where to start. I didn’t know what I was doing when I first started working on my novel and if it wasn’t for all the “free time” built into the English PhD program I eventually walked away from I don’t think I would have figured it out. It’s kind of hard to break into if you don’t know anyone who isn’t doing it already.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Capitalism.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
Everything will take longer than you feel like it should, and this is a gift. When I first signed with my agent, I thought that she would send it out, we’d get a deal, and the book would be out the next year. What happened instead was that she gave me really thorough notes and I spent the next two and a half years rewriting it. I recently looked back to this pre-notes draft, and it was…bad. I’m actually a little bit surprised I got representation at all. Even though I couldn’t see it at the time, I needed those two and a half years to make the book better.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started The Devil Three Times, what would you say?
I’m not sure I want to meet that guy and I don’t know that he would enjoy meeting me all that much either. If anything, I’d leave a note telling him to switch out his second cup of coffee for black tea or matcha.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of The Devil Three Times?
Music and poetry. Somedays I need complete silence and others I can’t write without listening to music, typically one song on repeat. As for poetry, reading it before I write reminds me of all the interesting things language can do. I was also inspired by visual art, one late chapter in particular owes a lot to the work of Harmonia Rosales.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Revise toward understanding rather than perfection; you’ll never achieve perfection, but you can always know more. This comes from Peter Ho Davies’s The Art of Revision: The Last Word (Graywolf Press, 2021). Also, retype each draft from start to finish. I’ve heard this advice from a few people, but it first came to me from Elizabeth McCracken.