The article was apparently a an advance volley from a book that just came out of his new book called “What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.”

I particularly like Boldtype’s review of the book, to wit:

Murakami’s tough-love take on writing seems bracing in the context of an unending stream of “craft”-oriented tomes. Whereas a classic writer’s book like Anne Lamott‘s Bird by Bird deals in trade-based tips — “The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth” — Murakami jettisons such undeniable (but not particularly helpful) truisms in favor of stressing the importance of elbow grease. Or, writing as sport.

Not particularly helpful, indeed. I think Murakami’s wisdom may do more for me in the long run. Who knows, maybe he’ll be able to tip my scale and get me out there on the road to running, and writing, a hell of a lot more.

Like the article’s author, I have always been plagued with a close relationship with the little green monster. I find it stifles me. I become overly obsessed with the details of the other person’s success, trying to find the place in their timeline where they just got lucky, sniffing out the aspect of their art that is more calculated commercialism than creative vision. Overall, I find jealousy is a serious waste of my time and energy.

No, I think what motivates me in a constructive and positive way is the notion of opportunity. If I feel like something I’m writing offers an opportunity to do something I’ve never done before, I am full of energy, ideas, and commitment. Being jealous over someone else’s work or career makes me focus too much of my precious* effort on someone else. Opportunity makes me focus on me. When it comes to writing, I think that’s probably more worthwhile. Luckily, I believe that sense of opportunity is around me right now.

It will also help if I stop succumbing to buzz about hot writing wunderkinds. That’s a work in progress, for which I’ll need to quit paying attention to much of what flows through the New York Observer, New York Magazine, and Gawker.

* I say “precious” not out of a sense of luxurious value, but “precious” in the sense of rarity.

Morbidly, I watched and learned about a brilliant writer from the Iowa Workshop, who published a first novel in 1972 called “The Stones of Summer.??? The novel receives a handful of reviews, they are mostly strong.

We later learn that the Mossman burnt himself out writing his first novel out of grad school. “The Stones of Summer??? isn’t published by one of the big houses. Mossman doesn’t promote the book. Then novel winds up filed on the Obscurity shelf. The writer goes on to a life of anxiety attacks, 20 years of welding, and caring for his elderly mother before the film director tracks him down.

All of this is woven around the discussion of one-hit wonder novels, from Harper Lee to Joseph Heller (sort of) to J.D. Salinger (technically) to a few other writers I had heard of but haven’t yet read. Now many of those books are on my Amazon list and I somehow, strangely, feel more charged (or thankfully just as charged as I did before) about keeping up with my craft.

I could have shuffled off to bed after watching “The Stone Reader??? feeling like the game is tricked against me and so many of us post-MFA writers. I could have looked at the view of the publishing world as the driven-by-chance, cannibalistic venture that it appears to be. There’s plenty of testimony to that effect. In the moview, the writer’s teachers, colleagues, even his agent add evidence to the fact that Mossman was an inevitable victim of the writing and publishing process. But — and here’s the rub — for all of them he was also that brief champion of art, unforgettable yet forgotten, burning like fire, and yet ultimately dimmed. We could all end up like this. But the trying, the effort, the possibility of one person reading that book and feeling something… It’s all worth it.

Check out the film, if you haven’t. Let me know what you think.

I’m reading Orwell’s essay, “Why I Write,” and this line pops out at me in bold, headline-size letters:

“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.”

I know I fit that description. And I like a good mystery. So, I’m going to sit back on my lazy ass and let you tell me more, Mr. Orwell.

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

No argument from me.

“One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

I’m right there with you.

I need these words, these solid, chewy nuggets of wisdom from Mr. Orwell. Just like I need to write. Like I sometimes need to sit down, do nothing, and call myself a lazy, vain, selfish monster. Yeah, I felt like giving up today. But Mr. Orwell spoke directly to me, affirming my right to be inert. Tomorrow, I’ll pick things up and continue.

If you haven’t read this essay — and I’m surprised I hadn’t before — and you feel like giving up, read it.

