Learning Curve: J. Mark Bertrand

As a crime fiction writer myself, I am thrilled to see J.
Mark Bertrand -- writer, instructor and inspiration to
thousands -- in the latest issue of Hardluck Stories.
Each issue of the online crime zine has a different
guest editor and follows a different theme. The current
issue, which posted this week, is built around the
theme of bank robberies of all manners and sizes.

Mark's story, "The Inside Job," is, to quote editor Dave
Zeltserman, "a haunting story of a reluctant bank
robber caught between guilt and obligation." ...

-

What was your first job?

When I was in high school, I served an apprenticeship
of sorts with a local private investigator. I'd completed
several of the correspondence courses -- "How to Be A
Detective" -- advertised in the back of magazines, and
it just so happened that the father of one of my friends
had a small agency. So I rode along on stake-outs and
occasionally acted as chauffeur. The detective and I
ended up talking a lot about writing fiction. Before long,
we gave up on the junior PI stuff and started driving
from Lake Charles to Beaumont for writer's workshops.
The rest is history ...

What is the best advice anyone has given you?

About a year ago, my friend Wm. Anthony Connolly, a
novelist in his own right, started pushing me to take
writing more seriously. I'm the poster child for the
overcommitted, always starting new projects before the
old ones are complete. Coupled with that is my mania
for editing and re-writing as I go, which tends to afflict
my writing with the literary equivalent of a wasting
disease. The longer I work on it, the less remains on
the page. So Anthony challenged me to be a finisher.
It's such a simple thing, but believe it or not, someone
had to tell me.

Are you an "artist" or a "minister"?

I came close to being both. After I finished my MFA in
creative writing, I became obsessed with the idea of
seminary. Theology and academia are two of my great
loves, so seminary seemed like a natural choice --
plus, having an MFA and an MDiv seemed like the
most unusual combination of credentials on the planet.
It shouldn't, though.

There's a section in John Gardner's On Moral Fiction,
which I've been reading recently, about the similarities
between the man of religion and the artist. Gardner
imagines that the roles of poet and priest were once
combined. I'm not sure I'd go that far, but there are
clearly sympathies between them.

Do you hate it when people ask whether you are
an "artist" or a "minister"?

No, I adore it. Evangelicals today have re-imagined the
whole of existence through the lens of evangelism, so
that, to be a legitimate use of talent, art must be
packaged as ministry. I resist that tendency because I
think it perpetuates a false view of art and a low view of
ministry. The tools of the artist are not the tools of the
preacher. Novels are not dramatized sermons.

More importantly -- and this is Gardner again -- the
method of fiction does not lend itself particularly well to
exhortation. In fiction, you create characters who
somehow embody ideas or virtues, and you test those
ideas by plunging the characters into crisis. You
discover connections (what Gardner talks about as
metaphorical identities) and, in a sense, "learn" from
what you've written. There's no reason why the same
person can't be both an artist and a minister, but the
fact is that the skill-set required for each role is quite
different, and if sermons are approached as fiction or
novels are built like sermons, it's a failure all around.

On your own site and also the Faith*in*Fiction
message boards, you regularly champion
"literary fiction" -- yet your appearance in
Hardluck Stories clearly shows you are
comfortable on this side of the tracks, too. Are
you like a switch hitter?

Actually, I'm uneasy on both sides of the track. The
antithesis isn't between literary and genre; it's between
artistic and commercial. As a reader, I don't enjoy
books that are little more than "product." When I come
across indifferent writing, familiar plot devices and
characters, and a formulaic feel, I lose interest
immediately. Ironically, all of these faults are justified
as being "what readers want," based on what sells.

In literary fiction, there's a morbid conviction that the
better a book is, the quicker it will reach the remainder
shelf. I don't agree, but one benefit of that conviction is
that writers have less incentive to plot their novels
based on an outline from Writer's Digest and populate
them with generic, predictable characters.

Obviously, this description does not fit all genre fiction
-- not by a long shot. There are genre novels I could
point to -- in fact, 20 of them by Patrick O'Brian alone
-- that are as artistically satisfying as anything I've
read. Nothing precludes genre writing from being great
writing, apart from the influence of commercial
considerations on writers.

I love crime fiction, but I don't have to tell myself there
is nothing higher in the pantheon of art in order to
justify my pleasure. I'm amazed, though, when people
who read nothing but crime fiction start talking about it
as if there is nothing better or higher in the literary
universe. That's ignorance talking, and a wise man
would not answer foolishness with foolishness. But I'm
not wise, not on this subject.

