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It’s great to have you back after the first part of the interview with novelist Sean Ferrell – The Author Talks About Writing.

Today, we continue with Sean talking about Numb the main character of his book (the book is also called Numb). I had 3 questions for Sean about his main character and I must admit, and he can verify, that these questions popped into my head while writing my email to Sean. It’s cool that Sean doesn’t mind me being silly. Well, read on and you’ll understand what I mean:

1) If your character could take 3 items on a desert island, what would he take?

I don’t think he would want to take anything. Numb is a pretty unattached guy: at one point he becomes very aware of the uselessness of the materialistic items around him. So, the metaphysical answer to the question would be: nothing.

However, that’s not a fun answer, so: he would take a hammer, his suit, and a ceramic mask.

2) Is the character based on yourself or someone you know or was he conjured up totally from your imagination?

Yes.

I’m not trying to be difficult, but I think that he is all three, an amalgam of me and others and imagination, and I think that if I tried too hard to break him apart and “know” where he came from I wouldn’t have been able to write the novel. Sometimes its just best to listen to our characters instead of picking them apart.

3) If your main character could be an animal, what would he want to be and why?

A monkey, for two reasons. First: monkey is an awesome word and can’t be said enough. Try. Monkey monkey monkey. By the third monkey it’s like heaven.

Second, when I think of a monkey I think of an animal that seems observant and soulful. Numb is both, or at least he is to me.

Somebody ask Sean what he means by saying his character would bring a suit and a ceramic mask. Is it for fun? See, the hammer I understand. I’m dying to ask and should have asked but did not ask. So I’m asking now. Why the suit and ceramic mask? You may think I’m taking this questioning and answering a bit too seriously. You’re probably right. I’m just curious. Sean? Why? You’re going to say they were just random items that came to mind and now under such intense scrutiny you feel you’ve got to make up a reason?

Okay, I’ll quit provoking you.

While we wait for an answer…you could chant monkey monkey monkey to see if it’s like heaven… or you could watch this funny Numb book trailer – no, this book trailer is not the one I responded to – see previous post – this is another one (exact title and video taken from Janet Reid’s website):

Hell with 2010…the world might end Wednesday

Monkey, monkey, monkey…Monkey, monkey, monkey….Monkey, monkey, monkey…

And no, I did not make this up.

Sean, tell them I did not make up the answers.

People please.

Oh, don’t go yet.

Just a reminder, the third part of the interview: Sean Ferrell Talks About the Book Trailer Numb will be posted on Friday.

Yes, I am dragging it out. I’m just too long-winded and frankly I fear for your health, and Sean’s of course.

Don’t worry, I’ll remind you.

I have Twitter and Hootsuite. Oh yeah. I’ve been playing…and probably annoying. All in the name of work.

Monkey, monkey, monkey…I think I feel it’s like heaven.

Try it.

Then find Sean on Twitter @byseanferrell and let him know if you feel it’s like heaven.

Oh, and according to Janet Reid, the world is ending today. So get out there and do something.

Published by HarperPerennial, Numb is out in August 2010.

Numb ~ Review from Publisher’s Weekly
Sean Ferrell, Harper Perennial, $13.99 paper (288p) ISBN 978-0-06-194650-9
In Ferrell’s offbeat debut, an amnesiac joins a Texas circus where his inability to feel pain makes him a big-top hit and earns him the name Numb. After a haunting experience wrestling a lion, Numb and his best friend, Mal, give up the circus for life in New York, where they live in a crappy hotel and make a living as a lowrent one-man freak show. When Numb lands a talent agent and begins to move up through the layers of celebrity, he leaves Mal behind for a cast of characters including a blind artist girlfriend and bad news model Emilia. But in Numb’s world, nothing hurts much at all, so Mal comes back and predictably turns things upside down, despite the men’s bond being difficult to comprehend. There are captivating moments and passages, but details like Numb’s rise to recognized-on-the-street fame aren’t sufficiently explained and require a hefty suspension of disbelief. Though some of the storytelling nuts and bolts are missing, the book has a lot of heart. (Aug.)

(via Sean Ferrell’s website)

[All photos used belong to Sean Ferrell]

Sean Ferrell – The Author Talks About Writing

Sean Ferrell – The Author Talks About the Book Trailer Numb

Chuck Sambuchino – An Interview: Published Book, Writing and a Writer’s Life (Part 1)

“You cannot change anything in your life with intention alone, which can become a watered-down, occasional hope that you’ll get to tomorrow. Intention without action is useless.”

