But that is the goal of one very determined Don Britt, part-time music teacher and self-professed “C.S Lewis Christian” preacher from Oxbow, Saskatoon, a city near Saskatchewan made famous by The Guess Who. Britt’s journey is documented in a play-by-play on his website, Twenty Four Novels One Year, where you can view his writing marathon in real-time lags.

Britt has already accomplished what most writers who sit alone on their piles of rejection slips rarely manage to do: climb up out of the abyss and get noticed. Garnering press from The National Post and other observers, Britt had already attracted the attention of many and is hoping something great is going to come of his mission. We’re all rooting for him.

As the clock ticks toward his November 5th deadline, I grabbed a bit of his precious time to discuss why the writing life can be so bloody depressing, along with a bit of political sparring and the sometimes surprising creative lust that harsh deadlines and restrictions can drive.

Don Britt, 3-day novelist gone wild!

Jennifer Thompson: Bukowski said that you can only call yourself a writer if you write. You are proving that surly old bastard right. Is there a difference between someone who just writes and a writer?

Don Britt: What matters most is the achievement of your personal goals. My goal is to write full-time. It’s my life’s only ambition, and I would be much better off without it. Really, I’m miserable a lot of the time. During one of my 3-day novels I told my best friend, “Death is preferable to chasing a dream.” The saddest part is that I meant it. People have assured me that my goal is not attainable. Loved ones have told me that I’m wasting my life, sometimes with tears in their eyes. The truth is, they might be right. But I’m not going to stop; I don’t know how.

JT: Admirable… to keep steadily focused in the face of such intense doubt. What started it all?
DB: Early in my marathon I had a chat with a knowledgeable veteran in the writing world. She told me that my project was a wonderful thing if I was doing it for the right reasons. Growth as a writer, a sense of personal achievement—that sort of thing. I confessed to her that I’m doing it for the wrong reasons. My goal is to make the break at long last through the use of guerrilla tactics.

In practical terms, I’m hoping to find a publisher who will let me turn 24novels.com into a nonfiction book. I remain hopeful that all this will translate into something tangible.

JT: Aside from maybe Dickens, the goal for most writers is quality not quantity; however, your determination to quantify your creativity on extreme deadlines gives the finger to that idea. Does any part of the craft of writing become threatened along the way when you are pushed so hard?
DB: The idea that material produced slowly is better than the stuff you churn out fast simply isn’t true for me, and I suspect it isn’t true for a great many writers. I started writing to a deadline when I took part in the 3-Day Novel Contest. The story I pounded out with a 72-hour timer ticking down was better than a lot of the stuff I produced old-school. It had energy and drive that much of my other material lacked. The fact that I liked what I wrote on the fly is one of the reasons I decided to undertake my “act of insanity”–writing twenty-four 3-day novels in one year.

I don’t believe any part of the craft is threatened by writing quickly and to a deadline. If things are messy, you can clean them up later.

JT: I like your metaphor of writing for the traditional publishing world as being akin to lobbing tennis balls into the ocean.  If you could design your own cocktail called the Mixed Metaphor, what would it have in it?
DB: I like something I call the predicate reversal. Here’s an example from one of my 3-day novels, Whatsoever Things Are True: “The pitch meandered toward the plate with the fierce resolve of a tree sloth on Valium.”

JT: Okay, so we’ll leave the cocktail mixing to Tom Cruise and North Korea. Why 24 novels, specifically? Is there a mathematical equation behind your madness?
DB: At first I thought I’d try writing twelve 3-day novels in a year, but it didn’t seem over-the-top enough. I thought twenty-four in a year would be enough to warrant the title “The ultimate act of writing insanity.” Producing two a month, on average, has been taxing, to be sure. But I’ve still managed to have a life outside my marathon.

6.5 pages a day would be sweet. Actually that’s about the speed at which my full-length novel, Cambrian, was written. And it gave me a draft in three months—which is a pretty standard timeframe. These 3-day novels are really novella length: 22,000 to 25,000 words. And the clock doesn’t stop for snacks or sleep breaks, so I need to churn out about 8,000 words a day during each entry.

