CARL FLAMM BOOKS: MY BEST ANSWER WHEN ASKED WHAT I WRITE ABOUT

Thursday, August 11, 2016

MY BEST ANSWER WHEN ASKED WHAT I WRITE ABOUT

I was in a coffee shop today and a person at another table saw my T-shirt that read "Be careful or I'll put you in my next novel" - a shirt that my sister in law had gotten me for Christmas. I didn't intentionally wear it just to show off at a coffee shop. It was wash day and it was the only clean shirt I had to put on. Really.

How do you know that I am telling the truth? Because quite frankly I hate it when people come up to me and notice that I am writing and ask what I write about.

How do you answer a question like that? I suppose I could say that I write about the horrors of the human condition, or that I try to tell a story with heart that will give the reader an uplifting message at the end, none of which would be true.

So I was honest:

I told them that I wrote stories about fucked up people doing fucked up shit.

That shut them up fast and suddenly they had to get back to their croissant.

So if you ever get the Jeopardy question: Who writes stories about fucked up people doing fucked up shit, you'll know the answer:

I do.

No comments:

Post a Comment

FROM THE AUTHOR

I really like to read and write Transgressive Fiction - a genre I believe originally developed with William S. Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, and Phillip K. Dick in the fifties and later popularized by such great contemporary writers as Chuck Palahniuk, Douglas Coupland, and Brett Easton Ellis, in which characters feel trapped and suffocated by their lives in every day society and try to break free of those walls of solid iron and concrete in unique and sometimes abnormal and unexpected ways.

Who can’t remember the first time they met Tyler Durdin or Patrick Bateman?

I'm anything but a perfect person and I believe we all have these very interesting character flaws that are so unique and can tell such an original story if we are willing to put aside our shame, let the ideas gestate for a while, and write about it. And then we put that fictitious twist in it, just for fun. Someone can always identify - maybe more than one would think, and in the process of exposing yourself, you are helping someone else expose themselves. I believe exposure is good for the soul - at least it has been for me.

REMEMBER

“Accomplishments are like skyscrapers. But do we ever look at such buildings and assume they sprung up overnight? No. We’ve seen the traffic congestion that attends them. The skeletons of beams and girders. The swarm of builders and the rattle of cranes.

Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little statements. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery.All the works that you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failure.

So whatever your project, whatever your struggle, whatever your dream, keep toiling, because the world needs your skyscraper."

- Pierce Brown, author of the Red Rising trilogy