AN INTERVIEW WITH:
MARK J. MITCHELL
Tell us one of your first experiences where you realised that language had power.
Well, I won an essay contest when I was 11 or so. I was awarded a $25.00 savings bond back when $25.00 was a lot of money. At about the same age, I started making up stories to tell Boy Scouts while we hiked and camped (nothing untoward happened).
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would you say?
Write it all. Don’t worry about something being serious or important. Just write it down. Make something. Shape something. You never know what people might like. You never know where just sitting down and writing might lead.
Oh, and if you’re funny, be funny on purpose.
Have you ever written under a pseudonym?
Nope. I tried on a couple as a young teenager, but I never signed anything that way.
What kind of research do you do for whatever it is you’re writing?
I mostly write poetry, which rarely takes research (although I once stayed up all night to track the path my father would have taken to the Biograph Theater in Chicago the night John Dillinger was killed).
I do a lot of research for fiction, since my work in that field is historical. I even taught myself to read Old Occitan for my forthcoming novel, A Book of Lost Songs.
What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters of a different gender to you?
I don’t seem to have a lot of trouble switching among genders in writing. Especially in poetry, I’ve tried to avoid using the vertical pronoun for the last few years, so usually, I’m writing in someone else’s voice.
My wife and several editors have told me I write good female characters. I have never tried to write a gay or gender-fluid character.
Do you believe in the dreaded Writer’s Block?
I believe many writers encounter it, but I haven’t.
It helps that I have a practice of writing a poem a day every day in Lent. I’ve done this for thirty years.
I write what I’m given. I’ve written five novels, two of them bad and unpublishable, and a lot of poetry.
I’ve also started some projects that don’t get off the ground, but that’s not a block, it’s just a failure to see where plots are leading.
Everything I write seems to just turn up. I can lie fallow for long periods between Lents, but I never let it worry me.
Well, I won an essay contest when I was 11 or so. I was awarded a $25.00 savings bond back when $25.00 was a lot of money. At about the same age, I started making up stories to tell Boy Scouts while we hiked and camped (nothing untoward happened).
If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would you say?
Write it all. Don’t worry about something being serious or important. Just write it down. Make something. Shape something. You never know what people might like. You never know where just sitting down and writing might lead.
Oh, and if you’re funny, be funny on purpose.
Have you ever written under a pseudonym?
Nope. I tried on a couple as a young teenager, but I never signed anything that way.
What kind of research do you do for whatever it is you’re writing?
I mostly write poetry, which rarely takes research (although I once stayed up all night to track the path my father would have taken to the Biograph Theater in Chicago the night John Dillinger was killed).
I do a lot of research for fiction, since my work in that field is historical. I even taught myself to read Old Occitan for my forthcoming novel, A Book of Lost Songs.
What’s the most difficult thing about writing characters of a different gender to you?
I don’t seem to have a lot of trouble switching among genders in writing. Especially in poetry, I’ve tried to avoid using the vertical pronoun for the last few years, so usually, I’m writing in someone else’s voice.
My wife and several editors have told me I write good female characters. I have never tried to write a gay or gender-fluid character.
Do you believe in the dreaded Writer’s Block?
I believe many writers encounter it, but I haven’t.
It helps that I have a practice of writing a poem a day every day in Lent. I’ve done this for thirty years.
I write what I’m given. I’ve written five novels, two of them bad and unpublishable, and a lot of poetry.
I’ve also started some projects that don’t get off the ground, but that’s not a block, it’s just a failure to see where plots are leading.
Everything I write seems to just turn up. I can lie fallow for long periods between Lents, but I never let it worry me.