It’s been at least ten years since I first started thinking seriously about eBooks and getting excited about the idea.  I had a Palm Pilot for work, and the display was poor and the Internet connection was horrible. But I loved the idea of carrying an entire library in my pocket. Still, I never even purchased the first book. The Palm Pilot is probably in some museum right now. Maybe the Gutenberg Museum we recently visited in Mainz, Germany.

Far Beyond the Pale is the new novel from Daren Dean.

Well, it’s taken me ten years to finally give it a try. What I needed was the right device and a strong reason to jump in. I bought an iPhone a couple years ago. But still, I didn’t download the Kindle app and a book until  my friend Daren Dean released his amazing novel, Far Beyond the Pale, on Amazon. I downloaded the app and fired up the book, and now I’m thoroughly enjoying both Daren’s excellent writing and the experience of reading a novel electronically.

Readwriteweb recently gave five reasons why eBooks are better than their paper ancestors.Though they highlight some amazing features of eBooks that aren’t available in the dead tree format, I wouldn’t go so far as saying this makes them superior. There’s still nothing quite like the smell of a fresh (or old and dusty) book, or the feel of pulp in your hands. There’s a sensory pleasure in reading a paper book that can’t be replicated digitally.

But the actual act reading, of experiencing words, even on the iPhone’s small screen, is just as engaging as reading on paper. You can make notes, highlight, save your spot. The iPhone allows you to flip pages with your thumb, adding a new level of touch to the experience that pressing a button can’t give you. The digital annotation tools are more efficient than the analog system of sticky notes, highlighters, bent corners and margin scrawls (albeit aesthetically less pleasing). The price is also fantastic. Daren is self-published, but I was able to buy his novel at a price on Kindle that allowed him a better profit margin (per copy) than if he’d connected with a traditional publisher.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of eBooks is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit.

There’s also something nice about the short page length on an iPhone…it gives you the feeling of headlong progress (through the 4,000+ pages that Daren’s novel reaches in this format). I thought I’d need time to adjust to thousands of micropages compared to the traditional200-400 page length of a novel, but it’s been no problem at all. In fact, I appreciate being able to flip a page or two between giving my kid a bath or waiting for her to brush her teeth. It seems easier to dip in and out of a novel than reading a fraction of a longer, standard-length page.

Some writers and book lovers may think that the advent of viable eBook platforms is a sad day for novels, words and books in general. I think that’s pessimistic horse shit. eBooks may just be what saves the novel form in this digital age. The new platform introduces the novel experience to people who are used to consuming all of their information on a mobile device and wouldn’t otherwise think to read something of that length. It saves trees. It allows self-published authors to reach a global audience in minutes. It enhances the opportunity to deepen the novel experience with, say, video of the author reading or social highlighting and notes that give you an instant book discussion group. The future of the book-length manuscript would be far more precarious if they didn’t translate so smoothly to the Kindle, iPhone and iPad.

And it’s silly to think that paper books will die as a result of the growing popularity of eBooks. We all now have keyboards and mobile devices that shoot video and record audio. People write blogs and online diaries and send volumes of digitally composed email. But personal journals are as popular as ever. Moleskine notebooks are on sale everywhere. I see them in every coffee shop in Oregon, but I also recently returned from Germany and Italy, and they’re all over Europe as well. Every corner in Florence seemed to have a fine stationary shop, where Moleskines were the cheap option, and antique leather notebooks fetched ridiculous prices. There’s still a place for the handwritten word five hundred years after Gutenberg. People will always read paper books as well.

Hands-on printing at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz - they'll still be doing this 500 years from now.

While we were in Germany, we stopped at  the Gutenberg Museum. My daughter joined her cousins in making prints in the museum’s hands-on print shop. She was thrilled by the tactile, mechanical experience of creating art in a method not unlike Gutenberg used when he printed his first Bible page a half millennium ago. This experience could never be replicated digitally. The art hanging on the walls of the print shop was innovative, and had a warm, comfortable feeling. Prints will be decorating walls for as long as I’m alive. Gutenberg’s invention brought the Bible and a host of other materials to the hands of people who didn’t have access to them before. He created a world of readers, expanding the simple practice of reading to the great unwashed. eBooks have the potential of bringing novels and book-length manuscripts forward, not only reaching people who already read them, but even introducing them to folks who never would have thought to pick up a manuscript on their own before.

Just like Gutenberg's invention brought the new experience of reading a book to people never reached before, the digital novel will bring novels to new readers.

So for writers and serious readers, there’s nothing to fear from eBooks. Bookstores will still exist. Some will flourish, and some will close. But books and novel manuscripts will persist. Writers like Daren Dean will be able to share their stories with friends on the other side of the country, and hopefully even reach a wider audience. Far Beyond the Pale is a compelling novel with an engaging voice. It’s a little raw, but it’s better than a lot of the pap that I’ve bought from traditional publishers in the past year. It also has a feeling of personal authenticity that other novels I’ve read recently. Maybe it’s because I know Daren, or maybe it’s because the digital age is allowing novelists to engage readers without the filter of big corporate publishers.

