[Link] Why I Write: Let Me See About Getting the Words Right

by Gary Phillips

I write because I can’t draw. Growing up in South Central back in the day, me and the fellas read and traded Marvel comics. You might sneak in a DC book now and then—say, an issue of Green Lantern rendered in the fluid style of Gil Kane. But certainly not a goofy Batman book. This was before writer Denny O’Neil and artist Neal Adams brought back the hardcore Batman, the template for The Dark Knight.

Marvel, however, was different. Beneath Spider-Man’s mask, the teenage angst was plain on Peter Parker’s face. The Hulk’s internal struggle was unending, involving both his horror at reverting to “puny” Bruce Banner and Banner’s own at becoming the man-monster. In the pages of Fantastic Four, meanwhile, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby introduced the Black Panther and the scientifically advanced kingdom of  Wakanda. Mesmerized by those monthly adventures, made vivid by the art of Kirby and Steve Ditko, my younger self desperately wanted to write and draw my own comic books.

Harrowing real-life occurrences also captivated me. In my neighborhood barbershop, as well as other barber shops and beauty parlors in the hood, various kinds of stories were told by patrons and haircutters. Often, they involved brothers who had run afoul of the cops out of 77th Division, which patrolled our area. The comics and the community: this would be the transmutable clay out of which I’d later mold my novels.

The desire to tell stories led me to reach out as a teenager. Before the internet, like-minded youngsters would get together to produce comics with their own characters. Maybe a hundred copies would be reproduced on a desktop Gestetner duplicator. Or, if enough money was raised, offset printed. Trying to get my work into those fanzines, I stumbled across mystery and crime mass-market paperbacks, as well as science fiction, all of it available on the spinner racks at the Thrifty drugstore. Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes, Andre Norton, and those Bantam reprints of 1930s Doc Savage pulps with eye-catching covers by James Bama.

A few more years would go by before it finally sank in that drawing comics wasn’t going to be my vocation. Yet even as I picked up a slew of rejections for my art, a few of the letters I got back did note that the writing wasn’t bad. Well, OK, then, let me see about getting the words right. This period dovetailed with my burgeoning community activism, which focused on the matter of questionable policing in my own and other Black and Brown neighborhoods.

Protesting police abuses led me to the anti-apartheid movement, which in turn fueled my participation in direct actions against the contra war, financed by the Reagan administration. From there, I went on, among other endeavors, to become a labor organizer and the outreach director for a community foundation. I found myself reflecting on these undertakings in nonfiction pieces for newsletters. Somewhere along the line, I started writing weekly op-eds for a community newspaper and a progressive media service. This discipline of writing on deadline proved useful to me when it came time to tackle writing a novel.

To write a book at first felt daunting. But looking back, it was an organic development.

Read the full article: https://www.altaonline.com/california-book-club/a61958649/why-i-write-gary-phillips/

Persistence in the Face of Great Adversity

by David James

As I sit here in my car doing my best to figure out exactly what I'm going to write about, I think about a friend of mine that's well published that uses a voice recorder in his ear while he goes hiking to do his first drafts. And I think of a marketer who uses a voice recorder to automatically type what he wants written for his marketing campaigns into Google Docs. Thus, using inspiration from both of them, I am doing voice-to-text right now as I think about what it is I am going to write.

One of the things that I admire in writers, is how they can take over a known universe, and make it their own, giving us a great story in it that continues the universe's Legacy. I think of the Star Wars Expanded Universe of novels. I think of the Star Trek novels. I think of authors that take over after other authors have died such as what Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson have done with Frank Herbert's Dune, and what Brandon Sanderson did for Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, or what Todd McCaffrey did after his mom died with the Pern novels.

For myself, when I was growing up, and in my early 20s, I would sometimes write Star Trek or Marvel or some such in a short story form yet I never would finish the story. A lot of it was just done for fun anyway. I would even have wild ideas I would start writing down and had nothing to do with anything established. I had friends would say to me what I wrote was very readable. Yet, I never would continue nor finish them. I always thought I would, but never did.

Then, I decided to be serious. I bought a used copy of Dean Koontz's book How To Write Bestselling Fiction, and I read it like a writer's bible. I bought Stephen King's On Writing and read it. Then I came up with various stories of my own which I started. I have a whole universe of stories in my head just waiting to be told or finished being told. A few years back I lost a 20x20 storage unit that I was not able to pay; many, many, many stories were lost forever that had been in progress. Yet, the last one that I had been working on, I had somehow been wise enough to save PDF files online which I was able to recover.

I have gone through the PDF, the full PDF, a few times now, and I want to finish it. Yet, here I am sitting in my car, it's raining outside, I am homeless, very tired, and autistic, and have a hard time concentrating in public when I pull out my computer. A friend even got me a computer recently, because my other one was messed up and I hadn't been able to write in over a year. Files are on it as well. I sometimes can concentrate, and sometimes not. It varies, depending on what stimulation I have going on around me.

I rather hope to finish my story someday, and perhaps restart some of the stories I had started previously, yet never finished. Perhaps I can finish those as well. Yet, each day is its own struggle just to survive. I have to keep gas in the car to be sure I have air conditioning so I am not too hot. I have to make sure I have food each day. And most times I don't have any shelter other than the roof of my car. Friends help me out with donations on occasion. Even though the novel is not finished, I am considering sectioning up the part I already have, which is over 100 pages, into a few sections which could be sold on the Kindle Vella. How many would be interested in finding out more about the story I currently have?

When I think of how other writers are able to step into other universes and just take off with those universes and do so well, I look at myself and how I'm just working on my own stories, and my own universe, and how although it would be wonderful to write a Star Wars novel or a Marvel comic book or a Star Trek novel or some other thing, I just want to see my own stories in print.

If there is one thing I can say, whether one is published or not, whether one has finished a story or not, if you are a writer, then you have to write. I have other aspects of me as well and I am a trained healer. I am a certified Wholistic Health Coach. I have also trained in a very specific healing technique, which is highly effective. I love to help people. And I love to see them get better. Writing is something which causes people to feel good. Reading words helps one to become a better person. I believe that is why I have such a drive to write, and to never give up. Persistence truly is the key to success. Whatever success you have, it is because you are persistent, no matter what!