Ask the Author: Darren Greer
Answered Questions (6)
Darren Greer
I think the most important thing is to establish a schedule that works, while still giving time to important matters like school, family, job and friends. Once you establish that schedule you should stick to it, making the commitment for the rest of your life if necessary. To be a writer is an important, sometimes ever a sacred, task. You have joined our ranks, become a self-appointed observer and commentator on the world. At first, before publication, it will sustain you. After publication it will ground you. I don't think there are any other tricks. Write, and write as well as you can. Eradicate laziness. Laziness, and fear, can kill a writer.
Darren Greer
I work as an addiction counsellor at a drug and alcohol treatment center during the day. I get up at 430 am every weekday to write. It makes for a long day, but even if you have another job writing has always to be a priority. On the weekend I still write, but less, and I catch up on my sleep.
Darren Greer
For about a year I've been working on a memoir. I published a collection of essays ten years ago called Strange Ghosts, and these were memoir-ish. But this current book is far more ambitious, and life-wide.
Darren Greer
Writing is the best thing about being a writer. I used to love the promotion--the reading festivals and interviews and public appearances. And while these are fine I enjoy writing the most. Especially when a reader reviews me. The greatest joy is for a book I've written to connect with a reader, to resonate with them. This makes it worth it.
Darren Greer
I don't. Sometimes writer's block is a necessary part of the process, an idling of the engine to give the entire vehicle a break. If I'm finding it difficult to write it usually means for me I'm not ready and I find something else to do. I used to believe that if I was not writing I was failing. But I know now the periods in between the writing are equally as important. I wait it out, and when it comes again, it often comes in a flood.
Darren Greer
I got the idea for this book while living in San Francisco in 2010. There I befriended the owner of a pornography company. His friends included street hustlers, university professors, an ex-FBI agent, film-makers and gay American reactionaries. He was a fascinating man, but dark and subversive. There was, at the time, not a single photograph of him in existence, despite his fame. I began to think about getting drawn into the dark world of the pornographer. Of getting approached, obliquely, by such a man in order to be recruited into his strange cabal. What would happen if a man like me started to receive a jumble of codes and secret messages, to be seduced out of his life into an underground world of unknown purpose? I wrote Outcast then, to answer this question.
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