I’ve overcome some of that with the help of avid, healthy reading and being more conscious about my goals as a writer. No more lofty notions of the great american novel and no more insurmountable goals that end up sending me far away from the keyboard and straight to a bottle of Jameson’s. Save the dreams of world domination for later.

One of the keys to enjoying writing and keeping it up consistently is setting small, achievable goals for yourself. May not be a new idea, but I don’t see it talked about in regards to writing as often as I’d think I would.Some examples of things to try in order to bring back the love:

• Improve the dialogue in one scene. Cut out the fat and make it flow.
• Search your story for lame words like “somehow” and “suddenly.” Replace them with better specific words.
• I once pared a story down from 2500 words to 1600. Talk about trying to find the perfect word… Do this to a story you really like for even greater effect.
• If you’re stuck on a story or a piece of writing, read a favorite story and find one thing to steal. Watch the plagiarism — but freely borrow a technique and apply it to solve your problem.

The idea of attainable goals is part of writing exercises and prompts. But for me, I’ve never really been able to get much out of exercises. I need to feel like what I’m writing is the real thing — even if I throw it out eventually. And, a small goal achieved is a happy writer, even if only for a few minutes…

In the first part of our conversation we learned about Jones’s life following his MFA and talked about his two short story collections, “Lost in the City” and “All Aunt Hagar’s Children,” as well as his phenomenal novel, “The Known World.” In this section, we get into the challenges of storytelling, books, a couple of interesting tidbits about movies and graphic novels, and whether or not there’s magic in writing…

When did books and writing become important to you?
The writing thing came late in college. Like I said, I’ve never been one to sit down and write every day. But books became important in my early teens, but I had been reading comic books before that. I would say reading has been important since I started learning how to read, really. But the writing thing came later.

I mean, I didn’t grow up thinking that I would be a writer — that’s not the kind of environment I came from. You grew up to get a solid job, so that you won’t have to pray about your rent and worry about food. And I didn’t know any people who were writers. But the reading was always important, and I suppose that there’s no better foundation in the universe, if you want to write, than loving to read.

You come across people in writing courses with poor reading — they haven’t read enough… One of the first things I noticed, before I even thought about being a writer, I think I was in junior high school, and for some reason I was in some office killing time, and there was a typewriter there. That was the first time I ever typed. I typed my name and I was fascinated by the way the black words looked on the white paper. And I discovered books when I was in my early teens, and one of the things I noted, for example, was quotations. There’s open quotations, and then there’s the comma, or the period, and then end quotation. I had this student, an intelligent woman, and one of the things she was doing was that she had no idea how the dialogue technically was supposed to be written. As if she had never read a book that had dialogue. I always liked to have conferences, whether in my office or over the phone, and I was telling her about that problem. I said, “Go to your bookshelf and take down a book.” And it was if she had never investigated how dialogue — a simple thing — how dialogue is supposed to be written… The reading thing is the best foundation.

So you’ve done two story collections now and one novel. Have you thought about or been approached about doing other types of writing, like nonfiction, or has Hollywood come knocking?
Actually, someone is writing a screenplay for “The Known World,” but I don’t know how far along they are. And I got an email from DC Comics about some ideas for graphic novels, but I have no ideas, so I don’t know where that will ever go.

That would be great —
They heard that comic books were a part of my childhood. I have never read a graphic novel…

There’s some good stuff out there.
That’s what I understand. You know, I saw “Sin City” on DVD and I liked that a whole lot. I’ve seen maybe one or two other things too. I think at first, when I thought about that, this coupling of comic book and novel, I wasn’t quite sure. But now I know that there’s some good things out there, and I’m looking forward to catching up.

As a fan, I would encourage you to go with that. A Jones graphic novel would be a great thing to see… One last question I had for, about the writing process — What’s the toughest part of writing for you?
Well, I think it’s all sort of tough… Because I’m not the kind of person to take anything from my own life. In both collections of stories, the second story in each collection deals with a little girl going off to school for the first time, and I would say that maybe 10% of each of those stories is from my own life. The rest of the stories — the second story in each volume — is all made up. And 100% of each of the other 26 stories are all made up as well. This whole thing of trying to create something out of nothing is difficult.

