Writer's Block

Q: I haven't had time to write, when I do write I have been re-writing some old stories. But now my head seems empty. How do I get charged up again? Mr. M.

A: Hey, Mr. M. It is always good to hear from you. Oh, a little bit of the old writer's block, eh? Groan. Well, first of all, you know that I do not believe in writer's block. Somewhere on the internet is an essay I wrote about that topic a few years ago.

Nevertheless, Here are some things you can do:

1) Work on something else, entirely. Then when you feel the juice, come back to the old thing you are blocked on.

2) Read. When I get up early in the morning and I am just not able to look at the saaaaaame manuscript again, I read. I read my old work. I read someone else's work. I read a novel I've been meaning to get to. I proofread . . . away from the computer . . . with pen or pen. I read the dictionary. I read the newspaper or aol blurbs. Sometimes I end up reading for three or four weeks straight, until I feel the juice. See, I get up at 4 or 5 every morning to write--but write does not always mean "write." Reading is an essential part of the writing process.

3) Write. Write a list. Write several lists. I love lists. I write a list of things that smell. Things that taste peculiar. Things that sound creepy. Things that sound like a car engine. A wish list for my dying friend. A list of ten things I never want anyone to find out about me. Things that feel like a woman's breasts (40-Year Old Vigin) . . . list of interesting verbs . . . believe me when I say that these lists often turn into ideas for stories or that they help to layer the stories I am working on. For example, in a scene I was working on a couple of months ago, that list of "ten things I never want anyone to find out about me" became a crucial element in a plot.

4) Interview your characters. I creat a list of interview questions and then I pick a minor character, usually, and interview him/her. These inteviews almost never show up in the fiction, but they are great at helping me get to the heart of what makes my people tick.

5) Specific edits--go back into the story and question each adverb--do I need it or not? Question each adjective--do I need it or not? Each "and"--do I need it or not? Each dash--do I need it or not?

6) If I absolutely must get the thing done, I muscle it out. I pick up that pen (figuratively speaking, since I actually write on the computer), and I write. I write my way through the writer's block.

This is my usual method, since I do not really believe in writer's block. I write.

I do not care of I write brilliant stuff or crap--I set myself a page limit goal, and then I go for it.

Sometimes I write stuff like "I am so blocked right now that this car chase scene looks just like any other car chase scene I have ever written, and it has gotten me to wondering why I have so many car chase scenes in my stories. This is not film, this is prose fiction, but I have been watching so many movies that it is affecting my writing. I am no longer experiencing the world--I am viewing the world through a director's eyes--I am becoming cliched in the way I see the world--just like Thomaso, roaring down the I-4 after his wife and her lover in the Camaro he borrowed from the pimple-faced teen next door. Now he realizes that borrowing the car from that kid was a dumb move. The kid is gonna know why he borrowed it, to follow his wife. The kid is gonna tell his mother, Mildred "ears and mouth" Gomez. Mildred Gomez is gonna tell everbody else. The ear and mouth tell all . . ." and like that I come out of the block.

Once we free ourselves to begin writing honestly, and not forcing ourselves to be brilliant, the block goes away. Our muse is attracted to honesty, not our pomposity. She comes when we are being true to our pen.

Hemingway, I have heard, had this technique--he would begin by writing one true thing on the page--one single true sentence. "I hate my mother." "Blue is a common color for hats." "The sun also rises." And then he would ponder this true sentence whatever it was, and it would beckon the muse.

Be honest. Do not become full of self. Do not see yourself as a great writer. See yourself as an honest man telling his story honestly. The block, which never existed anyhow, will go away.

Keep writing because that is what a writer does. A writer writes.

Thanks for you email, Mr. M.

Preston

You Are P

Q: Your blog is hilarious. You sound just like the character P in your novel. You are P, admit it.

A: I am not. I swear it. Seriously.

Preston

Are You Anti Gambling?

Q: Are you anti-gambling? Do you wish there were no casinos? In your other blog, you attack the idea of a state-run lottery.

A: Am I anti-gambling?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

No, I am an addict. Therefore, I am pro-gambling. I wish I could gamble. I wish I were gambling right now. The problem is that gambling, for me, is destructive. [[Is there such a thing as "constructive" gambling?]] Therefore, I pray that I never ever see the inside of a casino again. I pray this everyday.

But the state-run lottery . . . well, look at it like this--

If you are a crack dealer and you need to make more money, all you have to do is raise the price of crack.

If you run a state lottery and you need to make more money, all you have to do is raise the price of gambling: create numbers-games and scratch-off games that take in more money and pay out less.