Daren is an amazing writer who surrounds his readers with voice-driven prose and rich, tactile imagery that comes through just as well on screen as it does on paper. And even traditional publishers and agents have been telling him for years that he’s an amazing writer, though, “the market is just too tough right now.” But today he’s now able to reach the audience he deserves.

Gutenberg would be pleased.

Zusak's "The Book Thief" sparkles with gems

I just finished The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which was a runaway success a few years back that I somehow missed. But then I’ve always been a few steps out of tune with pop culture.

It was recommended to me by my sister, who has outstanding taste in books despite being a Republican. We forget that there are intelligent conservatives, or at least I do. Such individuals are no less misguided for possessing thoughtful qualities. But then there also are plenty of people who vote Democratic who are complete assholes. No general truths are absolute. They’re just generally true.

So back to Mr. Zusak and his wonderful book. The New York Times is credited with saying that, “it’s the kind of book that can be LIFE CHANGING (sic).” I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s pretty friggin’ good.

It’s set in Nazi Germany during the war, and it’s about an orphaned, illiterate little girl taken in by a foster family on the shady side of Munich. The family looks to be a horrorshow: a passive, if good natured husband and a terror of a foster mother with a foul tongue and a penchant for corporal punishment. Little Liesel Meminger seems to be in for a rough ride. I read with extra interest as my own mother was a child of four during the Allied bombing raids over Berlin. Liesel’s only a few years older. And I couldn’t help but think of my mothers stories all during this novel.

In a kind reversal, Liesel’s gruff little foster family is hardly Dickensian. Instead, they turn out to be surprisingly human in a world of Nazis. They hide a Jewish man in their basement, for example, at time when neighbors will readily turn you into the Gestapo. Papa risks a beating to give a crust of bread to a man being marched to a concentration camp. He teaches Liesel to read, which leads to the title character’s book thievery, giving this novel it’s title. And Mama’s capacity for love proves to be as large as her off-color vocabulary and as quick as the back of her hand.

With Allied bombs turning German civilians into hamburger, and columns of half-starved Jews marched through Liesel’s neighborhood on their way to Dachau, The Book Thief is brutal and tough, especially for a young adult novel. But then it’s probably the type of thing young adults should read if they are to tackle such a big subject.

The pages are replete with magic and dazzling characters. Like Liesel’s neighbor and boyish crush, Rudy Steiner, a wiry pre-teen who likes to sneak out of the house at night and paint himself black and run laps at the local track to emulate his hero, Jesse Owens, the man who rose from his own country’s segregation to travel to Berlin and disprove Hitler’s theory of racial superiority. Liesel’s first kiss with young Rudy will conjure a few tears if you have any sort of a heart. I’ll admit to being a little choked up at the end of this novel, and not a little sad that it was over.

Probably most magical element in this book is it’s narrator, who is none other than Death himself, Harvester of Souls. And Death certainly has his hands full during the Holocaust and WWII. In a brilliant stroke, Zusak makes Death the most thoughtful and “human” presence, whose grim work is undertaken (pun!) with such grace and beauty that one can only wish the real Grim Reaper has such compassion. For example, Mr. D says of this key character’s soul, as he carries it off:

This one was sent out by the breath of an accordion, the odd taste of champagne in summer, and the art of promise-keeping. He lay in my arms and rested.

The language is subtle, stylish and beautiful. There are many asides and interjections by Death made in bold type, little sonnets of wit and bittersweetness that give this long book a clever, clipped pace. When the book ended, I didn’t want it to be over. Zusak said, “I like the idea that every page in every book can have a gem on it.” He sure as hell writes as if he believes that. This book sparkles and glitters.

Four stars, three and a half thumbs up. It’s great to know that this whole novel writing thing is alive and well.

She strains cold air through her teeth, not quite a grin, and the blown sand that crusts her lashes and snakes over her receding footprints scours this hard child’s shell. Inside she’s all mush and hurt, but that shell, man, it’s something. You could break bottles on it.

She’s never before seen the sunset or the ocean, and this sudden confluence has her on a high. She trusts the dog and the reckless, headlong strides and the taste of the salt air, gulps of crab rot, kelp and bird shit.

She doesn’t understand her crimes, even less so the sentence, but the pounding of her feet, the tiny splash of each stride on the wet sand…this feels very real and solid to her.

Her brown hair is a ribbon, a salt-sticky pennant streaming behind her. The dog’s tongue lolls and flaps, and there are three princesses and sequins stitched into her garage sale sweatshirt.

She doesn’t know that regular children aren’t in the habit of screaming themselves to sleep at night, and they will assert their rights with tooth and claw only at their peril. Punishment doesn’t really work on her. “Is that all you got,” she grins back over her shoulder.

She also doesn’t know that the Labrador, who gallops ahead of her, tugging on the leash, aware only of a gull in the distance and this strange little creature in tow who is indulging her penchant for headlong flight, has only this morning chewed the armrest off of the sofa and that she shits regularly on an heirloom throw rug, the oblivious creature persisting only through the owner’s sense of duty.

