PUBLISH THIS BOOK: Writing About Publishing; Publishing About Writing

How did you discover your writing process? Did you know your audience beforehand or was it all organic?

The development of my writing was probably the definition of organic, mostly because I was writing so frequently and with such intensity at such a young age. I'd completed two novels (bad, bad ones) before I'd allowed more than a handful of my short stories into the world, by which I mean my high school lit mag. It took me longer to learn to admit I was a writer than to learn how to write. Which is kind of a weird phrase, right? "Learn how to write"--because anybody with enough time on their hands can write a poem, a short story, a book, but there are always those people who can put the words together in such a way that knocks us off our fucking chairs.

How did you decide on the length of your book (480 pages)? As you know, short stories are getting shorter and shorter and publishers I hear are critical while reviewing longer prose from first time novelists/memoirists. Thoughts?

So, so many thoughts. I didn't choose the length of the book, I just wrote the book I wanted to write and it happened to be 480 pages exactly. I've heard a few people say that they thought it was overlong but the majority of the comments I get are along the lines of "I didn't want it to be over." One girl wrote to tell me that after she got to chapter 10, she only allowed herself a chapter a week, so she could prolong it. Besides that, I absolutely hate it when people critique books based on length and I hate it that novels and books in general are perceived as needing to be shorter. It's such a joy to pick up any book, from Stephen King's Under the Dome to Jared Diamond's Collapse to David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, and just be stuck with this immense, epic interpretation of the human experience. I completely and utterly do not understand the impulse to lower our attention spans to the point of only pleasing the Twitterverse.

In your book you mention that your professor Steven tells you, "the book is terrible." Every writer goes through that phase, sometimes, even after the book is released. What's your advice on receiving criticism in general?

Confidence and humility in equal measures. Part of being a writer is the confidence that what you have to say and the way you're going to say it is important. You have this wild, wicked dream in your head that you want to force on the world that you want to impress on other people's synapses, and they're going to sit back and love the shit out of it. Yet at the same time, we're all broken vessels, we're all in need of people telling us when we're not doing something right, and you've gotta find the people who are brilliant at telling you what you need to hear.

Luckily--you mention Steven--I've been blessed in my life to encounter multiple brilliant, kind, creative people who read "Publish This Book" and have since read more of my work, and who are just great at being those voices of dissent. I also think that I've gotten much better at editing myself--at being able to kill my babies, as they say. So it's learning to dismiss the people who don't know what they're talking about or can't do what you do (oh, and they are legion), while at the same time maintaining that measure of dissatisfaction with yourself and listening to the dissent of the people you trust.

But why the narcissist frat-boy third-person voice? Did you discover your voice while sliding down aluminum poles or writing for Jacket Journal or eating too much Chinese food at four in the morning?

Well, see, I disagree with the premise of your question. First off, it's a first-person voice. Secondly, the reason I keep kicking myself in the book for my narcissism is a larger commentary on the role of narcissism in memoir. As in, there's probably no such thing as a memoirist who is not self-involved. After all, you're writing about yourself and that takes a certain amount of arrogance that people care what's happened to you. For that matter, you could probably pin the narcissist label on any kind of writer, actor, poet, painter, artist. Finally, I was never in a fraternity. I think frats are for insecure people trying to form instant-breakfast friend groups. Fraternity brothers did not invent great, hilarious jokes about penises and bowel movements, and I refuse to let them own that humor. By that standard everyone from Chaucer to Rabelais to Roth would be labeled "frat-lit."

I agree. More about your writing style … it reminds me of Justin Halpern's shitmydadsays. Any tips for writers, bloggers, memoirists, guys-who-want-to-impress-their-sister's- girlfriends on how to write humor?

Writing humor is tricky because what is hilarious to one person could be completely juvenile and idiotic to another. I've had people tell me that a specific line or footnote in the book made them laugh to the point of urination, yet another person will tell me that same joke was "beneath me" or something along those lines. The point being, you can't please all the people all of the time. Writing funny is like anything else--instinctual but heavily practiced. Like if you're not a funny person, you probably never will be. Christopher Hitchens will never make anyone laugh--and in fact occasionally kills happiness in babies. At the same time, you can always tell the people who've honed that craft, who understand how to surprise someone into laughter and it's usually because they read and write relentlessly.

Part of my admiration for your book is that you got to keep your voice and opinion all along. It’s incredible that you could convince an agent/editor who we all know are finicky about unpublished authors. How did you do that?

I lucked out a bit in that I sold the book based on the first two chapters and an outline, so both my agent and editor didn't really know what was going to be on pages 29-480. Luckily, they really, really enjoyed those pages that followed. My editor Peter Lynch wrote me an e-mail after he finished that was about the greatest thing a young writer can ever hear from someone who's been in the business a while. I'm better at writing a book than explaining what a book is about. To this day people will ask me what my book is about, and I'll give them this lame little "Oh, it's a humorous memoir about trying to write a book about publishing that book" when what I want to say is "Well, it's really about..." and then launch into chapters 1-23 while they stare at me like I'm a psycho.
 
There were rumors, there were myths, there were insinuations, but for the most part, what were you doing during the period following college and what did you learn at the end of the dark tunnel?

