Walter Mosley

Noted author Walter Mosley spoke on campus last night, and a spot opened up at the last minute for the dinner beforehand, so I got to spend an hour or so listening to him talk off-the-cuff in a small group. He's a very charming guy, and had a lot of interesting things to say about writing, politics, literature, and other subjects. Miscellaneous comments, in no particular order:

• Asked about working with Hollywood (a couple of movies have been made of his books, and three more are in the works), he said "As long as you don't go in expecting to make money, it's fun." Really, that strikes me as a rule that could apply to just about anything outside the financial services industry.
• Asked about how to get published, he noted that the worst people in the world to ask about the publishing business are authors, because all they know is how they did it, and it's different for everybody. Apparently, he shopped one book around before Devil in a Blue Dress, and everbody turned it down, but a novel with a black detective was niche enough to sell (he noted in his talk that one publisher said "But there's already a book with a black detective," to which he responded, "There's lots of white detectives...")
• He says that the genre he writes in is "Black Male Heroes," and that he's the only one writing those sorts of books. This sounds fantastically arrogant, but he makes a distinction between "heroes" and "protagonists," and says that he's talking about an everyday sort of heroism-- doing what you have to do to support yourself and your family, etc.-- so he could very well be right. I'm not well-read enough in mainstream fiction to say one way or the other.

• He had some moderately unkind things to say about the literary establishment, especially with regard to race. He attributed the high standing of certain black women writers to white feminists in the 60's and 70's who had problems with men that they didn't want to confront, that led them to select and praise black women authors who were angry at black men. He was careful to say that Toni Morrison et al. are excellent writers, while still attributing most of their critical acclaim to white feminists, which was an interesting balancing act to watch.
• He got a couple of questions about the relatively marginal role of women in his books, and noted in response that nobody would point out to Alice Walker that there isn't a single halfway decent male chaarcter in The Color Purple. He said again that his purpose is to write about Black Male Heroes, and that means the women are pushed out of center stage.
• He had a terrific riff on influences, when somebody at the talk asked him who his influences were. He said that any time you ask an author about influence, they'll lie to you, and did a funny bit about the calculations a black woman author would go through: "Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, because you need somebody famous... Zadie Smith because you need somebody young and popular..." He said "She'll give you this whole long list, when what really influenced her to become a writer was Nancy Drew." He said that it's what you read when you're eight that has the biggest influence, because then your heart is open to anything, while by the time anybody gets around to reading Beloved, their hearts are already closed. He said his own influences thus range from Winnie the Pooh to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
• Bonus SF notes: He said the most recent book he read for fun was a re-read of Zelazny's Lord of Light, and said very nice things about Zelazny generally. He also said that Samuel R. Delany is a genius, and as important and influential a writer as Toni Morrison, but he'll never get the recognition because he writes genre fiction.
• It's always weirdly refreshing to hear writers talk who don't regard the process of writing as some grand mystical thing. I'm not sure why-- it's not like I listen to all that many talks by mystically inclined authors-- but I always enjoy it. In addition to his very casual take on Hollywood, he was unconcerned with who read the audio books of his work ("Everybody has a job. My job is to write the books, their job is to find the right person to read them."). He said that he never has the often-talked about experience of characters having minds of their own-- "My characters do what I tell them" (though he did admit to occasionally being surprised by what he was telling them to do). He said that he's happy with all his books ("I love all my children"), and that there aren't any books he's really itching to go back and fix.
• On that last point, I wonder if this is a matter of working in many different genres, from mystery to SF to mainstream literary fiction to pornography (the faculty member introducing him initially called it "erotica," but he said "It's pornography.") and even nonfiction. Most of the authors I've heard this sort of thing from write a wide range of things, while you tend to get more mystical hoo-hah from people who do only a single type of book.

Anyway, he was very entertaining and funny, and said some really interesting things. Having gotten a free meal out of this, I bought a copy of one of the books on sale at the talk (Fear of the Dark, which he described as a "comic mystery," though it's certainly not packaged that way...). Because, of course, I always need more stuff to read...