She glances back only briefly to see her latest mother and the dog’s owner both waving and cupping their hands to their mouths to shout into a wind that sucks the voice out of their words before they even cross their lips. Then the Labrador snaps the leash and puts her head down to gallop with redoubled stride, as if to say, “come on, kid, now’s our chance.”

She squeezes her eyes shut and trusts the leash and the yellow plug of fur and muscle at the other end, not heeding the voices she can no longer hear, not even sensing that the big people far behind her are, without even admitting it to themselves, both hoping that these two girls just keep on running.

J. Adams Oaks is the author of the new young adult novel WHY I FIGHT, a gripping, headlong story with cinematic potential

Any reader who is also a writer understands that questions will rattle in your head as you wend your way through a work of fiction. Unlike regular readers, you can’t simply be subsumed by story, sinking into the world that the author has labored to create. Like a retired engineer you have to kick the tires, lift up the hood, puzzle through how this contraption was put together.

This is part two of a Q&A with J. Adams Oaks, the author of the hot new YA novel Why I Fight. The great thing about knowing writers, especially writers as talented as J. Adams Oaks, is that those questions need not merely echo around in my head. I can kick them over to Jeff and get some actual answers and insight into the process he went through in creating his amazing book. So let’s lift up the hood…

Your novel has one of the most distinct and unique narrators I can recall. As soon as I finished “Why I Fight” I went back and read your story “Ash Butterflies” in Hair Trigger 21. Two things struck me.  First, it’s amazing how the promise of this novel is contained in that story: the voice, the characters, your rich attention to detail.

But Wyatt’s voice in the novel has also grown since that early story…his wide-eyed, childish innocence has been colored by an edge of street smarts. He’s developed quirks and narrative traits that bring him to life. What happened after the publication of that story? What elements led to the evolution of Wyatt’s narrative voice?

First, thanks for the kinds words. I do think that Wyatt Reaves was much more naive back then, because “Ash Butterflies” was his very first incarnation and it was really that scrawny scared 12 and 1/2 year old sitting in his parents house alone for days on end telling that initial story. It’s that voice, more than anything, that made me want to carry the story forward. I couldn’t get his voice out of my head and I couldn’t help but wonder who these people were around him.

So I listened. The thing is that his story moved forward and he grew, so his voice aged and honestly, innocence can last only so long and then it gets really annoying, you know like a character in a Disney cartoon. So once I realized where Wyatt was going, I had to go back and revise his understand of his situation and the story. My amazing mentor, advisor and friend, Randy Albers, Chair of the Fiction Department at Columbia College and I had long discussions as to how distant Wyatt was from the telling. Randy encouraged me to see it from a 40-year-old Wyatt’s eye, but I just couldn’t hear that person. I couldn’t even imagine him that far into the future, and honestly I didn’t know if he even made it that far. So we hear it from a nearly 18 year old, who thinks he understands the world a bit, but really is only starting to see it. That’s what makes me so excited for him, he’s moving toward a beginning.

The story “Ash Butterflies” has become the emotional climactic scene of “Why I Fight.” All of the core elements are there, though the version that appears in the novel is leaner and more headlong.

Okay, well, I always saw the short story as the beginning of the Wyatt’s adventure, because most of it is told fairly chronologically. But, as I started to work with my phenomenal editor Richard Jackson on the 2nd and 3rd drafts, the story really became this close-up, intimate telling with Wyatt next to you on a bus talking to you just inches away. And because Wyatt was talking to you, a stranger, my editor asked me, “Would you tell your most shameful secret to someone you’d just sat down next to?” And he was right, there was no way he’d admit to what he’d done; he’d have to really sink in and feel comfortable before he could admit the truth.

Why I Fight

Did you do this much trimming throughout the book during the editorial process? Were there any moments that you hated to give up?

That novel was as big as 350 pages and as trim as 175. I wrote 5 complete new versions over the years. Each was this amazing learning experience that had a specific reason it needed to exist, so there was also expanding and removing and adding back in and shuffling of chapters and reshuffling and on and on. It was intense and insane, but I’m a much better writer for it.

I did hate giving one chapter that had Wyatt and Clark, his only friend, spending time together, but my editor said if it didn’t have a purpose other than them spending time together, it needed to go. I loved it. Sure, it did some stuff, but I couldn’t figure out why I needed it, so it’s gone (of course, nothing is truly gone with computer now, so I’ll tuck it away for another day…). But for the record, I L-O-V-E editing and trimming. I love to write a bunch of STUFF and then, like a puzzle, try to figure out how the words can be there best.

The novel has an urgent, headlong pace. It’s hard to put down. This is helped along by the structure, particularly the short chapters, averaging 5 pages. When in the process did you arrive at this structure? What were the advantages of breaking the story down in this fashion?

Honestly, it was done in the last draft of the book and it was after Richard Jackson and I had discussed how young adults would see the book. He mentioned shorter chapters are better for young readers to feel a sense of accomplishment as they turn the page.

I remembered back to my childhood and that feeling of reading before bed and thinking, “I’ll read through this chapter and then I’ll sleep.” Or I’d check to see how much further I had to go. But it also serves the purpose of keep that pace that Wyatt is keeping and keeping anecdotal as it would be in a longer conversation. Plus I think it’s good for my adult friends who read it on the L here in Chicago and can read a couple chapters on the way to work!