And also, once something comes to you, what’s a good and proper resolution? I remember when I knew there was going to be something substantial with “The Known World,” I took my mind as far ahead in the story as I could to create a resolution, create a climactic moment.

And I said before that you read some people’s novels — not necessarily the stories, because you can deal with that in a shorter period of time — but in novels, I think people sometimes they wake up with these wonderful ideas and they go ahead with them. They never think about how everything is going to resolve. So, then two-thirds tend to be wonderful because they had all this inspiration. And the latter third is rather flat because they ran out of inspiration, and because they didn’t know where it was going to end up. The resolution should always be in your mind. There are times when you just won’t have the energy, and the resolution should be like a star in the sky to guide you. You might run out of food and water but you can still keep crawling towards that star.

You just described basically what I struggle with in my own writing. That’s definitely something I am going to remember.
Yeah, I don’t have much patience — you know, people will say, “Oh, you know I just let the characters take over…” I think that’s so much junk. It comes out of your mind, it’s in your brain, whether or not you’re going to acknowledge it. And sometimes people will say, “Well, do your characters live on after you finish?” No! They don’t do or say anything I don’t tell them to do or say. You know what I mean?

People want to make it seem like there’s some sort of magic. There is no magic. It’s “once upon a time, Jack and Jill went up the hill…” And you don’t need any fancy language, you know?

——

And that’s it for the interview, sadly. I would like to thank the folks at HarperCollins, including my good friend Jeff, for helping make this happen. I was nervous about this, but it ended up being a conversation that gave me much to think about and many ideas to act upon. Can’t ask for anything more than that.

Thanks, also, to all the people who sent feedback and linked to the first part of the interview, including Maud Newton, who pointed out this great review/essay from Harper’s on Jones’s work. It’s recommended reading.

“Where crime comes into it for me is that I need a narrative engine to strap myself onto so I can write the book. ‘Cause otherwise, I feel like, “Oh, fuck, where’s this going.” And then he’s in the room thinking about things and the dust is blowing in the sunlight.” – George Pelecanos

I’ve been caught up watching an HBO series called “The Wire” on DVD. There is a pack of novelists who write for this show. George Pelecanos is one of them, along with Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane.

Just like a good classic novel, “The Wire” spans the gutter and the penthouse — Balzac does Baltimore. Characters are real, they change, everyone has a story to tell. It’s probbly the best TV show ever.

I didn’t know much about the writers on the show so I’ve been researching and reading about them. In the process, I came across the nugget of wisdom above and had to stop and think about it because I’ve been floundering with this for a while. What’s my narrative engine?

“Oh, fuck, where’s this going…?” That’s exactly the question that I’ve asked myself so many times.

In my writing, I have often played with subtlety and vagueness, because I thought a distinct narrative engine was maybe too simple, too easily disputed. I wanted to be mysterious.

On the one hand, I think this was cowardice: too afraid to really dig down in my stories and pull up real emotions, fears, passions, perversions, etc. But, to be fair, there’s also been something genuine — something inside me that truly likes the undefined and the blurry, that dust blowing in the sunlight that Pelecanos takes a dig at in the quote above.

But you have to latch onto something.

For Pelecanos and the other scribes on “The Wire,” crime is their engine. I can’t pinpoint anything so specific as crime — but it’s something close. Some literary miscegenation of people who look at dust in the sunlight and happen to get mixed up in very bad things. I’ve been playing along the borders of this for awhile, but was afraid to jump into it with full commitment. But, I think I just revved up my engine.
So this is where I’m going — for now, at least.

Where are you going? Down what roads is your narrative engine taking you?

I only needed to hear that a couple times when I started my MFA program to realize that I had a little problem. What’s the story? Whose story is this? Where’s the conflict?

“There’s a nice mood here… but what’s the story about?”

In the years before going to grad school, and even a few years writing for publications, I had spent plenty of time figuring out ways to evoke mood, atmosphere, thinking about dialogue, and a lot of time working on the rhythm and flow of sentences. But I never spent too much time on the nuts and bolts of what makes a story. Maybe I was lazy about it. I think I believed a real writer would just know it, so why bother studying, practicing, or intellectualizing what makes a good story?

