S.G. Browne

When I was two years old, I used to greet my father when he came home from work and convey to him the exploits of my day. He would watch me with this bemused expression and nod his head and say “That’s great” without having any idea of what I was saying, causing me to throw myself on the floor and scream and kick and cry because he didn’t understand me.

This is all according to my mom. I don’t have any recollection of these moments of communication frustration. Nor do I have any recollection of calling my pacifier a “loodela” (pronounced loo-da-lah). It was like I was speaking another language. Something Germanic, I’m guessing.

As I grew older, my speech began to resemble something closer to English, but I still had trouble with certain letters, like U’s and R’s. So words like “fork” came out sounding more like I was from South Boston. Apparently, this was a great source of amusement for my parents as their five-year-old son would say things like: “Where’s my fuhk?” or “I need a fuhk.”

Doesn’t everyone?

However, I do recall a not-so-amusing moment when I was seven years old and, frustrated with my mom about something that had just occurred, I yelled out “It’s all your fault!” and stormed up the stairs to my bedroom. Only because of my speech problem, what my mom heard instead was “It’s all your fart!”

I don’t know what that means, exactly. I guess it implies definitive ownership of the fart. But I do know it was enough to get my mom to follow me up the stairs and wash my mouth out with a bar of soap. Ivory. Dove. Palmolive. I don’t know what flavor it was. And I didn’t imagine myself going blind like Ralphie in A Christmas Story but let me tell you, it didn’t taste too good.

And what does this have to do with writing? (Scratches his head to try to remember where he was going with this.) Ah yes. It has to do with communicating your ideas to others. Using language and characters and plot to convey what it is you want to say to your readers. Getting your point across. As another author (I believe it was Nigel Hamilton) once said:

“If the reader doesn’t understand what you’re saying, then you’re just talking to yourself.”

I suppose you could say it would be the equivalent of literary masturbation.

I think that’s something writers just take for granted. Not the literary masturbation part, but the ability to communicate.The idea that the story we create in our heads makes it to the page without losing something in the process.

When my writing group read my initial drafts of Breathers, Fated, and Lucky Bastard, they brought up a number of questions about the worlds I’d created. I didn’t withhold this information on purpose, but the story made sense to me when I initially told it. After all, I’m the creator of the universe, so naturally it all makes sense to me.

It wasn’t until I got feedback from the other members of my group that I realized I needed to do a better job of getting my ideas across. I needed to convey the concepts in my head so that the reader would enjoy the story and understand what I was trying to say.

Which is why rewriting is such an integral part of my writing process. It’s where I get to fix the problems. Where I get to craft and shape the story. Where I get to clarify what it is I’m trying to say so I’m not just talking to myself. Sometimes this process can include as many as half a dozen rewrites before the manuscript reaches my agent. That’s followed by a round of edits with my editor, then another three rounds of line edits, copy edits, and proof edits before it’s finally ready to publish.

I guess you could say that if writing the novel is the equivalent of giving birth to it, then rewriting it is like raising it and teaching it everything you know before sending it out into the world.

After that, you just hope it doesn’t throw a tantrum or get its mouth washed out with soap.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the chance to experience having other people tell me what my books mean. What someone else got out of them. How strangers interpreted them. It’s an odd thing, having people who had nothing to do with the creation of your book tell you and others what it is you’re trying to say with your writing. Sometimes it’s so far off base that you wonder if the person took crystal meth before reading the book.

Like the person who thought Breathers was an allegory for the Holocaust.

Initially, this disparity was something I had trouble adjusting to, even when someone made me out to look smarter or more insightful than I actually am. After all, I’m the one who wrote the book, so I’m the only one who knows the truth of the words I’ve written. Of what I intended to accomplish.

But at some point around the time when Fated came out last November, I began to realize that the truth of creation is no more valid than the truth of interpretation. How one person reacts to a book or a story is true for them. It’s a reflection of how the book speaks, or doesn’t speak, to their sensibilities. Of how it makes them feel. So how one person interprets the words and ideas I’ve strung together is absolutely correct.

It’s just different than my interpretation.

Art in all of its forms is subjective, be it a novel, a movie, an album, or a painting. As a fan of writing, film, music, and fine art, I understand that my opinion is just that. An opinion. I understand that there is no objectivity in art. That art exists for us to experience and that each individual experience is shaped by personal preferences and viewpoints. There is no definitive quality that makes one piece of art better than another. It’s all subjective. As someone once told me, once you start to qualify art, it ceases to become art.

Just because I think Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown is one of the best albums of the past decade doesn’t make it true.

Just because I think Being John Malkovich was the most original film of 1999 doesn’t mean it deserved to have won any awards.