Caroline Myss – Author

CURRENT STATUS: Reminder, Motivator and Review Meeting (Read on if you want to join me in my Corporation of One meeting)

What l have learnt:

• Ebooks. More angst. Read When Assholes Collide by Matt Stewart (via Huffington Post).
• “Electronic rights are not e-book rights”. Read E-book Traps by Ron Knight (via UpAuthors.com). Something to think about.
• Could ‘The Jackal’ be the Death of Publishing? (via The Independent). I don’t know.
• There’s a 3 day novel writing contest in September. It sounds crazy to write a novel in 3 days and I’m tempted to try it.
• Mythbusting by Rachelle Gardner. It’s good to know.

What I have done:

• Learning about Squidoo.
• I cleaned my room and the bathroom. Ah, the smell of fresh linen. A gleaming bathroom is a wonderful bathroom.

WORD COUNT: Night Walker 135,000 in total. Tuesday 27 July 2,000 words.

John Irving on the Writer’s Craft on YouTube

Are you beginning at the end?

Are you beginning at the beginning?

Or are you beginning in the middle?

When it comes to writing a new novel, what starts it off for you?

Is it usually a landscape?

Is it a relationship?

Is it a gesture?

What captures your mind?

To the point where you’re gripped by the idea and you feel excited because you can see a story forming yet not totally defined.

Or are you like me, you don’t know the beginning or the end? It usually begins with an idea. You have some characters you want to interact and see what they would do?

And you just write and let the story write itself?

How do you begin?

Have a great weekend.

“You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.” Mary Pickford – Actress and Producer

CURRENT STATUS: Reminder, Motivator and Daily Review Meeting (Read on if you want to join me in my Corporation of One meeting)

What l have learnt:

• Using lyrics from well-known songs can cost you. Read Writers Beware of Quoting Lyrics by Jurgen Wolff.
• Great ways to add value to the content on your website and blog. Author Angela Wilson’s post Promote Your Book with Value-Added Content.
• What not to call your children’s book. Check out Worst Children’s Book… Ever via SlushPile Hell.
• Agent Chip MacGregor’s post How to Study the Market helps with research.
• The importance of revising, proofreading and editing from Sammy Bina’s post Revise First, Celebrate Later.

What I have done:

• Learning how to use Hootsuite and testing it out and see how they work with my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.

WORD COUNT: Night Walker 132,000 in total. Thursday 22 July 1,000 words

William Golding died in 1993 at the age of 81 having written 12 novels. There were other writings which included a journal of around 2 million words written over a period of 20 years.

It seems Golding was not the perfect man at all. He was clumsy, inept when it came to social etiquette and his life as a writer was without trying times.

Golding was rejected throughout his career as a writer. Lord of the Flies was turned down by 21 publishers. Faber’s reader Polly Perkins said the book was: ‘Absurd and uninteresting fantasy … rubbish and dull. Pointless’ quoted from the Spectator.co.uk’s post Reviving a Reputation by Philip Hensher. Here’s more:

After that, too, many of Golding’s novels were often greeted with a certain amount of carping. Even some of his best novels, such as Free Fall came out to a torrent of abuse. He never took the trouble to meet fellow authors, and at a Booker dinner in the 1970s is reported as sitting there with his wife, knowing nobody at all.

In the end, the daunting, sage-like hermit of his last years remained, as Carey respectfully and convincingly suggests, the same self-doubting, needy, self-critical but love-hungry man so unmistakably documented in Free Fall.

Golding was tormented by his own feelings of inadequacy. So we learn that even a great writer like Golding was still prone to all the negative thoughts all writers have experience. His self-doubt found its way into his writing. Like all of us trying to write everyday, these thoughts were probably like brakes on a car, crippling at times.

Golding was the eccentric recluse – the ‘archetype known to the trade’. The Independent.co.uk’s article William Golding, by John Carey said this of Golding:

As a writer, on the other hand – in his habits, obsessions and routines – he fits every archetype known to the trade.

As for the work – next to which all of Golding’s quintessential literary bad habits, the amour propre, the drunks and the misery, pale into insignificance – Carey is excellent on what gives the novels their distinctive patina: that odd mix of symbolism, derring-do and elemental human hurt. Here, inevitably, Golding’s detachment from the literary world works to his advantage. A sharper operator, who spent his time carousing with Kingsley and co., would have lost something in the process. You suspect that in the end he falls into Virginia Woolf’s invaluable category (first applied to Hardy) of “genius but no talent”. But it is this that makes him modern literature’s great outsider – not the sulks about Marlborough or the wasted days before the Bishop Wordsworth’s blackboard.

