Write Like a Gangster, Class 12: Reason for Writing

Hey, ho, let’s go!

Reading Assignment for this class: “The Hammer and the Spike” chapter from Teardrop Road

Writing Assignment for this class: The assignment from Class 8 is due today. Send it to jesseteller (at) yahoo (dot) com. Remember to rate and review your performance at the bottom of the assignment.

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Writers

Donald Maass (an agent) talks about storytellers and writers.

A writer calls every two weeks and wants a list of:
a) Who the agent has been talking to
b) When have they sold
c) How close are they to selling the book
d) What kind of advance are we looking at

What does a writer look like? I’ll go first.

A writer has a jacket. Sometimes they found it in their grandma or grandpa’s closet. Sometimes they legit have had it since they were a freshman in high school. Most times they got it at a flea market or a thrift shop. Where they got it doesn’t really matter. It’s their “writer jacket.” Usually has some kind of significance, either fake or real, that they can tie to it. Most of the time it’s sloppy of some kind or in some way unique. It has to be unique in some way. Mine was a caramel color corduroy and too big for me. I was gonna wear it today but I just can’t look at it anymore. It didn’t look bad on me. That’s not the point. It was an accessory somebody was supposed to mention, and they did. It was part of my costume. I had a couple jackets, but this one was part of my costume.

Then there’s the hat. Mine was a wide brim leather hat, obviously cheap. I took a crazy amount of twine and I wound it all together in a braid. I found a bead, and with leather and a leather needle, I sewed it to the hat like a band. It actually does look really cool. The end of the braid frayed in the back to make it look like the hat had a pony tail. It was pretty cool. The leather was really rough and I pierced the brim of the hat with copper rings from a piece of chain mail I used to have. It was a really cool hat.

It was my writer’s hat. And every time anybody asked any questions about it, I would say something along the lines of, “I’m just drawn to things like this because I’m a writer.” It was part of the costume. There were pants that I wore. There were shirts that I wore. I didn’t wear them all the time. I only wore them when I was putting the whole costume on. I would go to a party or a gathering, or I was gonna meet somebody new. And I wanted somebody to comment on the way I looked so I could tell them I was a writer.

Carried a bag. The bag had a leather braid on it. It was sloppy and I sewed patches on it. It was big but it was small. You could tell that I bought it at a department store, like a Walmart or something, but I had made it my own. I had personalized it. That’s important. It was a “writer bag.”

The time I can remember being a writer the most was after high school. I grew up working class. I wasn’t even expected to graduate high school, let alone go to college. I was the first person in my family to even graduate high school. So I worked two jobs, sixty hours a week. I was a desk clerk, graveyard shift, at a Best Western, and I worked as a full time cook at Pizza Hut. It was a pretty depressing part of my life, to be honest. And all I had was writing to give me any hope that it would stop and I could go to a new life.

I took my bag and I took my coat and I took my hat, and I went to the back of the dining room of Pizza Hut. I’d show up like three hours before I was supposed to work, pull out my comp book, and I’d start writing. Soda was free, so I drank a lot of Dr. Pepper. I would write, of course I wouldn’t get very far. Three hours, maybe five pages in a comp book. I was just not very serious about it. But it was really all I had at the same time. So I lived for this.

I wanted to be seen writing. I wanted people to know I was a writer. I wanted people to sit down, and me read to them what I had written. I was actually tortured, not acting like I was tortured. And I was more interested in looking like a writer and being identified as a writer than I was actually writing. It was a time in my life I had no identity.

My grandfather died. The heart attack that had been chasing him since I was six finally caught him when I was nineteen, and my aunt committed suicide. I was desperately holding onto something. I had stopped playing Dungeons and Dragons, so I wasn’t telling stories through that anymore. All I had was that bag that I had personalized, the braided leather cord coming off of it, and all the patches. I had a pewter pin. I had battered composition books that were gold to me. But mostly what I had was a sigh, and a gasp, and an “I’m a writer,” and a tortured attitude.

But I wasn’t getting anything done. This particular time in my life, I think I wrote six poems and one and a half short stories, and I wrote one piece of microfiction. And I would sit and wait for inspiration to take me. Sometimes it did. Other times I would just write about how much I hated life. And it got me through.

Being identified as a writer and building myself around the writer image, it got me through. But it wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. And I didn’t think myself capable of writing a novel. You can spend your life trying to look like a writer and trying to identify as a writer, or you can spend your life writing.

