Ask the Author: Matt Burriesci
Answered Questions (7)
Matt Burriesci
I am so sorry I'm only getting back to you now. Of course you can email me at matt@provath.org. I am terrible at social media and I don't login here often. I just did it today on a lark, so I'm sorry I'm just seeing your question. Thanks for reading the book!
Matt Burriesci
Power through it. Write junk and be okay with writing junk. It won't always be bad.
Matt Burriesci
For me, the best part of being a writer is when you're plodding along writing at a certain level and suddenly your shovel hits the pipe and you get a gusher. Those are the times you know it's working, because it's not like anything else. You're not mucking around with exposition, your'e not explaining anything, or setting some obstacle up. You're taking dictation and your job is just to keep up. It's probably your subconscious doing the talking, but I like to think it's something more cosmic than that, like you've tapped into the universal well. It's a rare event, and it's never lasted a whole book for me. Usually it's a chapter or just a scene-- you know it when you see it. There's a couple of sequences in Nonprofit like that (not chapters, but stretches of text, parts of scenes). I'm not tooting my own horn, because honestly it feels like I had nothing to do with them. I just did the typing. I believe the whole rest of the book hangs on those two sequences. The first one's in the "Benefit" chapter. You can actually see my clumsiness as a writer set against a gusher, and it's glaring. First you get that really great bit about the attendees, the duck, and the "delightful black children signing you songs," and it's followed immediately by a clunky (but mercifully short) sequence of the main character exchanging expository jibber jabber with his dinner partner. Every time I see it, I cringe. "Okay, you're really onto something here, Burriesci...you got it, you got it...aaaand here's where you convey essential background information." But that first part of that chapter (to me anyway) is pure magic. Those are the moments you write for.
Matt Burriesci
Write. Write a bunch of crap. Write everyday. But that advice isn't for everyone. People are different. They come at it differently. I wish I was the kind of writer who could just set it down for a while and come back to it like I never stopped. But I'm not. I know people who do that who are much better writers than I am. Jerks! For me, if I don't write for a while I find I have to sort of "get back into shape," before it starts working again. If I'm working on something, I'm working on it every day. If I let too much time go between chapters than I lose the spark, the voice, all that stuff. I think Poe said something about that--unity of effect and all that. I lose the consistency of the style, so it fails to work on the page and with the reader. Sometimes I write "placeholder" chapters where I know it's really bad, but I have to get to this other part I want to write. Actually, I've written a lot of books nobody will ever read because they're just terrible. They're like placeholders, too, only for new projects. I know they're terrible. I had some idea and it was either a bad idea, or it was a good idea and I just wasn't good enough for it. But usually I pick up a trick in the process, or some line, or a character idea. It's always worthwhile as an exercise. Really, 99% of what I write is junk. Every so often you hit that jag, and you can feel it. It was better on typewriters, actually, or on those old manual computer keyboards with the switches under each key. You knew when it was working because you could actually HEAR it, and you could feel the rhythm of it, the CLAK CLAK CLAK of it, and it's almost like you could go on autopilot for a while and follow that. It makes sense, actually. When you're varying up your word length and your sentence structure it sounds a certain way when you type it. When it's not working it all sounds monotone. Jesus that sounds like the advice Sean Connery gives in that terrible movie Finding Forester. "Strike the keys! You're the man now, dog!" God I hate that movie. Cloying garbage. That's what I got for you! More cloying garbage. If you wanna be a writer, then write. If you wanted to be a basketball player, you'd play basketball, wouldn't you? Also: spend the money and buy a decent printer.
Matt Burriesci
I try not to talk about what I'm working on because I feel like I jinx it. I'm superstitious that way.
Matt Burriesci
I don't, really. Writing always seems like a habit to me, like going to the gym or smoking. I think if you do it, you do it. But I think it has a lot to do with anxiety, actually. If I write, I find I'm less anxious. So it's a selfish activity, or at least something I enjoy doing for the benefits it brings to me personally. I also think there's times when you're really in it when you do lose track of the outside world. Time, people, distractions, email-- how else can you possibly get away anymore? It seems healthy to me. But maybe it's just cheaper than a shrink.
Matt Burriesci
I've worked in the nonprofit sector for 20 years now, even founded one back in college–– and I always thought it was a rich area to explore. So I guess that's where Nonprofit (my novel) came from. My upcoming book (Dead White Guys: A Father, his Daughter, and the Great Books of the Western World) was inspired by my daughter Violet, who was born in 2010. When she was born, it was a strange point in my career, in my life, and in the country as a whole. I was filled with anxiety about a lot of things, and I returned to the Great Books to find answers, or just calm me down. I didn't really find any answers, but I did find some questions worth asking. It also calmed me down-- but the experience of re-reading these works (or reading some of them for the first time) changed the way I thought about myself, my life, and everything around me.
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