Bruce Holland Rogers
Interview by Heather Blakey
HB: Describe, in detail, an upbeat visualization technique that you have employed to shape your attitude and performance in the handball court of marketing.
BHR: I can't say that I deliberately use visualization when I set out to market my work. That is, I use visualization, but not deliberately. Marketing has never been the hard part of writing for me. In fact, early on my problem was the opposite: I was too likely to send work out before it was ready, just to have the excitement of addressing and sending the envelope. And the visualization of marketing was something that just happened. I daydreamed. I'd pick up a copy of The Paris Review and imagine my name in the table of contents. Or I'd imagine the editor's tone of voice when she'd call to tell me that she was buying my novel.
It's always been easy for me to be excited at the marketing phase of writing. What's hard is sitting down to do the writing. For that, I may do the anchoring exercise I describe in Word Work, but I may also just sit quietly at the keyboard for a moment and visualize myself writing and enjoying the writing. The act itself can be absorbing and fun, and it has been absorbing and fun very often. On days when I don't think it's going to be fun, visualization can help me remember what writing feels like when I'm really immersed.
HB: Using the voice of your 'inner bitch' explain when a writer becomes real.
BHR: Darling, the writer never becomes real. The writer is this vulnerable, imperfect, temporary person, and he'd better watch his step or he'll be squashed flat by something that IS real, like a cement truck. The safe thing to do is stay off the street. A writer isn't up to being real. He ought to just stay in bed, pillow over his head, while I watch the street. In a world of cement trucks, something as soft as a writer can't be too careful.
HB: What is the most effective antidote to deal with the symptoms of an environmental toxin that has threatened your writing?
BHR: Community. People who value the same things that you value are an antidote to environmental toxins.
HB: As someone who has run the gauntlet, used every trick in the trade, devised ingenious motivational tricks to keep the engine room running write a one sentence mantra for a professional writer to chant.
BHR: Well, there's the one that I had taped to my computer when I was writing Ashes of the Sun: "I am an angel in disguise writing a holy text in disguise." One day, my wife looked at that sign, looked at me, looked at the sign again, looked at me again and said, "Good disguise."
Another one, for first drafts: "It doesn't have to be good. It has to be done." And the all-purpose: "This is the life I asked for, every bit of it."
HB: Tell us about the mother of all busman's holidays and the writing it lead to.
BHR: For me, virtually every holiday is a busman's holiday. I take my writing self, and my writing, wherever I go. On my honeymoon, I read medical parasitology textbooks, researching what eventually became the story, "Wind Over Heaven." I was on vacation when I was writing the chapter "Death and the Day Job." Writing is like life. It intrudes. That same vacation week, my grandparents died just as I was finishing the chapter. I flew out to help my father deal with this. My sister-in-law reported to me the conversation she overheard between my father and my grandmother just before my grandmother died, and I thought, "Wow. That's a story." It's not one I have written. But for the writer, all the time that he or she isn't writing is a sort of busman's holiday. Away from the job, you're on the job.
HB: Which of the archetypes who live in the house of Bruce Holland Rogers is the driving force behind Word Work. Describe your relationship today.
BHR: The whole ensemble is responsible. My Inner Bitch certainly had something to do with the chapters that weren't included, either because they weren't written or because she warned me not to include them in the book. And she was happy to help with anything about negative thinking. But the Hero, the Shadow, the Positive Anima all had a hand in this, as will all creative work.
And I must say, too, that I don't really think of those aspects of self in such a separating way except when I am wondering what a dream might have meant or I'm trying to explain an emotional experience that needs a metaphor. The psychology of writing is a bit like the craft of writing. You don't want to think about it unless you have to. If a character seems one-dimensional when you want the illusion of a real person, then you think about the craft of making characters. But you don't write a story by thinking up front about the Theory of Character, the Principles of Plot, the Mechanics of Meaning. You jump in and rely on theory only when you have problems that you don't know how to fix. (I say you, but I mean me, of course. And some writers do approach the writing with theory in mind the whole time. Often, it shows.) Similarly, I don't think about the archetypes that describe my own psychology unless the work isn't going well and I need to figure out why not. Even then, the first solution is to just keep working and see if the problem goes away. Writing is its own medicine.
HB: Describe the writing metaphor which best describes how a professional writer must approach their work.
BHR: Ah, but this depends on the writer, doesn't it? For myself, I am a hero on a mission, and every setback is part of the story, and expression of my devotion to that mission. The purpose of the mission is to bring the experience of life more fully to my readers, to have that experience more fully myself.
But for other writers, the metaphor is the factory: They find out what the buyers want and then turn that out in great quantity. The objective is to maximize profits.
For still others, the metaphor is a radio: They are picking up signals that most people can't hear and are translating them into a form that readers can apprehend.
There's no one right metaphor. There's no one right way to be a writer. There are multiple roads to success and many different kinds of success.
HB: Frame the question that I should have asked you about Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as A Writer and answer it.
BHR: Bruce, why did you write this book?
I wrote Word Work because writing is hard and heartbreaking and exciting and the only thing I ever wanted to do. And I know there are many others out there who feel the same way. I wrote it because there are many pitfalls in the writing life, and I had fallen into every one of them, often multiple times. And I still fall. But I have lots of practice climbing out, and in climbing out again and again, I have learned some things. I can throw a rope to other writers who find themselves in the pits.
I wrote the book that I wish someone had written twenty-five years ago, when I was starting out. I wrote it because, isolated as writers may be as they write, we really are in this together.
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Copyright © by Heather Blakey, 2002. |
Relevant Links:
- Author's Web site.
- Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer
- Fantastic Fiction's bibliography for Bruce Holland Rogers.
- Short story subscriptions.
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