Now, right about this time is when I’m supposed to tell you the story of the One Great Writer. But I don’t have the energy for that. I’ll do that in another lecture. I don’t have the energy for it, and I don’t want that energy in this room, because to me the most important thing is this. You are paying for an education. In the pursuing of that education, you have a certain identity. There’s a certain look to you, there’s a certain attitude to you, you’re learning how to be a writer. You’re getting a lot of different pieces of information and a lot of different pieces of advice. You’re being taught certain things, some that conflict with each other. But what often happens when you leave this institution, and an institution like it, is that you enter the real world and that certain identity you had while you were studying is taken away from you.

That’s what happened to me when I left high school. When I left high school, I was no longer the leader of the Degenerates, I was no longer the leader of Writers Club, all of that was gone. I was just a guy making pizzas and checking people into hotels. You gotta figure out how to be a normal person again when you leave this place. And at the same time that you’re being a normal person, you have to be a person who is writing books, writing poems, writing screenplays. The identity of being a student learning how to write is going to be taken away from you. And you can either build a life wrapped around recapturing that identity, or you can move on and focus on what you’ve learned.

Storytellers

I’m gonna tell you now about storytelling. I want you to listen really closely. And I want you to pay attention to the differences in identifying yourself as a person who creates stories versus being a person creating stories. Because there’s a big difference.

I might be pissing some of you off right now. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be doing that. I’m getting to a point. I had a look, an aesthetic I was going for that matched the kind of writing that I did. It was an artist thing. Now I’m not saying that artists and writers do not think differently than normal people when it comes to fashion or accessories. I’m not saying that at all. But I am guilty of it. I know a lot of other creative types that are guilty of it. They try to set themselves apart visually so that they can be asked about the thing they do.

It’s all part of a show we’re putting on, that I was putting on, that everybody puts on. It’s rooted most of all in insecurity.

There’s a band that came out in the mid-90s called Rancid. They’re a punk band. I was talking to a friend of mine who’s into punk and he said he would never listen to them because he saw a picture of them and all their leather jackets look brand new. One of my alters pulled that little piece of information out and set it aside, didn’t let us forget it. Been holding onto that little piece of information since early ’96, and I can tell you why. I’m not saying Rancid was a good band. Makes total sense to me why they had brand new leather jackets. And while writing this lecture, I can tell you I was thinking Rancid was probably the most punk band that had come out in decades.

First thing Rancid did as soon as they could afford leather jackets was go buy them. We don’t say, this particular rapper is not from the projects because they have nice clothes. They got a record deal. They got money. They can get nice clothes and they can afford nice cars now. Same thing with Rancid. That band was probably so punk and so poor that they couldn’t even afford a leather jacket. First thing they did as soon as they could afford one was go out and buy it. And they didn’t rough it up against the ground and make it look rough. They were authentic about it.

Not a Rancid fan. I have no answers if you ask me what any of their songs are called. But this is what we’re talking about. “That person’s not a writer because they wear t-shirts and blue jeans and New Balance.” “She doesn’t write horror, she’s got a sun dress, perfect hair, perfect make up.” We gotta let go of that, man. We gotta let go of all that.

So you picture a writer, they’re headed to a coffee house. They’re carrying a messenger bag with a laptop or maybe a journal in it. They’ve got a hat on. They’ve got a jacket on. It’s always raining, they’re hunched against the rain. They’ve got an expression on their face most of the time. You see where I’m going with this.

If I say, “what does a writer look like?” You’re gonna give me the same kinds of descriptions. This is what Donald Maass is talking about. Donald Maass is talking about people who are trying to be writers. It’s very important to them that people recognize them as writers.

I was so guilty of this for so long. The thing was, I moved to Wisconsin, started seriously writing during the winter. Couldn’t wear my writer’s jacket because it was bitter cold outside. Couldn’t wear my writer’s hat for the same reason. Still, I’m putting up serious word counts. I’m really happy with my work. I’m writing in the afternoon when I wake up, doing 3000 words, talking to my wife about it. Making dinner, hanging out with my kid. And do it all again the next day.

There was a coffee house two blocks down and one block over. It was a really nice one. Had a lot of personality. Perfect place to write. I had the comp books. I didn’t have the money. We’re talking about $7-$8 coffees, and I wrote every day. There were too many people going in and out. The music was too interesting. I have work to do. Who can afford to write 3,000 words in a comp book they then have to transpose over into… and buying a laptop was not possible, I just had two kids. It wasn’t important anymore, the coffee house, the backpack, the coat and the hat. None of it was important anymore.