JT: Where does editing fit in? Do you do it as you go or do you go back to it after?
DB: Editing gets short shrift in this kind of exercise, no question. I try to read over each page before moving on to the next one, but I confess I don’t always  The more first drafts you write at speed the cleaner they become, but things can still get messy, especially when I’m tired. The producers of the 3-day novel contest make a great point: they expect some typos and clumsy sentences in the submissions they receive, on the rather pragmatic grounds that the thing was produced in three days.

JT: So many indie authors seem to ignore the principles (and benefits) of good web design when promoting themselves online. Your website is clean, yet gritty and very well organized. Are you tech savvy?
DB: Glad you like the site! I see computers as televisions attached to typewriters. They tend to break down when I look at them sidewise, much to my wife’s consternation. Thankfully I have some great techies in my corner. My sister-in-law, Rhonda Gunaratnam, designed 24novels.com, and my friend Cory Taylor wrote the software that lets people watch as I write live online.

JT: Say you have no backups of your work. The Interweb combusts tomorrow in a fantastical explosion of red-hot nothingness, and your work becomes forever buried under cybersmithereens. After smashing your head into your keyboard, do you die a little inside or are you just glad you did it at all?
DB: It happened! Or I thought it did. One morning, on day three of an entry, I trudged to my computer to find my library page blank. Every story in my marathon had disappeared. Amid palpitations I checked my active page, where I write the story in progress. It was a big black wall, like the obelisk in 2001. For a while it looked like everything was gone, and I was a wreck. If that’s the measure of a man, then I am a pathetic, snivelling toddler.

But the words came back. They wouldn’t stay away. And I’ll never stay away from them either.

JT: Do you have a day job? If so, does it most often fuel your fire or put it out? What did or do you do?
DB: I’m a private music teacher by day. Maybe that helps. Christopher Hitchens said that every novelist he knows has some kind of musical inclination.

I’m also a preacher, a kind of C.S. Lewis Christian. The writer in me is a hopeless liberal democrat. Those two aspects are at war all the time. I often feel like a polarized America of one, with a Republican and Democrat having a slugfest inside of me. But even that kind of incongruity can be useful for a writer. That tension gave birth to my horror novel Cambrian.


JT: The writer inside me is claustrophobic. Republicans and Democrats sparring in the ring… who would you most like to see duke it out? Remember, the first rule of non-partisan Fight Club is that the Democrat must start off with one hand tied behind his back.
DB: John Kerry and Sarah Palin. I’d bring lots of popcorn to that smackdown.

JT: What happens after November 5th?


DB: The goal, really, isn’t just to finish my marathon. It’s to sell a proposal that would let me turn 24novels.com into a nonfiction book. Beyond that, I plan to settle back into the routine that my act of insanity has rudely interrupted: a sensible daily flow of some 1,250 words. I can’t wait to see where they take me.

–

Jennifer Thompson likes to think she hasn’t sold out to The Man. When not writing computer manuals and other business spin-doctory, she writes for fun and has had a modicum of creative success in Adbusters, SMUT Magazine, and several other information superhighway poetry, fiction, and humour publications. She is currently enjoying reviewing submissions and other fun endeavors at Black Heart.

Austin Nights is a winding tale of a road trip journey interwoven with a story of love and common experience. The story unfolds through gritty, tangible characters that personify the deeply important task a writer has to find the story in the everyday. Powered by a rich kind of nonlinear anti-narrative, Davidson weaves and cajoles us into believing that reality can be fiction and fiction reality, but more importantly, to stop looking for the border that divides the two.

I sat down with Michael from across the continent to talk about what drives his writing forward, the advent of Tiny TOE Press (which he runs with his girlfriend Bridget, who is in the book as part subconscious narrator and part muse), Austin life, and why self publishing is changing the measure of creative success.

JENNIFER THOMPSON: Thanks for kind of being here in surreal time over the Internet. First, let’s address the pseudonym in the room. Why Herocious?

MICHAEL DAVIDSON: It’s a product of living in Barranquilla, Colombia for four years. My time there skewed my understanding of English. I moved back to the States for my junior year in high school. At the lunch table, I used the word “herocious” as an adjective. One person at the table spoke up, asked me to repeat what I said. I used the word “herocious” again.

Michael Davidson, aka Herocious

He told me it wasn’t a word.

I said, “It’s a word.”

