Ask the Author: Perry Brass
Answered Questions (10)
Perry Brass
A man woke up and found the people most close to him were unrecognizable. A first he thought there was something abnormal about himself, and the more he tried to become "normal," the horrible everything around him became.
Perry Brass
There are so many fictional landscapes I'd like to visit, from so many different writers. I think I'd love to go to Dostoyevski's "The Idiot," or "Crime and Punishment," Hemingway's "The Sun Also Rises"—a book I wanted to "live in," when I was a kid, and of course, "King of Angels," the Savannah, GA, of my youth. What would I do in these worlds: just be alive, look a lot, see a lot, and be alive to the magic of art.
Perry Brass
I am currently reading Oliver Sacks's memoir "On the Move," which is interesting in that he is open about being gay in it, something that he avoided for most of his life. I met Sacks several times, and found him to be distant and elusive, although I have several friends who were close to him. I think the fact that I am an openly gay writer bothered him. He did come from a horribly homophobic Jewish background in pre-World War II England. I am somewhat familiar with that background from other friends of mine who went through the same kind of painful oppression there. As Quentin Crisp said about the difference between America and England: "In America, everyone wants to be your friend." After numerous trips to England, I found that very much to be true.
Perry Brass
The great mystery to me is how do people know what they know—how did I know to leave home at 17 and start a life for myself; how did I understand my place in the world? I am always seeing things that seem like clues to a mystery, the way people behave in public when they think no one is looking—writers look all the time. We are great spies from the kingdom of the heart, and that is why, I think, people still read mysteries, romantic stories, fiction, poetry, and other aspects of the art of writing.
Perry Brass
Luckily, I don't have it often. When I do, I try to relax, and also I exercise a lot: physical exercise is important for writers: we need to "get out of our heads" often. Also travel is good—see something different. But the most important thing is to be writing something that so grabs you (as it will the reader, you hope) that there is no turning back. All you want to do is get up in the morning and start working on it.
Perry Brass
Being involved with this wonderful art form. I love books, language, the musicality of words in English, the great things that you can do with them. Language is the software of the brain, and I am very pleased that I can do something to keep this software moving. I also love that I have given a lot of people real pleasure and happiness, just as so many writers have done that for me. And I love being a part of the Book World, an important part of human culture. I am very grateful to be making a living doing this.
Perry Brass
Read great books, not crap that hits the bestseller lists. Understand what makes a book work, how the chapters flow and how the plot, if it is fiction, and the character impress you. Characters are more important than plot: how many plots can you remember? (Probably very few.) How many characters in books do you remember? (Probably many more.) Also either learn another language or become familiar with other aspects of English than the casual spoken language—like become familiar with medical English, or nautical English, or medieval English. Let the language open you up to other worlds. Too many books now are written in bad English, in slang, in a casual language that does not allow the depth of the language to come out, and the depth of your feelings.
Perry Brass
The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love. It should be out in the spring of 2015.
Perry Brass
By reading other good writers—very important to me—and also by physical experiences. I feel that writing is a very physical thing, that words have a physical presence, a genuine dimension. Anyone who has ever had the right words at the right time change his or her life knows that. So suddenly the words are there, and I enter them and they tell a story to me. But I have to put myself into that sensitive place where I can listen to them.
Perry Brass
Usually books just come to me in an almost physical way—they are like making love or cooking or eating. Either the book just appears to you—kind of like a landscape you walk into, or it doesn't. However, now I am working on The Manly Pursuit of Desire and Love, a companion book to The Manly Art of Seduction. The idea for this book came from so many reactions to the Manly Art of Seduction: it seemed that a lot of people were not having problems with seduction so much as understanding desire itself and how it shaped their feelings. So I wanted to deal with that.
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