Like, for example, add $2 or $3 bucks to the price of the lottery ticket with the enticement that if the player wins, he/she will get an extra 10 or 25 million dollars added on to the prize [[the 1 in 13 million odds to win doesn't change at all, just the price to play--from 1 buck to 2 or 3 bucks, suckers!]]

If you are a crack dealer and you need to make more money, all you have to do is find more customers: children are the future--pass out free samples at the junior high.

If you run a state lottery and you need to make more money, all you have to do is find more addicted customers: children are the future--advertise in front of the kiddies--as soon as they turn 18, they're as addicted already as their parents.

If you are a crack dealer and you need to make more money, all you have to do is make your old customers increase their consumption of the product: I have no idea how a crack dealer would accomplish this feat. But a state running a lottery--

If you run a state lottery and you need to make more money, all you have to do is make your old addicted customers increase their consumption of the product: create games that are more addictive (check out the newest scratch-offs--they are not only expensive but they have lots and lots of bells and whistles to keep you excited as you scratch); create games that can be played more often (now the Cash-3 and Play-4 can be drawn TWICE a day--Fantasy 5 can be drawn 7 times a week--Mega Money can be drawn twice a week--and the lottery is also played twice a week.


Get the picture?

To earn millions in revenue, the state is pushing a drug called gambling on its addicted citizens--and pushing it hard. But the same state is also spending millions to "cure" its addicted citizens.

But then the same state is finding ways to increase the number of addicted citizens and also to make them MORE addicted because the state needs to earn more revenue.

This is crazy. Somewhere in there is a dog endlessly chasing its tail. Somebody stop him please!

Figure out what you are, oh great state. Are you my pusher or are you my saviour?

I am a sick degenerate gambler and so I love the lottery with every ounce of my being, but even a wastrel such as I can see that the state should be in the business of curing those plagued with a vice, and not in the business of increasing their dependence on it.

And people, please stop asking me gambling questions. I'm drooling all over my good shirt.


Preston

A Direct Appeal

Thanks to all of you who have emailed me questions and comments. I like the direction this blog has taken, and I owe it all to you.

Now I'd like to make a direct appeal: please go out and purchase a copy of my book ALL OR NOTHING and write a review for me on Amazon.com. It really is a great book. I promise you will enjoy it.

The book has received rave reviews from the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, and Library Journal among others.

Get your copy today! Support living, breathing writers!

Thanks,

Preston
______________________________

New York Times: "As with Frederick and Steven Barthelme's disarming gambling memoir, Double Down (1999), the chief virtue of All or Nothing is its facility in enlightening nonbelievers, showing how this addiction follows recognizable patterns of rush and crash, but with a twist—the buzz is in the process, not the result. 'That's what people don't understand about gamblers,' P explains. 'We gamble to gamble. We play to play. We don't play to win.'

"As a cartographer of autodegradation, Allen takes his place on a continuum that begins, perhaps, with Dostoyevsky’s “Gambler,” courses through Malcolm Lowry’s “Under the Volcano,” William S. Burroughs’s “Junky,” the collected works of Charles Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr., and persists in countless novels and (occasionally fabricated) memoirs of our puritanical, therapized present. Like Dostoyevsky, Allen colorfully evokes the gambling milieu — the chained (mis)fortunes of the players, their vanities and grotesqueries, their quasi-philosophical ruminations on chance. Like Burroughs, he is a dispassionate chronicler of the addict’s daily ritual, neither glorifying nor vilifying the matter at hand."

Library Journal: "Told without preaching or moralizing, the facts of P's life express volumes on the destructive power of gambling. This is strongly recommended and deserves a wide audience; an excellent choice for book discussion groups."

Publishers Weekly: "The well-written novel takes the reader on a chaotic ride as P chases, finds and loses fast, easy money. Allen reveals how addiction annihilates its victims and shows that winning isn't always so different from losing."

Kirkus Review: "A gambler's hands and heart perpetually tremble in this raw story of addiction.

"We gamble to gamble. We play to play. We don't play to win." Right there, P, desperado narrator of this crash-'n'-burn novella, sums up the madness. A black man in Miami, P has graduated from youthful nonchalance (a '79 Buick Electra 225) to married-with-a-kid pseudo-stability, driving a school bus in the shadow of the Biltmore. He lives large enough to afford two wide-screen TVs, but the wife wants more. Or so he rationalizes, as he hits the open-all-night Indian casinos, "controlling" his jones with a daily ATM maximum of $1,000. Low enough to rob the family piggy bank for slot-machine fodder, he sinks yet further, praying that his allergic 11-year-old eat forbidden strawberries—which will send him into a coma, from which he'll emerge with the winning formula for Cash 3 (the kid's supposedly psychic when he's sick). All street smarts and inside skinny, the book gives readers a contact high that zooms to full rush when P scores $160,000 on one lucky machine ("God is the God of Ping-ping," he exults, as the coins flood out). The loot's enough to make the small-timer turn pro, as he heads, flush, to Vegas to cash in. But in Sin City, karmic payback awaits. Swanky hookers, underworld "professors" deeply schooled in sure-fire systems to beat the house, manic trips to the CashMyCheck store for funds to fuel the ferocious need—Allen's brilliant at conveying the hothouse atmosphere of hell-bent gaming.