Once I started grad school, though, I realized I was at a serious disadvantage when it came to spinning a good tale. I still struggle with it. But I was lucky enough to read in my first year an essay that helped shed some light down the dark tunnel of the narrative arc.

To paraphrase this essay, for words, sentences, and paragraphs to qualify as a story there needs to be an “incremental perturbation of an unstable homeostatic system and its catastrophic restoration to a complexified equilibrium.”

Yeah, it sounds like abstract malarky, but John Barth’s essay “Incremental Perturbation: How to Know Whether You’ve Got a Plot or Not” works because of that mumbo jumbo. It made the important elements of story abstract enough that I was able to stand back and see things in a nuts-and-bolts way. Before reading this, for the most part, I couldn’t get my head around what I needed in front of me to make a story — I was too caught up thinking, “I’m a writer, I should know this stuff. Shit! Damn!”

In a nutshell, Barth broke down to me that to be a story, you need to set the stage (ground work), ramp up the interest with a series of rising action, and then bring things to a state of (hopefully slightly different from the ground work) equilibrium. Kind of simple, but I had never thought of the mechanics in that way. And Barth added good humor and sensible examples to bring it all together.
I reread Barth’s essay every couple months, when I’m feeling stuck on something. It’s my go-to bit, and I recommend it for anyone else who struggles with rising action, conflict, setting the ground work, or anything else that helps us spin a good tale.

“Incremental Perturbation” comes from “Creating Fiction,” a collection of really useful writing essays — one of my favorites.

What do you read when you’re stuck? Anyone else have any essays or chapters from writing books that they go to in a pinch? Please tell your tale in the comments…

It’s a good story.

I love the way Jones writes about people of color without having to spell out explicitly that he’s writing about P.O.C., at least not at the beginning.

But, way more importantly, I noticed “Bad Neighbors” is a good story because it breaks some serious rules of workshop fiction.

Jones uses flash-forwards liberally, for one thing. In one moment, and just for a paragraph, in some cases, he jumps ahead years in the future. He also starts the story in a way that makes it difficult to immediately answer the Number 1 Workshop Question of All Time: “Whose story is this?” Of course you know soon enough.

Jones got himself an MFA. I think he must have heard bad feedback about techniques like these.

All of which goes to show you that you can undergo what some describe as the indoctrination process of MFAs and workshops, and still emerge with what reads like an original and refreshing voice.

Post-MFA Lesson for the Day: Recall some of the most vehemently negative/critical feedback you got in workshop. A flash-forward, internal dialogue, not explaining through backstory how the two main characters fell in love — whatever it was that irked your workshop. Now, write (or rewrite) a story utilizing those techniques. Make it all work for the story.

How did “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” come to being? What were its formative moments?
As you know, I worked in bookstores, with a passion, for 10 years, and for 7 years after that I was a publisher’s sales rep who called on bookstores. It’s just been in my blood, for whatever reason. Happenstance, most likely, a fortunate happenstance. And as a writer, one always considers one’s experiences for material. But in 1992, or thereabouts, I was asked to write some general essays about bookselling for American Bookseller magazine. Those were a lot of fun, and I knew then that I had to write this book. I knew what it would be called, and how it would look even, and am happy to say that’s all turned out to be true. But other than that, I really didn’t know where to start. I quit the book business in 1994 and started teaching, and it wasn’t until 2000 that I really had a clear vision of the book. I think it took that distance to get the picture I wanted. I knew that a memoir of my own bookselling career would be fairly tedious, and I felt that a larger view–an historical view, a wide cultural view–would benefit the book. I wanted to write a book about the bookstore in general, to write about all bookstores. I wanted to write a memoir on behalf of the bookstore. I needed the time away to find that larger focus.

