Artisode; 3.2; John Nichols

I never met a writer I didn't like, I never met a book I didn't like. Flowbear is credited with saying, I think this is a paraphrase, that a writer must know everything. Hitler invades Europe and 60 million people die, or a good story is the life cycle of a dragonfly. It's a wide range, I mean anything that you're interested in enough to really try and tell about it from whatever angle is a good story. I like telling stories, and I've never wanted to keep repeating myself, going to take you pretty novel, stretch your crowd of my big brass bed. People I was said after the Milagro Beanfield War came out to say, John, write the son of Milagro Beanfield War, write Milagro Beanfield War meets

Abbott and Costello, you know, write, you've got a good thing going here, go with it, and I had no desire at all to repeat it. Tickle your toes till they turn cherry red, and I just was interested in trying to do different things, solve different problems. People say, well, what happened to you, John, you know, you wrote the New Mexico Trilogy, which are big, thick, panoramic books, and then you start writing these little pissant stupid novels, you know, and I said, you know, hey, the pissant stupid novels are part of the overall thing, you know, they interest me, they're another little piece of the puzzle, and I suppose when I finished my writing career that I will have put together a lot of pieces of the puzzle, and all together, that will be how I viewed life. And

obviously, I'm in love with the art, I like words, I like language, I like slang, I like different cultures, I read an awful lot, I read and read and read. If you don't quit it now, you're going to make me lose my mind. I've read breakfast at Tiffany, a hundred times in my life, I read it to see how did he construct that book. It just seems like a perfect little book to me, and I keep trying to teach myself how he did it, or how other writers do it. Sometimes I just pick books out of the bookcase, and I make lists of vocabulary words. I will write a first draft, which is just big brushstrokes, and then I just insert words one by one, by one, by one, by one. I restructure every sentence one by one by one,

just laboriously over months. For me, it's pretty chaotic. The one steady thing is that I just do it on a daily basis. I throw out three quarters of what I write, and I rewrite everything else a hundred times or a thousand times. It's relentless, you know? I have a tendency to do first drafts just day in and day out, day in and day out, every day in order to get, like, let's say, a four hundred page first draft. And then I'll spend six years rewriting those pages. I tell people sometimes that, okay, I want to write a book. I've got a jungle, and I know that there's a pyramid, an old pyramid hidden in the jungle. I got a machete,

and I start chopping through the jungle trying to find the pyramid, but I don't know where the pyramid is, so I chop or a year in one direction, you know? Just jungle. Then I go back and I start chopping in another direction, right? It's just jungle. I go back. I start chopping in another direction. Then I start chopping sideways. I chop sideways. You know, if I'm lucky, I stumble across the pyramid. I don't believe in inspiration. I don't believe in genius. I don't believe in talent, but I really, really believe in work. And I think if you do the work, just plot it out, step by step, word by word, that you have a chance of something, you know, working out, becoming a decent piece of storytelling. There's a moment in the Milagro bean fuel war at the end of the Milagro bean fuel war.

Everybody's gone to sleep. Everybody is peaceful. The sheriff finally lies down in bed, and he says now, he says welcome, ball fans, so the world series of peace. The phone rings. He picks it up. It's the storekeeper, Nick Riel, that says Bernie. My mom just escaped from the house. She's gone up in the hills, and we got to form another posse right now. What better ending could you have for another one? For me, darling. It says that's the end of this story, but we have to start another story right now. That's the way it works. There is no time out in life, but that's profound. That's all folks.