Connections by Michael Dolan
ABC: Always Be Creating
I recently attended a gathering called the NYC Writers Meetup in Manhattan. I was thinking of starting a monthly gathering for writers here in NYC, and after doing a little internet sleuthing, I turned up this event that happens at KGB Bar each month, so I thought, why not give it a try and see if what I’m looking to create already exists.
At the event, introverted though I am, I tried to start up conversations with some of the folks in attendance to see what they were working on. With the exception of one NYC-based novelist who I recognized (a Twitter friend), much to my dismay, the people with whom I spoke weren’t working on anything right now. Some were looking for work in writing. Others had day jobs and were ‘thinking about writing’ but hadn’t quite put fingers to keyboard yet. And even though this was admittedly a gathering of random attendees, it didn’t quite yield the conversations about writing I was yearning to have, and it haunted me for days.
I wondered to myself, maybe writers don’t come to these types of events because they are introverts like me. Or maybe, they don’t come because they’re too busy actually writing? Which led to the question, what do you write about if you never get any outside experience besides sitting in a room with your keyboard and your pet?
As a book publisher and editor, I get asked for writing advice pretty frequently. The main advice inexperienced writers seek usually revolves around the how of it all. How do I take this idea and make it a 300-page thing that people will care about?
And my advice is usually the same. If you’re going to write something, you have to care about it first. If you don’t have a passion for what you’re writing about, it’s sure to fail, because your disinterest in the material is going to seep through every page. And second, you have to find a way to write that is sustainable for you. And that’s the trickier part of the proposition. You likely have a full-time job. You may be in a relationship. That relationship may come with children. You may have aging parents that require more of your time. And in that hectic schedule, you have to find time to do this thing called writing that comes with absolutely no instant gratification whatsoever.
But the people who find the time are the ones who find success as a writer, however you want to define success. They are the ones who are driven to finish that first draft, figure out a way to get quality feedback for it, revise it, revise it again, revise it however many times necessary, query it, query it however many times necessary, until it finds a home. And then they market it every single day until it finds a new reader. Because that is when your work becomes complete, the moment someone opens the book and reads it.
Still unfulfilled and wanting to talk more about writing, I went to one of my homes away from home, The Mysterious Bookshop, which is located just a few blocks away from the Trinity Boxing Club (my other home away from home). I was fortunate enough to hear Walter Mosley talk about his newest book, Every Man A King.
Walter is well known for his body of work which includes the Easy Rawlins mysteries, the Leonid McGill mysteries, and the Socrates Fortlow series. His newest, Every Man A King is the sequel to Down the River Into the Sea, which centers on Joe King Oliver, a former NYC police officer turned private detective.
Walter talked about starting his writing career in his mid-30s despite the protestations of a father who loved him dearly but grew up during the Great Depression and didn’t see writing as a sustainable way to make a living. Walter said that despite his father’s love, when his dad died, he had structured the will so that Walter would not receive any of his father’s inheritance for 10 years. Even in death, and despite Walter’s growing success, his dad feared that if Walter was going to be a writer, he may need that money someday.
His dad never had to worry because he underestimated one thing about Walter. Despite all of his success, Walter has never stopped creating. Even when he moved to Los Angeles to work in television—first as a writer for the well-received Snowfall, then teaming with Samuel L. Jackson to create The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey, Walter was still always working on his books. When I asked him if moving to LA and working in television had any influence at all on his writing ideas, he said very quickly, “No, none at all. If anything, it made me appreciate writing fiction and the writing community that much more. I missed the writing community.”
For another person in attendance, Walter explained his writing process. “My understanding of writing is like my understanding of psychoanalysis. You do it every single day,” he said. “You spend that period of time in the morning. I spend no more than three hours every day, but every day, I’m writing. The rest of the day, my unconscious is taking in everything I was writing about, and the next day, there’s new stuff there. The big thing for me is I write every day to keep the lines of communication open. Some people say, ‘Well I write more than you, ‘cause I write all day all weekend long.’ Yeah, but between Monday and Friday, you lose the strand.”
And that brought everything full circle for me, from the writer’s meetup to Walter’s reading. In order for you to be productive as a writer, you have to find that balance between the sacrosanct time that you spend at the computer writing (which Walter claims he has done nearly every day for the last 37 years), and you have to allow the time to have the life experiences that provide the ideas that fuel your writing. It’s very difficult for one to survive without the other, and when we lose that balance, we lose the strand that Walter is talking about between your subconscious and the words that find their way to the page.
That’s why Walter quoted the great American poet Quincy Troupe who was once asked if he wrote every day, to which Troupe replied, “Every day I sit down at my computer, and when a poem comes, I make sure to catch it.” Don’t let your poem slip away. Sit down at the computer each day to make sure you catch it.
And as for that elusive gathering of NYC writers who come together and periodically talk about writing, it’s in the works as you read this. But if you are interested in joining, you can always leave me a message here or via Twitter at @mikedolanny.