TRAMBLINGS. . .

Greetings. I hope everyone had a great week. Well, it's that time again. Big round of applause for GARY PHILLIP'S, the focus of our Q&A series today. Pull up a chair, stay awhile, listen to what Gary has to say about publishing, the mystery world, comic books. . .

1) When you wrote HIGH HAND, PERDITION USA and THE JOOK what did you know for sure about each book?

I never know for sure about any damn thing I write. I write what I want to read, but I don't mean that in an arrogant way. I simply mean if I'm entertained, I hope the reader is too. THE JOOK is purposely different in tone than PERDITION, U.S.A. So what I really hope is that I'm not writing the same book over and over. You know as a writer there are certain tricks, certain shortcuts you do each time you practice this most precarious business of ours. It's these things that signify our work versus other's works. But we also know that they can become our own cliches, and thus we as the writer are under the gun to question ourselves, look again at that passage I just wrote. How do we make it look effortless knowing that really, writing is rewriting, honing, sharpening, always sharpening.

2) To borrow a question from NOVEL IDEAS: CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS SHARE THE CREATIVE PROCESS, how did BANGERS, your most recent novel, "gather" for you? What was the seed of the story and how did you pull it all together?

The genesis of BANGERS was the RAMPART SCANDAL, here in Los Angeles that burst into the general public's consciousness around 1999. But it's not as if the innocents and gang members in the Pico-Union section of L.A., under the purview of the Rampart Division, didn't know about these excesses for years before their deeds were uncovered.

Anyway, I knew then that it would make a good story - how could it not with corrupt cops, gang members, and finger-pointing politicians? It's the stuff of classic novels by DASHIELL HAMMETT, JIM THOMPSON, and certainly the retro-modern work of JAMES ELLROY. And in fact before there was TRAINING DAY or THE SHIELD, I'd pitched it as the book to an editor I encountered at one of the LEFT COAST CRIME conventions. Long story short, I messed around about a year with this editor, after doing an outline and 50 sample pages then 100 sample pages, but the main problem was that I didn't redeem any of the characters.

Okay, this gets me to the answer of your question.

Like any writer, I gather news items constantly. I'm notorious for picking up those free throwaway weeklies when I'm out and about as well as letting copies of Newsweek, the New Yorker, The Nation, ESPN magazine, whatever, pile up much to my wife's chagrin. So when I'm forced to clean up, I sit down and leaf through these publications and will rip out pages if there's a story that interests me. Let alone I of course watch the Daily Show, the Newshour on PBS, listen to NPR when I'm writing, get alternet online and so on.

The point here is that I don't just take say the Rampart drama and only use that to construct my story. The district attorney character in the book is based very, very loosely on someone I know (I ain't saying who - but a clue is that her cousin is high up in the Bush administration), the meth heads are there because I had been dong some reading on the then growing problem of methamphetamine trade, and so on. Not that I write like it's a menu, taking one item from column A, then another from column B, but you take all this data in and synthesize it through your experiences and creative impulses.

3) What is a question that you've never been asked in interviews that you always wanted to answer in regard to your writing?

I'll take the Fifth on this one. Ha.

4) Is there a single book that has influenced you more than others?

It's a book that was given to me by one of my "aunts" - a lady named Virginia who lived with my Uncle Sam, my dad's youngest brother, when I was 8 or 9. I still have it, it's called FROM THE TWILIGHT ZONE published by Doubleday, and it's Rod Serling's prose short story versions of his Twilight Zone scripts. The book was a revelation to me because you're a kid watching TV shows like the Twilight Zone, but not really understanding that someone has to write the actor's words, and the book made that clear to me because there on paper was the dialogue I'd heard on TV. And it just struck me how clean and precise Serling's prose was, his descriptive phrasing, and the power of his ideas, his glimpses into the human condition. This book will never be on anybody's top ten list, but it's probably the one I'll be clutching on my deathbed.

5) Did becoming a published author turn you into a different kind of reader? How so?

Yeah. We all recognize when somebody's padding a story, don't we? Or is that the result of living in the age of video games and the shaky meth-addict held video cam of MTV camera work? Can we not let a story unfold at a leisurely pace? The demand is get to the action, get to the meat. We're told the editor must be hooked in the first 10 pages of your manuscript or it's tossed aside.

Maybe being published has made me more of a cynical reader. We all as fiction writers manipulate characters and situations, so the trick is do be able to do it so it's organic in the construction of our story, and that's getting harder and harder to do. Also this gets back to where do you get your ideas. If you're reading your peers, you invariably are going to steal from them - consciously or no - and make derivative work. That could be why I don't read that many mystery novels (though I collect quite a few from friends who are mystery writers, so I do read them) particularly when I'm in the middle of writing my own, and favor political and pop culture non-fiction for inspiration. Say like CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOMIC HIT MAN by John Perkins, who says "My sin was ripping off people around the world."

6) How do you find the voice for each of your characters?

Some part of my brain disengages when I'm in various situations because generally speaking, I have a faulty memory. But when it comes to remembering people's gestures, patterns of speech, phrases they use over and over, how we mispronounce words or use them incorrectly -- there was a bit that Damon Wayans did on the old Living Color where he was a prisoner who'd obviously read, but consistently misused words in an effort to appear articulate. This must have inspired Donald Rumsfeld -- this I can bring up when creating these amalgam characters for my stories.

But nothing beats talking with or observing the people in the sub-group you're trying to write about. And hearing them tell you their stories, their anecdotes. Whether it's in a ride-along with cops, talking with the trucker the next stool over at a cafe on the road to Yuma, wherever, I mentally record these mannerisms and snippets of dialogue.