I’d like to think “herocious” has become the part of me that intuits things in the same way certain people intuit things. It’s my Everyman. I don’t think of it as a pseudonym, or even an avatar. I think of it more as a reminder of the storyteller in me.

JT: The road trip is an iconic character of its own in books, movies, and songs. It misleads, it redirects, and it delivers. Austin Nights celebrates the love of the road trip, of freedom and spontaneity. What do you think about the interstate has worked so well for so many storytellers as both the journey and the destination?

MD: It’s interesting. Now I’m thinking about how many road trip stories there are in the U.S. So many. In European literature there doesn’t seem to be that many, or at least none immediately come to mind. I know I’m wrong, but I feel like the train traveler/pedestrian is more central in European literature, walking through city streets and between towns, taking the train, as opposed to driving across boundary lines, along thousands of miles of paved road. And in The Odyssey, the voyage involved the sea. All of these work well as a canvas for a story, a way of discovering. Although their poetry has different meter, they are each gateways into the soul of things.

JT: As a math tutor by day, your left and right brain are equally useful, unlike many of us creative types, whose right brain lays there like a fish out of water, slapping around the pavement. What effect does this dual, yet seemingly diametric, acumen have on your writing as a craft?

MD: Algebra is dear to me. I’m no genius when it comes to math, but there are mathematical concepts that blow my mind, or at least get it to expand and feel even more flummoxed and awe-struck about the Big Picture.

I’d say my respect for math has colored my writing with some kind of loose pattern and cadence. I’d say the idea of irrational numbers going on forever, never repeating as they write their own story, is very humbling. I’m spiritual when it comes to irrational numbers.

I believe every story I could ever write is already written word for word in their expanding string of numbers.

JT: Imagine you leave Austin for good and, at 85, you find yourself a window dweller in one of god’s waiting rooms somewhere in the Midwest. What image will meet the powers of your recollection, even though you can’t remember what you had for lunch?

MD: So many. I’ve seen many beautiful things. Things that give me goose bumps. Things I trust will tingle all my senses even when they’re dumb with senility. A picture of Miami Beach at 41st Street is the wallpaper on my tiny computer.

Not to dismiss the Midwest – I love Chicago, I don’t think there’s a better walking city in this country – but if I leave Austin for good and, for some blasted reason, end up back in the Midwest, solitary and in waiting and far away from Miami Beach, I’ll probably focus on what my heart and brain have been closest to.

JT: Do most people pick up on the pun: Austin Nights, Austinites?

MD: No. I’m glad you did. Austinites are what people who live in Austin, TX call themselves. Like Chicagoans, or Houstonians, or Miamians. It’s a subtle way to target your specific market. Or are you thinking of devout Jane Austen fans?

JT: “Devout” Jane Austen fans. Hmm. Are there any left?

MD: I see a lot of her books in the bookstore, sometimes a couple shelves stocked with her words, so yes, I think there are Austenites out there, somewhere, but maybe they’re a dying breed, maybe our collective taste is progressing.

JT: The Austin arts scene is vibrant and varied, which may surprise an outsider. What are the ties that bind those on the fringe in Austin?

MD: The city of Austin is little and very supportive of its local culture. The weekend Farmers’ Markets are a big deal. Austinites like locally grown food and locally brewed Kombucha. Austinites like local eateries, local coffee, and local efforts. They like riding their fixed-gear bikes and being hip to things. Within the city, which is about the area of a circle with a 5 mile radius, chain establishments are not treated well. All the shitty retailers you see everywhere in U.S. cities are banished to the outskirts of Austin. This city appreciates the whole DIY approach. Neat coffeehouses abound. Independent booksellers and indie record stores thrive. Storefronts are like art galleries. You ask what the ties are that bind those on the fringe, well, I think it’s individualism, simple as that.

JT: Wal-Mart calls. They tell you that they want to stock Austin Nights across Texas, which could result in massive exposure and big bucks. The catch is, you have to do book signings across the state while wearing a Wal-Mart uniform and sitting beside the “greeter” at the entrance to the store? Do you do it?

MD: Selling books at the entrance to a Texas Wal-Mart is about the same as selling books on the street, and I’m preparing to sell books on the street. I have a blue cardboard box that wine bottles came in. My girlfriend painted it blue. Every week I will make more iterations of Austin Nights on my kitchen table, and I will put them in this box and sell it around Austin. There will be no Jane Austen in this box. I’d gratefully put on a Wal-Mart uniform and do the same thing, sitting beside the greeter.