I got nobody to dress up for. Start finishing books and I realize I’m a storyteller, I’m not a writer. Then I start noticing that I never leave the house. I get in the car, I pick my child up from day care, come back, I’m in the house again. I once did that for three and a half weeks. People came over and I hung out with them, but I didn’t go anywhere. No restaurants, no nothing, stayed at the house, close to my computer, close to my writing. Didn’t want to be far away from the story I was telling, or I also didn’t want to change the subject. I was around my wife. I was in a house. We were always talking about my book. We go out to dinner or something, we change the subject. I wanted to be close to my story all the time. And it didn’t matter what I looked like.

I still told people I was a writer. I mentioned it anytime I could. I had conversations I’m embarrassed about now where I’d make people sit and listen to story ideas, and what I was doing with my book. But it wasn’t about a jacket. It wasn’t about a coffee house. It was about getting work done.

Donald Maass told me he represents Anne Perry. If you haven’t read her, she’s brilliant. She puts out books consistently. She has a great origin story. He said that they would be on book tours, he’d knock on her door, she’d let him in and he’d see her laptop. And she was writing. While on the road, writing in her hotel room. It’s not about the jacket or the hat, or the twine braid that you made. It’s not about patches on your bag. It’s not about any of that. It’s only about the work.

There are some people who are writers. I’m not saying their work is not good. But they’re mostly concerned with recognition as a writer. And that’s not how a storyteller lives.

I asked the Lighthouse of Alexandria if this lecture was getting too long. She said it’s not, so I’m gonna tell you a story about the day I met another oral storyteller and we recognized each other.

My stepdad had friends that lived in the same town. They were from his first marriage. He’d married a Native American. And this was a member of her family, I think distant. I’m sitting in a room with him, I’m not supposed to be. I’m supposed to be playing with his kids. I’m supposed to be hanging out with his kids. I’m a teenager now. Adults are supposed to bore me, and this guy’s got a beautiful daughter. I’m supposed to be flirting with this girl.

Guy starts telling a story. He’s big, he’s very, very, big. Wide in the shoulders, thick in the chest. He’s got a face that looks like a fist that smiles a lot. Smiling fist. Long black hair, gray workout sweater. He doesn’t look like anything special. He starts to talk. He had this level of charisma that can’t be described or denied. He starts to tell a story, and it was the way he worked his way into it. I recognized it immediately. He had led the conversation and let everybody say their piece. Everybody had said whatever they were gonna say and came to an end. Then I watched him mention my stepdad’s work, and by this time I knew what he was doing, because I’d been doing it for years. This is the build up of a story he’s gonna tell about a job he worked.

Then I remember him. I was a kid. Oh man, I must have been like five years old, and we had gone to visit him. I remember his beautiful daughter back then, and the way she looked at me, and her smile. But it was him I was focused on. I had started watching storytellers by then, and there was a quality about him.

Have you ever really been around a trained oral storyteller? I mean, it’s, there’s just a quality about him, you can’t take your eyes off him, and you don’t want to. He had done this exact same thing, shut the room down slowly, respectfully. Mentioned work and talked about how he had been an EMT. I was remembering it then, it was like a curl of the shoulders, a hunch. I was watching it as a teenager, I remembered it as a child.

He planted one hand on the table, just like he had planted one hand on his thigh when I was a child. His other hand kind of hovered around chest level. When I was a kid he had told a story about being an EMT. Said he’d gotten a call and they had told him there was an elderly man who was wounded, had gotten into an accident and could not drive himself to the hospital, so he had begrudgingly called an ambulance.

When they drove out to check on this guy, the old man was standing on the sidewalk, staring at them as they came riding up. And he looked fine. He wasn’t grasping his chest. The storyteller pounded his chest. I got a sense of what was happening as a kid, I knew it now staring at him as a teenager. By pounding his chest right over his heart, he was giving a certain amount of power to the character he was talking about. That one little moment solidified the old man as tough. I was remembering it now as a teenager as he was revving up this new story. The old man had a pry bar, flat piece of steel cut like a L, with a long handle, a pry bar. And it was stabbed right through the front of his thigh and coming out the back, all the meat.

They walked up and saw the pry bar, he looks at this old man. It’s another generation, a tougher sort back then. They get to him and both of the ambulance drivers, the EMTs, they were in shock. The old man said, “Sorry to bother you fellas. I just can’t sit down in my car, so I figured I’d give you guys a call.”

I remembered that story, I remembered that old man. I’m sitting in this guy’s kitchen. I’m now 17, that story had been told to me 12 years ago.

The rest of the story from when I was 5, was a description of a guy who called them screaming, moaning, ended up calling 911 a number of times. I think it was 911 back then, the story might have taken place before 911. He’d called a number of times, and when they got there this guy had a hangnail coming off of his toe. Flop sweat, wailing, it was a perfect umbrella of the story of an EMTs experience.

