Author’s Interview: Michael Burns
1. Where did your love of books/storytelling/reading/writing, etc. come from?
The question puts me in mind of a wonderful short story by the late Harvey Swados entitled “Where Does Your Music Come From.” The protagonist in the story realizes at the end that he knows where his music, along with his youth, has gone, but where it came from he doubts he’ll ever know. As for my own love affair with the reading and writing of books, it began quite early, in first grade, when I learned to read and discovered a whole new (and more agreeable) world between the covers of books. I didn’t explore fiction writing, however, until my sophomore year in high school. My teacher assigned the class a “creative” writing exercise. We were to write a short story of our own invention. It was the first writing assignment I had ever “got into.” Alas, my teacher, after reading my little story, immediately suggested that it was not “original” work. In other words, she accused me of plagiarizing the story (I didn’t). Her accusation crushed me. The upshot was that I didn’t write anymore from my imagination for a very long time. Furthermore, I was busy at the time pursuing a career as a juvenile delinquent. I didn’t write another line of fiction until the age of twenty-three.
2. How long have you been writing?
Since I was twenty-three. Next, I suppose you’ll want to know how long I’ve been writing.
3. What do you think most characterizes your writing?
I think the characters I have created. I recall what Faulkner once said about writing stories: “It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I do is trot along behind him with paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.”
4. Who are some of your favorite authors that you feel were influential in your work? What impact have they had on your writing?
As far as inspiring me to write, dozens of authors have influenced me. This is not to say that I have ever tried to emulate a particular author in style or content in my work. As a preadolescent I enjoyed the writer Ellery Queen Jr., especially his stories whose protagonist had the unusual name Djuna. Djuna and his dog solved many mysteries and were in almost constant danger. I wrapped myself up tightly in these tales. As an adolescent I had the far-fetched notion that Mickey Spillane was the premier writer of realistic fiction. I identified with the hard-boiled private Dick genre. Pity that I hadn’t heard of Raymond Chandler at the time. Later I came under the thrall of Norman Mailer. In my mind today there aren’t many authors, living or dead, who have improved on Cervantes as a storyteller. In my life as a deliberate writer I am reluctant to read the work of my contemporaries for fear of the subconscious influence their work might have on my own. It is unlikely, therefore, that I would ever try to emulate Henry James. Lately I have confined my reading to long dead authors, most of them from the nineteenth century.
5. What process did you go through to get your book(s) published?
I finished writing my first novel, Gemini, in May 1998. I queried literally hundreds of agents in an effort to find someone to represent me with publishers. In the first two years I had been taken on by three different agents, none of them competent. They had no success landing a contract for me with any of the big trade houses. Finally, I decided to strike out on my own and restrict my target to the small press. I sent out query after query to many American, European, even Southeast Asian small presses. I spent a good deal of money on postage for sent manuscripts (in the days before the electronic submission was in vogue). Finally, in December 2000 (the day before Christmas) I received a phone call from the president of a small press in Denver, Colorado offering me a contract for Gemini. The book came out the following September, alas about the time of the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon. I finished writing my second novel, Where You Are in April 2005. Again, I went the literary agent/small press route. It was not until June 2008 that I got a contract offer for that book from a small press in El Paso, Texas. The book was in production (presumably) when I ceased hearing from the publisher. I learned that she had contracted a life-threatening illness and was unable to continue in her work. That left me and a few other hapless authors in the lurch. After wallowing in existential disappointment for a short time, I went back at it again, querying agents and small presses. To my surprise and delight I received a contract offer from All Things That Matter Press and by July 2009 the book was in print. Gemini’s Blood followed on its heels in September. This July ATTMP re-published Gemini, so I now have three novels in print. Persistence, sometimes, pays off.
6. What projects are you working on at present?
I’m about fifty thousand words into a novel whose working title is Emilio Lives. After finishing Gemini’s Blood, my third novel, in 2007, I began a fourth and got into it to the tune of 133,000 words before coming to the stark realization that it wasn’t working. That work I have put aside in the hope that I may be able to fix it in future.
7. Do you count time or words in your daily regimen?
Neither. The goal I set for myself when I’m writing a first draft is three pages of lined notebook paper a day. This averages around 800-900 words. I strive for that, whether it takes me a half hour or the whole day. I continue in this fashion until I fill a fifty-page tablet, then I transcribe and edit on the word processor (at the same rate of three pages). When that is finished, I start another fifty-age tablet, and so forth. When I have finished the story I print out the whole thing and go through it from the beginning for further editing. This is when I should recognize anything that requires major revision. I have discovered that writing is essentially revision. It’s also the only part of the process that I might describe as fun. When I have finished editing the whole piece I put it away for a month or two and work on something else. I hope to have achieved enough detachment in that time to see what I have actually written on the page, not what I hoped would be on it.
8. Do you write about what you know or what you want to know?
I like what Robert Duncan said in answer to a similar question: “If I write what you know, I bore you; if I write what I know, I bore myself; therefore I write what I don’t know.” So I guess for me writing is a voyage, a kind of odyssey, a discovery.
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