There’s a lot to be said for those self-indulgent writing exercises like journaling, and so much advice given out by professional writers often has to do with that sort of “follow your muse” model, even as it also gives some pointers to directing your prose to be of interest to others. You are not, it turns out, your ideal audience, though you are a segment of it.

To me, the best training I ever got in regard to writing for myself and clinging to my own self-indulgent flights of fancy was to not only write for someone else, not only write on assignment, but to write about things that not only I didn’t care about but might’ve even bored me to tears — and make it good writing, often produced fast.

This was first achieved through articles I wrote over a period of years for the Boston Globe, their special sections that would link up informational articles with advertising opportunities — the topical umbrellas could be anything from parenting to health to home improvement to weddings. I did a lot of wedding writing, actually, and the fact that my own wedding consisted of a justice of the peace, a Mexican restaurant, and the new Kate Bush album says a lot to our desire for ostentatious spectacle.

The trick, I always found, was to find the interest in the article through the interviews that I  had to do for them, if there was nothing else to grab onto. So, if I was working on an article about alternative bridesmaid parties, and using spas as the setting, then I pulled from the rapport with the spa owners in order to make the article fun. Sometimes you could get more creative — I remember once doing an article on interesting spots on Cape Cod to have your wedding, so I decided to interview wedding photographers about the subject, because I thought they would offer interesting advice. They did, it turned out well and a little different for what it was.

Writing is, very often, a form of problem solving, and sometimes it’s good if you aren’t the one creating the problem that needs solving. If you’re not even remotely interested in the subject, writing about stove tops and sinks can be great challenges rather than drudgery — and, I think, better than journaling if you want to attempt to use them as a springboard for your own ideas and personality. That job ends up being a little subversive, definitely sneaky, but it might also make the article itself much more interesting than it might be from someone just going through the motions.

Besides, for many writers just trying to make a living, the best game plan is to take any paying work you can find early on in your career and go in with the attitude that everything is a learning experience. Every article you write is another exercise in becoming better at what you do, and if someone is going to pay you money to learn a little something about your craft by lobbing a great big challenge your way, I say rise to the occasion.

You have to start somewhere, and Jana and I started with “The Potato Sack Princess.”

Did you not see that one on the shelves at Barnes and Noble?

Here’s why.

It was toward the end of our stay in Brooklyn and during our year in New Paltz, New York, that we began working on project ideas together. The first was a comic based on an odd little man I knew named Fernando — he was friendly mentally challenged fellow who looked a bit like a mobster and walked around with a little dog named Blackie. I befriended him and used to talk to him all the time, and he used to say the funniest, most surreal things. I really liked him and he inspired me to write about him in a fantasy setting. The story would take place in another dimension and would involve his Japanese sister Sushi, his mother (who looked like Divine, I believe), and some evil woman who wanted to marry him. Sketching out the general story and characters was as far as we got.

Concurrent to that, Jana had been working on her own children’s book story that was based on something involving her job as a nanny. She hit a narrative snag and asked me for help — I did, ended up rewriting it, and it was a partnership.

Somewhere along the line we left Brooklyn for New Paltz — New York City seemed like it was falling apart at the time, this was 1987, and we needed to clear our heads. So we moved to the country, took menial jobs, and tried to figure out what we wanted to do with ourselves and where exactly we wanted to be. During all this we continued work on our story, “The Potato Sack Princess,” with the plan to try and sell it once it was in a place to present to publishers.

Eventually we did sell it to a small educational publisher also in upstate New York — it would be part of what they called their reading series, which I think meant it would be utilized in school for beginner readers. We were thrilled, we took it as a sign that we did something right, even though it was only for a limited, specific release, and the money was hardly the mother lode — $100 split between us.

We decided to build on it as an appeal to move forward with our lives and immediately set about a plan to move to Boston and get our lives started.

Before we left, we went to meet Mr. Kimnitz, the editor and publisher, in his house. He was a mumbly sort of guy who didn’t wear socks. He seemed nice. The business seemed real, and I still have no reason to doubt that it wasn’t.