And now that I was sitting in front of this guy as a teenager, I remembered every word of it. Now I know what storytelling really is. Sitting in that kitchen, I know exactly what a storyteller is.

Well, he started telling another story, he had been a construction worker, working on repaving a road in the middle of winter. The road dipped between two high hills covered in trees. Little bit of snow on the ice, he’s wearing a full piece body suit to keep him warm.

This man and the crew that he’s working with, oh man, they are about 25 minutes from the nearest bathroom, and breakfast hits him. And he realizes he shouldn’t have had those last two sausage patties. He’s in a full body suit, thick wool and canvas. So he goes to the top of the hill, unzips himself, pulls his pants down, gathers up all the extra cloth and hugs it to his chest.

Man, I can still remember the look on the face of this storyteller. As a 17 year old sitting in his kitchen, I knew he had complete mastery over every muscle of his face as he told this story.

He leaned up against a tree, squatted down. He ended up slipping, rolling down the hill, over bushes. His overalls wrapped around his ankles, a fountain the entire time he was rolling, completely covered, screaming, moaning, he can’t pull those coveralls back up. He’s got nowhere to go. The guys working on the road with him, they see him. He’s naked from the waist. It’s freezing cold. He’s covered in snow and feces and urine. His feet are tied together by the overalls that are not covering him but are also very covered.

When he’s telling this story, you can see every moment of it. This is a master. I’m sitting before a master storyteller. He’s Native American. From what I know, they’re proud of an oral tradition. I realize as I’m 17 that I am sitting in front of a trained master. Just the beginning of streaks of spiderwebs of gray through his hair. His early 40s, he’s got decades of storytelling ahead of him. I’m 17, and this is what I want. This is my goal. I wanna be this. I wanna tell stories for a living.

Sitting at his table, his kitchen table, I don’t know how he knew me. I don’t know how he recognized me, 17 year old kid with Romani blood, who was trained to be a storyteller since the day he was three. He planted a hand on the table and he turned his body to look at me, and he nodded. So I told one to him.

I’m not gonna tell you what mine was about. It was a gift to him. He can do with it whatever he wants. It was a gift to him just like his story was a gift to me. Mine was good. I remember being inspired by being in this man’s presence to tell the very best story I possibly could. My story was solid.

So, I walked to the door. I was the last person out. He had called his daughter in when I started telling my story. She was a kind of beauty I had not seen before. Walked me to the door. I was the last one out. She hugged me. She told me, “Good story.”

He shook my hand. And he said, “You’re good.” And he nodded to me. To this day it’s one of my favorite compliments I’ve ever gotten in my life.

I told him, “Not as good as you.”

He smiled and said, “You’ll get better. You’re better than I was at your age.”

I said, “It was nice to meet you,” and I gave him my name.

He shook my hand and said, “It was nice to meet you,” and he gave me his name.

I said, “I’m gonna do my best to forget your name and only remember your story. I wanna remember you only by the story you told.”

And he nodded and said, “Yes, that’s the way it’s done. I’ll forget your name, too.”

If he’s alive now, he’s in his 70s, late 60s. Can you imagine the stories he’s telling? I think about it sometimes when I get in the dark like I am right now, I’m quiet, only my wife can hear me. And I talk to her about the greats. I think about him. How many hundreds of stories has he told since? How many hundreds of stories have I told since? It inspires me to awe. I’ll never forget him.

Sometimes I expect to get a phone call and be told that he’s on his death bed and he has another story he wants to tell me, a more important one this time. A gift from his culture to mine. Then I remember he didn’t want to know my name. And I didn’t want to know his. It’s not him that’s important. It’s his story. So I keep his story alive. Told it to you. I keep the story of the man alive. I told it to you. The tradition, the tradition of oral storytellers.

This is the thing, I can’t make a living as a storyteller. There are conventions. One in particular I think is in Ohio or Oklahoma. Every year, a group of storytellers gets together. They have booths that they can design to give you a setting that they then tell stories to people all day long. Sounds amazing. I’d love to do it one day. Just to walk in the building while the stories were in progress, walk past all the booths, all the tiny rooms that had been set up. And hear as I walk by, the whispered hushes, the yelling, laughing, the snarl of my people at work, the storytellers at work.

I’ll probably never do it. I’ll probably never do it because, for me at least, the stories I choose to tell are hand tailored to the personality of the one I’m sitting in front of. I know what kind of stories I would tell my friend Teddy, versus the kind of stories I would tell my friend D, and how only my wife, my Lighthouse, my wonder of the world, gets to hear them all.

