Read guest author David Roth’s thoughtful & thought provoking comments on writing narrative!

David Roth’s bio:

David received his undergraduate Communication degree from Stanford University. After moving to New York City to pursue a career in documentary film production, he began MA studies in Creative Writing at New York University, which included a course with his first literary hero E. L. Doctorow. He took a leave of absence after a semester to focus on supporting his growing family. That leave lasted thirty-five years and was primarily spent writing and/or directing and/or producing business communications.

Inspired by the courage and audacity of his three adult children, David eventually left the corporate world to revisit his dream of writing fiction. He started by attending a summer writing workshop at The American University of Paris in 2014. Back home he intensified his training in a series of workshops at Drexel University’s Storylab under the tutelage of novelist Nomi Eve. In 2015 he gained admission to Cedar Crest College’s Pan-European MFA program, which included residencies in Vienna, Dublin and Barcelona.

Three months after completing his degree he placed second in the inaugural Bucks County Short Fiction Contest judged by Janet Benton (Lilli de Jong). Shortly thereafter, Passager Journal became the first to publish one of his short stories. The Northwest literary journal Moss. was soon the second. Driftwood Press has twice made him a quarter-finalist in their Adrift Short Story Contest.

In 2019, David turned his attention to expanding his MFA thesis into his first novel. Regal House Publishing picked up The Femme Fatale Hypothesis and it debuted in November 2021. The novel was a finalist for the 2022 INDIES Book of the Year and was the 2023 International Book Awards selection for Best Literary Fiction

David lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania with his partner of over 45 years, astrologer/tarotist Beth McConnell. His stories and novels are set in or shaped by life in the small Delaware River town in which they raised their three children and now occasionally entertain one or more of their four grandchildren. davidrroth.com

My interview with David:

1) At what moment did you decide you were a writer?

This is a difficult question because I believe the jury is still out. I’ve been paid to write my entire adult life, starting in my early twenties with advertising copy and marketing materials before moving on to corporate training scripts. I even sold a few early poems and freelance magazine articles. My success as a business writer led to work leading corporate creative teams. These leadership roles had various titles, none of which included the word writer. So, despite all the writing, I never considered myself a writer.

There was an important moment in 2011 when at the recommendation of my mother I read Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, a nonfiction paean to the Epicurean philosophical poet Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. It is the story of the man who rediscovered Lucretius’ poem centuries after all copies were thought to have been destroyed. Its protagonist, Poggio Bracciolini, chose to live his dream—the austere life of a book hunter—rather than pursue more lucrative options available to him. The sentence summarizing his reasoning came at me from the page like a taunt. “The pattern of dreaming, deferral and compromise is an altogether familiar one….it is the epitome of a failed life.”

That phrase hounded me for three years until I finally left the last of my corporate jobs to pursue my own fiction writing. So, I suppose you could say the moment I decided to begin the work of becoming a writer happened some time in 2013 when I stopped pursuing jobs that did not have writer in the title. However, a writer writes, and I find that even now my days are still predominately occupied with activities that are not writing. So, I suppose you can say I have yet definitively to decide.

2) Why do you write?

Another good and difficult question. I suppose it is because when I am writing – which includes reading and researching and thinking about writing – I feel most myself, or at least the expression of myself that I am most comfortable with. It is not because I think it is a calling, or because I believe I have a story that must be told, or because I have a vision of what fiction in the 21stC might become, or because if I don’t write I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. It’s simply because when I am writing I am engaged with life, the lives of others, and words – those slippery metaphors masquerading as minions of communication that distinguish us from other species. Writing is a form of magic, a conjuring, the passing of information, images, ideas, emotions from one human to another by way of an ineffable sleight of hand. To paraphrase an observation from Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, we humans can talk about entities that we have never seen, touched, smelled, tasted or heard. This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of our species’ language. Dabbling in the white and black magic of composition brings me great pleasure and sometimes even pride.

3) Do you feel compelled to write or choose to?