JT: That’s great. After all, it is about getting it out there. References to other books pepper Austin Nights. For example, The Quiet American, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. If you were only allowed one book when leaving for jail to serve a life sentence for murder with no chance of parole, what book would you take with you? Why?

MD: For murder? That’s different than the whole stranded-on-an-island scenario. If I were sentenced with no chance of parole for murder and allowed one book, I definitely wouldn’t take a book I’ve read. I’d probably want to stop thinking about the stuff I’ve read, since clearly it steered me wrong. I’d want to try something new. I’d want to take a book with me that would force me to become a much better person. Something simple and good, something right. I’d probably take something by the 14th Dalai Lama. He seems happy and innocent.

JT: Commendable, but you may need something light to offset your predicament. What about Snooki’s autobiography? The 13th Dali Lama gave it two metaphysical thumbs up.

MD: You mean from Jersey Shore? I’ve never watched it. A friend came over from Houston once. He was here for ACL, and he did an imitation of what the guys on Jersey Shore do every time they go to a club. He said they all huddle together in a circle and slowly rise up and start bouncing up and down hard to the beat. Trust me, it was funnier when he told it.

JT: That is funny. I got a great visual there accompanied by the imaginary scent of orange skin and hair gel. What, if any, influence does music have on your writing process?

MD: Sometimes I write with music on. But music usually muddles my thoughts too much. I get anxious after a little while. I feel cracked out with everything going on around me. I think I feel a little prone to sensory overload. I am not one of those people who can read AND listen to music. Music without lyrics is as far as I’ll go when I’m writing, and that’s only when I want to rejuvenate ebbing energy. Otherwise, I like quiet places. No voices. Just the sound of the keyboard, which, when it’s going, is really the sweetest kind of music.

JT: Yes, music can be distracting to say the least. That said, some songs inspire. In Austin Nights, Michael says that a good movie makes him want to get up and do something creative. What was the last movie you saw that made you feel that way?

MD: Some songs do inspire. I can count on Sigur Rós for this. It’s Kind of a Funny Story made me feel like I could create, but I watched the whole thing, so by the end it was enough to have watched it.

JT: Self publishing used to be considered a last resort. This attitude has changed dramatically of late, likely catapulted by the evolution of the e-reader. Do you think necessity was the mother of invention in this case, or the other way around?

MD: E-readers seem to be revolutionary. They seem to be changing the landscape of books. I haven’t given them much thought. Anything that makes it easier for writers to reach an audience without having to go through the usual channels seems like a move in the right direction to me. Sure, there’s going to be a lot of shit out there, stuff rife with typos and in need of some cuts, but even without the advent of e-readers this was still the case. I also think there’s something to be said about suddenly having the option to read stories that have not been shaped by so-called professional editors. Perfection, or over-editing, sterilizes.

JT: Publishing in the traditional sense sets a pretty limiting marker of success for most writers. You have your own publishing endeavor in Tiny TOE Press. Tell me a bit about that.

MD: It’s more of a guerrilla operation, or it has the potential to be. Tiny TOE Press handcrafts books to keep overhead as low as possible and to season each of our paperbacks with love. Perfect iterations of your book are as sterilizing as having your story over-edited. Tiny TOE Press doesn’t have as much practicality as the more traditional presses, but our books make up for that with their quirks.

JT: The world ended last Saturday. How has your life changed?

MD: I can officially say I’m not the kind of person who euthanizes perfectly healthy pets.

JT: I always thought Youth in Asia would be a great name for a rock band. Have you ever had a rock star fantasy?

MD: I have trouble wearing sunglasses and keeping a straight face. I like that other people are rock stars. They can fill those shoes.

Austin Nights is available for purchase from Tiny TOE Press.

–

Jennifer Thompson likes to think she hasn’t sold out to The Man. When not writing computer manuals and other business spin-doctory, she writes for fun and has had a modicum of creative success in Adbusters, SMUT magazine, and several other information superhighway poetry, fiction, and humour publications. She is currently enjoying reviewing submissions and other fun endeavors at Black Heart.

BLACK HEART: What compelled you to start writing a novel, and how long have you been working on it?

