Interview With Author Tom Maremaa
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I’m a writer, coder and storyteller living in Silicon Valley, California. I’m the author of 18 novels and novellas, as well as some non-fiction. technical works, plus plays. I wrote my first novel when I was fourteen years old as a middle school assignment. That gave me a taste for fiction, but I had a long, long way to go before I could produce another one. In my salad days, I worked as a journalist, later a software developer, and now as a software engineer for a tech company where I own the language for all the technical content that appears publicly on our company’s website. Right-brain, left-brain, one for technical work, the other for imaginative fiction. Both worlds of consciousness intersect and learn from each other.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
My latest work is I, Michelangelo. As it happened, I was working on another novel when I, Michelangelo, came on to me unexpectedly with a surge of remembered emotion and passion. I knew then I had to give it voice, listen to the characters and allow the novel to write itself without a huge amount of interference on my part, at least not consciously.
Passion always dictates form and in this case the form was not generic fiction but something entirely original in voice and storytelling. The account of a man who teaches middle school, then loses his job and his pregnant wife in a hit-and-run accident, and breaks bad with a criminal enterprise to support his young son and rebuild his life and family was strong enough to have a life of its own. It felt like a story that had to be written, although I never envisioned telling it from so many different points of view. It was a technique I had never employed before in my previous works of fiction, and felt strange at first, yet appropriate to the narrative. These things happen, I realized: you start on one book and another surfaces and makes itself known and demands to be written.
Oddly enough, on walks and while lying in bed at night I kept reciting the lines from Eliot’s Prufrock, which have always haunted my imagination:
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo
Why? And who was this Michelangelo? And then right there, the character of Michelangelo D’Antoni emerged, almost full blown. He began to walk around our house from room to room, smiling and laughing a bit, and even accompanying my wife and I on our walks outside to catch a breath of fresh air. He seemed friendly and engaging, a decent fellow, with a lot on his mind. He also seemed to have a dark side. Once characters step inside your house, they almost become family and you begin to treat them as such. Memory knows and knowing remembers: I had grown up with a lot of Italian kids in my old neighborhood and particularly in school and knew them well, loved playing kids’ games with them, hanging out, talking about girls and sports, and getting a pretty good feel for how they thought and acted and what they seemed to want from life. The mystery to be solved was what they had all become, in time, as they grew older and took on life’s myriad burdens and sorrows. What happens to a man like Michelangelo D’Antoni? He makes certain choices with his life and suddenly finds himself in the thick of a plot to take him out by a force he barely comprehends. All the while he is trying to bond with his young son Gio who has turned sixteen and is feeling his oats, running a bit wild, challenging the father’s dominance and control. As I read the biographies of Michelangelo the painter and sculptor, I noted the same conflicts and struggles with fathers, both his own and the Holy Fathers who sat in their papal thrones in the sixteenth century in Florence and Rome.
And then there was this thing about Florence. I felt compelled to add to the story the events of the young sculptor’s life, particularly the creation of the statue of David and the painting of the Sistine Chapel.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
Habits? I write spontaneously, without an outline, without notes, only a rough idea in my head as to what I want say in a particular scene or section of the narrative. I write discover what I don’t know, what comes to me from some othe place than my day-to-day conscious activities. I write when I can hear and feel what my characters are hearing and feeling. I go for a streak, as Ken Kesey once told me you should do. You write and write and see what happens. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes not. You can always edit the content later, recast the narrative or pull it in a different direction. I shoot for one hour per day without interruption. I ask my wife not to interrupt me during that hour, not word, not a phone or text message that might distract me. Head down, letting the word flow, not judging if they’re good or bad (that comes later with editing). Speaking of editing, I let that happen after I’ve got a first draft that I think I can live with. Then I ask my critic to step up and make his or her voice heard. It’s a lot like playing tennis spontaneously on the court, hitting your shots without thinking, allowing your body and mind to reflex and react to the shot as it wants without pre-judging. I mention tennis because I come out that sport, I was a junior champion, played in college, played in Europe, later taught tennis, and even later than that created the first tennis game/simulation for the Macintosh, called Grand Slam. The sport has been good to me, and often when folks ask about my writing, I say, Well, I happen to be a tennis player who happens to write.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Right now, my major influence is Orhan Pamuk, the great Turkish writer. He’s a master I’ve learned from with every novel he’s produced. Other influences include Bolano and his genius work, 2666, plus J.M. Coetzee and of course, my early influences, like Joyce, Pynchon, Nabokov, Barth, Kesey, Franzen, among others.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on recovering from my latest novel, I, MICHELANGELO, which absorbed my energies for over a year. And I working on recovering from a bad accident I sustained on the tennis court.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
Author interviews, my website: tommaremaa.com, reviews if I can get them. Compulsive Reader (their website) has been a good source for interviews.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
My advice is simple enough. Read madly when you have a chance all the works of the masters, like Tolstoi, Dostoevki, Joyce, Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, et al. Select your own list of masters. Then take a deep breath and let go of those masters. You won’t need them. Write to discover. Your writing will be as true and deep as you’re feeling when it’s running truest and deepest, so advised Gertrude Stein.
Mix up your genres. Remember, each genre has a formula that readers love. If you know that formula, you can keep producing the same work over and over again, if that’s your goal. It’s also a recipe for burnout. After a half dozen genre works, you’ll see that you’re repeating yourself. You won’t be happy. Or maybe you will be because you’re delivering what you know readers will like. That’s OK, but not for every writer, particularly if your goal is to produce work that’s original, provocative, or visionary.
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Don’t become a writer. Become a teacher who writes, or a doctor who writes, a software engineer who writes, a world traveler who writes. If you allow writing to become your only source of income, you’ll struggle to survive in a brutally competitive world of the arts.
What are you reading now?
I’m reading 3 books currently: 1776, by David McClough; City of Djinnes, a Year in Delhi by William Dalrymple, and for the third time, my great favorite: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Each time through that work, I discover new insights, a greater understanding of human nature, why we do what we do, and who we are. My eyes pop wide open and see things I hadn’t really seen before, and make connections with historical events I hadn’t thought of before.
What’s next for you as a writer?
What’s next? I wish I knew. I continue to work full-time in Silicon Valley as a software engineer and technical writer. I write imaginatively at night and on weekends when time allows. I don’t push it. Whatever comes, I trust will be what I need to write next, especially if the characters are engaging enough to hold my interest, and the interest of my readers.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Ulysses, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and 2666 by Roberto Bolano. Those works should keep me busy for a long, long time, as I soak up the language and see the world as I haven’t see it before. Maybe I should bring one or two of own novels to that fabled island, but frankly, I don’t like to re-read my own work and never do.
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