Author Interview

Scott Feero author of Dressing Stone, interviewed on Books Go Social https://booksgosocial.com/category/interviews

“I absolutely love writing because it provokes the blossoming of ideas in me that I otherwise would never have had.”

Tell us something unexpected about yourself!

I never learned how to sing, that’s the reason I became an artist and writer. Really. I have always been envious of people who can sing. Not singers, but common everyday people, who are able to express themselves and find camaraderie in song. I was always too shy to join in. And although the shyness has pretty much evaporated—it’s too late to change, I prefer solitude. I always have. That’s probably why I never learned how to sing.

Why do you write?

Because I’m not much of a talker. I have no ability as a raconteur whatsoever. I started writing because I could never think of the right thing to say in the moment. The perfect phrase occurred to me later, after it was too late. Before I started writing, this used to really bother me. I would be haunted by regrets when the elusive bon mot, the witty quip, that scorching comeback, the jaw-dropping anecdote would come to me, useless and limp, long after the moment had passed. I coined the terms ‘Retro-eloquence’ and ‘Regretro-eloquence’ to describe the symptoms of the disease, and began keeping a journal and ultimately cured myself of this lumpen trait.

In writing you always have time to think of the right thing to say. You always have time to find the right words. You always have the chance to revise and elaborate. No matter what you want to say, it’s never too late. I absolutely love writing because it provokes the blossoming of ideas in me that I otherwise would never have had.

What book do you wish you had written?

When I wake up Don Quixote; around noontime Moby Dick; throughout the evening Zola’s 20 volume Rougon-Macquart cycle. But at the end of the day I settle on Sinclair Lewis’ 1922 novel Babbitt, every time. A spot-on satire, and oh so accurate depiction of American materialism and aspirational mediocrity, it is the quintessential depiction of the American success story.

A best seller in it’s day, it was given special mention by the selection committee in awarding Lewis the Nobel Prize. It was so widely read that a Babbitt came to mean a materialistic and smug businessman whose only interest was his own social set, and Babbittry the boorish behaviour of a Babbitt.

Where did you get the inspiration for your current book?

From a lifetime of witnessing, and on occasion participating in crude conduct and bad behavior. As an artist living in NYC while supporting myself working in the construction trades, there were plenty of odd characters to observe. I have known a lot of artists and a goodly amount of my clients were either artists, or worked in the arts in some capacity. Then there’s all the other clients and tradesmen met on the job, along with the rest of the city’s inhabitants one meets in passing… Living in NYC I witnessed a lot of acting out, some of it stupid, much of it neurotic, a lot of it inspired, but too much of it dissipating, desultory and delusional. The specifics of these experiences did not so much make their way into the novel, as much as just sort of reaching a critical mass and provoking me. You could say the sum total of the art-scene’s madness really set things rolling. The somewhat crazy client met in Chapter 2 started out as an amalgam of several real people, but ultimately Cynthia Kohl took on a life of her own, as did all the characters in Dressing Stone—which is as it should be if I’m going to call it fiction.

What do you enjoy the most about your genre?

There’s a question. My genre is Literary Fiction, which to a large extent is just a pigeonhole in which every novel that does not fit in with any of the other genres gets stuffed. That the term sounds highbrow and snooty appeals to me, but I often use the term Contemporary Fiction to let people know I’m not an ardent elitist—that I’m also a man of the people, who is if nothing else, their contemporary. But I’d be dissembling if I didn’t say that what really appeals to me about the genre is the name. The word ‘Literary’ smacks of culture and the cultured, and evokes precisely what all writers wish to create—no matter what their genre—compelling literature.

How would you describe your writing process? 

Like most writers—except during those most exalted moments—it’s fairly tortured. There’s the struggle to sit down, the struggle to concentrate, the struggle to stick to the day’s plan, the struggle to stay awake, the struggle with the distractions of social media and on and on… I’d consider all this something easily managed if I could just tick them off a simple list, but they constantly gyrate about the room, attacking throughout the day.

