"Neil, who could think of little else, threw himself into his work, rebuilding the fantastic church tower word by word ... He decided one should never describe a tower unless one could make it the only one of its kind in the world, which he would do through exhaustive enumeration. Not a tower like a well-formed sentence that runs on for pages, splashing like a duck in its own watery prose; or a concrete poem, many meanings in an eyeblink; but a tower like a phone book, or a stock inventory at a lumberyard, or an alphabet."
Chris Eaton understands the thankless life of a fledgling writer. The hero of his novel The Grammar Architect dedicates his life to the all-consuming, painstaking, and unprofitable task of re-building a church tower out of words.
This week Eaton is our special guest--talking about his own struggles as a fledgling writer and about his work with the stellar band, Rock Plaza Central.
This is the first installment of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a serialized set of weekly interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing...
Jason Boog:
The Grammar Architect depends on a group of struggling young artists getting mixed up with each other. You describe this world so vividly, and you must have experienced first hand. How did you support yourself during those early years before publishing a book or landing your first record deal? Any advice for fledgling writers who can't see the light at the end of the tunnel? Continue reading...
Chris Eaton:
As depressing as it sounds, I'm not sure there is often a light at the end of the tunnel.
Certainly there are folks who reach the bestsellers list and you easily live off that. And lately there's been a spurt of big advances to first time authors that's pretty mindboggling. But an author's royalties on a book tend to be in the $2 range, so you need to sell a lot of books before you can live off it.
Like most writers, I seem to have worked a lot of jobs. I worked one day for the post office but was fired for being too efficient. I worked for about a month in construction until I hurt myself too often and they laid me off.
I worked in a record store and as a bartender. Worst bartender ever. I still don't know what goes into any drink that doesn't have the ingredients in its name (e.g. gin and tonic, rum and coke). But my longest jobs have been as a radio journalist, which was probably the best job I ever had but was ultimately too time-consuming to get anything else done creatively, and then as an advertising copywriter, which was equally time consuming until I realized I could do it freelance.
I feel like I'll probably always have to do something else, and the best advice is to find something you can do really well and really fast that pays a lot. Then you buy more time to do what you want. Also, throw out your TV.
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