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FEATURED AUTHOR
RANDALL SILVIS
About the Author
Randall Silvis is an award winning creative writer, novelist, playwright and screen writer. He has numerous books in print including Mysticus, Dead Man Falling and The Luckiest Man Alive and quite a selection of articles for magazines, including Destination Discovery, the magazine of the discovery channel.
About the Book: Mysticus
In 1949 Ronald Shepard, the son of servants to
a millionaire playboy living on a private island off the coast of
South Carolina, meets Marilyn Monroe. This begins the child's
movement from innocence to the eventual experience that results
in an obsession with sex, power, greed and ambition that shapes
the rest of his life.
In 2001 seventeen-year-old Cassandra DeRoy has been employed in
the world's oldest profession for three years. A dead ringer for
Marilyn Monroe, Cassie stands at a street corner one night when
Ronald spots her. Remembering his encounter with Marilyn so many
years ago, Ronald picks her up and takes her home. He proves to
be the gentlest man she'd ever met.
In 2018 sixteen-year-old Ginger Todd faces the ugliest elements
of her society. Disgusted with her past, Ginger sees no hope of
improvement for her future. Adopted to people who don't
understand her, Ginger finds herself pregnant and seeking answers
to her identity in the journals of her alcoholic mother. For a
brief moment, she realizes she had actually been valued, that her
existence had not always been an inconvenience and an annoyance.
Randall, your first book, The Luckiest Man Alive, won the acclaimed Drue Heinz Literature prize, what was the first thing you did afteryou'd heard you'd won?
Just days before receiving the telephone call about the prize, I had resolved, with great despair, to quit fooling around with this writing nonsense and get a real job. I had no other options; there was $35 in the checking account and nothing in the savings account. Christmas was just around the corner and then suddenly, out of nowhere, came the telephone call. I cracked open a bottle of 12 year old wine, turned up the music and danced round the house with my wife. I felt like adeath-row inmate who'd just had and 11th hour stay of execution.
Was it difficult making the transition from non-fiction to fiction?
Actually, the transition happened the other way around for me. My first writing, if you don't count the reams of bad poetry I wrote in college, and I'd prefer that you don't, was all fiction. Dozens of short stories and a couple of agonizingly bad novels. By the time I'd won the Drue Heinnz Literature prize for short fiction, I was still beating my brains out on a couple of stories every week, only four or five which had managed to find their way between the covers of obscure literary magazines that promptly went belly-up.
Then came publication of my story collection, The Luckiest Man Alive and with it came representation by a New York City literary agent. Then I published my first novel A few years before the novel, I had started writing plays, and was having a good bit of luck getting them produced and winning playwriting awards. For the next few years I devoted more time to plays than fiction.
After writing plays for half a dozen years, I first tried my hand at creative non-ficiton, particularly the personal essay. Creative non-fiction struck me then, and still doesn, as less artificial and more intimate than fiction, so I turned my back on playwriting and rode the creative non-fiction horse for a while.
It was sometime in the mid-1990's whant I came across a copy of "Destination discovery", the magazine of the discovery channel. I sent the editor some clips of my personal essays and before long they were sending me to Texas to write about the McDonald Observatory, the Artic Circle to write aobut caribou, to the Gulf of Mexico to write about roseate spoonbills.
They kept me busy with assignments, so busy that I had to turn down assignments to write about the great cathedrals in Europe and to go to Australia to write about the strange fauna there. I didn't have much time for any other writing, but I loved writing for that magazine. Who wouldn't?
Unfortunately they underwent a format change, no more long narratives, only short 500 word program guides. Gloom, despair and misery. Out of necessity I wnet back to expending most of my creative energy on the writing of novels. My third book was bought by Hollywood and I talked the producer into letting me write the screenplay. The movie was shot in Charleston with Tom Berenger and Valeria Golana, I was banned from the set (too long and sordid a tale to go into here) and I've been writing the occasional script on commission ever since.
