Sunday, January 8 (cont'd)

Q: So you just finished writing a book. BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK.

You are trying to figure out what to do with it. Where to send it. And what to write next. What the book you are in will look like.

A: Yes. Sometimes I will sketch out a series of books, so I will have some idea what the next book will be about. Sometimes I just start writing and find out as I go along.

Also, sometimes I will finish a book, start a new book, and see that the new book is a continuation of the old one. I will combine them and rename the book.

Q: How long have you been doing that.

A: Since the first book, actually.

OVER THE TRANSOM. Give myself a year to learn to write, the last year of a postgraduate fellowship in anthropology at Tulane. Write a mystery, OUT IN THE OPEN, and send it out. Then a memoir about how I became a writer, what I thought I was doing in the first book. Then a dialogue between the lead character of the first book and myself. Not a very conventional start. The plug is out. The die is cast. The pattern is set. All subsequent books are variations on this method. I write, I send it out, I write about what happens to it, and how what happens makes me feel. What I do about how I feel. I write. I mix fiction, poetry, and the essay. Autobiography and literary criticism. I throw in filmscripts and plays. Grant applications and replies to rejection slips. Letters to a friend.

Q: So your first book was a novella, a short memoir, and an interview between yourself and your protagonist.

A: My anti-hero, yes. It was an anti-novel. But also an anti-memoir. And an anti-narrative nonfiction book about writing.

It was something new under the sun.

Daily typewriting.

Also known as enema vérité. What you see on the end of the fork when you really look.

Sometimes, to see what's on the end of the fork we have to eat with chopsticks.

Q: And you put the theory in the book with the application, the actual practice.

A: Yes. As an example. The example causes me to modify the theory, if it doesn't work.

I learn by doing.

Q: And you're still learning?

A: I'm still asking questions about what I am doing.

What it means.

Why would a man dedicate his life to doing something he doesn't get paid to do? That's not rational behavior, economically.

Q: He must expect to be paid for it down the line. He must expect a deferred compensation.

A: Or he's gratified by doing it. He gets his reward from doing it. Seeing himself make progress. In the work.

He hears back good things from readers.

He senses he belongs to a tradition of outsider artists who didn't get paid.

Those would all keep him going.

If he starts a job, he finishes it. He's not a quitter.

Action is character and character is plot. Writing is a form of action.

The novel is based on conflict. Writing a book is a test of character. Is you is or is you ain't an existentialist.

Saunders lives in Parker, Florida.

He is a writer.

Mainly, he just sits in his room and writes, but sometimes he makes side trips, to have something to write about. To collect material. He's a report writer, and does research.

He's a travel writer, and travels.

Odysseus was a travel writer, and The Iliad and The Odyssey were early travel books.

Saunders' wife, Brenda, says he ought to get out more. Last night, they watched The Big Lebowski on DVD. The Coen Brothers didn't have to get out to write The Big Lebowski. They didn't have to get out to write O Brother, Where Art Thou? O Brother, Where Art Thou? was based on The Odyssey.

Saunders posted the books he wrote on the worldwide web, daily, as he wrote them. At his web site, The Daily Bulletin.

He called his web site The Daily Bulletin: A Newsletter on the State of the Culture, or, How To Write World Literature From Parker, Florida.

He had solved the problem, not only of how to write it, but also of how to get it out to his readers without the mediation of a publisher. He published it himself, online.

That is, he not only wrote in real time, he published in real time. That's new.

To be able to read a book, as a writer wrote it, without having to wait for it to be whittled down to size, by agents, editors, publicists, lawyers, bookkeepers, and the Ideological Rectitude Police (IRP) was fresh. Immediate. Raw.

Uninterfered with. Unrefined. Coarse.

Mr. Natural.

The myth of the natural, who could do something complicated without learning how.

Saunders showed himself learning. He showed himself trying and failing. "Once I saw I could make a mistake I knew I was onto something," Ornette Coleman said.

I saw a copy of Elle magazine in the Winn-Dixie with a picture of Scarlett Johansson on the cover, done up like a femme fatale.

We had just seen her playing a gawky teenager in The Man Who Wasn't There. Gawky until she leaned down in Billy Bob Thornton's lap to give him a blow job.

"Heavens to Betsy, Birdy!"

And what I'd seen her in before that was Ghost World.

Now, Natalie Portman, I knew was going to be glamorous when she grew up. She was sexy as a kid, in The Professional.

But Scarlett was more interesting. What would she grow up to be?

So that, Saunders didn't need to go anywhere, he could just sit at home and watch movies, read magazines like Elle, watch television, go shopping at the Winn-Dixie.

Everything was grist for his mill.

Then, thinking about what he would write next, after the book he was in, he went to the post office and got an issue of Bluegrass Unlimited and saw there was a festival next month at Ives Dairy Road, in Ojus. The Everglades Bluegrass Festival. He had it!

AFTER BLUE-COLLAR REDNECK: AN ONLINE JOURNAL (OLJ). January 6 - January 31. In progress. I drive to Fairhope, Alabama, to read and sign books at Page and Palette Bookstore. In planning what this book will be like I see that it is part of a series called Online Journal (OLJ), and is followed by THE CLASS OF '57 HAD ITS DREAMS, BY JACK SAUNDERS, THE SWINETTE-PICKER OF AMERICAN LETTERS.

THE CLASS OF '57 HAD ITS DREAMS, BY JACK SAUNDERS, THE SWINETTE-PICKER OF AMERICAN LETTERS. February 1 - February 28. Projected. I decide to write a book for my 50th [high school] class reunion, next year. As research, I drive down to the Everglades Bluegrass Festival, hosted by the South Florida Bluegrass Association, and held at Ives Estates Optimist Club, off Ives Dairy Road, in what used to be Ojus, Florida.