How did you arrive at the title?

Oh, the title… Hmmm… Okay, so the original title for years was “Shreds” which came from the image of Wyatt tearing up comic strips and burning them, but obviously referred to the larger shreds of Wyatt’s life. Once the book evolved into this intensely intimate first-person narrative, wise Mr. Jackson asked me a simple question that would stump me for A VERY LONG TIME. He asked me, “Don’t you think that Wyatt deserves to title his own life?”

Well, damn it. How could I say no to that. But what would you name your own life, you know? That’s not as easy as if sounds. And certainly not for a 17 year old. So, I brainstormed and brainstormed and emailed them to my editor. Often times, I’d come home from a night out drinking, and I’d sit down at my computer and make a list of 10 or 20 that I’d shoot off to Richard, he’d reply in the morning with the two or three he thought were okay, but not quite right, we were getting there, keep going, he’d tell me. And somehow, maybe with the bourbon helping the creative flow, WHY I FIGHT was in one of panoply of lists. FINALLY! It felt right. It sounded proper. I think Wyatt would like it, you know?

One of the many vivid, visceral scenes in the book has Wyatt killing and cleaning fish at Spade’s insistence. I can still recall a version of this scene that your read in class more than ten years ago. Was that always a part of this novel? If not, when did you realize that it was part of something bigger?

No, that was always part of the book. And yes it started in that class, me trying to understand Wyatt and Uncle Spade’s relationship. It always felt very defining for the two of them.

There are so many emotionally charged moments in the book, like Spade’s confrontation with Lynnesha, or when Wyatt grabs Clark by the throat. Was there any scene that was particularly challenging to write or especially draining for you as the writer?

Without giving away the scene with Lynnesha and Spade finally confronting each other, I’ll say that it was one of the most difficult, because as I got into it, I kept saying to myself, “I don’t want this to happen… Is this really happening? What’s going on?” and it had to happen. It was the story telling me what it needed. The violence was overwhelming to me.

So many other people are upset by the killing of fish and tadpoles, but man that confrontation gets me every time! Wyatt and Clark having it out, was actually taken out of the book and then added back into a much later draft. I relished writing it, not for the violence by any means, but for the moment Wyatt is really claiming how he feels and standing in it so fully. I love imagining him standing in the woods, clenching giant fists as the rain trails off them, his brow furrowed. That’s like a movie scene for me!

This is a road novel that carries Wyatt and Spade across the country. Did you hit the road while you were working on this book? How did you capture the sights and smells of the state fairs, the salvage yards and the seedy motels?

I didn’t do much road-tripping while writing the book, but I did take one specific vacation before my last semester of grad school; I had a week off, rented a car and drove only rural routes and back roads all the way to Boulder, Colorado and back. I journalled a lot along the way.

Most of the book was actually written while I lived in Denver. Two of my closest friends, Claire Fallon and Steve Kalinosky, were kind enough to let me live with them for free as long as I wrote every day, so I committed to 4 hours daily. And Colorado was so foreign to me as a midwesterner that it certainly helped me truly pay attention to The Road. I should also say that my parents are academics, so we all had summers off and our vacations were in the family station wagon seeing as much of the U.S. as possible. Thought I didn’t really appreciate that education until I was much older.

The whole novel is framed as Wyatt spilling his guts to a stranger on a bus, with the reader standing in for the stranger. How did this device come about? You can truly hear Wyatt’s voice in your head. Did this structure help to develop that voice?

After Richard Jackson decided to work with me on the book, he asked me a question that I’m sure you and I were asked frequently in classes at Columbia: “Who is Wyatt talking to?”  I answered quite flippantly, trying to dismiss this extremely important question, I said, “He’s talking to a stranger on a bus.” Dick answered, “Well, if that’s so, you haven’t written that book.”

We talked about what that situation would really contain: only enough information during a bus ride, a public conversation, a censorship of language, etc. So I worked on an entire draft considering what Wyatt was saying to this “stranger.” Eventually, in later drafts that stranger became the reader. And in the second to last draft, Dick asked me read the entire book out loud to myself, and if I couldn’t say it then it wasn’t working, if it didn’t fit in my mouth then I had to consider whether it needed to stay. It was amazing to read the whole thing over a couple days. It made me hear those flowery sentences that were the author or the narrator over pouring Wyatt’s voice. It made that voice really come first.

The entire novel is linear except for the fire scene near the end…why did you decide to jump back in time right at that point of the story?

I think I accidentally answered this earlier. It felt like Wyatt just couldn’t admit to what he’d done until he felt comfortable with the listener, the stranger.

Nana, with all of her quirks and eccentricities, is one of the colorful characters that sparkles in this story. How did she come to play such an important role? And where did the crates of glass come from? How did you decide to give Wyatt his ever-present piece of “Nana glass” to hold on to?

Nana was one of the first characters developed in grad school after I’d written “Ash Butterflies.” I’m not sure what exercise we were doing in class, but she really came to life pushing that grandfather clock, surrounded by cats and crates. I wasn’t sure what was in the crates at first, but once I saw the glass, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Why did she have it? What made her do it?

