Why We Write (19 page)

I think the good for me comes in continuing to work and trying, a little bit, to believe in what I do.

Caution: reading can lead to writing

I like books, the actual, physical things. I like to carry them around. I don’t mind how heavy they are, and I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles on my books.

Before I ever wrote, I was a voracious reader. Both my parents are people who always have a novel they’re reading. A kind of object fetishism of book as a sacred object runs in my family and was imparted to me at a young age. I don’t know exactly how long the book as we know it will exist, but I fully expect to make it to my death without having to give up on books.

Merciless

My big ambition is to avoid doing the same thing twice. The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is an essential part of my personality, and I judge myself very, very harshly. I am all but entirely merciless about myself and my work. Alas. Those who are otherwise are probably healthier.

I
n the fine tradition of Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe—two of Walter Mosley’s influences, along with Gabriel García Márquez, Langston Hughes, Dashiell Hammett, and Graham Greene—Mosley is inextricably linked to Easy Rawlins, the protagonist and namesake of his best-known mystery series. Some other associations: Bill Clinton. Blue Dress.

Not
Lewinsky’s
blue dress, the one in the title of Mosley’s first published book and first movie adaptation,
Devil in a Blue Dress.
As for the presidential connection, in 1992, candidate Bill Clinton famously called Mosley his favorite author.

At age sixty, nearly thirty years after he began writing, Mosley told me, “The fact that I ever got published is still amazing to me.” Against all odds, maybe, but not amazing at all to anyone who has had the pleasure of reading his lightning prose.

Walter Mosley

Why I write

I really love putting words together to tell stories. It’s a great thing to do. I can’t think of a reason not to write. I guess one
reason would be that nobody was buying my books. Come to think of it, that wouldn’t stop me. I’d be writing anyway.

It’s not like writing has been a lifelong thing for me. I’ve been drawing since I was little. I used to draw every day. But I only started writing in my thirties, and I fell in love with it. It’s like a relationship. You meet someone, and suddenly you’re in love when you didn’t expect it. I could ask you why you’re in love, but you wouldn’t be able to tell me.

I like writing, but I don’t fetishize it. If I write a sentence I really like, it’s the same great feeling as when I do anything well: play an electronic game, play chess. There are more moments like that when I’m writing than when I’m doing anything else. But even when I’m just walking down the street, my life is a life of imagination.

Fire ants

Before I was a writer, I was a computer programmer. I didn’t hate it, but there was no meaning to it. I didn’t come home and imagine myself inside of my work, the way I do now.

One day I was at my job as a consulting programmer for Mobil Oil. It was on a weekend, so there was no one in the office. I was tired of writing programs, so I wrote this sentence: “On hot sticky days in southern Louisiana, the fire ants swarmed.” I’d never been to Louisiana, and I’d never seen a fire ant, but I thought, “This sounds like the first line of a novel. Maybe I can write fiction.” So I wrote my first book.

No one wanted to publish it. I couldn’t even get an agent. The book isn’t about white people or black women, and no one wanted to read about black men.

I thought I’d never get published. I decided I’d keep working, maybe take some classes to learn about writing, get a teaching job. After I’d been writing for about four years, I wrote
Devil in a Blue Dress
and gave it to a writer friend of mine. He gave it to his agent, and she said she’d like to represent it. She sold it within six weeks. Publishers were all looking for different kinds of mysteries. They thought a black mystery was a unique thing. It was a handle they could use to sell it.

The best moment of my career was getting my first book sold. It was so unexpected. I called my dad and said, “I sold a book. They paid me the same amount of money that I make in a year.” He didn’t believe it; I didn’t, either.

That’s how it all started. The book did okay, and people started paying attention to me. The best thing was I didn’t have to work anymore, which was amazing.

Once I got started…

I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I have three or four novels in my computer right now that nobody’s bought. I haven’t showed them to my agent. She says, “Not another book, Walter. I don’t have time to read this book.”

I had a collection of six novellas that I sent to her. She said, “Walter, I can’t read this. I have other clients. I have four other books from you that I haven’t had time to read!” I feel the same way I felt before my first book was published. I know they’re good books. If you don’t want to publish them, fine. Sooner or later someone’s going to publish them.

Rejection can be sexy

The worst moment in a writer’s life is the perpetual recurring moment, and that’s rejection.

If you keep writing what you want to write, you’re going to get a lot of rejection. “We’re not printing this novel; it has too much sex in it.” “We’re not printing this nonfiction book; you’re not a talking head. Who do you think you are?”

Rejection is always painful, but you learn to enjoy it. It’s part of an incredible life, and you have to realize that you couldn’t have this life without this pain. That pain becomes eroticized in a way. You kind of enjoy it. You love to get together with other writers and talk about the worst rejection you ever had.

I got a review in
Publishers Weekly
once: the guy said my characters weren’t even strong cardboard. I love saying that to people. It’s so funny. It’s a terrible thing to say about any writer, even a writer who’s in third grade, but hey, my book got published, so that’s okay with me.

This is what I’ve decided to do. I’m like a boxer: getting hit is the worst moment and the best moment. I’m just trying to survive.

My problem

This sounds so crazy, but my biggest problem is capitalism. It works like this. People produce products on an assembly line, and then they’re sold. If it’s your job to put the front fender on the Pinto, you don’t put the brakes in. You can’t just decide to change what your job is.

Being a writer is the same. I write science fiction, nonfiction, books, TV shows, plays—I write everything. But people don’t want me to write everything. It’s the problem a lot of writers have. The more successful you are, the more problematic it’s going to be. If you made a million dollars on one book, and now you write a book that’s going to make only two hundred thousand, it’s not just the publisher who starts to think the second book isn’t as good.
You
start thinking it.

A lot of writers are defeated by the system of writing. I was talking to one recently. He said he couldn’t get published, so he was thinking of quitting. I said, “You have to be kidding me, right? You’re not writing for publication. You’re writing to write.” If you’re looking to get married, you need another person. If you’re looking to write, you really don’t.

My favorite writers—Charles Dickens, Mark Twain—come from a time when publishing wasn’t completely in the domain of capitalism. I’m a writer, not a seller. So I have to keep myself from thinking about the bottom line, so it’s the publisher saying, “I want you to make a lot of money,” not
me
saying it.