Fun time in the Inferno."

A Page from the Diary of Fate

Q: You wrote about this before but I just want to be clear. Is there suh a thing as luck? How do you define it? How do you define it in your novels? Is P lucky? Are you lucky?

A: Some people define luck as a magical force that governs the dice as well as one's life. One's "luck" is the same as one's "fate." For example, Bubba is lucky because he is the healthy, handsome firstborn son of a billionaire. Bubba becomes unlucky when he drowns in the family swimming pool at age 6. As "fate" would have it, Bubba died young. We say that Bubba was unlucky, unfortunate, ill-fated . . .

It is clear to me that this kind of fate or luck, regardless of what we call it, is a kind of deity that controls all--it is the deity of what will be will be; it is the deity of what is.

But when many, many bad things happen to us, we feel especially unfortunate, or unlucky, or ill-fated, or "cursed."

Bubba2 recalls a day when his money was short, his piece of crap car was not running, his other piece of crap car was not running, he had no means to pay a mechanic or to rent a car, he needed to get to work for an important meeting, he was in college and needed to get to class after work for an exam, his cable and water had been turned off that morning--did I mention already that he was short on cash? Actually, he was overdrawn at the bank, so he was shorter than short--he was negative. Bubba2 had nowhere to turn. So much bad luck. He felt cursed.

Bubba2 got down on his knees and prayed . . . to whom?

He prayed to the deity that controls what will be. In Bubba2's mind, the universe is controlled/ordered by a sentient being who can be appealed to. In other words, prayer and supplication to this deity can tip the universe in one's favor--it can turn one's bad luck into good.

Bubba3 is sitting at a poker table. He has lost all of his money except for the thousand he has put into this last pot. In other words, Bubba3 does not have a penny left, not in his pocket, not in his bank account, not in the world. But the pot has $10,000 in it. Bubba3 is holding aces. His opponent is holding kings. The dealer has flopped an ace and two spades--three aces for Bubba3! Bubba3 is in the lead. Bubba3's opponent can only win if the dealer puts four spades out there to give him a flush, which will beat Bubba3. On the next card, the dealer puts out the third spade. One more card to go. Any random card and Bubba3 wins. But if it is a spade, Bubba3 loses.

Bubba3 is praying for . . . luck?

But this is the deity of what will be. If it will be a spade, then it will be a spade. If it will not be a spade, then it will not be a spade.

If it is not a spade, then Bubba3 will win and be called lucky.

If it is a spade, then Bubba3 will lose and be called unlucky.

There is no luck. There is no luck, the defied kind. There is no good luck. There is no bad luck. There is simply what will be.

The great thing about gambling is that it delineates in a highly readable fashion what will be. Over and over and over again. Each spin of the wheel says this is what it is. This is what it is not. Each flip of the cards is a page from the diary of fate. This is what it is. This is what it is not.

Gamblers sit all day reading their fate, not controlling it, but reading it . . . this is what happened . . . this is what did not happen. Some things they read are good. Some things they read are bad.

They can hope and pray all they want, but they will get the truth a second after the other player shows his/her cards.

Luck and bad luck, then, can only be determined after the play has played. "Luck" and "bad luck" are titles they affix to decribe the sum total of events that have already happened. Thus, "luck" and "bad luck" don't really exist in the way people think--as predictors of what will happen. They are desciptors of what just happened.

Nevertheless, in your parlance, I can say that I am not/was not a "lucky" gambler. I played what I played and lost more than I won.

P was not a "lucky" gambler.

Most gamblers are not lucky.

The laws of probability, a subject I will perhaps tackle later on, say that the "house" games gamblers play will most of the time result in a loss for the gambler and a win for the house. Thus, all gamblers who play slot machines and roulette are likely to lose. This is not luck. This is a plan. This is a computer program.

But when you win at the slots, you "feel" lucky.

Well, it certainly is not skill that earned you the win, but is it really luck? Can you take this so-called luck and do it . . . again?

You are not lucky, no. But what will be will be.

Thanks,

Preston