Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—
Q: Scrib Online isn’t A Writing Life, but it’s Ten Years on the Worldwide Web.
A: It’s poems and stories. Poem and stories don’t sell.
Collections of poems and stories.
Ten years worth of poems and stories. And criticism and literary theory.
Internet writing doesn’t sell. It’s too easy. Anyone can do it.
It doesn’t meet professional standards. It hasn’t been edited. By a publisher.
Q: You have worked as an editor.
A: I edit my books.
They have been edited. By me.
“Are these your own words?”
I don’t know. I can’t remember.
I think so. But it could be something I heard, or read.
Q: Mail art didn’t just have apartment festivals, it had plagiarism festivals.
A: Yes. Also art strikes.
Q: Are you on strike?
A: On strike against whom? For what?
I am on a for-hire contract. An at-risk contract.
You can’t strike anybody if nobody wants it.
What are they going to do—reject me?
Q: That’s funny. “What are they going to do—reject me?”
A: Brian Aldiss says, “To have a career in writing—well, I hardly see what the phrase means, unless it means to be not so much a writer as a careerist, with, as an ultimate objective, perhaps a hotel in the Bahamas, or an estate in Tuscany—retiring from writing, in other words, rather than actually becoming a writer.”
If you become a writer you write.
Or rather, if you write you will become a writer.
That’s the only way to do it.
To become a writer, write.
Becoming a writer is the end. The goal. And how you do it is you do it. You keep doing it. You get better at it.
A career might or might not follow.
It won’t be a career like medicine, the law, the military, or the cloth.
Writing is not a profession it’s a call.
Q: Your theme, stated in five words or less, is, “vocation and career in conflict.”
A: That’s correct. They are in conflict.
That’s why what I write applies to professions outside writing.
To every profession.
To technical writing.
To housepainting.
Are you going to take a ration of shit off some paper asshole with a necktie on or are you going to go your own way, to hold to your own ideals and principles.
Parker, the hero of The Hunter, wanted his money.
It was the principle of it.
He wouldn’t be jerked around by a bunch of heatherns who didn’t honor an agreement.
Now, he had to go off the reservation to get his money.
In the movie, Payback, he ended up with no money, shot up, and the girl’s dog killed.
They had to make a different ending.
They had to write a new third act.
But Brian Helgeland didn’t have to do it for them.
He told them to go piss up a rope.
He wouldn’t do it. He couldn’t do it.
You can or you can’t. You will or you won’t.
That’s the test.