The moment someone starts blustering about all this
new-fangled literary writing with its fancy words and
inside references to books no "normal" person has
ever read, and how anyone who won't write good,
honest sentences that a third grader can grasp is
some sort of pretentious snob, I roll up my sleeves for
a good fight.

Who are your literary influences?

Graham Greene, for one. He wrote both "serious"
books and "entertainments," and brought his faith into
the mix in ways that fascinate me. His novel The Heart
of the Matter is the Platonic ideal, the work to which all
others aspire (at least, all of my work). I'd also like to
claim Henry James, more for psychological influence
than stylistic.

With the book I'm working on now, there are a handful
of novels I think of as totems: Barry Unsworth's Stone
Virgin, Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, Arturo
Perez-Reverte's The Club Dumas, and A.S. Byatt's
Possession.

Who are your spiritual influences?

It may sound strange, but the Apostle Paul has been
the greatest influence. Over the course of several
years, I taught his epistles line-by-line, and the beauty
and rigor of the Pauline mind is astounding. You can't
grasp it in sound-bites or proof-texts. You have to take
Paul by the chapter and see the sweep of his thought.
That experience changed my whole conception of the
faith. After Paul, I would list John Calvin and then a
series of Dutch Reformed thinkers, from Abraham
Kuyper to G.C. Berkouwer.

Can genuine art also entertain, or does a writer
necessarily have to pick one or the other?

Genuine art entertains me. It's more vivid and
intoxicating than the other stuff by a long shot. But it's
also a question of taste. I happen to think Chicken
McNuggets taste all right, mainly because I grew up on
that sort of thing. But I have friends who are horrified I
even consider them edible. We have different tastes,
but let me tell you, I'm not going to defend that heavily
processed commercial food and say that people who
dine at fancy restaurants are deluded because the
fare is equally fine (if not more so) at McDonald's.

Extolling the virtues of your favorite author -- who
released a six-pack of Nuggets (er, books) this year
alone -- is a lot like championing the McNugget. If you
go farther than that and say finer cuisine actually
sacrifices flavor (i.e., doesn't entertain), then people
who know better are going to think you're delusional.

What is the best thing anyone said about your
writing?

A friend of mine recently said I write with authority, that
she believes every last word. That has to rank right up
there.

What is the worst thing anyone said about your
writing?

"Though the manuscript you sent has not found a
place with The Atlantic Monthly, we thank you for the
chance to consider it. Best of luck placing it elsewhere."

You are toiling away on your historical-literary-
thriller ... which do you find more challenging,
the novel or the stories?

Definitely the novel. The history goes back to 1996,
when I read an account of the fall of Constantinople
and an image played in my mind: a man fleeing from
the breech with the Turks on his heels. Fleeing toward
what? Who? That started a chain reaction of invention
that is still going today.

The real story, as it exists now, crystallized a couple of
years ago, and for the past few months I've been
getting that version down on paper. It's a much better
story than I have the talent to write, so I'm having to
learn as I go. Writing short stories gives me a chance
to step back and focus on craft.

Which are more challenging -- the stories or the
essays?

Good question. I've written a nonfiction book on
worldview that I'm currently shopping around, and I
found the process much more straightforward than
fiction -- but then, it's a subject about which I'm pretty
passionate and I've lectured on it quite a bit. My
background in corporate writing helps, I think. I've
acquired the skill of producing good copy under the
pressure of a deadline. Still, I think fiction comes more
easily than nonfiction to me.

What are your writing habits?

I don't write every day but, when my schedule permits, I
try to go through phases of writing daily. The
conventional wisdom is to put words on paper and sort
out whether they're good or not later. I agree in theory,
but I have a hard time with that in practice.

As a result, I do a lot of editing as I go, and it takes
longer for me to start a project than it might take a less
inhibited writer. I have to chew it over and decide how
to approach the story. Once I have an angle, I just
write whatever comes: sometimes backstory or
exposition, sometimes character sketches, and
sometimes a pristine and promising draft of the story.

All the writing is done on a laptop, but I print things out
and review them as I go, making changes to the
hardcopy. It wastes paper, I know, but for me there is
something important about seeing the ink on the page.

Are you an "outline" writer or a "make it up as
you go" writer?

Before writing, I tend to have a sense of the story's
shape in mind, and I know what people and themes I
want to bring together. I mentioned John Gardner
earlier in this interview, and I think his notion of
process is helpful in thinking about outlines.

He describes the artist's method in three stages:
imitation, the discovery of metaphoric identities, and
the construction of hypotheses about the structure of
reality. This is from the first chapter in Part II of On
Moral Fiction. The process he describes is something
that can't happen before the writing begins. An outline
might get you to the point of imitation, but once you're
there, a deeper mechanism is at work.