I also have no reason to believe it was ever published. And I have no memory of actually being paid for it. But all that is okay — the real point of making the book was making the book. It was part of our process to figuring out what in the world we wanted to do with our lives. The sale was just the little signal from the world that we needed, something we could interpret as “Good start! Keep moving!” and then do so.

In simple terms, it motivated us.

Exactly a month after we decided to move to Boston, we were there, hauling our stuff into our studio apartment in Back Bay, in a beautiful neighborhood just across from the Charles River. “The Potato Sack Princess” had more than paid us back for the time we put into it, and 20 years later I’m still very satisfied with the way it all came out.

Right now I make my main living at a newspaper and a portion of my work involves articles on artists and their work — by artists I mean the traditional sort, as well as filmmakers and musicians and writers and photographers. Over the time I’ve been doing it, I’ve come to realize that a good piece on a creative person — and certainly anyone else you care to do an article on — walks a very strange line between fictional writing technique and journalism.

The balance is like this — you are there to tell this person’s story. You are also there to provide some context for this person’s story and to sometimes pull meaning from the undercurrents of what they tell you. There’s a side to it that isn’t far from being a shrink — you’re looking for patterns in order to find your article’s theme, and much like a shrink, the best way to arrive at these patterns is through a freeform give-and-take. At its best, an interview is an aural collaboration between the two parties, and what transpires in print is a result of the work together.

I feel like the most successful articles I have written have always been followed up by notes from the person the article was about explaining in one way or another that what I wrote helped them frame their own work to them. I’ve had at least one artist tell me that she keeps the article I wrote about her tacked up near her workspace for moments when she has lost track and come unfocused from what she is doing with her art.

That, to me, is the most successful article you can write — and, I think, it’s something that should be adapted into critical work as well, but that’s for another time.

The real point of all this is to address how in the world you do that. Over time, I’ve seen a lot of younger people pass through the newsroom, and a majority of them studied to be a writer in general, and a journalist more specifically, in college. What this experience seems to have taught them is to be tidy in their information gathering, which demands a list of questions that give structure to the conversation and, later on, the story itself.

I say hogwash to all that. A good article is as much an artistic endeavor as a good story, and the same anguish and gut feelings need to be poured into it. I rarely come up with a list of questions for my interviews — instead, I approach it as if I were having a conversation over a beer with this person at its most amiable, and if it were a therapy session at its most professional. The important thing about this approach is that I let the subject guide the conversation, but I pay enough attention to what they say in order to get them to expand on the odd and interesting things people say when they are not being quizzed, when they are comfortable in an exchange.

When the process is done, I transcribe out the conversation and scour it for its own structure.

Why do I do it this way? Because I’m interviewing people the way I would have preferred to be interviewed — and was by the better reporters. Over the years, I’ve been interviewed by press for my comic book work, zine work, and my two published books, and as that was happening, I took every thing to heart, so that once I was in the position of sitting on the other side of the phone — the side with the recorder on — I had a pretty good idea of how to write a by-the-numbers article about a person and promptly decided to ignore that knowledge.

That is really where the fictional writing technique comes in — every person is a story that needs to unfold. They unfold through interviews that, like poetry, require interpretation. When you compile an article, you are crafting your subject’s official story — to do this, you need to get inside them, to write as if  you are inhabiting a character in fiction.

Conversely, I think learning how to write non-fiction in this manner will only help you with your fiction. You never know what kind of person you will profile, and the challenge of that is invaluable if you are able to rise to the occasion. As you begin to live inside the three dimensions of other people, and hand yourself over to their reality, you’ll be able to apply that to your own characters, and they’ll come as alive for you as the people who taught you that sort of empathy.

Do you remember when you first needed to write?

It’s a little sketchy in my brain, but I think I was seven years old when I first did so for pleasure and compulsion. That seems early to me, in that I was probably just learning to write, really — this was 1972, we were more relaxed in education back then. It actually wouldn’t be fair to call it writing in the mechanical sense, I think it would best be described as storytelling, because it was in the form of primitive, two-page comics (the next step in which I present as the Secret History of EL Comics, which date to probably age 8). I don’t remember the specifics of what the comics were about, just that I had a friend involved and that I had resolved to sell them door to door.

