Ask the Author: Marc Jampole
Answered Questions (8)
Marc Jampole
The mystery of why everyone but me in my immediate family growing up suffered from mental illness.
Marc Jampole
I would want to visit Dante's "Inferno." I would take the trip with Dante and Virgil through the circles of hell.
Marc Jampole
"Terra Nostra"/Carlos Fuentes; "Memory Rose into Threshold Speech"/Paul Celan; "Little Constructions"/Anna Burns; "Measures and Men"/Witold Kla
Marc Jampole
The trauma of my early years left me with a permanent writer’s block that did not affect my ability to do commercial writing like journalism, news releases, ads and speeches, but obstructed me from my true love—poetry and fictional prose. I still can spend days looking at a blank page, too immobilized to type a phrase, even though all the words for chapter upon chapter of prose are organized perfectly in my mind. Feelings of shame or guilt serve as an embankment dam that holds back the flow of words. Instead of putting my finger in a dike to stop leakage like the mythical Hans Brinker, I must symbolically drill holes into the dam and let the ideas flow out, usually in a trickle, rarely in a roaring flood.
Once I realized that the dam would always be there, I taught myself how to drill bigger and bigger holes. My drill bits consists of little rules and techniques: Make sure you sit at the keyboard for a few hours every day, even if all you do is stare at the screen. Always have a number of projects going, so if you’re blocked on one, you can work on another. Always end the day with something more to write the next day (a tip I picked up from Hemingway). Make artificial deadlines and enforce them.
My most important rule when nothing else works: stare at the blank page and remind myself with my best tough-love demeanor that I’m emotionally crippled and always will be, but I can’t let my malaise stop me from doing what makes me happy.
Once I realized that the dam would always be there, I taught myself how to drill bigger and bigger holes. My drill bits consists of little rules and techniques: Make sure you sit at the keyboard for a few hours every day, even if all you do is stare at the screen. Always have a number of projects going, so if you’re blocked on one, you can work on another. Always end the day with something more to write the next day (a tip I picked up from Hemingway). Make artificial deadlines and enforce them.
My most important rule when nothing else works: stare at the blank page and remind myself with my best tough-love demeanor that I’m emotionally crippled and always will be, but I can’t let my malaise stop me from doing what makes me happy.
Marc Jampole
Don't take creative writing course. Instead, study classic and contemporary literature in all genres, plus world history. Write in your spare time.
Marc Jampole
A new novel that takes place in the future, during the third major pandemic of the 2020s.
Marc Jampole
Every morning. I sit down at my desk and start writing or thinking about writing, no matter if I am inspired or not. I treat it like a job.
Marc Jampole
My latest novel, The Brothers Silver, combines two ideas: 1) fictionalizing my traumatic childhood; 2) imagining what a contemporary Rip Van Winkle would think if he saw what has happened to America over the past 40 years.
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