BB: Idle hands are the devil’s playthings, but they’ve served me quite well. For a couple summers in college, I worked at the college’s physical plant, under the outfit of “campus services.” We were the guys who fixed/moved everything. If fifty folding tables needed to be taken from storage to an auditorium, for a conference, we did it. If all the furniture in a dorm room, for the entire floor, needed to be stacked and consolidated in the corner so the carpets could be steamed, we did that. The point is, it was odds-and-ends stuff that you couldn’t predict, almost like working for the fire brigade, which meant there was down time. Not right away, but eventually, I filled it with reading. The first summer I worked at campus services was the first summer I didn’t play baseball, as I had been cut from the team the previous winter, and along with it, all of my illusioned dreams of baseball as a career. I wallowed that bitterness, reading the Russians, starting with Dostoevsky. It was two-thirds of the way into The Brothers Karamavoz, that part when you find out who has the money and where it is, that I was hit in some fatalistic way, like how the Titantic struck the iceberg, and that was quickly followed by the realization that to write what I had just felt must be better/stronger than to read it. It was the opening of the possible. I think Keats had a similar moment when he stumbled upon a line of poetry, “the sea-shouldering whale,” or so the story goes. Then I read, and read, until I realized reading is not writing, and I took up the pen. (sidenote: I hate the keyboard, it’s Neolithic and I can’t wait for it to be trumped by thought-recognition technology.)
LH: Do you have any favorite authors who inspire you?
BB: I like the best of the best.
Camus
Dostoevsky
Hemingway
Cervantes
Beckett
Faulkner
Turgenev
McCarthy
Joyce
Shakespeare. Shakespeare. Shakespeare.
LH: What do you most enjoy about writing?
BB: Elbow room.
LH: How do you get the ideas for your books?
BB: How does rain fall from the clouds, it sort of happens. But without getting mystical, I like to look at the news. Subtle Ties is a treatise on Machiavellian power played out on a college campus. Directly though, it was a response I got from reading The Great Gatsby for the fifth time. Old money has to have, at some point, accrued that wealth by some sort of opportunistic exploitation, whether by mind or force, something Fitzgerald avoids in his book. So that’s what I tried to show. The rich are rich because they’re smart. Looking back now, I was reading Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, at the time, and that Darwinian rethinking might have influenced me as well.
LH: How much of your own story and experiences do you weave into your fiction? How do you keep the line between fiction and memoir clear? BB: I think you write from your total knowledge, and I think I only weave something semi-relatable to my own life, into my fiction (I stay away from memoir), if I’m “stuck” and need something semi-important to get me going again that will later, probably, be cut from the finished product anyway. That’s in terms of plot actions. Metaphors are on different grounds, where it’s always open season.
LH: Would you say your emphasis is plot, character, or setting?
BB:It’s hard to have characters without plot, and plot without characters, so those are 1 and 1a, and depending on the day, they might be 1a and 1. Setting, however, is 99z, but something I’m working on, but something that seems to be misguided. It seems to me if you value setting, you should paint or make movies. The flat, black and white letters grouped into words and aggregated by punctuation, does not seem to me, the best medium for setting. What I like is motion, and setting is set.
LH: In your latest novel, the beer pong table, Bellatrix, is close to being a character. How did you get the idea for that?
BB: That might actually be something that I sort-of, somewhat borrowed from real life. One of my college roommates was an engineering student and he crafted a beer pong table that you could imagine strutting forth from the R&D facility at Alfa Romeo. And for the plot of Subtle Ties to work, I needed something desirous, something unique, something college students are passionate about. Beer Pong.
Then there’s the whole MacGuffin theory/technique that was pioneered by Hitchcock. It seems to work. Although I’ve never deliberately applied it.
LH: Where do you get your titles? Do you spend a lot of time working out the right title for a novel
BB: Yes, the need for a title, a good problem to have. But it will probably develop an angst which you could easily misdiagnose as an ulcer. It’s funny to look back at the classics and see how easy they had it, The Old Man and the Sea, David Copperfield, Don Quixote, The Stranger, Ulysses, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet, all boring titles. A title shouldn’t matter, but it does, because the marketing of literature deems it so. So, over the dusty covers of time, a few solutions have appeared, mainly pilfering from other texts. That seems to be the common route. But the pages of Shakespeare and The Bible are so pillaged that they suffer from deforestation. However, the titles they have as their text—were imagined—and if you can’t learn the process to sprout-organic imagined things, probabilities are that your book doesn’t need a great title, unless you want it to clash like baby fingers pounding the piano.
Bottom line is that there’s no reason to think a title requires any different magic than what it took to come up with the next line in your fiction.
Where do I get my titles from? Wherever I can. Subtle Ties is the double innuendo of friendship split in two to state quiet significance, which I thought was what the book was about and perhaps, somewhat, how the style of it was written. The end game is that there should be a matrimony between title and text, not a love affair.
As for the time it took me to conjure Subtle Ties, I think Marlowe said it best, “Whoever loved that loved not at first sight?”
LH: Your ebooks are self-published so far. What can you tell us about marketing? Any tips to share?
BB: Take the following with 4 TBSPs of Na+, to date I have not sold much beyond my circle of friends and family.
For fiction, I’ve heard the best thing to do, in terms of marketing, is to publish short stories. With them, you receive eyes on your work from readers who probably already like your style of writing, and the publisher pays you for your advertisement that’s wrapped-up in a short story’s clothing. It’s supposed to be win-win.
Along with that, it’s also said, for fiction, you need more books to sell a book. Five authors, each with one book, will sell less copies than one author with five books. Readers buy books that are credible.
Time could be better spent writing, and improving, than marketing, as the theory goes.
LH: Who would you consider your ideal reader? Do you imagine writing for anyone in particular?
BB: Ideally someone with the same humor and interests as I have. That person (hopefully persons) should be able to pick up on the little clever quips that, to us, would be inside jokes; while, hopefully, the common reader would pass over them noticing nothing good or bad.
Demographically, if I had to pick, I’d go for the 16-30 year olds.
No, I don’t imagine a “reader” while writing the first draft. From thought to words is tricky enough without putting some phantom proxy in the middle. However, if I correct, I try to do if from the perspective of Henry Ford, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
LH: Any other thoughts to share with the blog readers?
BB: No. I try to weave my greatest hits of thoughts into my fiction, and then sell them. (http://www.amazon.com/Subtle-Ties-Bart-Bultman/dp/1493547054/)
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