Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Bradley Somer. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Alright, Bradley thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?

I’m not sure there’s one project that’s more meaningful to me than any other. I think, someone who is working in any art form has to find meaning in the form itself, more so than in any singular work. Otherwise they are just creating a work of content.

Creative people are being asked for more than ever before, more fuel for infinite content machines. From this, the vital question arises: what is content and what is art? Is there something more meaningful, or at least distinctive, in one than there is in the other?

Content is created for the purpose of drawing and holding attention, generating within a patron some form of emotion by eliciting thrills and shocks, that is, eliciting emotional empathy in order to entertain, distract, engage, and perhaps even educate. Someone’s time and attention, after all, are the basest units they have to give. In exchange, they deserve an experience.

Content strives to satiate evermore competitive calls for people’s attention, for influence over thoughts, and to hook someone’s mind to the ever-quickening pace with which we crave and consume its delivery. That is, content both generates hunger and feeds it, an addict’s requirement for more.

Content is mercenary. It fills space in some medium, and in every form of media, and is generated to satisfy the demands of some form of revenue stream: advertising, direct sales, membership growth and retention, ‘clicks’ and ‘followers’, and so on. Content engines are capitalist creations and our attention is the currency.

These characteristics inherently generate the content cycle: create, consume, discard, and repeat. Content is all of this. You’re currently reading content… right now.

A savvy reader may be rolling their eyes by this point because they have cottoned on to the kicker, which is: art is all of these things, as well. Content and art are almost exactly the same, almost…

They are both purposefully created to be consumed. It’s not for a creator to presume the purpose of their audience. There’s nothing less noble about escapism than there is in cerebralism; all purposes served and all intent is subjective.

I couldn’t pretend to presume what is meaningful for anyone except myself, making it tricky talk about meaningfulness. But there it is, I think, the trump card that art holds over content. Art is content that would have been created without demand because it is meaningful to the creator of it. Art would be created anyway.

And this is how I write. My meaningful projects do have all of these hallmarks of content, but they have this one extra piece; that they would be created and exist regardless.

I write thematically, and for me, each novel is an anchor for an idea, a tool for focused and meaningful thought.

My most recent book, “Extinction”, asks what we owe to those we share this world with, and to what extent we accept that our existence has inherent impact. This is dramatized in the struggle of a ranger fighting to save the last bear on Earth from poachers.

The novel before that, “Fishbowl”, illuminates how we don’t live our own life, we are living each other’s lives together. That one, dramatized by a goldfish named Ian falling off the high-rise balcony and witnessing the intersections of the resident’s struggles as he plummets.

My forthcoming book this Fall, entitled “We Are All of Us Left Behind”, is a queer coming of age story that examines belonging and family, what we inherit and what we create.

Writing to a single and exploratory purpose means I get to examine a theme for the year or two it takes to dramatize that topic. It means I get to hold this nugget from a million different angles, in a million different lights, over the span of hundreds of days and thousands of hours, to just think. Personally, writing any last line means I have done something meaningful, to me, regardless of where it goes from there.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

My name is Bradley Somer. I like books and I write books, always have. My latest novel is coming out this fall. It’s called “We Are All of Us Left Behind” and will be published with Freehand Books.

I hold degrees in archaeology and anthropology, and have worked in the oil patch as a heritage resource manager, in camps so remote they could be only reached by helicopter. I’ve worked the dark night shifts at Pizza Hut, and in landscaping, and as a real estate agent and now am trying my darnedest to make a go of it as an author. My husband and I married 17 years ago. We live a mostly happy life with friends and family around, sharing adventures and all the amazing things that come with living that amount of time together and also sharing the realization that these years are too short.

My most recent novel, “Extinction”, was published by HarperCollins (UK, 2022) and Blackstone Publishing (North America, 2022). It was a pick of the month for best sci-fi/fantasy by The Guardian UK and has appeared on several similar lists since. I’ve also penned the screenplay for EXTINCTION, which has been jointly acquired by two Los Angeles-based production company and is currently in development.

My earlier novels include: “Fishbowl” (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), which sold in twelve regions worldwide, including five language translations, two audiobook productions, and has been continuously optioned for film since publication. This book was awarded the Georges Bugnet Award for fiction and was long-listed for the Alberta Readers’ Choice Awards. It was well-reviewed in the Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, The Toronto Star, Cosmopolitan UK, among others, and was selected as one of The San Diego Union Tribune’s Best Books of 2015. And “Imperfections” (Nightwood Editions, 2012) was my debut novel, which earned a starred review from Quill & Quire magazine and was one of the Canadian Bookseller’s Association Top Picks for 2012.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

Every year I’ll read books on writing and craft. Narrative fiction is a form that can’t be mastered or perfected and it demands lifelong learning. Even after dozens of published short stories, essays, and four novels in, I still find so many gems in everything from the ‘beginner how to’ books to the ones that are much more focused and craft specific.

For anyone wanting to be a more thoughtful reader, or writer, I’d recommend Robert McKee’s “Story”. This one takes you through all the mechanics of story with unsurpassed clarity. Yes, it’s technically a screenwriting book, but screenwriters have a much less forgiving form than novelists, they can’t hide poor concepts and execution behind pretty language.

For anyone wanting to hone their empathy and ability to read subtext, can’t recommend better than Lisa Cron’s “Story Genius”. This one looks at how our brains work, and cognitively, how stories work in our brains.

Anyone looking to fine tune their own ability to write thematically, or tease thematic trends out of what they’re reading, “Power Screenwriting” by Michael Chase Walker, is unbeatable.

And the classic “The Art of Dramatic Writing” by Lajos Egri should be required reading for anyone wanting to be a human, in my opinion. It’s masterful in its treatment of human interactions, motivations, and all the wonderfully messy ways we interact.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

There are a few horrible mainstays in the advice given to writers in classes and the more thoughtless “how-to” books on the narrative form. Two, in particular, are a hinderance to new writers and should be unlearned, if they’ve been unfortunately planted. Better, dispose of them in the first place! I always beak off about these two unhelpful fallacies, given the opportunity… and here’s an opportunity.

The first one is, “write what you know.” Nonsense and limiting, these four words are. Better is: know what you write. Narrative fiction is a bizarre thing where a reader willfully subjects themselves to emotional manipulation in order to share a hallucination with an author, with the goal of being entertained and experiencing something they otherwise wouldn’t. The joint task of a reader and author is to create this together. The authors only task is to make a fiction seem real. There would be nothing more dull than an author writing about their world, not concocting a believable fantasy. Write about what you don’t know, explore, but make it believable.

The second is, “find your voice.” Now, a distinctive voice can be a career long boon for an author. The tricky part is, you can get stuck in a voice. The voice is double edged, it can make a career and it can leave an author stuck in the limitations of that voice. For an immersive experience for both the author and the reader, better advice would be to find the voice that works best for the story. Authenticity of narrative voice should be malleable, and shift to serve the project best, instead of trying to fit all projects…

… whew, rant complete.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://bradleysomer.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thebradleysomer/

Image Credits

Phil Crozier, Stacey Jamieson, Lily Wong