I sort of figured that something broke lose inside of her when she lost her husband and so she found this manic behavior to occupy her time. Wyatt’s Nana glass is up for your own interpretation, but I know that constantly trying to understand his family and that is just a little piece of it for him.

How have audiences been responding at readings? Are you still taking the book around on tour?

Ah, the “book tour.” I seriously thought that was a real thing. I mean, I’m sure that well-known authors with a serious track record or maybe authors with small presses might be taken to a few cities by their publishers, but at this point there is so little money in publishing that the houses are struggling to keep afloat which means authors are left to self-promote and that is like taking on a 4th job.

I’m trying to visit friends around the U.S. and use the visits as stops to do readings. I’m going to North Carolina, where my brother and his family live. I’ll read for a couple book clubs and maybe a bookstore. The readings themselves are a blast. I love talking to folks about the book and seeing people excited. I’m especially excited to get responses from young adults. I did a reading in Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin month back and two young boys showed up, dropped of by their parents. They sat in the front row and wouldn’t look me in the eye they were so nervous, but as soon as I opened it up to questions they raised their hands and came up with some of the most astute observations I’ve gotten so far. They seemed to really “get” Wyatt. And that makes all the hard work worth it!

Read more about Jeff at his site, buy his incredible book.

- DB

Book Description

Wyatt Reaves takes the seat next to you, bloodied and soaking wet, and he is a big-fisted beast. Tell him to stretch out like an X across asphalt and you’ve got a parking space. But Wyatt’s been taking it lying down for too long, and he is NOT happy.

Since he turned twelve and a half, he’s been living with his uncle, a traveling salesman of mysterious agenda and questionable intent. Soon, Uncle Spade sees the potential in “kiddo” to earn cash. And that’s enough to keep the boy around for nearly six years.

But what life does Wyatt deserve? Alcohol? Drugs? Bare-fisted fights? Tattoos? No friends? No role models? Living in a car?

If you’re brave enough to stay and listen, you’ll hear an astounding story. It’s not a pretty road Wyatt has traveled, but growing up rarely is.

Praise for WHY I FIGHT

“A breathtaking debut with an unforgettable protagonist…His painful and poignant story is a wonderful combination of the unlettered and the eloquent.” –Booklist (starred review)

“For male reluctant readers.” –Kirkus Reviews

Novels are like a marathon. Here’s my process: wake up obscenely early; read a few hundred words from the previous day and do some light editing; crank out a target number of words (500 – 1,200); go out and live your regular life; sleep; repeat.  You need a rhythm that you can sustain for a long period of time. Years.

With film scripts, it seems to be a series of sprints. A first draft can take a couple of months only because full time work, family and mortgage-related related obligations conspire to squeeze out the time you have to write. The collaborative aspect of making a film also changes the dynamic. You’ll do a read with cast or crew members and find yourself editing on the fly. One of your actors will be a different age, gender or ethnicity than you’d originally planned, and that will force changes. We had trouble casting a woman in the 40s-50s age range for A Country Wedding, so we wrote her out of the script and added a younger woman in her 20s because we had a strong read from a younger actor.

So one form of storytelling happens in the slog of an isolating routine, and the other happens in the chaos of collaboration.

The key aspect of writing prose fiction is focus. You need to zero in on the emotional core of your work. you need to intensively follow the heart of your story. In screenwriting, it’s all about flexibility. Can you hold the story together when someone throws a wrench into your plans. These surprises come in the form of budget issues, equipment and location challenges, producer notes, etc. Writing prose fiction is muscling through a steep uphill hike through thick underbrush and loose scree. Writing for film is holding everything together while your scampering down the same grade at a headlong sprint.

I’ve tried to make comparisons for my own sake, and I can’t identify any inherent superiority in one form of writing over the other. I enjoy them both, or rather compelled to do them both. Storytelling is that weird, narcissistic compulsion to make something up and share it with other people. Writing film scripts and novels both address this need. If you’re so disposed, it’s not like you really have a choice. Not writing isn’t really an option.

Don’t call me kiddo. I REALLY hate it. People been calling me that way too long. Fever and Ma and Uncle Spade all call me kiddo, and it makes me crazy. See how I ain’t smiling? People who know me, know that means trouble.

J. Adams Oaks is the author of the new young adult novel WHY I FIGHT

So begins the new novel by J. Adams Oaks, Why I Fight, which is already earning glowing adjectives (poignant, breathtaking, unforgettable – Booklist). It’s the story of a 12 year old bare knuckle boxer from a dysfunctional family, and from the pugilistic prose you might think Jeff is the type of writer to step in the ring with Papa Hemingway. But in truth, he’s more of a Faulkner guy, with a little Toni Morrison and Gabriel Garcia Marques thrown in.

I attended Columbia College Chicago ten years ago, where I had the great pleasure of watching the inception of the story that became Why I Write. The Fiction Writing Department at CCC doesn’t tell writers how to write, instead, they cultivate voice and foster the conveyance of rich imagery in prose. And did they ever cultivate the hell out of Jeff. His first book, more than ten years from inkjet to hardcover, is amazing.