7) What other artistic mediums influence your writing? Music? Film? Art?

This also is an answer to the previous question about voice for characters. I am such a pop culture junkie - comic books, film, TV, music - that it all is sensory delight to me. But loping back to the point about observing other types of people, I do find that documentaries are great in that regard. MURDERBALL about the crazed, handicapped wheelchair-bound rugby players, the WAR ROOM about the frenzy of a presidential political campaign, KING LEOPOLD’S GHOST, about the atrocities of colonialism in Africa - if you can't interview these folks, at least a doc gives you a look into their world. And that provides the foundation of the stories I want to tell.

But when it comes to matters of fiction, I watch and enjoy lowbrow, but well-done efforts such as SAW 1 and SAW 2, to the devastating MYSTERIOUS SKIN by GREG ARAKI. Or often at night before going to sleep I read one or two comic books (I also write in that medium).

Take for instance the recent Nighthawk minI-series by Daniel Way and Steve Dillon which is a ruthless send-up of the Batman-Joker feud, the Vigilante mini-series by Bruce Jones and Ben Oliver about a psychiatrist who is treating a costumed avenger and Chicanos, a quirky series Carlos Trillo and Eduardo Risso do about a very unlikely private eye. In a lot of ways, comics are fertile territory for all sorts of stories that for practical and market reasons can't be told in books or TV. There's a lot of dross in comics, but as there seems to be a glut these days of titles, some good stuff is getting out there too.

8) Do you have a favorite book between all of your novels? If so, which one and why? If not, what does each of your three most recent books represent to you and your growth as a writer.

Of course picking a favorite book is like picking a favorite child, you just don't do that. There are aspects of each of my novels I like for different reasons.

As to growth, well, I've said this before in public, but I do think it's harder for a man to write women than the other way around. Having said that though, I was much more in Martha Chainey's "skin" in the second book I wrote with her, SHOOTER'S POINT, than the first. My wife and a couple of other woman I know who read it told me as much. I was over the fear, to some extent, I had about writing a female main character.

Still I write white characters, Latino, Asians, peckerwoods, bikers, gays, so in some sense you have to be able to slip in and out of the various skins. At least as far as making these characters credible on the page. That then gets us back to the nature of how you do your research. You can read and read up on a subject, but there's nothing like interaction with the folks you're attempting to capture in sound and texture. By extension then, from BANGERS to the Chainey books to my supernatural short stories ("Disco Zombies" in the COCAINE CHRONICLES and "Searching for Cisa" in the KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER CHRONICLES anthology), I want to bring it - zombies gotta represent too, dammit!

9) Have you ever considered a writing project a complete failure? How do you avoid that sort of thinking?

No. Never a complete failure. Though I suppose I fall short of my goals for a story - I wasn't as artful as I could have been or as clever with plot. You can't get too complacent in this business because then you're too comfortable; too much in a groove you find yourself repeating yourself from book to book. I try not to dwell on it overly much, but I do try to learn from whatever the latest piece of writing I've done be it a chapter in a book, a book review, a comic book script and so forth. I try to bring the same level of professionalism to whatever it is I'm writing

10) Have you ever been "given" a story by another writer? Have you ever given one away?

That mostly happens to me when it comes to doing short stories for anthologies. As you know, most anthologies are organized around a theme, a specific place, and so forth. Recently I had to do a YA - a young adult story - about poker and then one where there had to be a scene taking place at Hollywood and Vine. To some, they might find these constraints irritants but I find them challenging and like the fact that it compels me to work in the box so to speak. I think writing short stories are a great discipline for the writer. I suppose it's that Serling influence that still prods me.

As to ideas, I horde them like a miser his coffee can of money. You'd have to lock me down in Gitmo, blasting Britney Spears songs into my brightly lit cell 24/7 to get me to give my ideas up. There's nothing worse than drinking with other writers at the bar and bantering notions back and forth. 'Cause then whose idea was it?

11) What has been the most rewarding part of the publishing process? The most frustrating?

Getting the book published is such a cool high, isn't it? And if you're on a plane or bus and see someone reading your book, and as long as they don't throw it aside in disgust, that's a hell of a feeling as well.

That's the rewarding part. The part that sucks, and this is universal with most of us, is the lack of promotional efforts for our precious babies by the publishers. There's all sorts of reasons for this, some legit and some bullshit, but it is what it is these days. That means you the writer also have to take it upon yourself to let people know about your work. But what's a clever way to do that, what can you do to break out of the pack? It might mean you hire your own publicist, and that you have to think about this aspect of the business even if you find it distasteful and merely want to write.

Now don't get me wrong, if what you want to do is write and be damned the marketing, right on. Go on with your bad self.

12) Do you do any writing besides fiction? Nonfiction? Screenwriting? Songwriting? Poetry?

As I mentioned, I write comic books now and then. I've done work for DC, Dark Horse and Moonstone Comics. I also recently did a piece for the L.A. Times Book Review on two books about the Black Panthers -- Huey and Target Zero - as well as a commentary in their Current section a few months back. And like everybody else in this town, working as valets or dog walkers, I've tried my hand at writing a few scripts. In fact, I have one script out there now that my agent is trying to sell and I'm working on a couple of ideas with a couple of co-writers.

# # # # #

An INTERVIEW with Gary.

More from Gary on COMIC BOOKS.

The UGLY TOWN author page.

SHADES OF BLACK: CRIME AND MYSTERY STORIES BY BLACK AUTHORS.

A SHORT FILM by Gary Phillips.

Until next time. . .