Ask the Author: J. Mulrooney
Answered Questions (5)
J. Mulrooney
Hello Ana,
I'm sorry, I don't get out here often so didn't see your question. I am a fan of Bettelheim. It's been a long time since I read Auerbach, but I learned a lot from him.
Where can we read your story?
I'm sorry, I don't get out here often so didn't see your question. I am a fan of Bettelheim. It's been a long time since I read Auerbach, but I learned a lot from him.
Where can we read your story?
J. Mulrooney
Sit down with what you’ve written so far. Start at the beginning and read through. When you get to the second last page, open your notebook or word document. On the last page, get out your pen or put your hands on the keyboard. When you finish the last page, start writing.
The other thing I tell students is that you don’t have to write the thing consecutively. If you know that Martha and John are going to have a blowout over the dog, you can write that now, even if it won’t come for a few chapters. You may need to revise a bit more later, but sometimes writing out of order helps you focus on the big things and keeps the project moving.
A final tip - when you're writing something larger and know you're going to have stop, take five minutes and write a few lines about what you have to do next. You're in the moment of creation, and especially after a good session, you can see where you're going. But you don't always find your way back to that zone immediately, so giving the future you a little note about what the in-the-zone you saw coming can really help.
The other thing I tell students is that you don’t have to write the thing consecutively. If you know that Martha and John are going to have a blowout over the dog, you can write that now, even if it won’t come for a few chapters. You may need to revise a bit more later, but sometimes writing out of order helps you focus on the big things and keeps the project moving.
A final tip - when you're writing something larger and know you're going to have stop, take five minutes and write a few lines about what you have to do next. You're in the moment of creation, and especially after a good session, you can see where you're going. But you don't always find your way back to that zone immediately, so giving the future you a little note about what the in-the-zone you saw coming can really help.
J. Mulrooney
Well, not a fair question, since it's a book of short stories, so it was really 14 ideas instead of one. With these, I was trying to get back to the bones of story-telling -- these are stories that wear their story-ness on their sleeves and start with sentences like, 'There was a man' and end with sentences like 'And that is they are standing in the meadow to this day'. My models were fairy tales, fables, lives of saints, folktales.
Maybe a better way to answer is to suggest a listen to Benjamin Britten's folk song arrangements. Britten is this hyper-sophisticated 20th century composer, and he takes the simplest British folk songs, some no more than nursery rhymes, and - using just piano and voice - arranges them with the full pallet of 20th century technique - the dissonances, multiple keys going on at the same time. I wanted something like that, I wanted to do lives of the saints or Hawthorne's Tales of the Puritans, but without hiding the fact that I'm writing now and the whole 20th century obsession with literary technique happened.
Maybe a better way to answer is to suggest a listen to Benjamin Britten's folk song arrangements. Britten is this hyper-sophisticated 20th century composer, and he takes the simplest British folk songs, some no more than nursery rhymes, and - using just piano and voice - arranges them with the full pallet of 20th century technique - the dissonances, multiple keys going on at the same time. I wanted something like that, I wanted to do lives of the saints or Hawthorne's Tales of the Puritans, but without hiding the fact that I'm writing now and the whole 20th century obsession with literary technique happened.
J. Mulrooney
If you're writing a novel? 500 words a day. Every day. It's a lifestyle.
I don't really know what non-fiction writers do. If you're writing short pieces, the answer is different as well, because you have to generate new ideas all the time. Truth to tell, I think writing a novel is easier than a book of stories.
I don't really know what non-fiction writers do. If you're writing short pieces, the answer is different as well, because you have to generate new ideas all the time. Truth to tell, I think writing a novel is easier than a book of stories.
J. Mulrooney
Finishing up a large novel entitled "An Equation of Almost Infinite Complexity". The opening sentence is "When the devil moved in next door, Cooper had the same question everyone else did: How would it affect the property values?" A book length story with the same kind of energy as the Philosophical Fables, but funnier.
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