See, stories are all that matter to storytellers. And this right here is the lesson. I came to this guy’s house, he was wearing a gray sweater you’d wear to workout. He had no hat or rings or jewelry of any kind. Sitting in front of a white coffee cup. We’re at a kitchen table. And he’s plying his trade.

Donald Maass, the agent from New York, who told me about what it’s like to represent a writer, then described what it was like to represent a storyteller. He was not necessarily talking about an oral storyteller. I wanna stress that. There are storytellers who are quiet and just wanna work on a computer and tell their stories. When Donald Maass talked about storytellers, he was talking about a quality.

He said when you’re working with a storyteller, they give you the book, they ask you certain questions:
a) Is there anything else you need from me?
b) And the big one, as they’re walking out of the office, from a very short meeting, the shortest they can manage, the big question is, how much time can you get me so that I can work on the next book?

See, a storyteller knows that they’re not gonna be able to sell that book. If they called in every day and asked that agent, they wouldn’t understand what he was saying. And a storyteller knows that there’s always another story to tell.

And that’s their job. It’s not their job necessarily because they’re getting paid for it. They might be making no money. This guy was a construction worker. They have another story to tell because it’s their contribution to society. Whether you write your stories, speak your stories, sing your stories, paint your stories, a storyteller is always working. And that’s all they wanna do.

Donald Maass, when he’s talking to a storyteller, he gets this. Boiled down, it’s always this: Do you have anything else you need from me in order to do your job? Because I have to get back to work and do mine. That’s who he likes to represent.

We’re talking about two completely different animals, when you talk about a writer and a storyteller. Both powerful. Both deadly. One’s a lioness, the other a lion. That’s the best way to describe it I think. One’s a lioness, the other a lion. They both do the same job. They’re both powerful felines. They both have their place in the pride. In this particular instance, that pride is the publishing industry. Both of them eat gazelles and zebras. But the lioness and the lion are two completely different kinds of creatures.

Now here’s one of the greatest musicians who has ever lived. The axis of the world is gonna tip a little bit more when this man dies. I’m not gonna be okay for a long time when he’s gone. This is Tom Waits. This video is from a Letterman performance. Everything you see his body do, every gesture he makes with his hands, that’s just the way he sings. It’s how he gets it out. This is my favorite musician. He’s my favorite musician so much that I only listen to his work maybe about twice a year. And then only four or five songs, because I don’t want Tom Waits to take over my life.

Writing Assignment

This is your writing assignment. It’s due in 3 class periods. Most likely there is somebody you have met, who you’ve been in the room with, and this lecture is making you think of them. Without knowing it, you have been in the presence of a true storyteller, whether they were trained or not. I want three pages describing why you think they’re an actual storyteller, describing not the story that they told, but what it was like for you to experience it. Let’s remember that we’re giving ourselves star ratings based on how good we believe we did on our assignments, and we’re writing a small review of our own work.

I said a lot in this lecture that would lead someone to believe that writer types who write in coffee houses and have fancy jackets are not respected by me. That’s not always true. And I don’t wanna imply that if you see someone writing a story or a poem on a laptop in a coffee bar, that person is not committed to the story they’re telling. I just wanted to show you the two different kinds of attitudes that writers get. And I wanna say this, and this is what the entire lecture boils down to, this one thing. It all comes down to this one idea. It’s not your job to look like a writer. It is your job to write.

Do not waste your time crafting a look. Because if you do, then a terrible thing might happen to you that I hope none of you ever have to live through. You spend your time crafting yourself to look like a writer, then you’ll face this terrible fate. People will remember you instead of your story. And they might remember your name more than they remember your story.

In the end, it’s not us. It’s not us at all that matters to the literary world, or any genre we’re in, or poem that we write, or style, it’s not us that matters. It’s the story we’re telling. It’s the thing we’re giving to the world, not our own personality.

Writers have a tendency to wanna write their work and they have a role model in mind. “I wanna write like George RR Martin, JK Rowling, Maya Angelou, William Faulkner, Dr. Seuss….” And that’s poison to your career. It’s absolutely poison to your career. Have heroes, for sure, but don’t mock them. Don’t sit down and try to write like Stephen King or Jane Austen. Don’t mock your heroes. Join them. Stand beside them.

A lot of times you’ll hear people talking about a book, or you’ll see a blurb on a book that says, “This is where Star Wars meets Lord of the Rings.” One of my series was once called “The Avengers of fantasy” and I was horrified by that. Because when someone reads my book, and when they read yours, they should have the same experience, they should think of you uniquely. And not think, oh, this is the next Steven Erikson.

Reading Assignment

Reading assignment for next class: “Pop” and “Mrs. Galvin” chapters from Teardrop Road

Seeds of Tarako will have to be read by Class 17.

—Prince