Tag Archives: on Writing

From Art to Author

01 Friday Nov 2013

Posted by in books, fiction, Sartre, writing

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I grew up with art, was surrounded by it, breathed it.  My father is an art dealer, so our house became an annex for his San Francisco art gallery.  At ten I took a book of Bruegel etchings from his bookshelf and began the laborious task of copying the images.  If you are not familiar with Brueghel, his works are similar to Hieronymus Bosch, lots of strange little characters with animal heads and creepy figures crawling out of eggs.  It is a child’s dream (nightmare) of strange creatures and imagination.  I still love his work.

It was then that I decided to be an artist, to draw great works.  Not painting, drawing, I loved the line and shading.  So I continued copying other artists and kept it up until high school.  By this time in my life I’d probably been to more museums and art galleries than all my classmates combined.  But something inside fizzled.  I didn’t want to be an artist anymore; the fire had burned itself out.

Don’t get me wrong, I still loved art, always will.  It’s like a second blood supply for me.  But the fire to create it had gone out.  During this same period, I had been reading, reading a lot, fiction and science fiction mostly.  There wasn’t really such a thing as young adult fiction at this time.  There were just books that were a little easier for teenagers to read.  I would find a writer that I liked, then consume every book he or she wrote.  Clark, Asimov, Heinlein, H. G. Wells, Bradbury, Maugham, Golding, Salinger, and many more.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but all those words sunk in, shaped my mind and eventually, my desire to create.

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Strangely enough, I studied business in college.  Oh it was tedious and awful as you would expect for an art lover.  To make it bearable, I took lots of literature classes, Shakespeare, poetry – no business students in there.  In my junior year, just as I was ready to drop out, I received a letter inviting me into the foreign exchange program.  I grabbed it like a life-preserver to a drowning student, and spent my final year studying in Copenhagen, Denmark, then traveling around Europe.  Wonderful experience, I recommend it to all students, drowning or not.

What a crazy thing life is, somehow everything comes around to be exactly what it was supposed to be from the beginning.  After college, I followed in my father’s steps, becoming an art dealer and later a gallery owner.  During this time, I wrote lots of things, mostly business related stuff, copy for ads and PR.  Then I tried my hand at essays.  I was invited by the editor of the Aspen Daily News to write a weekly column about art.  I was given plenty of rope with which to hang myself.

I have never studied writing, had only a general idea about journalism.  But why should that stop me.  Unafraid, I just wrote about what I thought would be interesting.  The articles were stupid sometimes, one was about art that had killed people (falling sculptures and poisonous paint), but sometimes it was very deep, a two part article about the Nazi plundering of artwork in Europe.  I got plenty of good feedback, people liked my stories and I kept it up for about two years.  Then the pressures of time and the demands of my art gallery forced me to quit.

But I didn’t stop writing.  Fiction has always been my love.  Sure, I love great science fiction, but my real love is 19th (and early 20th) Century literature, Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, Falkner, Twain, Hugo, Kafka and dozens of other.  It is difficult sometimes, paragraphs that span pages, descriptions that go into minute detail, but they are always rich with meaning and discovery.  These giants could write.  Great literature is the equivalent of seeing a great painting.  That sigh that is released from your soul when you realize you are witnessing genius.

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So here I am, putting the two things together, art and writing.  Sure, I could write about art, I still do that, but that is not really what I mean.  Art has taught me how to see, how to imagine a scene, the characters, the situation unfolding in my mind.  When I write, I literally see everything happening in the story and just describe it on paper.  Many readers have commented how visual my writing is.  I don’t see how it could be otherwise, that’s where it comes from.

Like I said earlier, life has a way of putting us on the path meant for us.  I guess I should have gotten a degree in literature, studied writing, but it didn’t happen that way.  I learned to write by reading (still do) and how to see by viewing and making art.  Regrets are for the dead.  This is how it is and I’m grateful I get to do what I love.

Even if it took a few extra decades…

Writing Your First Book

26 Saturday Oct 2013

Posted by in books, fiction, Threshold of the Mind, writing

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It took me 12 years to finish my first book, 3 years for the second one, 9 months for my third, 6 months for the fourth, and 3 months for the fifth.  At this rate, I’ll be writing a new book every week, right.  Not quite, but it does get easier and certainly more pleasurable.  My first book, Threshold of the Mind (formerly In the Image of God) is my first book, even though it was published as my third.  The first version was complete in about 8 years, after 3 complete rewrites.  It weighed in at a whopping 200,000 words (approx. 700 paperback pages) and included every idea I had ever had about the future, politics, human relations, and yes, the kitchen sink.  It was dense and rambling, not altogether bad, but not what I had hoped for.

I set the book down for about two years and beat myself up for being a hack.  In the meantime I wrote newspaper and magazine articles, short stories and poetry, things I could complete in a few days.  The opposite of a book.

But in the back of my mind, my book kept whispering to me, “I’m not done, rewrite me.”  No way, not after close to a million words piled in a drawer, backed up on 42 floppy disks (remember those?).  It seemed indulgent, the book that would never be done, just writing and writing, until one day it would be 27 volumes completed the day before my death.  My children would shrug when they saw it, then stuff me and the volumes into a casket.

Finally, I woke up ready to face it.  Enough time had passed.  I promised to be objective and honest about it, throw it away if it was no good.  I would approach it as if someone else had written it and needed my help editing it.  I sat down and read it cover to cover, without a pen, thoroughly subduing the desire to cringe and make notes.  I just read it like a reader would.  Hey, it wasn’t so bad, really good in spots, but there were problems.

I spent the next 3 months outlining the book, one chapter at a time.  Who were the characters, the scenes, the action, the place, the plot developments?  I used a spreadsheet to see the book in a logical way.  It was a good exercise, one I hope never to have to do again.  It was pretty tedious work.

When this was complete, I realized many things about my book.  It had: too many characters; things I loved, but didn’t make any sense to the reader; action that was exciting and well presented, but didn’t advance the plot; and other stuff that didn’t help the story.  I kept the core and began rewriting…again.  It took about nine months this time.  I went through again and cleaned stuff up (another couple of months), but essentially it was done.  It was half the size now, 102,000 words, (310 pages).  And best of all, I loved it, not liked it, loved  it.  That was my first book.

When I finished this time and showed my wife, strutting and proud of myself.  She said, “good for you, now go write another one.”  She had just read The War of Art too.

After that it got easier, much easier.  The whole idea of a book being this enormous project that could take years and millions of words was behind me.  I did it, I finished the first marathon and my feet didn’t break off, I got stronger instead.  One step at a time, as they say.  And that’s exactly what a book is, one word at a time.  Find an idea, a story that you love and start it; don’t worry about how long it will be, or how long it will take.  Don’t worry about doing it the way the experts tell you to, or agonizing if you should have a detailed plot or outline before you start, or if you should know the ending before you begin.  None of that matters.  It only matters that you do it.

Here’s another bit of advice, don’t tell anyone anything about it until you’re done (at least the first full draft).  Maybe don’t even tell them you’re writing a book.  Just pull it out one day and say, “hey you want to read my book?”  Enjoy the jaw-drop effect.  Because if you share it too early, your friends or family, or whomever you show it to, will have all kinds of helpful advice about your plot or characters.  Or they’ll tell you it sounds like someone else they read, or the lead character reminds them of their ex-wife (whom they hate) or some other idea freezing crap.  They can’t help themselves, they mean well, but everyone is a critic.  And you’ll stutter or stop, and your great idea won’t seem so great anymore.  Undeveloped ideas are like snowflakes, very, very fragile.