 Writing is always a choice, no matter what other writers say. Writing is not a basic necessity of life, like food, water, air. Therefore, by definition, every writer makes a conscious choice to dedicate some portion of their life to the craft. I’m not aware of any writer who was compelled to write themselves to death by sacrificing breathing, eating or drinking to the thrall of their muse. But if you’re asking about the act itself – am I compelled to make my way to my office and put in the hours or do I choose to do so – I would say it depends. If I have a client and a deadline, they and the subsequent payment for services compel me; if I am writing my own fiction and no one is awaiting the next draft, I am of the Toni Morrison school of writing discipline: I write when I feel like it.

4) Who has supported you along the way?

My mother, though she didn’t live to see the result of her subtle, unwavering support of her only son’s deferred dream; my sisters, who are my most reliable fans and the only critics who really matter; and a few very generous early readers. There have also been mentors who taught me a great deal and encouraged me to press on. But they are paid to be supportive and their support wanes when one is no longer their student or client.

5) How much to you is writing a solitary activity and how much a communal one?

Again, it depends. With my own fiction, I’m on my own. I can count on my sisters and a few thoughtful readers to chime in on a draft, but the process is essentially a conversation with myself. However, if I am writing for hire, the process is by definition communal because I have subject matter experts and other client representatives who don’t dare face a blank page, but when they are presented with a page full of words, they instantly become seasoned editors.

6) Has your education helped you become a better writer?

Yes. I decided to get an MFA in Fiction after coming to realize how little I really knew about writing well. Though there were many fiction writers whose work I admired, and I had been paid for plying my business writing skills for thirty-five years, I could not articulate why my or anyone else’s writing worked. My MFA taught me aspects of the craft I had never thought about. So, yes. Absolutely. My writing education helped me become a better writer and a better reader. But I wouldn’t want my endorsement of my MFA program to suggest that my earlier education did not contribute to the development of my writing. My general schooling and the education I have received and continue to receive through direct life experience have contributed significantly by filling my head with stuff to write about.

7) As a result of publishing your book, what have you learned about yourself and/or the writing process?

I’ve learned that I’m not cut out for today’s book publishing/promotion process. I simply don’t have the energy for it. There was a day when a publisher’s editor and/or a literary agent discovered an emerging author and developed them, sticking by them as they built their reputation. Today most publishers are little more than glamorized printers, and agents are mostly frustrated writers making a living off of other writers’ work. They all require way too much investment of time and money from their authors for promotion and marketing. Authors are expected to have a robust social media presence, a built-in audience for our work, which we are to sustain through ongoing “engagement” with our fans. We’re expected either to have done the publisher’s work for them ahead of time, or to do it going forward while earning pennies on the dollar. For the vast majority of authors, traditional publishing is little more than glorified self-publishing these days.

In addition to that grim assessment, I’ve learned the following:

1. Writing has to be its own reward because all the other nonsense related to publishing and promotion has nothing to do with writing.
2. Most of the people who tell you how impressed they are that you wrote a book won’t read it.

8) Do you belong to any writing groups or communities, either online or offline?

Groups, no. Writers should be very selective about the other writers they hang out with. It’s generally more interesting and helpful to engage with groups of people about life writ large than about writing or the writing life. Writers talking about writing is generally as pointless as old people comparing notes on the inexorable decline of their bodies. Read other writers; skip the shop talk.

9) What is something you’ve always wanted to try but have been too scared to?

Too scared seems like too strong a phrase, but I suppose fear or cowardice probably contributed to why I never went to live alone for an extended period of time in a foreign country where English is not the first language. In Fear of Freedom Erich Fromm speaks of the loneliness of freedom. I think fear of that loneliness probably kept me cowering under the protective umbrella of the familiar, of reliable work, of traditional family structures and values. I envy people whose histories include a plunge into a world in which they were the stranger and dared to cross cultures and conventions to find their place in the strange land. There is much to be discovered about oneself in considering what one is prepared to give up and what one clings to during such an adventure; what in one’s life is up for reconsideration and what is nonnegotiable. I still long to take that plunge.

Many thanks to David for this thought provoking and thoughtful interview!