Then there’s the exalted moments. The moments of vision. The moment’s of possession and trance, where pure concentration focuses your mind so precisely on the spot where the rubber meets the road that nothing can break you from your revelry—not the bark of the phone nor the barking of the dog—you cannot even bother to scratch your nose, you do not remember to restart the circulation in your legs, because all feeling and complaint is removed from your body as you are born aloft by the unfolding narrative vision. The concerns of the entire world recede into an inchoate blob, a blur of fingers dances over the keyboard, extruding as effortlessly as if squeezed from a tube of toothpaste a chapter’s worth of scene and story in twelve pristine pages of clear and concise prose until you—until you simply must stop. You tear yourself from the keyboard—yet you cannot—still held fast you must nail down the last flickering threads—you must capture those last-gasp wisps of the fading idea—con brio—now without regard to spelling and punctuation or even entirely making sense—pleading con agitato—that you can capture even a crude simulacrum of those barely perceived thoughts still lying encapsulated in that now dying ember which will provide the key insight for what happens next—before it all goes out in a puff of smoke.

Surpassing four hours of non-stop typing your fingers are cramping, your throat is parched and your tongue is clamped between your teeth, because if you do not stop this instant, your bladder is going to burst…

So yeah, in the main, the key part of my process is to minimize the distractions.

How do you react to seeing a new review for your book?

I get an adrenaline rush with every new arrival, couched within this of course is a jolt of fear as I wonder if I’m about to be gutted, or about to have my ego burnished. Having said that, reading what people have written thus far has been extremely gratifying. It is definitely nice to know that what I have written, is at the very least comprehensible, readable and entertaining according to a growing number of readers.

What advice would you have for other writers?

“If at first you don’t succeed, go suck at something else.” This has been my adage and guiding principle in my artistic life. I don’t mean it as flippant as it may sound to some. I certainly don’t mean quit writing (so long as you’re not putting your health at risk) but being that the putative ‘other writer’ is asking for advice, I’m assuming they have some sort of writer’s block—otherwise they’d be writing instead of asking me for advice.

When feeling blocked, I take a break, and do something else creative. I like to draw, because it it awakens my sense of concentration. Concentration is a muscle, but one that is very sensitive to the the creative cramps. I believe writer’s block is a self actuated construct. An excuse, it’s the refusal to let drop the fixation on a specific problem and move on to something else for a while. There are all sorts of things that need doing when writing a book, but sitting there gnashing your teeth and rubbing your temples isn’t one of them. If you’re stuck on a particular passage, move on to a different one. If your stuck on something in the storyline, then work an a different part of the storyline. If you can’t do that, then try indulging in some other creative activity for a while.

Now, stop fixating on being blocked, and get busy, or I won’t give you the rest of my advise… which is to say: Proper time management is half the battle.

What’s your next step?

For the foreseeable future, it’s book promotion, full time, all the time. Sadly, this takes away from time spent writing, but right now I’ve got to give the promotion of Dressing Stone my all out effort because I wholeheartedly believe this book is worthy of wider attention in the world. 

Dressing Stone is a tour de force, and suffice it to say, that only some sort of self-absorbed narcissistic shutin would stand in the way of the release of this terrific book. True, I was once that very guy—that guy who was just writing for himself, that guy who wasn’t going to worry about being published, that guy who didn’t care what anyone else thought, that guy writing his novel purely as a labor of love. So yes, I was the guy who heartlessly stood in the way of publication—but all that was before this astonishing work was complete. Now that it’s finished, I’m no longer that insufferable self-centered hoarder of my own text. A new day has dawned and I feel munificent, generous, and wholeheartedly magnanimous—and in this newly found all encompassing altruism I shall share my phenomenal masterwork with all comers. I intend to bequeath (at a heavily discounted price) my spectacular novel Dressing Stone to the world.

https://booksgosocial.com/2019/03/15/author-scott-feero-interviewed-on-books-go-social-2-19-19/