GRAHAM STRONG: I started writing when I was six years old, and I think ever since I could comprehend what a “novel” was, I’ve wanted to write one. But novel writing doesn’t pay the bills, unless you’re very, very lucky, so I work as a freelance marketing writer and part-time freelance journalist. Honestly, I am just happy that I can support my family with my writing. For me, that’s living the dream.

However, I never gave up on writing a novel; it just became that “someday” kind of thing for me.

Last summer on a whim I went to a local writers’ conference where I attended workshops by Terry Fallis and Miriam Toews, both of whom are recognized writers here in Canada (Toews won the Governor General’s award and Fallis just won Canada Reads 2011 with his debut novel). I was there with another writer friend of mine, Duncan Weller, who writes and illustrates children’s books. We talked about finding time to write, and he said I could probably find an hour a day to put towards my novel. I laughed at first, but then I realized he was probably right. I also realized that if I didn’t plan to write a novel, “someday” would never come.

So I started writing on September 7, 2010 – the first day of school here – and committed to writing one hour per day. I finished my first draft around Christmas.

BH: Since you’re on your second draft now, what kind of advice would you give those working on a first draft?

GS: I think the most important advice is to have fun with it. One of the biggest reasons novels get abandoned (I think) is that writers get discouraged – and as a group, I think we are easily discouraged. To fight that, I decided to not focus on getting published, but just to “muck about in the sandbox” as it were. I had a vague idea for a story and characters and themes, so I just started writing. If something wasn’t working, rather than get stuck spinning my wheels I moved on to another scene. I wrote scenes I knew would never make the book or that were too long, because the idea wasn’t to write perfectly, but just to write and get those ideas down on paper.

Once they’re there, it’s easy enough to start forming them into a storyline in the second draft.

BH: Why write a blog about your process of noveling? Do you find it helps with your writing process? I feel like I am distracted by writing updates about my own novel-in-progress, so I try to minimize them. I’m curious about why you chose to update daily and not weekly.

GS: Accountability was my number one concern when I decided to blog about my novel. As we all know, nobody cares if you work on your novel today or not. There is nobody to answer to. I’d learned from past experience that without that accountability, I’d likely abandon the project again.

So I publicly announced that I was writing a novel. I invited friends and family to read about my progress – I became accountable to them and, in some personified way, the blog. I posted daily because I was writing the novel daily, so it was kind of a “shift report” about the day’s events.

In that sense, it also validates the day’s work – too often you finish your writing for the day and it feels like a drop in the bucket compared to what the completed novel will be. But we have to remember that every drop is important – every day, something we write will eventually show up in the novel. Even if the whole scene is eventually cut out of the book, it served some purpose to write it, and had an impact somewhere. Blogging about the work underlines that one drop and brings validation right now. It helped keep me going.

Now that I’m in the second draft and not working on the novel daily, I’m not posting as often – I try for four to six times per week.

There were other reasons to blog as well. I got a lot of encouragement from my readers along the way, which made writing a novel less lonely. It will also serve as a sort of writing journal, detailing the process “from blank page to published author” as I call it.

"Gotta Be Stronger Than The Story" (photo by Flickr user Robert Bruce Murray III / Sort Of Natural)

BH: Do you usually prefer to write for a specific amount of time or toward a certain daily word count? Which do you find more motivating?

GS: Personally, I think writing to a certain word count every day would drive me nuts. I’d constantly be looking down to see where I’m at. Very distracting, I think.

When I was writing the first draft, I wrote one hour per day. I set a timer and then I didn’t have to think about it again – I could just focus on the writing. It’s also important to note that I’d stop right when the timer went off, even if I was in the middle of a sentence. I found it made it easier to pick up again the next day.

BH: You may have answered this somewhere and I just couldn’t find it on your site, but does your novel-in-progress have a name? And could you give a general idea of what it’s about?

GS: I have consciously not given away too many details about the novel. I’ve come to realize that many writers, for whatever reason, refuse to talk about what they’re working on (I thought I was the only paranoid one, but apparently not…) I think it’s kind of a writers’ superstition, but there are some practical reasons behind it too. If you tell someone anything about your book, you’re bound to get feedback – or at least leading questions – and that will affect your writing. It can’t not. So I’ve found the best policy to not talk about the story, at least in the early going.