This is part 1 of a two-part Q&A.

So what have you been up to for the past ten years?

Wow! So much. I’ve finally found a good balance of writing, teaching, and bartending to pay the bills. The novel, WHY I FIGHT, in its first form was my thesis for Columbia College Chicago. I tried working a 9-to-5 job and write, but that didn’t work, so I actually moved to Denver, CO into the house of my friends, Claire Fallon and Steve Kalinosky, who let me live with them for free as long as I was writing every day. I cranked out that first draft, then started bartending while I looked for a literary agent. That took me four long years during which I rewrote the manuscript and told everyone I met that I’d written a book and was trying to publish. I actually got referred to my agent through a regular at my bar!

What’s the worst job you had during that time?

I have to say for me personally the worst job I’ve had was the 9-to-5 cubicle farm job, commuting into The Loop into one of those beige buildings into an office with no windows at a grey desk. I never was a morning person, so  I pretty much spent my day yawning and waiting to get home to sleep. It’s hard to find your creativity doing that, you know?

Why I Fight

I’ve always had an aversion to the old dead white guys of the traditional cannon, because they were the ones I was being told I had to pay attention to and connected to the least. All through undergrad and grad school, I searched out the people that didn’t live like me, that didn’t write like me and who’s voices sounded nothing like mine so that I could really see how they found their own sound. I studied Spanish lit and Latin American writer, like Lorca and Borges and Garcia Marques. Later on in grad school, as I started to find my main character, Wyatt Reaves’, voice, I really started to pay attention to Sandra Cisneros and Junot Diaz and Herbert Selby for their powerful individual expression of singular voices. I also love reading in the morning before I start, reading to be inspired, to feel that feeling of “I want to try to do that!” so I’ll read Toni Morrison or William Faulkner or poetry or even a friend’s work until I just have to turn to my own writing.

Do you feel any different now that you can wander into a bookstore and find your work on the same shelves as writer’s you’ve admired your whole life?

Funny you should ask, because that’s what I’ve been telling everyone: “I just want to be able to walk into the local bookstore and see my novel there, then I’ll feel satisfied, feel relieved.” I’ll also say that I’m glad that Joyce Carol Oates wrote a Young Adult book, so mine can sit next to hers.

Like a lot of writers, you spent time studying your craft in an MFA program. What was the most important aspect of that experience?

Boy, I’ll tell you that for anyone looking for an MFA program, I really recommend checking them out to find one that works for you, because everyone has different needs. I was so impressed by Columbia College’s Fiction Department, which emphasized oral storytelling translating to the page and really find one’s voice as well as reducing the amount of pointless criticism and competition that can occur in other programs. The only competing I felt with my colleagues at Columbia was, “Man, I want to write something as good as that. Now how did she DO that?!?!?”

What have you learned in the years since graduating? How have you changed as a writer?

Oh, jeez. That is a hard one. I’ve learned so much by being active in a vibrant literary community like that in Chicago. I’ve been active in an astounding theater company called Serendipity that produces “2nd Story” which is a highbred a reading and a performance. You can check it out at www.storiesandwine.com. I’ve gotten to learn how to really stand in front of an audience and give my voice. I’ve also had the opportunity to work with one of the best editors, Richard Jackson, a truly talented man who understood how to guide me as a writer toward the strongest writing. He knew I needed to do all the work, when it came to page, letting me learn along the way through 4 FULL rewrites of the book! And the list goes on of what I’ve learned, because I feel like as artists we have to be constantly learning or we get stagnant.

How long did it take you to get to the heart of “Why I Fight?”  How long have you known this story was a novel?

You know, I think “the heart of WHY I FIGHT” was what told me it would have be a novel. At the time I wrote the very first scene, which I assumed was a short story, I felt like there was something much larger there, and if I listened carefully it would tell me what else it had to offer. I feel like Richard Jackson taught me to really listen to what the work demands and not force it into something it’s not. So to answer your question, I think that WHY I FIGHT was always a novel, whether I knew it or not….

You’ve been working on this project for a long time.  During that whole time were you ever tempted to abandon that project and focus on something else, or abandon writing altogether?

I never thought about abandoning writing. I’ve always known I’d do that whether it was seen by others or not, but there was a drive there to share my work with more people than just family and friends. I did work on this book a long time. I finished the first draft in 2000, and the reality is that it sat in a drawer for 4 years while I did the business of writing, that’s the other side of it people don’t really talk about enough. Art requires some serious drudgery as well as creation. I do think though that a writer should have more than one project going so that they don’t get sucked into the whole of that one work. I always seem to have 5 or 6 documents on my computer’s desk-top and I pop into whichever is taking my attention that day. The worst thing is to work on something that you can give no passion.

What gave you hope or confidence along the way?

It’s really the who that gave me hope. Everyone I work with on writing wants everyone else to succeed, so we are all pulling for each other. Not to mention, Mom and Dad. But I also have to say, writing is my career and a career just takes putting aside the insecurity and getting down to business, you know?

Where do you turn, outside literature and writing, for inspiration?

