Interview with Freelance Writer Joseph Chinnock

When did you start writing?

I started writing in 2006 when I lost everything in the real estate market and found I had days on end with nothing to do. I read a book by Aharon Appelfeld called All Whom I have Loved about a six-year-old Jewish boy in the Ukraine torn between his father, a brilliant painter, and his mother who is trying to assimilate as the German army approaches. It’s heart-breaking and funny and insightful as well as being told from a child’s perspective. A child who is not going to be saved by anyone and slowly comes to realize that. The language is beautiful, even having been translated from the Hebrew, it’s lyricism comes across.

From there I discovered Amy Hempel, Tom Spambaur, Denis Johnson, Thom Jones, Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger and many other post-modern writers as well as Roth, Atwood, McCarthy and Dellilo.

It became clear to me that prose and poetry better represented the human condition than psychology, science or religion.

I was lucky enough to take a seminar with Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate Kurt Gutjahr and then work with him one to one for five years. I currently have a novel being considered by agents and am working on a collection of short-stories. Most of my writing is dark, funny and spiritual.

How long have you been a freelance writer?

Five Years. I do creative writing, technical writing, and non-fiction pieces as well as research. I did a piece on the Church of Scientology that required me to interview current and former members as well as read all of Ron Hubbard’s books.

What are your favorite subjects to write about?

Love, betrayal, suffering, how people use language to deceive themselves and others; food, technology and how it seems to lead people to their worst impulses, the failure of our civic, communal and religious institutions, other writers and books, music, Asia, Buddhist and Hindu thought and art, the eighties, schlock culture and why it can be so satisfying, film, biology, the differences between men and women, and the West. I consider myself a post-modern Western writer.

What do you enjoy most about being a writing coach?

I like working with people to help them tell their stories no matter how strange or awkward they may be. I’ve worked with a woman who was born in Lebanon during their civil war and invasion by Israel as well as her betrothal at fifteen to her cousin, a female physician who suffers from domestic abuse and depression, and a whistle blower in the insurance industry who wrote a screenplay about the industry’s abuses.

Does working as a coach with other writers inspire you as a writer?

Of course! Writing is lonely work and meeting other people who are passionate about it is awe-inspiring. Meeting passionate readers is also great too. Gives me the tenacity to keep at it.

What is the most difficult aspect of writing a novel?

Everything. Spending long periods alone with your thoughts and staring at a screen, not knowing if it will ever see the light of day, and putting off the pull of life to create what is basically an artifact. Learning how to write I found I had many erroneous ideas about how narrative worked and it wasn’t until I learned how it’s intrinsic to our neurology did my writing come together. We evolved through stories and they give us information on many levels. That’s why it’s so funny when someone says they don’t read fiction because it’s not “real.”

Fiction is the distillation of so many levels of real that it’s sometimes hard for the reader to even understand how they are being led into the story, or story-world, as writers say. It really is pulling someone into a dream state that is also vividly true. True enough they will put down the phone, computer, TV or Internet to stay in that world for hours or days.

For example, Eisenhower wrote a book called Crusade in Europe about the invasion of Europe to destroy the Nazi war machine. This is by the guy who orchestrated the entire operation, had all the inside information and could see it from a global perspective. How many people have you met who have read that book? Most likely none. Why? It’s dull as dust.

How many people have you met who have read Harry Potter? Tons. Why? The prose is pretty straight-forward, it’s a book for kids, and its set in a fictional realm where magic works. Some of the reasons it’s so popular are that it seems to represent the coming of age process in a way that non-fiction cannot: magical mentors and schools, rites of passage, and friends who inspire us. Even the wars between various groups in the later books make sense to us. They are led by characters we love or hate, who are conflicted themselves, and whos decisions have direct impact and consequences unfiltered by bureaucratic systems. It’s the world we want to live in. Same with Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones and, I imagine, Fifty Shades of Grey, though I have never read it.

What would you say to an aspiring writer who is just beginning a novel?

Do it! What do you have to lose? You will learn a lot about yourself in the process, it’s cheaper than therapy, and you will end up using a lot of the material in everyday life on your way to getting published.

Joseph Chinnock is a freelance writer, writing coach, world traveler, entrepreneur, and all around interesting guy.