I feel like I'm still doing what I wanted to do when I was a kid, so that hasn't changed. There was one seismic shift in my writing that took place midway through college. Up until then, I modeled my writing mostly on John Irving and wanted to write things that were sad. I started to catch wind on how manipulative that kind of fiction is, how much it relies on melodrama, and how it doesn't require much art or skill. Since then, I've been working on making an emotional connection in my writing while subtly subverting melodrama at every opportunity, which is saying quite a bit for a fella named Melo.

I think I've changed quite a bit actually. For a good decade I was mostly focused on acting in theatre and film, my interest in writing happened gradually. I've always enjoyed doing it, throwing down a short story or a poem here and there, but I started seriously writing as a way to build material for film projects. Most of the film stuff was dark and intense, but strangely enough some roles that I thought I was pulling out heavy dramatic punches wound up actually coming across as comedic. Then I started running with a comedy troupe and playing with more light-hearted satiric projects. It was refreshing and cathartic in an entirely different way then the louder, angrier characters. Though it's fun to rage on stage, it was a high to get laughs. So, why not mix both a little bit? And then I began more and more to love prose, the fact that the writing by itself can be a means of experiencing. I now focus my time more heavily on writing fiction than the other mediums, but I think my acting years have shaped me in that I like to approach each project as its own different character so to speak. Though they may have vaguely have a similar core, I think in looking at some of my pieces over the past couple of years, the tone and the style of each is fairly different.

Hi Jeff, I've heard that involving oneself in acting is supposed to be very good for writers--so it's great that that's how you first entered into writing. I think the two fields compliment each other.

When I first started out, I was interested in drama and realism--then much later I started writing absurd poetry and now I'm working on a science fiction novel. I think the early writer in me would be very puzzled and would think I was weird--which is probably true. However even though the genres are vastly different--somehow my style is still similar as are my themes. It's strange.

Yes. I'm damn glad I did it. It was a long time coming, but I finally wrote the book that I wanted to write back in 1972 (or around there, might've been 1974.) I remember hanging out for a few days with my friend Jack, and we both talked about wanting to be writers. We even set up a place where we could go write and dragged out a typewriter from his mom's house (he was visiting her for the summer.) Then we became surly with one another because nothing was happening the way we thought, we knew what we wanted to write, but hadn't quite acquired the tools or the patience to settle in and do it. Well, sharing a typewriter was a pain in the ass too...having my friend hanging over my shoulder saying "Are you going to write something? Hurry up, I want to write something." And he sat there at his turn unable to make anything significant either once confronted with the blank sheet in the roller and of course, it being his mom's typewriter, it went back to where it came from and Jack's visit with his mom ended. So our grand ideas didn't work out so well. It was a magical time, I remember the thrill of the ideas that crowded into my head, brilliant pictures of ghosts, secret passageways, and the awareness of being alive. That book I wanted to write way back then turned out to be Dusty Waters. The one's that have followed, they surprise me the most. One book is a blessing enough, but to have more than that is very special. It still takes my breath away. I haven't seen Jack in nearly 40 years...I have no idea what ever happened to him or if he ever followed his ideas that struck him back then too...or if he even remembers that brief time when our paths crossed.

Hi Laura, What a great story! Thanks for posting it! I love that you tried to share a typewriter. I feel like there's a short story in here somewhere. Kathryn

Oh my goodness, why did we think sharing the typewriter would work? How funny, right? The more I thought about it last night, I started remembering more details...summer days lasted forever when you're ten (or twelve), and I think that event only lasted one day. By the next day when I ran back looking for him, excited about getting started with my ideas, I discovered that Jack had hooked up with Pat (drag). So we moved on to something else as having another kid hanging around changed the dynamics of our plans from the day before. Eventually, it wound up being one of those "two's company, three's a crowd" sort of days, and because I was "the girl", I was the odd one out that day. It was nice for one day I didn't have girl cooties! I hung out with a boy who actually listened to me, and we inspired one another to become writers...for a day. Sure there's potential for a story...I already thought of that ages ago, it's floating there in a salt n' pepper notebook where the zygotes of my books are written in long hand, it's waiting for its time and place in another book. The spirit of it sort of found a home in Dusty Waters... Emmett (a boy totally not Jack) bought a typewriter with his paper route money and trucked it around in a Radio Flyer all the way to Dusty's house for safe keeping in a special place. Not quite the same story. I'm glad you enjoyed the story! As I recall, he caught hell from his mom for dragging her typewriter outside. (It was in the garage, it's not like we left it in my fort out in the woods!)

Starting out, I think I just wanted to tell the stories about the people around me--which is probably the way it starts out for most writers. It’s this voyeur aspect of my personality married to a borderline sadistic desire to control and manipulate the outcomes. I grew up in a household that didn’t put much stock in books, my entire exposure to literature came from first catholic school in the UK and then the public school system here in America. Shockingly, it wasn’t the kind of experience with literature that had any resonance with me. Because of that, I didn’t think anyone was out there writing about the world as I lived in it, and felt like it was my responsibility to report on the situation on the ground. It wasn’t until I got to college, that I learned that there were thousands of assholes out there writing about their take on my world. And as it so often is with assholes, most of what they had to offer was shit.

So there my youthful naivety was beaten down by the cold facts, I was but one in a crowd and no matter how unique I thought my take on the way people lived was, it is too easy to be overlooked. Somehow, I avoided the next step in the progression of jilted lover, the extreme action stage, the lashing out. I didn’t start cutting text up, or drop all the punctuation or explore the saucier side of incest or enter the masturbatory Mobius loop of meta-fiction. I just never saw the value in talking about why I’m talking about what I’m talking about.

Instead, I focused back on the simple dynamic, the friction, the conflict, the money shot if you will, which is the interaction of the character(s) on the page with each other and the world. And that’s where I find myself now, character focused. The subject matter changes, I’m not talking about the same things at 34 as I did at 17. There’s a lot less gratuitous violence and awkward sex in most of my stories--weird. I find that as I grow and have to get hands on with things once abstract like children, taxes and health insurance these things worm their way in and pop up in my work, for better or ill. But that’s where I stand, writing domestic fiction about un-domesticable people.

Technically I haven't been a writer long, if you consider the careers of other amazing individuals such as yourselves, since I'm only 24. But I've already seen differences in the way I approach things, primarily because I've taken writing workshops and undergone some methodology. When I first started really writing, actively writing, I was in high school and I wrote a lot of things that reflected the things I was reading. I was so in love (still am!) with Tolkien and read tons of fantasy, so the "novel" that I started in high school was my own fantasy universe. The writing was terrible, the plot regurgitated, but it was so much fun. I wrote without much editing because I was still playing around and didn't know it (a kind of blessing). I abandoned this novel in college when I realized how hashed it was, and how I wanted my writing to reflect so much more and how I wanted to be a better writer. So the super-critical editor was born and almost brought my writing to stand-still because I couldn't move forward writing if I wasn't happy with ONE sentence. I struggled with this through college and I struggle with it still, because I haven't quite found a happy middle-ground. BUT... the largest change is that my writing is also so much more character focused now. And instead of writing purely genre or purely literary, I mix both, because that's what I want to see in the publishing world. I want more stories in which you can't draw the line between genre and lit, in which the establishment can't turn up its nose because it's more than entertainment. My process has also changed. I schedule writing time into my days. In high school, I just wrote when inspiration hit. In college, I procrastinated and wrote the night or two before in a panic with doses of energy drinks. Now, with a full-time job, ANY TIME IS WRITING TIME. And every train ride is precious.