Category: Writing

The Eight Books That Made Me a Writer: From Vonnegut to Raymond Carver

Recently I was thinking about what I read as a kid, and how I eventually decided to try writing myself.

Looking back there seems to be four phases, each represented by two authors.

The first phase was reading on my own in elementary school in the mid-70s. I first became obsessed with Robert Arthur’s Three Investigators books and then with the John Christopher trilogy.

After that I stopped reading for several years. I don’t remember much of a “YA” category to bridge the gap. I read a little C.S. Lewis and JRR Tolkien, but fantasy was not my thing. I was more into BMX and sports.

In high school I didn’t pay a lot of attention to reading until around junior year in 1984 when an English teacher assigned 1984 and Brave New World. These books definitely got my attention. This was “real” adult writing to me.

The first writers that got me to read on my own again were Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson. I was very into punk rock and these authors seemed to have a punk rock, anti-establishment attitude.

In college I decided to be an English major, and began reading all the classics. But then I found Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski. These were the first writers that made me think about writing myself. Something about their simple, clean lines and direct stripped-down storytelling gave me permission to try.

What were the books that got you into reading and maybe even into writing?

Mac 512

I wrote these stories on a Mac 512 between 1990 and 1994. They were saved on floppy discs and printed out on a dot matrix printer. 

I’ve always considered the design of these early Macs to be absolutely iconic. I recently discovered that mine is still in the shed at my parents’ house, yellowed with age. 

This little “Maclock” came into my feed the other day. I usually avoid buying this kind of crap but I couldn’t resist this time. It’s surprisingly accurate. And it’s darn cute.

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Italo Calvino on Writing and Memory

In getting ready to publish Firenze, I revisited some of my favorite Italian writers, including Italo Calvino. I picked up a copy of his first novel The Path to the Spiders’ Nest and was particularly struck by a few passages in the the preface, which Calvino wrote years later when revisiting his early work.

What you read and what you experience in life are not two separate worlds, but one single cosmos. Every life-experience, in order to be interpreted properly, evokes certain things you have read and blends into them. That books always derive from other books is a truth which is only apparently in contradiction with the other truth, that books derive from practical existence and from our relations with other people.

There is another point: for those who start writing after one of those experiences that leave you with ‘so many things to say’ (the war in this, and in so many other cases), the first book instantly becomes a barrier between you and that experience, it severs the links that bind you to those facts, destroys your precious hoard of memories – a hoard in the sense that it would have become a reserve on which to draw permanently if you had been patient enough to husband it, if you had not been in such a hurry to spend it, to squander it, to impose an arbitrary hierarchy on the images that you had kept stored there, to separate the privileged images, which you believed contained a genuinely poetic emotion, from the others, those which seemed to concern you too closely or too little for you to be able to portray them; in short to set up in your arrogance a different memory, one that has been given another shape instead of your whole memory with its blurred outlines and its infinite capacity for retrieval… Your memory will never again recover from this violence that you have done to it by writing your book.

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I wrote Firenze on a Dell Axim X3

I wrote Firenze on a Dell Axim X3 with the Think Outside Stowaway folding keyboard. I wrote most of the novel on my lunch break in the Columbia Tower atrium in Seattle around 2003/2004. The Axim had a “Windows Mobile” operating system and I’d connect it to my big old PC each night at home and download what I’d written that day. 

Those were not the easiest times for me. I was a new father and sleep deprived. The dot com bubble had burst after 9/11 and I’d traded my cool remote dot com jobs for a soul crushing corporate job. I was having some doubts about giving up California for rainy Washington State.

I’d written Mountain View with extreme optimism. A desire to get that awkward period between adolescence and adulthood down on paper before I forgot what it felt like. I probably sent it to 100 agents. Got a lot of requests, a lot of very nice letters back from some big names in publishing. I wrote Kato shortly after moving to Seattle from San Francisco in a kind of furious/fuck it, I’ll just write something jokey and fun. But then I was told by people close to me it didn’t have a chance in the publishing world at that time. So I sat on it.

Then life happened. I had this idea about not being able to appreciate things in the moment. I had some other ideas I was still turning over in my mind from both Mountain View and Kato. But Firenze was a struggle–I had so little time to work on it. On this funny little device and folding keyboard in this big bustling atrium. Wearing corporate casual–khakis and a blue button up. Getting texts on my Nokia 3310. 

I was definitely listening to a lot of Radiohead back then. Hearing Amnesiac takes me right back to that time and place. 

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