This week’s featured writer is Marc Acito, author of How I Paid For College and Attack of the Theater People. Marc is also a frequent contributor to National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and for ten years was a comedic operatic tenor. Marc uses libraries to immerse himself in the world he’s writing about.
Anne: What is your writing process like?
Marc: I work in bed, in the time-honored method of Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and prostitutes. Before my feet even hit the floor, I reach down for my laptop and get started. Writing is a lot like dreaming, so it's how I ease into the day. I don't actually get up until I'm hungry.
I like to immerse myself in the world of whatever I'm working on, so I listen to music that puts me in the zone, read and watch everything I can that relates, post pictures above my desk, which, of course, I only see in passing because, as I said, I work lying down. My desk doesn't even have a chair.
Working all day in your pajamas sounds cushy, but it's also dangerously close to clinical depression. So I try to motivate myself out the door once in a while. Since I live in Portland where it rains 200 days a year, this is difficult.
I try to make people laugh, make 'em cry and make 'em think. I want my work to give people a lift. Life is hard enough as it is.
Anne: What role does the library play in your writing?
Marc: I'm a promiscuous library user. The only affordable way I can immerse myself in the world of what I'm writing is by borrowing the books, CDs and DVDs from the library. At any given time, I've got a knee-high stack of material waiting for me.
Personally, I rarely buy a book I haven't already test-driven from the library. I figure if I'm only going to read it once, why own it? If I truly love a book, then I buy it, so I can mark it up with underlines and marginalia. My habit began out of a combination of financial necessity and limited space, and now reflects my commitment to a sustainable lifestyle. Plus, I've got a pretty small house.
Anne: Did you use the library a lot growing up? What were your favorite books?
Marc: As a kid, I spent hours in the library. My father had an office in a different town that had a better library, so on Saturdays he'd drop me off while he put in a few hours at work. I was eight years old, but I'd skip the children's section and go straight to the adult library to scan the theater and film section. I'd find the scripts of musicals, then go over to the record section and see if they had the corresponding original cast album. Back then you could listen to LPs with headphones on turntables right there and I'd follow along with the scripts, absorbing the shows as if I were seeing them. That year I familiarized myself with pretty much the entire history of Broadway, an interest that continues to this day, as evidenced by my two theater-related novels.
We moved the following year and I was slow to make friends. So every afternoon of fourth grade I'd go to the school library, take out a book, then fill the rest of the lonely day by reading it, typically finishing it under the covers with a flashlight. Then I'd go back to school and repeat the process. I must've read 200 books that year. Over Christmas vacation I did nothing but devour Gone With the Wind for the first time, all three bazillion pages.
That was also the year I read every Agatha Christie novel, a task I've since repeated twice. Her work has since influenced my own a great deal, particularly her corkscrew plotting and eye for social satire.
I'm forever grateful for those libraries. Jorge Luis Borges said, "I have always imagined Paradise will be a kind of library" and I couldn't agree more. To have a world of information available to me was indeed heaven.
Anne: When you write, do you think about your readers?
Marc: Having trained as an actor, and then worked as an opera singer, I think like an entertainer. How could I possibly hope to occupy readers for hours if I didn't think about their needs? Every time I write I think, "Is this worth chopping down a tree?"
Anne: At the risk of sounding like a bad joke, what do writing and theater have in common?
Marc: Very little. I had my first play produced this past fall and found it the antithesis of writing a novel. For starters, there's all this white space on the page with only twenty thousand or so words, compared to a hundred thousand in a novel. And there were all these actors and designers to flesh out all those details I would normally create myself. I found it a refreshing change.
Anne: Do you have any advice for people looking to break into either field, writing or theater?
Marc: When embarking on a career in the arts, there's no shortage of people who will ask you, "But what are you going to do to fall back on?" This is well-intentioned but unhelpful because it presupposes you'll fail. All too often, however, the young artist responds by venturing out into the world without any sustainable means of support. But with rare exceptions, it takes years before you can make a living as an artist. So, rather than asking yourself, "What am I going to do to fall back on?" an artist must ask, "What am I going to do in order to succeed?" You need a plan to sustain yourself through those lean times, not just at the beginning, but also throughout your career.