I think the business plan all fell apart, largely because we were seven and not as dedicated as we might have been. I have a vague memory of pages that involved dots and lines, and of at least once going to a neighbors door with that friend and trying to sell one to her from a several existing copies.

It’s as an eight year old that I remember my first serious efforts to tell a story — and my obsession with “Lost in Space” as a springboard to my personal creativity. I remember being given one of those thin, blue test books in school and filling it with a series of short stories — I’m talking two-pagers — under the umbrella title “Somewhere in Space.” I don’t remember any other details about the story, and I don’t even recall whether this was in regard to a school assignment or of my own choice.

I do remember also writing stories about a hero named Captain Could. He wasn’t a captain in the sense of Captain Marvel — he was a captain in the military who went off on daring adventures. Alas, I remember no detail about the good Captain’s adventures either, but I do know that he eventually made it to Colonel and was the subject of a couple issues of my later comic-book making when I was eight or nine. It’s important to point out that he was an original creation — and that I’m fairly certain that weaving a childish variation on “Lost in Space” probably got my brain into gear to conceive of Captain Could.

The only other piece of writing I can recall that early was a poem, which was really a baseball-themed variation on “Home on the Range.” It got printed in the mimeographed third grade literary take home collection. I think there was also a recipe one at some point.

Anyhow, even at an early age, I had obviously progressed from amateur to contributor rather quickly. I can tell you one thing — it was something I was actually confident at, something that came naturally, much more so than kickball.

That’s hardly the end of my adaptations of popular culture into my own projects, and I have plenty more I will no doubt talk about at another point, including my opus based around “Lost in Space” that one-upped “Somewhere in Space” in scope if not actual writing. The point is that if you are a writer, I think it comes out at an early age not necessarily through writing, but through the unstoppable urge to tell stories. I was obsessive about that throughout my pre-teen years, telling stories.

And though I’ll probably also have more to say about this at another point, science fiction television was my story catalyst in the way that folklore or Bible tales might have been 100 years before. I think that’s how creative minds work, and it’s central to my views about copyright and fan fiction, which falls in favor of the latter and wishing the former would ease up a bit. Creative storytelling is nurtured in a society through children copying the old stories and growing up to adapt them to new audiences.

And so I had to write “Somewhere In Space.” I had to tell my version of “Lost In Space,” because that’s what human’s have done in various forms for thousands of years. It’s the origin of religion and bad television, and it starts with eager little kids.

I just looked at the original word count for this children’s book I’ve been working on — it’s 277 words. The final rewrite is 167 words. It’s taken me a year to get there.

These are the longest 167 words of my life.

I think that some people imagine writing a children’s book is easy. Anyone who has read bunches of them know that it’s the furthest thing from it. Take away your low level for hire work — the stuff that is produced cheap and fast, the stuff you find in bins in dollar stores — and the celebrity stuff, where people trade in their fame for vanity projects, and you’ll find a pretty grueling process.

There is a conception that writing children’s books means writing simply, but that’s not it at all. Writing children’s books means writing with complexity in the simplest terms possible — saying as much as you can with fewer words. It also means trusting an artist to fill in gaps visually. Children’s book writing is about not writing so much.

Admittedly I only have one published children’s book, but in my defense I’ve had plenty of others considered by major publishers, so at least I can slip my manuscript in the mail slot — that’s a fancy writer variation on “get my foot into the door” — if nothing else. In fact, those 167 words are currently being looked at, and they point to the intricacy of how this process can work.

The lesson — before I even tell the story — is that you don’t just dash off a children’s book. Appearances are deceiving.

Here’s the process. Those original 277 words were presented to my wife, my collaborator in these matters, and she gave her suggestions. Whatever those might have been — at this point, it seems like decades ago, so I can’t honestly remember — I adjusted the manuscript and she drew out her dummy book. She showed it to her agent for some feedback. We went through several rewrites after that — this including much creative struggling and creative meetings, where, together we worked on the words and devised how the words and pictures would work together. This resulted in a different version of the same book. Then someone inquired, read what we had at that time, sent us some notes, and yet again, we completely rewrote the thing.

