We recently connected with Ron MacLean and have shared our conversation below.

Ron, appreciate you joining us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

Early in my short-story writing career, a story of mine won a big prize and was published in a glossy national magazine to much acclaim. Not long after, the editor who had worked with me on that story became fiction editor at Esquire magazine. She called me and said she wanted to feature one of my stories in her first issue at Esquire, and what did I have ready.

It was the opportunity of a lifetime for visibility, a chance to build on my moment in the spotlight. At the time, though, I was deep into work on my first novel. I had only one short story in progress, and it was an odd one, about a moose that gets drawn to city streets, and the park ranger who tranquilizes the moose and carts it back to the wild. What made the story odd was that I had a section from the moose’s point-of-view.

Crucially, the story was also half-baked, in that I had no idea where I wanted it to go. What, beyond the novelty of moose POV, I was exploring with it. So the new Esquire fiction editor told me she was willing to work with me on it. Awesome. To her, the story was about the ranger and his attempts to care for the moose by getting it out of the city and back to the woods. That was the direction she nudged me in for revision. Well, a couple drafts later the story felt closer to something she liked, but I had lost the thread of what interested me about it in the first place, which I was still unable to name.

The magazine’s deadline was approaching. The editor and I had a few conversations, after which I decided the story was not ready to go. I had not yet found in all the back-and-forth a story that mattered to me to tell, and I didn’t want my debut in Esquire to be a story that felt empty to me. So there’s an issue of Esquire from its heyday as a home for literary fiction that did not have fiction in it. That “hole,” in essence, had my name on it. To this day, it remains the closest I’ve come to an Esquire “debut.”

However, I don’t regret my decision. In fact, I look back at it as an essential moment in finding my voice. The decision to not put something out into the world until I knew it was my best work, until it was a story that mattered deeply to me, helped me learn to recognize what did matter to me, and to get after it. That experience was a key to helping me find my voice as a fiction writer, and to recognize that it’s the quality of the work that matters most to me, even more than a prestigious publication home.

Ron, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I was in my twenties, working as a journalist in Los Angeles and, despite having a promising job in my chosen field, I was miserable. An empty shell. I would come home in the evening, plunk into a chair and stare at the walls, unenergized, unmotivated, nearly catatonic in my affect. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong.

Until my then girlfriend, now wife, sat me down one night and asked me what on earth was up.

“I don’t want to be doing this job. I don’t care about it.” The truth of my answer surprised me.

“What do you want to be doing? What do you care about?”

“Writing fiction.”

I did not come from money. I came from a blue-collar family. The focus of a life was on making sure you and yours could get by. “Fiction writer” was not a career. Not a practical choice of what to do with one’s life. My girlfriend’s response surprised me, and has stayed with me all these years:

“Well why don’t you apply all that intelligence and creativity of yours to figure out a way to make a living while doing what you actually care about?”

Now I write stories – short ones and novels – that explore what it means to be human at this point in the history of the world. To struggle imperfectly for connection and meaning. To live out foibles and ill-informed choices and somehow come out the other side. To interact with a world that often confounds our understanding, and to do so with whatever humor and grace we can muster.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

I get to spend my days doing work that matters to me. Work that challenges me. Work that touches, amuses and sometimes even inspires people. That’s pretty satisfying.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish I knew that everyone working in the arts – or any other creative pursuit – is going to experience self-doubt. Moments, or even stretches, of time where you question the value of your contribution to society and/or the quality of your own work in a VERY subjective realm.

For years, I thought it was some deep-seated flaw in me that made me doubt myself. And it took me years to learn to push through it. To stop trying to solve it or permanently fix it. To accept it as part of the process. To acknowledge it, then set it aside as best I could for that day and do the work in front of me.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ronmaclean.net
• Instagram: ronmaclean24
• Twitter: @RonMacLean_

Image Credits

Author photo by Sharona Jacobs