(Besides, if you tell everyone the whole story, they’re not going to need to read the book when it’s done, will they?)

What I have mentioned though is that it is a contemporary Canadian novel, it is a “buddy road trip” novel, and that I am writing it as if it were a non-fiction book. I’m developing a certain style while writing it based on New Journalism, popularized by writers like Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. It’s a very rich, colourful way to report, and suits the subject matter and themes well, I think.

I haven’t decided on a title. I have had a few titles pop into my head along the way that I’ve written down. One stands out in particular, but I won’t be talking about titles until I reach the “review draft” stage when I start looking for readers.

BH: Do you already have a publisher lined up, or is this part of the process you’re going to attend to after the writing is finished?

GS: I wish I had a publisher! No, not yet, but part of what I’m doing is educating myself on the process, reading stories about getting published from other writers, and so on. I have a couple of places in mind I’d like to approach, but I’m nowhere near done that part of my research.

Right now though, my main focus is on getting the novel finished.

BH: Related to that, are you considering self-publishing?

GS: This is a very exciting time in publishing, isn’t it? Self-publishing today isn’t what it was five years ago or even last year. Many writers, both veterans and newbies, are going the self-publishing route and finding success.

Personally, my Plan A is to find a publisher though. I think there is a certain validation in finding a publisher (though maybe I’m old-fashioned that way). I’m also noticing that the writers who are having the most success at self-publishing are genre writers. Since mine is a “literary” novel (I use the term in the loosest sense – not Tolstoy literary, but say Rex Pickett or Tom Robbins literary), I’m not sure I’d have the same success.

That being said, I will definitely self-publish if need be. I already have a plan to hire one (or more) professional editors to help polish it up in the end stages.

BH: Also related, are you thinking about sales strategies, or just focused on the writing process for now?

GS: Yes – I’m a marketing writer, so I can’t help but consider ways to sell the book. Actually, the strategy I have in mind doesn’t quite exist yet. I envision a model where like-minded writers get together and pool their marketing powers/reach/finances. The idea is like the “Amazon suggests” list at the bottom of your book pick – if you like this writer, perhaps you’ll like that writer too.

Lee Goldberg  said he’s doing something similar with some of his writing friends (I haven’t followed up on that yet, so I don’t know all the details) and Seth Godin’s Domino Project looks interesting. I think these “communal publishing houses” will grow in popularity, and ultimately if I self-publish, I’d like to be part of this movement too.

Terry Fallis first gave away his book in podcast form, reading one chapter per week and making it available for download. That’s a great idea too (though I’m not sure I have the speaking chops to pull it off) and ultimately helped him land a major publisher in Canada. I might give that a try too.

As I mentioned already, the focus right now is definitely on finishing the novel, but there is time in between to research and consider what will work best for me. It’s better to be prepared for when the time comes, I think.

BH: Can readers of the blog help shape your story in any way? I’ve heard of writers using these kinds of gimmicks before, either bidding on the chance to have a character named after them, or something like that, so I was curious to know if you had any ideas for reader interaction in the creative process.

GS: Yes, I’ve heard of those too. I really like the idea in theory – it helps get the readers involved, which is never a bad thing.

However for this book, it will be all me. Right now, the biggest part of this venture (besides completing a novel) is learning how to write a novel. Or perhaps more accurately, learning how I write a novel. Once I’ve learned the process – and developed a readership – I’d love doing something like that, if it felt right at the time.

I do plan to put the call out on my blog for people who might be interested in reviewing the book and giving me a critique, when I reach that stage. So in that way, my blog readers will definitely have an impact.

BH: Is there a specific date you’ve currently got in mind for your deadline, or do you prefer to play things by ear?

GS: I do not have a deadline – in fact, I’ve avoided deadlines altogether. I’ve decided that as long as I’m working honestly on the novel, I’m not going to put any pressure on myself to have it done by a certain time.

Besides, this really is a side project as well (when you’ve got a family to support, anything that doesn’t immediately pay the mortgage has to be considered a side project, I think). I’ve been really busy work-wise lately, so I haven’t been able to work on the novel as much as I’d like. I’d feel guiltier about that if I had a deadline in place.