In the book, you talk about how you came to books and literature through “The Grapes of Wrath.” You also talk about almost immediately picking up and trying to write a story after reading that particular book. Do people who love to read always want to write? And vice-versa?
Well, I can’t say for sure, but it would certainly seem that way. When I was teaching continuing education courses, I frequently heard new students–anywhere from 20 to 70 years-old–say that they’d always wanted to write, that they’d always been readers, and at some point, they knew they had a story to tell. Sadly, I also heard as many of them tell me that they’d started out writing only to have this notion squashed by any number of people–parents, teachers, friends, failed writers who’d given up. Everyone? Probably not. But a lot, that’s my guess. If you were a huge baseball fan, say, and watched and went to game after game, wouldn’t you at some point but a glove and yearn to play catch? Maybe start a team? It’s inevitable. But with this addition. Everyone who knows how to read already has the tools, that is, they have written something before–poems in school, essays, business reports, letters. It’s part of being human, telling stories, and when you’ve got the tools, well, why not?

Does every avid reader have a writer inside crying to get out? Should they all get out?
Don Delillo says that the novel is a truly democratic art form and claims that every person has a novel in them, at least one novel. Sure, I’m willing to buy that. Every person certainly has a unique path through reality, and each of those paths suggests some important testimony, some witness to a life on the planet.

Should each of us write a novel? There are some who would say no, that that’s best left up to, well, to whom? Professionals? No, every writer is an amateur, and the best writers retain–you can feel it in the urgency of the writing–something of their amateur status. Because that is, in the long run, what we want, urgent messages from others. A lot of teachers I’ve worked with bemoan the burgeoning of writing classes and programs, claiming that somehow it crowds the market. But I would disagree. I’ve had something close to 1,000 students in my twelve years teaching, all wanting to write–all writing, by the way–and while not all of them, in fact hardly any of them, are going to become “successful?? or even published, I can’t see the harm. Each of these students has written something of interest, something of their lives, a piece of testimony that wasn’t there before. They’ve investigated the world and their place in it. How can that be bad? And all of them will be better readers, more engaged readers. Why shouldn’t everyone write, tell their story? It’s better than building bombs.

While in graduate school, I always struggled with this sense that I wasn’t as well-read as my fellow students. I definitely feel better read now that I’ve finished… How do you come to a sense of being well-read or not?
One never feels well read. It’s a constant struggle to feel that you’re making inroads. Because every time I read one book, it only uncovers five more books I want to read. There’s only one thing for it, the time and persistence it takes to read. It’s an odd concept, though, feeling as if one’s well read. For who defines that? You read and read and read, and always fall behind. It’s actually a great thing, this falling behind, to feel that you will never run out of great books to read. How sad to feel all-read out.

There seemed to be a consensus amongst the staff at USF that writing went hand-in-hand with reading. Is this consistent among all MFA programs? Is there any room for exceptions to those rules? Do you absolutely have to be a voracious reader to fulfill a dream of being a writer?
I know one good writer who doesn’t like to read. Claims that he hates it and only reads what he has to. He’s a failed concert pianist who took up writing as a means of self-expression. And he’s the exception. Do you have to be a voracious reader to be a writer? I don’t see why you’d have to. But I just can’t figure out why you’d want to be. Most writers are compelled to write because of their reading, the sense that words have immense and beautiful powers. And from this reading, their own stories start to emerge. I just can’t understand why someone would want to be a writer if they weren’t also an habitual reader. I mean, why would you want to? So, as a rule, yes. As a piece of common sense, though, reading is naturally tied to writing. I certainly wouldn’t want a brain surgeon who was some kind of maverick and didn’t keep up with what other brain surgeons had done and were doing. All trades learn from apprenticeship on one level. Reading is the key element in a writer’s apprenticeship.

***

And, with that, I thank Lewis Buzbee for sharing his time with me. He recently informed me that “The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop” has gone into its third printing. No surprise to me. I’ll be honest, when I picked up a copy, I was a little anxious. What if I didn’t like it? That would have been a serious blow to teacher-student relations (not that it’s a requirement for students to enjoy their teachers’ work). But I didn’t need to worry at all. TYLB is one of the best books I’ve read all year. Buy, steal, or borrow a copy and check it out.

Explore more of Lewis Buzbee on the web:

Lewis Buzbee Interview (Novelistic)
Lewis and Daughter Interview Their Fish About His YA Novel “Steinbeck’s Ghost” (YouTube)