e careful what you tell people on the phone. That person might become a writer and tell your story to other people.”
Before he wrote and published a New York Times Bestseller, Jason Mott was a customer service operator for Verizon Wireless in Philadelphia, Pa. A few days after his first novel, “The Returned,” was accepted for publication, he quit his job with giddy triumph. Now, “The Returned” has been optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company, Plan B, for a television series based on the novel, titled “Resurrection,” that is scheduled to air on ABC in March 2014. Mott said — as he says to all interviewers who ask — that although “The Returned” has been optioned for film by Plan B, he has yet to meet Brad Pitt, but he’d love to meet Angelina Jolie. Mott’s sudden stellar success in the publishing and visual media worlds has had him traveling the country on a whirlwind book tour; one of his stops along the way was the Bowers Writers House at Elizabethtown College on Monday, Sept. 23.
Mott earned his B.F.A. in poetry and M.F.A. in fiction from the University of Maryland College at Wilmington in Wilmington, North Carolina. His initial attraction to poetry, he said with an unabashed laugh, was “to meet women.” But even prior to this, Mott had always had an interest in some of the oldest poetry known to man, such as the epic poems of the Greeks and Mesopotamians. At his craft talk in Bowers on Monday, he cited “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” “Beowulf,” and “The Illiad” as a few of his earliest inspirations. For him, these pieces were also influential in discovering the innate and deep-rooted connection between poetry and fiction.
“Poetry and fiction are not as separate as people think they are,” he said. His post-secondary studies in both poetry and fiction, in addition to his early interest in epic poetry, helped him throughout his learning process to realize that the mechanics, structures, themes and purposes of poetry and fiction are far more similar than most believe. “The idea of fiction and poetry being separated is a fairly new thing,” he said, explaining that the two were almost synonymous in ancient culture. The epic poems, while they are most certainly poems, are also works of narrative. Epic poems have characters, plotlines and many other structural and stylistic elements that we see in both mediums of writing. A more recent demonstration of this, he said, is Shakespeare’s famous poem, “The Raven.” This poem, he said, employs a very complicated rhythmic structure in a masterful fashion and still maintains the story elements of narrative fiction.
While Mott began his professional writing career as a poet, having published two books of poetry, his transition to fiction was a conscious decision to expand his horizons. He does not believe that a writer must be only a master of one or two particular forms, but that it is equally important to practice the craft in many different ways. For Mott, “the challenge has become staying true to the roots of poetry” while moving so swiftly and successfully into fiction writing.
One of the most valuable aspects of an M.F.A. in fiction, Mott said, is having the opportunity to be mentored by a professional in the field. His own mentor instilled in him the importance of a strong work ethic as it pertains to the writing process. Mott said that writing is “not about waiting for that good idea to come. It’s not about inspiration. It’s about doing it even if you don’t want to, even if you have other things to do.” For serious writers, writing is not simply a hobby, but rather a lifelong habit. Making writing into a habit, Mott said, is the best way to improve productivity as a writer, so that when the inspiration does strike, the craftsman will be ready and have the appropriate practice in order to perform well. “A writer is only as good as their work ethic,” he said. “Don’t wait to get inspired. Sit down and write the words, and maybe you’ll get inspired later, eventually.”
Rejection is another hot topic in the publishing world. The vast majority of professional writers see a rejection, or many, before their first acceptance. Mott encouraged the participants of his workshop to deal with rejection in a way that’s not detrimental to the rest of a writer’s career. “You will spend nights alone, crying and drinking… And [rejection] always happens on the worst day.” However, he added, “You have to take that as part of the game and keep moving.”
Revision is a vitally important part of the writing and publishing process, and Mott also warned his audience against measuring their success based on their first draft. “First drafts are allowed to be horrible,” he said. He introduced what he calls his “lego block theory,” a concept which describes how a writer will “dump all the pieces out” of the mental bin and sort through them in order to construct the story, and the initial blueprint is key in order to build upon the structure later. Crafting the story is about “building a sandbox for your characters to play in,” as Mott described it. As he returns to a draft and begins to revise, he asks of himself, “Can I make it do more? Can I make it say more?” Asking these questions of ourselves as writers, and also as people, can make revision – either of the written word or of thought – that much more productive, and a much more successful product.