All that being said, I’m on track to having a third draft finished by this summer. This will be what I call the “review draft” which I’ll send out to select readers for critiques. After that process, I plan to find a professional editor to help me with the final polish.

BH: What’s the best book or article you’ve ever read about how to write a novel?

GS: I haven’t read any books specifically on novel writing – not a comprehensive book on the subject, at least. Larry Brook’s blog StoryFix.com has some consistently great advice, and I bought his Story Structure De-Mystified ebook to help me structure my novel (it helped me a lot, BTW).

I also really like Stephen King’s On Writing (which is weird, because I’ve never been able to finish one of his novels…).

To read more from Graham Strong and follow his path from blank page to published author, check out Graham Strong’s Novel Writing Blog.

Black Heart: How long have you been writing, and what made you decide to start emailing people your writing instead of just posting it on your website?

Robert Bruce: The first thing I remember writing was a detective story. I was around 12 years old and it was called The Knife was Colored Red. I’m glad to report that it’s lost somewhere in the dustbin of history, a good riddance if there ever needed to be one.

I’ve gone back and forth on the website/email thing a few times, but have settled into a combo situation now. Everything is there to grab freely on the site, but I place the email subscription above everything else. I like the commitment, from both sides, that email requires.

BH: Your e-book is poetry, but most of the pieces you’ve been sending in your emails have been short fiction. Do you consider yourself to be more a poet or a writer of prose, or does the distinction matter to you at all?

RB: I’m a prose writer. The poems had no meter, no classical structure, but the short form appeals to me. I’ve carried it into the stories now, each one coming in somewhere between just 500-2,000 words.

The distinction is there, but it doesn’t really matter to me. I start, and then one thing or the other happens. Lately, it’s been more on the story side of things.

BH: A lot of your poems deal with technology and how you view the Internet as both a blessing and a curse. Have you, like Prince, declared the Internet “completely over”—or are you secretly just as addicted to Facebook and all that crap as everybody else?

RB: Anything I say about the wonders of the Internet will have already been overworked, but I’m generally with those who think its power hasn’t yet begun. The blessing of the Internet is the freedom it’s unleashed onto the world. The curse of the Internet is the freedom it’s unleashed onto the world.

Been thinking a lot lately about this question of the Internet as stepping-stone—are we making something new here, or is it just another tool to market your way into the book or record deal? I think we’re making something new, an entirely new format that is an end unto itself.

BH: Annie Proulx has said that writers should slow down and write everything longhand, and it would seem you agree with this to some extent, judging by the inclusion of several handwritten drafts in your book. Do you prefer pen and paper to typing things on the computer, and in either case, why?

RB: I write notes and outlines longhand. Without knowing the context of her thoughts, I think Proulx is onto something there. Hers is not a pro-Luddism or a late-adopter type of opinion, I think it’s really important to see your hand slowly spilling ink onto a page. It’s a frustrating process, which is good for the stomach as well as the mind.

That said, I also have a good time typing fast into the laptop late into the night.

BH: Where do you usually write? And do you have any photos of your workspace?

RB: There’s a blue chair in the living room that’s become my favorite spot. If the dog is on there with me, things go better.

Sometimes it happens at the desk, but not very often.

BH: What compels you to write?

RB: My stomach and my grave.

BH: I’m curious about your donation-based business model, as well as whether or not you view it as, indeed, a “business model.” Does this work for you (i.e. does it make any money), or do you find that people are taking your stuff for free without giving back?

RB: I do view it as a business model. From question 3 above, I think it might be the business model for 21st century unknown artists, etc.

Bukowski said it best, something like “If I feed them, they’ll feed me.” It’s a way to start. There’s more take than give right now from the readers, but that’s what it is. My audience is relatively small, but in 15 years? 25 years?

Art (especially art on the Internet) is a striking example of free-market democracy. If I do my job, they’ll eventually take care of me. If I don’t, they’ll leave, as they should.

BH: One of your poems instructs writers to “Read every poem and novel and newspaper you can get your hands on before the age of 21 then stop completely.” Do you stand by this advice, or are you still secretly a reader? And what types of things do you like to read these days?

RB: I stand by it. I own a Bible, a handful of contemporary novels, a volume of Shakepeare, and a few business books (I am an armchair businessman).

I think we need to read less, but read good books better.

I’m 38 years old, a genuine late-bloomer.