As it currently stands, it is more than 100 words less than our original conception, has a completely different narrative device, and a big role for a character that wasn’t even in the original version — all without a monetary transaction of any form. Just another day at work.

And so I’ve put in a year’s work on the simplest story possible, best summed up as “a kitten keeps getting into trouble.” At its core, the process involved whittling down the story to as close to those six words as we could get it.

And it’s still not done. It’s in someone else’s hands currently. When it arrives back to us, we might have to go through the grind all over again. It might turn out that 167 words is too long, and that the act of creation will continue to be the process of stripping away.

The bigger point here is that if we do sell the book, the amount of work that went into it may not be apparent in the final product — it’s often that way with picture books, and because of that can offer a whiff of easy money. But by the time it does get published, it will constitute probably two years work between two people. Let’s just say we are paid a $10,000 advance for the effort. That’s $5,000 a person for more than a year’s work each. Imagine a part time job in which you don’t see that pay check until you’ve worked it a couple years. Imagine if you’re not actually guaranteed a paycheck in the first place. Imagine if that pay check isn’t actually your pay, but borrowing against future earnings. It’s actually debt.

That’s why it is important to really want to do this with your life, expect no reward, but feel victorious when you get one. The majority of writers do not swim in money, they live project to project. But if I told you that poverty and uncertainty were both worth it, would you still want to be a writer?

Bravo if you said yes.

So I look ahead to the prospect of cutting down my words even further for a paycheck that is less hazy in the distance than it was a year ago, but still far enough away that I’m unclear it has my name on it. Is it worth it? For me, yeah, it’s what I signed up for. I’m ready to slash away more words if that’s what it takes to make it a great book — because making it a great book is the point more than anything other.

“So how did you become a writer?”

Every once in a while, I get that question. The understanding behind it is that I used to not be a writer. That’s probably valid in some cases, but it’s not in mine. It does point to questions of degrees in regard to what you consider a writer is.

If there’s one thing I feel confident that I know, it’s how to be a writer. How to be a successful writer is another topic, and one that is certainly up for debate. It depends on your definition of success. If your definition requires wads of cash being thrown at the writer, then there is nothing I am going to tell you here that will be informative to you.

But if your definition of success makes room for lesser monetary rewards that are still large enough to call it a living instead of a hobby — and keeps the writer away from the shackles of a regular, non-writing job — then you may like this.

Even if I had to have a dumb job I would write. I know this because all my life, even when I’ve had to have the stupidest jobs ever, I wrote. I wrote and wrote and wrote, with the understanding that it was all about the act of writing, not the act of selling the work. It didn’t matter if I finished the writing or if anyone else ever saw it. My brain has never allowed me not to write, regardless of the circumstance.

A few years ago, someone found out that, among my writerly duties at the newspaper where I work part-time as an editor, I was a film critic. Apparently, this was his big dream job.

“How do you get to do that for a living?” he asked me.

I don’t really know what answer he expected, but I chose to give him a real one, and described how I had freelanced for a long, long time before blundering into the position at the newspaper, how I did my time out of my comfort zone doing police reporting and lifestyles stories and covering various local issues and human interest stories, learning the newspaper craft. Eventually, I was able to suggest that I’d like to do some reviews, the editors thought that was an interesting idea, and so it began. Looking back on it, it was a silly choice to give that answer. I really need to get better at small talk.

Regardless, that was just the short version, obviously, and I at least understand that the long version is not only NOT interesting party conversation, but probably of little interest to most people in any conversation. In any creative endeavor, though, there is that component of self-indulgence — coupled with the belief, sometimes correct, that the story which springs forth might be of interest to someone outside your own skin after all. The self-indulgence is all about communication, though — the necessity of it, the compulsion of it.

And so the short answer to the question I posed at the beginning — dispensing with all the career nonsense and getting to the root of what writing is — is “I wrote.” The best way to become a writer is to just write. For no other reason than you have to, just like you have to breathe and eat and poop. Because you have to write when you’re out on a hike, or shopping for groceries, or in a kayak, or at a doctor’s appointment.

The best way to become a writer is to not stop writing. Ever.