Suite101 talks to Jesse Bullington about why he writes, his first novel, studying history and avoiding categorization.
Is writing something you've always wanted to do?
I’ve always wanted to tell stories, and came to writing very early on. Other forms of storytelling require outside assistance, actors or illustrators, but for writing you only need your vision. Well, that and time and skill and discipline and more time and lots and lots of outside assistance in the form of critiques and publishing markets and so on, but I digress. I grew up in a rather isolated farming community, and so spent a lot of time by myself, and most of the time I spent by myself consisted of making up stories and games, and even at an early age I saw writing as an extension of that, a way to continue playing make believe long after I was supposed to grow out of it.
You started writing The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart after finishing a degree in History and English Literature; how do you reconcile an academic approach to text with thinking and writing creatively?
I have mixed feelings on academia in general, and in its approaches to literature in particular. The professor who taught one of my favourite classes, which was to no small extent about the pomposity of academia, described Tolkien as “warmed over Medievalism,” which is a great burn even though it’s obviously incredibly dismissive of what else Tolkien accomplished or at least attempted.
Overall, though, I did not encounter as much snobbery or genre-bashing as one might expect in my English department, but maybe they smelled the corruption on me and kept their mouths shut lest I try convincing them to watch my Krull DVD or something. That said, like a lot of people with a fondness for both so-called genre fiction and so-called literary fiction it chafes me to no end that literary award committees do draw such a heavy distinction between the two and overlook superior novels simply because they take place in the future or another world.
To actually sort-of answer your question, though, reconciling an academic approach to text with thinking and writing creatively has never been very difficult for me, probably because examining someone else’s work and examining my own work are very different processes. With the former I’m trying to understand something on as many levels as possible, and with the latter I’m trying to make something understandable on as many levels as possible. In that respect my background, if not exactly expertise, in literary criticism has been most beneficial to my creative writing, because I’m aware of all these other potential filters that my writing could be viewed through.
In the end, what the reader takes away is the most important thing, to them at least, and while I think being critical where reading and writing are concerned is essential I also keep in mind that it all comes down to personal interpretation.
I'm glad to see that you are a writer who tends to shy away from putting what you write into a specific genre or category. Is this something you do on purpose?
I think good books are good books, and segregating them into little categorizations is rather silly. The neo-medievalist in me loves taxonomical distinctions, and understands how natural and unavoidable they are, but I nevertheless steer clear from them whenever possible. In my experience the best stories are those that are difficult to sum up in an elevator pitch or push into a single genre. Of course, we all have the sections of the library or video store that we gravitate toward...
A degree in History must have been a nice asset for researching and writing the book.
I think the most good I got out of my time in college was the discipline and methodology I acquired where researching history was concerned. While a few of the texts I used were picked up during my time there, the bulk of them were sought out specifically for the novel, and I wouldn’t have had nearly as good an idea of where to look before starting my degree. Primary sources are a love I came to late in life, and in many ways I now almost prefer them—history is such a nebulous creature that seeing how real people described their world can be a much better source for recreating said world than a collection of dry dates and presumed facts.
I also haven’t found a superior substitute for a good lecture course—I’ve kept quite a few notebooks from my favourite classes, which I refer to from time to time depending on the need.
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