Everywhere! It’s the world. I carry a little journal with me all the time so I can write down a conversation I over hear on the bus or a description of a bit of graffitti I see or a name or an adjective that tastes good in my mouth. I’m writing all the time. That’s a blessing and a curse.

If you were to take a road trip to clear your head, what type of vehicle are you in, what’s playing on the stereo, and where is the road?

I don’t own a car, since I live in the city and take the train, so ANY car would be great! I’d love a sun roof and a really big stack of CDs including some great jazz, bossa nova and some surprises. That road would be heading toward water because I really really REALLY could use a little time at the beach. Sigh. But I’d have to take my journal with me, even if I was on vacation. I don’t want to miss anything.

What’s next?

I am working  on #2. It’s tricky to find time when I need to work on getting the first one out there, but I’m so glad to have something else to work on. It takes place partly in Spain, soooooo…. I’m thinking research trip is in my future, right? Wish me luck and I’ll keep you posted.

Read more about Jeff at his site, buy his incredible book and look for Part 2 of the Q&A soon.

- DB

Book Description

Wyatt Reaves takes the seat next to you, bloodied and soaking wet, and he is a big-fisted beast. Tell him to stretch out like an X across asphalt and you’ve got a parking space. But Wyatt’s been taking it lying down for too long, and he is NOT happy.

Since he turned twelve and a half, he’s been living with his uncle, a traveling salesman of mysterious agenda and questionable intent. Soon, Uncle Spade sees the potential in “kiddo” to earn cash. And that’s enough to keep the boy around for nearly six years.

But what life does Wyatt deserve? Alcohol? Drugs? Bare-fisted fights? Tattoos? No friends? No role models? Living in a car?

If you’re brave enough to stay and listen, you’ll hear an astounding story. It’s not a pretty road Wyatt has traveled, but growing up rarely is.

Praise for WHY I FIGHT

“A breathtaking debut with an unforgettable protagonist…His painful and poignant story is a wonderful combination of the unlettered and the eloquent.” –Booklist (starred review)

“For male reluctant readers.” –Kirkus Reviews

I’m not a film critic, so I’ll stop with the analysis. What I should talk about is the subject…this is a film about the writing process, and, ultimately, the origins of creativity. Where does it come from? How do we channel it? The film doesn’t provide any real answers beyond the only one that someone who makes up stories can give: writing is just something you do.  Asking why and from whence is for critics and English teachers. What matters is the process, which is what this film dwells upon and also what makes it interesting for writers.

Roger Ebert seconds this notion of the naivite of interviewers who ask the same old questions for which novelists and screenwriters have no real answer beyond what they think might sound good in quotes. About the graduate student who is interviewing Langella’s character, Ebert notes:

Soon she is discovering what every interviewer learns from every novelist: He doesn’t know what anything in his books “stands for,” he doesn’t know where he gets his ideas, he doesn’t think anything is autobiographical, and he has no idea what his “message” is. I am no novelist, but I am a professional writer, and I know two things that interviewers never believe: (1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next.

Ebert’s two statements offer some of the truest understanding of the process as it works for me. Viewers who aren’t writers might drift off, but this film will raise interesting questions for anyone who spends a large portion of their time making up stories, tapping the keyboard with a limited idea where they are going and little to guide them beyond the faith that a story will eventually reveal itself if you are true to your compulsion and if you hang on long enough.

One exercise to develop your sense of place is to sit on a rotting log in the woods for four hours. The Oregon coastal rainforest is a perfect location.

Creating a sense of place is different in all three forms of writing that I do. In film, you’re leaving hints. In a script, you can’t overdo it on the description…a screenplay needs to be spare and have enough room for the director and producers to fill in the details for how they want this film to feel and look. You need to just hint at the sense of place. And you need to do it in one and two word bursts throughout the script. It’s hard to do. I’ve been working with a patient director who has helped me hack away everything extraneous from the screenplay. But through our conversations, I can tell that he is seeing much more than what I’ve put on the page…he’s filling out the vision for the film. That’s his job, not entirely mine, and as a screenwriter I need to remember that fact.

In fiction, the task of creating a sense of place falls entirely to the writer. There won’t be a production designer, a sound designer and a director of photography to help you color in the details. You need to taste the air that your characters breathe. You need to know the names of the flowers and hear the calls of the local birds. You need to know what it smells like after it rains or understand the way a dust storm leaves a dry rattle in the back of your throat (even if you fabricate these details via imagination). The way I try to create a sense of place in prose is through details. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to know the setting well enough and the details are conveniently on hand. I always order a field guide to the local flora and fauna for every place that I write about in ficiton. I’ll read the geological history. You need to know how the crust of the Earth was formed beneath the place that carries your story. All of this is challenging for opposite reasons from screenwriting. In both mediums, it’s difficult.

Now that I’m working on comics, I’m finding a new way to create a sense of place. While fiction is created by an individual and film by a team collaboration, comics seem to be a partnership. And the artist creates the tone and emotion from the sense of place that happens in a story, but it has to also resonate with the narrative. And it keys on the panel descriptions you give to the artist…these are words that will never be read by the audience…they will be interpreted by the artist and presented via his visual style. It’s tricky, and I’m not exactly sure how the process works yet, though I’m pleased with the results we have so far.