I've also continued to write novels and the infrequent essay and the even less frequent short story. My 8th fiction book came out from St. Martin's last May. My 9th book however, will be a return to creative non-ficiton - the story of a woman's exploration of Labrador in 1905 and the tragedy that inspired it.
So in answer to your question, no, I've never found the transition from fiction to non-fiction difficult, or from play to story to screenplay. I follow Aristotle's formula for the well-made story: interesting characters caught up in a compelling situation that is told with a beginning, middle and end that is held together by escalating tension that results in a satisfying resolution. Works for me.
Where do you get your ideas from?
From everywhere, from newspapers, from songs, from bits of overheard conservation, from dreams and nightmares, from rides on my motorcycle and from walks in the woods, ultimately from some deep, dark region of my brain or the universal subconsciousness or whatever unfathomable place they come from.
In Mysticus, the late Marilyn Monroe plays and important part to the plot, did you find it daunting to write about someone who was so well known?
Not daunting, no. But I was aware of the need to portray her accurately, even in fiction. She isn't on stage very long, as it were, but her presence resonates throughout the book, just as it does, I think, in contemporary culture.
What sort of books do you like to you read?
Books in which something happens. Books in which the characters, either real or imagined, take big risks and lay something on the line. Books written in an innovative style, with beautifyl well-wrought prose that isn't overdone or at the other extreme, doesn't come out flat in its failed attempt to emulate Hemmingway's prose, but withot his exquisite touch for understatement and irony. Books that take me to places I've never been, or which reveal to me new facets of places that I thought I knew.
Books that can do all that are very hard to come by, but I keep trying to find them. A compelling story beautifully told - that's not too much to ask for, is it?
If you could meet any character from a book, who would it be and why?
That's a tough question to answer. Maybe it would be Melville's Ahab, because I like characters who are larger than life, characters who set the world to spinning. I also seem to be drawn to secretive characters, those with dangerous skeletons in their closets. Loners, outsiders and mavericks, such as Mac Parris in my novel "Dead Man Falling." Here's a man pursued not only by external forces but by inner ones, yet he continues to attempt to live a meaningful life.
My two most recent novels, both from St. Martin's, feature Edgar Allan Poe who has more inner demons than an office party in Hades. Yet he perseveres; he plows on in the face of overwhelming odds.
And then there's my favourite of all my characters, Ronald Shephard in my novel Mysticus. Which is by the way, my favourite of all the books I've written. Ronald could be the poster child of familial dysfunciton, yet he won't give up on life. He can't give up, for the same reason that we can't give up on reality - because we're human, we love life despited its many pitfalls and emotional abysses. We continue to dream of and to long for a better state of being. That's the quality that makes a character worth reading about; it's the quality that makes a human being admirable.
What are you currently working on?
My nonfiction book called "Heart so Hungry". It's scheduled to be published by Knopf in Canada 2004. I'm also working on a couple of movie storylines.
What have you found to be the best way to promote your books?
Public appearances. I no longer do bookstore signings, beacuse you can never count on the bookstore to do sufficient publicity, but I like to do readings tha are promoted as literary events and that bring in 50-100 people or more. If you can win these people over with an interesting reading and a bit of literary gossip, you have a life-long reader.
And finally, if you had just one pice of advice to give to new writers, what would it be?
Know what you want from this business. If what you want is to be rich and famous and to have your face on the cover of every magazine, you'd be better off enrolling in the Monica Lewinsky school of notoriety.
Beacuse success as a writer is a very long shot indeed. And by that I don't simply mean being published; these days thanks to the plethora of electronic and POD publishers willing to exploit readers and writers, any anspiring writer can get something into print, whether it deserves to be or not.
But if what you want is to write the best stories you can, then forget about money, forget about fame and learn to take your joy from the sublime accomplishment of turning long solitary hours into memorable prose.
Thank you, Randall.
It was my pleasure.
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