The first novel I ever wrote was a spy thriller that I
turned in as my undergraduate thesis in 1990. I wrote
it a chapter at a time. At the end of each section, I had
to stop and figure out what needed to happen next.

Somewhere near the end, the final scene appeared in
my head. I was so shocked -- it was late at night and
the moment had the character of revelation -- that I
wrote the ending down on a piece of legal paper,
folded it, and sealed it up with candle wax. Only when it
came time to write the final chapter did I open the
paper up and read it again. Needless to say, that novel
sucked.

Now, I do a lot more thinking about what needs to
happen in the story. I try to work out plot problems in
advance, so that I can focus on mood and character in
the actual writing. When I reached the half-way point in
my current novel, I wrote a chapter-by-chapter outline
of everything that has to happen to reach the end. So
far, nothing I wrote has turned out to be accurate.

What is a favorite memory from your childhood?

To be honest, I have a treacherous memory. So far,
none of my cherished childhood stories have turned
out to be true. Here's my favorite example. I was never
allowed to hit my little brother growing up, because my
mother said he had "brittle bones." As a result, he was
free to punch and kick me, and to stab me with sticks. I
always had to run away, because if I retaliated, he
would die.

It's kind of humiliating to be chased off by someone
half your size, especially if he does an arrogant little
victory dance. One time, he actually maced me. I came
pretty close to letting him have it, but I couldn't keep
my eyes open long enough to grab him.

Years later, I asked my mother what ever happened
with his medical condition. After all, he grew up to be
an adventurous rider of all-terrain vehicles and is
always falling off them and getting hurt. How does he
survive it?

My mother said, "What are you talking about?" I said,
"You know, the brittle bones." She looked at me
strangely and then started laughing. "Oh," she said.
"You mean little bones. When he was young, I told you
he had little bones." All of those years of beatings
deferred flashed before my eyes.

How ironic: a writer's life made miserable thanks to
mishearing a single letter. There are many more
stories like this, but I don't have the heart to share
them.

What is your day job?

Some people think my day job must be to harass
perfectly happy genre writers on the web. It's not true. I
write copy and do design for print and web. I'm also on
the board of Strange Land Books, a Houston
non-profit that promotes theology, literature and
culture studies. Summers I spend on the road with
Worldview Academy.

What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Read the best, most challenging books you can handle
-- the more you know about the tradition, the greater
the resources you can draw upon -- and find a reading
and writing community that will have you.

What one aspect of God do you most hope
readers will take away after one of your stories?

I've said in the past that the book of Ecclesiastes is my
aesthetic handbook. There, we find a sober, even
cynical, assessment of what life "under the sun" and
apart from grace is all about. Yet, in the midst of that
gloom, grace interjects, encouraging us to drink, to
enjoy love, and to find comfort in family, friends and
even labor. That's what I'm after in my writing -- though
it is very much a work in progress, the sort of thing I
hope to achieve over a lifetime.

In terms of a specific "aspect of God," two things come
to mind. First, Calvin wrote: "There is nothing but
death and condemnation in us, until we know that God
came down to seek and save us." The sense of awe
those words instill -- God came down -- is something I
would like to capture in fiction.

A second thought, this time from Berkouwer: "Man's sin
is not a manifestation of his freedom, but its
perversion." As long as we conceive of freedom as a
state of independence (or even liberation) from God,
we can't appreciate it or the one who gave it to us for
what they truly are.

What one thing about writing do you wish
non-writers would understand?

That it requires a lot of leisure time and the buying and
reading of many books. The non-writer I have in mind
here is my wife, but it would help convince her if
everyone else started understanding this, too.

What one thing about writing do you wish other
writers would understand?

That great art requires sacrifice. Here, I have myself in
mind: this is a lesson I've avoided learning for quite a
while, and it's time to wake up to the reality. Every
writer should keep a copy of the Henry James story
"The Lesson of the Master" handy, and if you haven't
read it that should be the first thing you do. The
questions in that story are the ones every artist will
have to answer sooner or later, if he really takes the
aesthetic calling to heart.

Many thanks to J. Mark Bertrand. Don't forget to read
his excellent short tale, "The Inside Job," at the
prestigious online zine Hardluck Stories. Catch Mark
online at his personal site and at his creative
diary,Notes On Craft. He also posts every Friday at the
group blog The Master's Artist.

© Copyright 2005, CCMMagazine.com. All rights reserved.



			StudioWell