We recently connected with Isaac Marion and have shared our conversation below.
Isaac, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?
When the Warm Bodies movie happened, I went from no career at all to semi-celebrity status almost overnight. The movie paid me well, though not as well as you might think—thousands, not millions—and between that and my advance for the first and second Warm Bodies novels, I was able to be a full time writer for several years. But the sequel suffered from a disastrous publishing error that basically killed the series, and since the money I’d made wasn’t enough for any real investments other than buying a house, it eventually dried up.
In recent years, I’ve had to diversify my work to a pretty ridiculous degree in order to scrape together a living. I’m doing freelance writing for video games, selling merch, running a Patreon, and recently launched a YouTube channel that is starting to pay a little. And in the background, I’m still chiseling away on my new novel, The Overnoise. It’s frustrating sometimes to have so many irons in the fire, and I would love to be able to focus more on my original calling. But this seems to be how it is for artists these days. Painters have to be Instagram models. Musicians have to be sketch comedians. Between corporate greed and the general devaluation of art, there just isn’t enough capital left in these industries to provide a complete income for the vast majority of artists. So we hustle!
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I wrote the novel WARM BODIES which was adapted in a film on 2013, and then followed it with three more books in that series. I’ve had a few short stories published since then but Warm Bodies remains my only major release to the world, so I continue to be “the zombie guy” even though zombies are not at all my primary interest! I generally avoid anything that wears its genre label too comfortably. I prefer weird hybrids of ideas both in my reading and writing.
Warm Bodies was really the first time I worked that deeply within a genre and I nothing I plan to write in the future will follow that path. My new novel is about the modern world surrendering itself to NOISE, both cultural and literal. My YouTube channel is all about everyday life in the wilderness, natural beauty and natural struggles. Future novel plans jump topics just as much, though perhaps they all could fall under “weird fiction.” I’ve never liked being tied down to a category so my work always zig-zags like that. One weird trick marketing teams HATE…
Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?
Ever since I started writing at age 14, I think the main driving force has always been the same. It’s a desire to discover things and then share them. I want to explore outer realms of thought and experience, and then bring whatever I find back to the village. There’s a social aspect to it, because I’ve always felt kind of lonely in my head and writing was a way to connect to other people and invite them to share my mind world for a while. But there’s also these drive to explore and discover. I’ve felt that especially strongly since moving out to the wilderness, living alone in this little cabin, trying to build a life that quiets the overnoise and encourages deep experiences. But I’ve also resonated with what Christopher McCandles concluded at the end of his crazy experiment, “happiness is only real when shared.” So my art is my way of trying to share whatever I find out here.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
Honestly, I just think people need to realize that art is not just a naturally occurring fountain that’s being paywalled by big companies. It’s being created by human beings, most of whom are not nearly as rich as you think, and they need to make a living if they’re going to continue making the stuff you enjoy. Most people don’t seem to recognize that connection, they have an adversarial relationship with art because they view it as merchandise being sold by a corporation, so they’re always eager to find new ways to get it for cheap or free, or to outright steal it if possible.
I would love to see a shift toward more of a relationship with the artists as people instead of viewing them as a media source to be extracted and discarded. I would like to see a sense of responsibility for keeping culture alive. If all we care about is bringing the price down, we are going to bring the quality down too. We will end up in a cultural dust bowl where all the crops have died.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://isaacmarion.com
- Instagram: @isaacmarion
- Youtube: http://youtube.com/@outeredgeoutpost
Image Credits
Isaac Marion