How I Became a Writer

When I was a kid, my artistic endeavors centered more on visual art—making oil-on-canvas copies of scenic photographs I found in travel books—and classical music—taking weekly lessons in piano, music theory and composition, and ear training. I tried creative writing a few times, when prompted to by teachers, but I found it slightly terrifying to make up my own stories. If anything could happen on the page, dear lord, then what should happen? It was the writing of poetry that overtook me in college, when during the study of architecture I was clobbered by the usual discoveries in personal identity—this was 1968, after all. And then, after college, I fell into editing and feature-writing for arts and style magazines, which occupied me for the next thirty years. Eagerly, I took to covering the work of musicians, filmmakers, painters, writers, dancers, fashion designers, architects, and the like—even as many of my friends were novelists and some were editors and agents who took me to lunch now and then, to ask what kind of novels I might want to write. But I had no idea what I might want to write. Rather passively, I assumed that that kind of writing was just not for me.

Then, in the mid-‘90s, magazine editing led to a partnership in an internet company I helped found, Platform.net, which created the first “urban youth culture portal.” (Remember portals?)
We aggregated content from various hip-hop and skate publications, offered original content from a talented young team of reviewers and bloggers, and even got into e-commerce by offering a curated selection of streetwear and urban gear brands—in the midst of which we decided to introduce an original, illustrated serial drama set in the late-‘90s world of branding for youth-culture audiences. When the writer we’d hired for the serial drama dropped out, I gamely stepped in to “storyboard” the thing—and then, during the dot-com valuation bubble-burst event of 2001, Platform.net went out of business. Yet I loved the world and characters I was creating for my storyboard. For the first time in my creative life I felt something really necessary surging out of me and suddenly understood what a novelist friend, Andrew Holleran, had once told me, that the only thing we should be writing was the world we were dying to hop into every day.

With some literary development, the serial drama became “The Demographer,” the anchor story of my first novel, Dreadnought, which took the form of seven interconnected stories in a dark world of branding-gone-mad. The stories, individually and then as a group, actually sold rather well in a then-new Amazon program that another author friend got me into, Amazon Shorts. And since then, that enticing feeling of dying to hop into a certain world every day has only gotten stronger—especially when I am writing historical fiction, when the pleasure extends from describing small but fascinating design details of the period to conjuring the texture of lived experience itself, inflected by some of the peersonal, period-specific manias that don’t quite get captured in news reports and historical accounts.