Like I outline in the book, I spent it driving around until I ran out of money and had to get on with life. It was good, though. People mock the young for doing stuff defined loosely as "finding themselves" but this usually comes from bitter finance majors who've spent their lives making money in a joyless cubicle. I wouldn't trade that year of my life for anything, and my only regret is that I didn't have more psilocybin on the way. What I learned is that I have about 1.5 things that make me happy, that get me through the day, and 1.3 of that is writing. That if I'd gone into anything else--politics, activism, whatever that finance-cubicle job might be--I would've burned out quickly.

Your political articles, news-corp-scandal-getting-b-a-n-a-n-a-s and debt chicken pack a lot of punch. In this digital age with mashups and pseudo-blogs and bitly shortened tweets serving us quarter-baked half-truths of the raw unforgotten world, when no news agency is "fair and balanced," when all you get is left-wing or right-wing and nothing in between, then, what do you think is the future of op-eds?

The Internet has democratized information but it's also ghettoized it. People don't understand that their Google search results are pre-determined to be the results Google thinks they'll be most interested in. So if you spend all your time reading left-wing blogs, and you type in "debt-ceiling" it's guiding you toward your pre-confirmed opinion about that topic. I admit I have a traditionally left-leaning view of the world but only because, like Colbert said, reality has a well-known liberal bias. I try to challenge myself as often as possible whether that's reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page or listening to economics podcasts with Austrian and Chicago bents, but I'm not going to pretend I ever get swayed much from my position. Nevertheless, now that almost anyone can express an opinion, opinions are becoming much less valuable. Even the most influential actors in American life are only speaking to a small minority that's already bound to agree with them anyways.

They say writers need to read a lot. Have there been any influences from your reading life, perhaps, one that inspired the most in writing your first book?

Endless, endless inspiration. Publish This Book had no genesis in any other specific work. It really was just a late-night brain fart that suddenly unspooled into this kind of epic quarter-life journey, but all writers are amalgamations of their favorite authors, and that's all I am. I've made lists before, but it's so scattershot--Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Wright, Hunter Thompson, Bruce Springsteen, Quentin Tarantino, Stephen King, Dave Barry, Spike Lee, 2Pac, Jon Stewart, Bob Dylan, Nabokov, Howard Zinn, Mark Twain, Stanley Kubrick--that it becomes kind of pointless to do the list. The only actual important thing is to never stop reading. I don't understand people who don't read. It's so goddamn fun.

Voyeurism has never been in such prime. Do you think the surge of memoirs in the market is due to the popularity of reality television?

Sure, it's easy to say the two go hand-in-hand but that's not to devalue either. The roots of reality television are nothing more than the documentary, and recent documentaries like "Exit Through the Gift Shop," "Restrepo," "Inside Job," "Food, Inc." and plenty of others have easily outpaced their fictional counterparts in terms of commenting on the current socio-political moment (Sorry, I'm not intentionally trying to sound like an asshole). So reality TV as we define it comes from a much more important tradition than what we think of as "reality TV." Now does that mean a bunch of Italian stereotypes screaming at each other with their shirts off has any redeeming value? Well, probably not. Nevertheless, the same is true of memoir. Sure, a lot of memoirs are pits of voyeurism, self-indulgence and despair, but going back to Montaigne, memoir is also a way of reflecting the universal human experience. The point of reading and writing memoir is that we see ourselves--our fears and hopes and sadnesses--in others.

Now that you have a book out, do you think your writing process will change for the next project? Part of the puzzle I think for unpublished writers is the idea that somehow after the first book, things will be easier. Is that true or -- is it harder now?

Writing isn't harder. Rather, I'm frustrated by how slow the publishing business moves. My agent and I are shopping a big, epic novel around to publishers right now, so hopefully that will like be, like, bound and distributed in book form at some point, but I've been unable to stop myself from starting the next one. Sometimes I feel like I've got a rocket strapped to my back, ready to head straight for the center of the sun, but I've got to sit around and get someone to push the "start" button.

So writing is easy right now because I've got the energy and the hubris of youth, but the business side of it is just such a bitch it can't be described. With Publish This Book it's frustrating because I know from the e-mails and Facebook messages and Tweets and letters that it's a book that touched a very distinct nerve with people. It's got this awesome cult following, this kind of tide of fans who adore it and express sentiments about my writing that make me incredibly grateful and astonished and weirdly humbled, but it never got that one big break, you know? It was never on Daily Show or Colbert or a podcast like Voice of Young America, it's never had that one voice with a loud microphone saying, "Hey, you should really check this out."

And I think that's just the way of the world for my generation of writers. We're facing headwinds of technology and economics and distribution and waning cultural significance that no one predicted just ten years--Hell, five years--ago. For the reality TV stars and the celebs-of-the-minute, it will get easier but for the actual creative people, the ones who write from a place of joy, the journey has gotten longer and weirder.

Lastly, your two cents for writers struggling to find their voice?

Just like you find the love of your life. Keep at it. Give up. Then keep at it again.
 

Stephen Markley's website is www.stephenmarkley.com/

Priyatam Mudivarti writes fiction at late nights, writes complex software code during the day as a freelance software engineer, and documents people's lives taking time-off as a traveling documentary photographer. He has earned his bachelors in Computer Science Engineering and is currently pursing MFA from Pacific University. He is working on a collection of interlinked short stories and a novella, Yuti, set in India. He lives in Cambridge.