Byron Edgington, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Byron Edgington
Author (Self) interview 8/22/2013 4:05:49 AM
I find inspiration every day the sun comes up, so most mornings... GWP: So, you’ve yet to find anyone interested in conducting an author interview? (My Ghost Writer Person settles onto the chair opposite me, notepad in hand, iRecord app furtively running on her iPhone)
BE: No, which is why, in my craven desire for publicity, and to hopefully lavish my excellent work, I mean inflict my writing on the reading public, I decided to contact you. Since you’re my biggest fan besides my wife, and astonishingly similar to myself in so many ways, my expectations are quite high for a successful session. By the way, thanks for taking time from your busy schedule to do this. It must be difficult juggling an interview career with your gutter cleaning and drain clearing company, though I do see the similarities with writing.
GWP: Yes, Leave’Em&Love’Em Plumbing is a hectic endeavor, but the business can manage without me for one afternoon, I hope, so… Shall we get started?
BE: Looking forward to it. Might I expect the usual questions?
GWP: Yes, starting with this: why do you write? And a follow-up question if I may, what would you do if you couldn’t write?
BE: I write because as the second of ten kids I couldn’t get a freakin’ word in edgewise. It was like animal house and the food fight every night, except the flying food came from mom and dad, the only safe way to get it to us. Writing for me is like singing in the shower. When I’m all lathered up it sounds really good. Then I rinse off, and always discover one last filthy stain, or a horrible streak of goo in my draft, and I wonder why the heck I ever thought I could be a writer? Plus I always get dirty again, so… If I couldn’t write I’d be a professional curling star. Who knew waving a broom around on the ice could be so sexy? Those guys rock. Know what I’m saying?
GWP: Uh, I think so, yes… Moving along, what’s the hardest part about writing?
BE: Besides these banal interviews? I’d have to say dealing with BISS.
GWP: I give up.
BE: Butt In Seat Syndrome. It’s the only thing that works. Especially these days, it’s much too easy to follow the rabbit trails— G+, FaceBook, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter… are those folks called Twits? Anyway, social media may be the death blow to good writing skill, simply because they’re too frickin’ easy to get lost in when you should be writing. Blogging ain’t writing, by the way, in case you wondered. On the other hand, those who can avoid the social sites will no doubt pull in front, since they’re the writers who will succeed. It’s a craft. I truly believe there’s a writing muscle, and with exercise it gets stronger and more supple.
GWP: Favorite author?
BE: Besides myself?
GWP: Uh, yes, please.
BE: I respond that way for a reason. When I flew for a living, I heard a fellow pilot once say, ‘if you don’t think you’re the best in the game, you’re in the wrong game.’ Same with writing. You gotta believe you’re the best writer in your niche, your area of expertise, or you will not succeed. Other favorites include Melville, Harper Lee, Steinbeck, Gordon S. Wood for non-fiction and the old Maine Live Lobster master storyteller himself Stephen King. Nothing beats a good story, that’s the secret.
GWP: Favorite stories?
BE: To Kill a Mockingbird is possibly the closest thing we have in our national narrative to perfection. That beautiful little book does what a good story should. It shows us who we are, and who we aspire to be. Beyond that, Moby Dick. Melville’s classic contains the DNA of who we are as Americans, the burning desire to travel, to not be someplace but to be someplace else, the relentless pursuit of our own white whale, and the passion that drives us mad until we destroy ourselves chasing it, white culture as a blessing and a burden, diversity as strength, even the earliest writings of our troubled history with racism, sexism, elitism, capitalism and homosexuality. Moby Dick has it all. Without it, there may not have been a Huck Finn, or Farewell to Arms, Gatsby, or even Mockingbird. Plus, with his Bartleby the Scrivener, Melville created the apotheosis of the reluctant writer. There are numerous days when I, too, turn away from the writing, with “I’d prefer not to.” Good old Bartleby.
GWP: What are you working on? And how do you find inspiration?
BE: The Sky Behind Me is happily published, doing reasonably well and I’m happy with the product itself. The book truly is a good story of loss, hope and redemption, things rarely seen in such graphic fashion in memoir. In progress, a novel about the Air Medical business and the people who make it work. I’m writing ‘The Final Sky,’ working title, as a love story, since that’s what Air Med is in so many ways. The people who gravitate to Air Med are not ambivalent about life. They tend to be passionate people, and that attribute is a double-edged sword in their potentially perilous world. Here again will be a story of loss, hope and redemption. I find inspiration every morning the sun comes up, so most mornings. With age comes a kind of sacred understanding of the gift of time. GB Shaw was right; youth is wasted on the young.
GWP: Let’s return to loss and redemption. Do I sense a theme?
BE: I plead guilty to the charge of following my own passion. Like a lot of people— perhaps all people— I’ve experienced the loss of a dream, scrambled to replace what was lost, and found something better by an order of magnitude than the original dream, and been redeemed by it. And I’m convinced it was that loss, not the family food fights that gave me the need to write.
GWP: Last thoughts for aspiring writers?
BE: Call yourself a writer. Own it. Write every day. Railroad crossings used to have a sign that said ‘watch, look & listen.’ Good advice for writers. Do all those things with intensity. Henry James once said, ‘if you must take notes on what struck you, perhaps it didn’t strike you.’ Kill your adverbs. Read it aloud. And finally, don’t under any circumstances put it out there with your name on it until it’s polished so high it shines like a diamond in a goat’s ass. Then go sing in the shower.