But sometimes it’s difficult to be on the other side of the process, to be the creator rather than the consumer, and maintain that point of view. To understand that when you let your creations out into the world, they no longer belong to just you. They belong to everyone who experiences them.

However, when someone—a reviewer or a teacher or some self-proclaimed literati—claims to know what the author intended, whether it’s a novel written by me or by someone else, that’s where I think they’ve developed an over-inflated sense of themselves. You can’t possibly know what the author intended unless you spoke with the author about his or her intentions. You can guess. You can theorize. You can view the books through your own personal lens and offer your own personal insights. But you can’t know what the author was thinking. It’s all just a matter of opinion. A matter of interpretation.

And in spite of the fact that I might not agree with them, all of those opinions and interpretations are true.

I didn’t always want to write.

In grammar school and junior high, I wanted to be a football player. A wide receiver. Maybe a defensive back. Except at age 14, I was 5’11” and 145 pounds and wasn’t exactly built for the sport. And I don’t like pain. So no NFL career for me.

In high school, I excelled at math. It came easy to me. I loved it so much that I figured I could parlay my aptitude into a career in engineering. This was because I really had no idea what I wanted to do and engineering seemed like a safe career path.

Problem was, I didn’t realize how much I hated physics. And thermodynamics. So after a year of floundering in science classes and watching my high school GPA drop more than a full point, I switched to a major in business. Still no thought of being a writer.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year at UOP, when I started reading a bunch of Stephen King, Peter Straub, F. Paul Wilson, Robert McCammon, and Dean Koontz that I first considered the idea of dabbling at writing. Actually, I can remember the moment when I wanted to become a writer.

I was sitting in my room, reading The Talisman by Stephen King and Peter Straub. While it’s not my favorite novel by either author, I got so caught up in the adventure unfolding within the pages that the world outside of the book ceased to exist. And I thought:  I want to make others feel like this.

I didn’t start pursuing a path of writing at that point but the idea was there. The following semester, I helped with my fraternity’s entry into UOP’s annual Band Frolic – a musical stage competition between all of the living groups (fraternities, sororities, dorms, etc.) Each group was responsible for a fifteen-minute skit that included dancing, singing, acting, and some semblance of a story. We came in second in the men’s category that year. We got screwed.

When the title of Band Frolic Director was passed down to me at the end of my sophomore year, I was now in charge of writing, directing, staging, choreographing, and costuming my fraternity’s Band Frolic. We came in first each of the three years I was director. And after the second year, I realized that this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to be creative in some way.

So I took a couple of writing classes, graduated with my BS in Business, eschewed by degree, moved to Hollywood and got a job working for Disney, and wrote some short stories and a couple of screenplays. After three years, I moved to Santa Cruz, where I wrote a few dozen short stories and the first of three unpublished novels and where I would eventually write my fourth novel, a dark comedy about zombies, titled Breathers.

So even if you don’t start out having any idea what you want to do, you can still get here from there.

I’ve been asked several times over the past couple of months what kind of music I listen to when I write.

The truth is, most of the time when I’m writing, I don’t listen to anything.  It’s just me and the silence.  Which is why you’ll never find me sitting at a Starbucks or a cafe with my laptop.  I’m easily distracted, both by sights and by sounds.  Especially conversations.   However, when I’m on an airplane or when I have to deal with a jackhammer or a car alarm (hopefully not all three at the same time), I plug into my iPod and listen to my Writing Soundtrack.

Since I’m easily distracted when I’m writing, I have trouble listening to anything with lyrics. I find myself singing along.  Though I do have a writing mix that includes songs by Green Day, Morphine, Sublime, The Pixies, and The Doors.  Their songs inspire my writing without being distracting because I’ve heard the lyrics so many times the words just tend to blend in with the music.  For some reason this doesn’t hold true with The Beatles, who are my favorite band, just ahead of Green Day.

I tried listening to classical music, but it tends to put me to sleep and not provide the right kind of energy I need to write.  Same with a playlist of all jazz.  So I’ve compiled a mix of instrumental songs that includes funk, surf music, 50s tunes, classic rock, and jazz that seems to do the trick.

Included in the mix are songs like “Peter Gunn Theme” from The Blues Brothers soundtrack, “Green Onions” by Booker T. & the MG’s, “Espionage” by Green Day, “Thunder Chicken” by The Mighty Imperials, and “One of These Days” by Pink Floyd.

The mix also includes songs from The Ventures, Sugarman 3, The Greasy Beats, John Lurie, The Red Elvises, The Dust Brothers (from the Fight Club soundtrack), and Medeski, Martin & Wood, among others.  And I’d be remiss in mentioning the soundtracks for Pulp Fiction and Get Shorty, which I love.