BH: What makes a great story or poem? Or, alternately, what makes a really awful story or poem?

RB: Great—A protagonist who wants something, and the resulting action she takes to get it. Awful—Everything else.

BH: What are you working on now, and do you have any plans for more books, whether digital or “conventional”?

RB: I’m eight weeks into this one-story-every-week thing on robertbruce.com. If I come out of it with a handful of good stories, there’ll be another book or two.

Beyond that, I just keep writing.

Sign up for Robert Bruce’s mailing list to receive a new story each week, delivered straight to your inbox, at robertbruce.com.

Silent Type #2

Black Heart: Why have typewriters so captured your imagination that you’ve made a zine about them?
Cheryl Lowry: Typewriters are beautiful objects. Mechanically complex, elegantly designed, they reflect a century of slow evolution in product design. Using them is a tactile joy. I sensed that people needed a reminder of this, or an introduction, if they never experienced it in the first place.

BH: What made you decide to start a zine, as opposed to a blog about typewriters?
CL: I’ve actually blogged about typewriters since 2007, at strikethru.net. The community of people I’ve met through this site became the authors and audience for the zine, which is ironic, since the Internet is often accused of killing off zines. To the contrary, it can be used to grow audiences for print.

BH: How did you decide what types of items to include, and will Silent Type have themes in future issues?
CL: I’ve been pretty open with the theme so far: anything related to retrotech, with more restrictions on format; issue 1 prose and poetry, issue 2 just poetry. Typewriters and poetry strike me as a logical pairing, since it’s said both are doomed. For the third issue, should I do one, I’m leaning toward instructional information about typewriters—people in the typosphere (the community of typewriter bloggers) have come up with many innovative ways to modify typewriters, ribbons, and paper, and I’d like to see this information compiled in a Silent Type.

BH: You spray-painted your typewriter pink, which is awesome; do you have any special tips, tools or ideas for those seeking to replicate the Pink Typewriter, or hints for keeping parts you don’t want painted from coming under fire?

Cheryl's infamous pink typewriter!

CL: I have been meaning to do a blog post on this (or perhaps, a piece in Silent Type 3). I have no particular painting skills, I just found a machine that was easy to take apart (it was a Hermes Rocket with a shell attached by screws) and had a rough metal finish that took well to paint. I made sure to clean the parts I intended to paint, and then set them on a cardboard box and painted them with craft spray paint, using long, even strokes. When the shell dried I just placed it back on the typewriter. This is how you avoid spray painting the typebars, platen, and other parts you don’t want affected. I’d advise finding a typewriter that comes apart easily with a screwdriver, and has a metal (not plastic) body.

BH: How many typewriters do you currently own?
CL: This morning I had nine, this evening I have six. I just gave away three at a type-in event this afternoon. I try to keep my total number under 10, as they can be difficult to find places for around the house!

BH: How did you acquire your first (or favorite) typewriter?
CL: I grew up using a 1970′s Smith-Corona Sterling, on which I wrote bad fan fiction about Huey Lewis and the News when I was in junior high. I wish I was kidding about this.

Silent Type #1

BH: Will you, indeed, be making another issue of Silent Type?
CL: After (barely) finishing issue 2 during an extremely overscheduled year, I swore off of further Silent Types, but I still am considering the “instructional” 3rd issue nonetheless.

BH: With the increasingly digital world we live in, what role does ancient technology like the “portable” or “silent” typewriter play?
CL: As analog and offline options to read and write become more scarce (the closing of bookstores, interacting with screens around the clock) I believe people will begin to seek deliberate experiences to disconnect and regain their solitude and concentration. The typewriter provides the perfect opportunity to rediscover the joy of monotasking.

BH: What’s your favorite brand of typewriter?
CL: Olympia, which is a German brand. Olympia typewriters are solid and well-made in a way you’ll rarely experience with modern products.

BH: If you could be typing anywhere in the world, where would it be—and why?
CL: A sidewalk cafe in Paris. I went to Paris in 2009, but regrettably didn’t bring a typewriter along. Typing, watching people, and drinking wine in Paris would be the perfect way to pass an afternoon.

You can download PDF versions of Silent Type #1 and 2 at strikethru.net, or purchase a hard copy (#1 only; #2 is sold out!) at Microcosm.