He was an island and was not ‘in’ with the literary crowd. The article also described Golding as a depressive and a drunk and he, like any writer could not dodge the bad reviews:

Free Fall’s middlingly hostile reception in 1959 is supposed to have set him back creatively for years.

Solitude was part of Golding’s upbringing. Christmas for William Golding meant family members spending time in separate rooms so writing and reading became his friends, a way to express himself and a way to participate. This is from Scenes From a Life

So I must have learned in the awareness of my own solitude that reading was a sort of companionship.

He read ferociously. He was not an island when it came to reading – see post by Lynn Price Ransom Notes about reading. So not only was reading a solace for Golding but as we can imagine he found comfort in his writing, his imagination and drink. As writers, we understand this. In the NewStatesman.com article William Golding the Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies Golding was said to have been “imaginative to the point of hallucination”.

He preferred to keep himself to himself. If you thought yourself as ‘a monster’ perhaps you too would hide. In the post A Talent for Writing and Falling into Things in the NYTimes.com, we find that

Golding was an intensely private man, one who gave few interviews and did not want a biography written during his lifetime.

The article also suggested he was aware of humanity’s potential for cruelty and the primitive nature of man. With this profound ability to understand human cruelty so well he thought himself as ‘a monster’. This brought about the fear of hurting other people for Golding and the urge to experiment. In an extract from ‘Scenes From a Life’, he hit his brother by accident and he described the ‘terror’ he felt creeping into the house and hiding ‘from everyone else under the dining room table’ even though later he found out that it wasn’t as bad as he had thought.

The article Author William Golding tried to rape girl, 15 spoke of his self-hate. The problem with journals, especially from the point of view of someone who seemed to be inside his own head most of time is that they’re very subjective, when strong emotions can distort events. Every man has a dark side but if you write about it and dwell on it, it consumes your thoughts. His dark side consumed Golding’s thoughts which led to musings, self-torment, and experimentation. Those who wrote about him may discuss his delusions snidely but to this man it was all very real. Demons feel very real when the demons are your own. And sometimes these demons inspire great writing:

“The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone’s neurosis, and we’d have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads.” ~ William Styron, Writers at Work, 1958 (via Laurie Pawlik-Kienlen on Steffani Cameron)

He lived in a time when the writer’s platform was not something expected of writers. In some ways social media and blogging are the perfect platform for writers in that the Internet allows for the illusion of anonymity and privacy. But would Golding have used blogging and social media instead of writing in his journals or would he have done both? Would he show one persona in one and another in his private writings?

How many writers and authors out there who are only showing their ‘cheerful’ faces? I bet there are enough who can relate to Golding. But it’s not cool to have self-doubt, self-hate and be needy. No, of course, not. We don’t show that side of us until after our deaths.

What can you and I learn from William Golding?

That even with rejection throughout his life, he persisted. Sure, he stopped but then he carried on. We can do that too. Golding was full of self-doubt and still managed to write and get published. We can do that too. Even with the self-disgust, the drinking, the depression and not having the support of the writing community, he still kept going. We can do that too. He was dysfunctional socially and below par when it came to hobbies and personal pursuits and yet he still managed to write books and get them published. We can do that too.

So next time you’re feeling discouraged, think of William Golding and think if he can persist, then you can persist too. Are you moving? Are you persisting?

[pic taken from here]

Similar Posts ~

Stephen King – Read, read, read

Why Supporters Are So Important

“Fear can’t hurt you any more than a dream.” William Golding – Lord of the Flies

CURRENT STATUS: Reminder, Motivator and Daily Review Meeting (Read on if you want to join me in my Corporation of One meeting)

What l learnt:

• Do not send until you’re ready. Read Lynn Price’s Premature Submitulation post.
• This is funny – for people who are creating their own website – Time Breakdown of Modern Website (via amarketingexpert.com on Publishing Insiders Wrap-Up: Why Some Authors Fail). The latter states what you need to have on your website – what I’ve been going on about for the last few days.
• Twitter fiction: it’s not bad at all, good in fact – see Joel Friedlander’s Writing’s Next Frontier: Twitter Fiction for some great examples.

What I have done or decided:

• Added some iPhone apps recommended by Jane Friedman to help with writing.
• Going to cut down on blogging to a few times a week.

WORD COUNT: Night Walker 123,000 in total. Wednesday 7 July 500 words; Thursday 8 July 500 words.