So there you have it.  That’s the music I write to when I want a soundtrack.  And I’m always looking for more songs to add, so if you have any favorites that are sans lyrics, send along your thoughts.

And as always, thanks for listening.

I wrote some words today, oh boy
One thousand nouns and verbs and adjectives
And though the words were rather small
I got to count them all…

(With apologies to John Lennon and The Beatles.)

I’ve been asked about what it’s like to be a writer, how I spend my days, what my schedule and my process is like.

This is usually met with me saying something like:  “Schedule?  Process?  I’m supposed to have those?”

In an ideal universe, I would wake up at 6:00am every morning to the chorus of garbage trucks serenading me outside my apartment, feed my two cats, meditate for half an hour, grab a banana and a hard boiled egg and some Trader Joe’s Green Plant juice, then sit down at my laptop on my couch for four to six hours writing anywhere from 1000-1500 words.  Which is really all I can manage in a day.  Anything more and my brain gets fried.  Apparently other writers can pump out 3000-4000 words a day in the same amount of time.

I hate them.

My four hours of writing would be followed by an early lunch where I would sneak in half an hour of reading something either for pleasure or for professional reasons (I’m currently reading Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby).  Then I  would spend an hour or two answering e-mails and doing the Facebook and Twitter thing and, depending on the day, posting to my blog.  And just for the record, it takes me at least an hour to write a blog post.  Sometimes two hours.  It just does.

The rest of the afternoon would consist of taking an hour bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge or a walk through the hills of Pacific Heights and, if the weather is nice, enjoying the day outside.  Then some more reading for pleasure, some dinner with friends, maybe a movie, a couple more hours of writing or updating my web page or answering e-mails, and then sleep.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it always happens.  Here’s something a little closer to the truth:

I wake up without an alarm around 6:00am every morning, sometimes with help from the garbage trucks, sometimes to the sound of a hairball getting coughed up.  After wondering if I can manage to milk anymore sleep out of the morning, I get up around 6:30am, feed my cats, clean their litter box, and, if it’s nice enough out, I’ll take a bike ride or go for a walk because I know come the afternoon I’ll be too lazy to do so and will probably end up taking a nap instead.  Plus it gets windy in the afternoon and I don’t want to have to navigate my way through the tourists who manage to take up the entire pedestrian/bike pathway.

So by the time I get done with my bike ride, it’s after 8:00am.  Once I’ve showered and eaten breakfast and read for longer than I should, it’s 9:00am.  Breaking rule #1, #4, and #7 of my Ten Commandments for Writers, I check my e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts first and get sucked into them for at least an hour.  Often longer.  This usually involves me rationalizing that I’ve just moved my schedule around and am taking care of this part first.

It’s now 11:00am and I should have finished my four hours of writing at this point but instead I’ve written nothing.  So I finally start writing but around 1:00pm I’m now hungry for lunch.  An hour later, after perusing my latest issue of TIME or Entertainment Weekly because I don’t watch the news or much television, I sit back down at my laptop and by 5:00pm, if I’m lucky, I’ve pushed out 1000 words.

I say if I’m lucky because I’ve likely been distracted by beeps on my cell phone telling me I have e-mail messages or text messages or voice mail and, like one of Pavlov’s dogs, I have to check to see who it is.  I should really put it on silent mode.  Distractions are a daily part of my routine.

It’s also possible that I’ve gone outside to enjoy the rest of the afternoon because my windows are southern facing and my apartment is always warm and I’m perpetually in a state of summer and I want to go outside and drink Coronas at the beach.

Plus, I spend my eight-hour workday in my apartment with no one to talk to but my two cats, who don’t have an extensive vocabulary and never laugh at any of my jokes.  I need some human interaction.  I also need to go grocery shopping and check my P.O. box and try to get in thirty minutes of tai chi.

So by the time I’ve taken care of all of that and I’ve had dinner and fed my cats and watered my plants and cleaned my kitchen (because I haven’t done that in a while), it’s now 9:00pm and I realize I haven’t checked the latest sports updates on ESPN.com.  Which gets me sucked into Facebook and Twitter again.  And suddenly it’s 11:00pm and time to go to bed.

And it all starts over the next morning, be it Monday, Thursday, or Saturday.  Sometimes with the garbage trucks.  Sometimes with a hairball I have to clean up.  Sometimes with rain instead of sunshine.  Sometimes I have lunch with a friend.  Sometimes I watch a movie on Netflix.  Sometimes I volunteer at my local animal shelter.  Sometimes I head down to the beach to watch the sunset.  Sometimes I go visit my mom or my dad.

Perhaps not as glamorous as you might have imagined, but at least I don’t have to deal with commuting or putting on pants or navigating office politics.  And one way or another, more often than not, I get my 1000 words written.

Even if some of them are rather small.