A sense of place is a foundation for any narrative. I don’t know how other writers develop their skills for creating a place for a story. For me, I think I cultivate this sensitivity through spending as much time in the natural world as I can. Like Thoreau, you’d do well to sit on an old stump in the woods for four hours and feel how the forest changes around you. Unfortunately, I haven’t been doing this nearly as much as I should lately. Life has a tendency to get in the way. But the sun is finally out in Oregon, and I know I’ll soon be packing a tarp into the woods to spend a night or two curled up next to a rotting log or on the edge of an alpine lake.

It was then that I realized how natural is the narrative concept of story within a story. My daughter, barely five, is hardly thrown by a complex narrative.

Story within a story, as a device, is as old as storytelling itself. Take The Arabian Nights and Sheherazade’s desperate bid to prolong her life serving as a framework for a string of tales. Take Guillermo Arriaga’s multi-threaded storytelling in Amores Perros and Babel. Take the picaresque collection of tales in Big Fish, each exaggerated story serving the greater narrative about a complex father-son dynamic. Or consider the simple story within a story told by Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War that amounted to the finest moment in that film: he tells the story of how he became involved in politics as a young boy, ending the tale with, “And that’s the day I fell in love with America.”

The technique is used so often in film and fiction that it’s hardly original or distinctive. It can be done well, as in Joseph Conrad’s Youth, which is a story within a story delivered around pints of beer by a sailor in a pub. Or it can be as clumsy and hamfisted as the oft-maligned flashback. But a flashback is just another form of story within a story, an if you do it well, nobody will complain.

Way back in grad school, I was taught that story within a story was a useful technique that could help you advance a narrative. The instructors in Columbia College Chicago’s fiction program used an exercise called the “steeple chase.” Basically, you’d take a short story or novel excerpt and put it through the ringer, telling parts in first person, parts in second, switching narrators and tense, or telling part of it as a letter or newspaper article. We were also required to tell part of the narrative as a story within a story. Often it served the purpose of unsticking a stuck narrative. So if you’ve got a novel or script that you can’t seem to bear to finish, try having a character tell a story within a story, or launch into some tangent, and see what effect it has on the narrative…it might just set things into motion again.

Whatever the case, it’s a natural device in storytelling…so inherent to the art that it’s simple for even a five year old to grasp.

You’ve got two options. Give it away for free, or follow the traditional market models. The power of the Web allows the former to happen rather easily. But the latter is still the best way to turn your efforts into cash money.

I’ve now earned a modest amount of remuneration for making stuff up. Certainly not enough to keep the mortgage paid. And as a Web professional, I’m all for the concept barrier-free communication. Everything I do at my day job is designed to make it easier to access information. And this is at odds with the whole notion of publishing. It’s hard to access novels…you have to walk to the store and fork over twenty bucks, or sit at home and wait for the box from Amazon. So the notion of paying for text is ridiculous. Every word I’ve ever written, which is by now numbering in the millions, would fit on a thumb drive and could be sent around the world in seconds from my iPhone.

But as a writer, I also want to get paid for the years I’ve invested in creating that text.

A part of me believes it’s inevitable that writers, novelists in particular, will be giving the goods away for free online, using sites like Scribd. Even publishers are starting to offer free content on Scribd and elsewhere, trying to figure out what the business model will be.

But my friend Mort Castle, with his razor wit and boundless optimism, doesn’t seem to think that is such a good idea.  He’ll proceed as before on his 40-year quest to be an overnight success. Few writers work at it harder than Mort does.

But is the role of the publisher changing in a world of open communication? As these fireworks at SXSW demonstrate, publishers are being forced to face this question directly. I think the guy from Penguin makes a solid point when he proclaims the importance of the filter. That’s always been the role of the publisher and agent: find the gem in the slush, make it easily accessible to the masses. In essence, readers pay publishers to find the best stuff. Won’t a publisher’s role become even more vital in a world where choice is expanding?

Still, the sticky question is how to capture a profit when shelf space and distribution is now free. Some projects would never have existed if it weren’t for the Web, these the sorts of blog-to-book scenarios that writers dream about manufacturing.

Do you wait for a business model, or do you make one? Or do you just experiment? Or do you just stick to the traditional models like Mort? For now, I’m still sending manuscripts to New York in manila envelopes. Though I’ve noticed that agents in the traditional book biz are even changing, with requests for PDFs or Word versions to load onto Kindles increasing. As for LA, I’ve never printed and sent an actual screenplay manuscript…it’s all been PDF (and a scanned release form) since I’ve gotten involved.

But I’m also giving it away. Next week I’m launching a Web comic, an online graphic novel called ‘Los Refugiados,’ with artist Santiago Uceda. We’ve kicked around adding a donate button. We hope someone will recognize our brilliance in monetary form. But we have no real business model.

In the end, telling stories is something that humans do. If the market didn’t exist, it would still happen. If the Web weren’t around, we’d sit around the fire and spin yarns or scratch it into the walls of our caves.

But it sure would be nice to get paid for it.