We recently connected with Jack Remick and have shared our conversation below.
Jack, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?
Artists and writers have to start someplace. When I was younger, I wanted to be a poet, but I didn’t know how to do that. It sounded easy–write poems. I tried that but got no where until I met Thom Gunn, an English poet teaching at Berkeley. He taught me how to go forward and into the publishing world. To tell the truth, it never got easier because the more I learned about writing the harder it got to raise the bar. Even as a “published author” with a dozen books in print, I had learned, from Natalie Goldberg and others that you have to start over every time. You start over because every book, every story, every poem makes greater demands on you or you wind up imitating yourself. That’s never good. Creative work takes its toll on the writer. The goal is to grow with every work. The goal is to create what hasn’t been before. Some writers talk about speeding up the process, but for me, the start low, grow slow method worked better.
Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.
The first question I have to answer from non-creatives is “why do you write?” The answer is at one and the same time enigmatic and perfectly clear–I write because I have to. I have to because when I don’t write, I get weird. I get weird and I get crazy. People around me know it, I know it. To be a writer, you have to be a little bit crazy, but it’s a “good crazy.” I have read dozens of books by other writers about why they write and while there are many who say they do it for the money, if you look harder, you will also read the subtext…I write for the money and because I have to. Writing isn’t a profession that yields its treasures immediately so there is this hidden drive that makes writers stick to it. There is this feeling that comes when you, as a writer, create a sentence that not only makes sense, but gives something to the world that cannot be achieved any other way. There are writers, for example, who bring new words to the language. Think of Robert Heinlein and the word “Grok.” A word Heinlein created in “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Here it is now, in the vocabulary of millions of people and their lives are enriched because of it. Remember Jonathan Swift? He gave us the word “Yahoo.” Millions of people, every day, use that word in its varied meanings without knowing that a novelist gave it to us. I write every day and I hope someday that I too will bring forth a new word that will make the lives of readers and non-readers, richer. You see? I have to write. I love the quest. The journey.
This is an excerpt. You can read the Full Interview with Canvas Rebel by Clicking Here.