We recently connected with Jack Remick and have shared our conversation below.

Jack, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

Artists and writers have to start someplace. When I was younger, I wanted to be a poet, but I didn’t know how to do that. It sounded easy–write poems. I tried that but got no where until I met Thom Gunn, an English poet teaching at Berkeley. He taught me how to go forward and into the publishing world. To tell the truth, it never got easier because the more I learned about writing the harder it got to raise the bar. Even as a “published author” with a dozen books in print, I had learned, from Natalie Goldberg and others that you have to start over every time. You start over because every book, every story, every poem makes greater demands on you or you wind up imitating yourself. That’s never good. Creative work takes its toll on the writer. The goal is to grow with every work. The goal is to create what hasn’t been before. Some writers talk about speeding up the process, but for me, the start low, grow slow method worked better.

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.

In August, 2023, I published my twenty-seventh book: Man Alone–The Dark Book. While writing as much as I could, I also taught writing. What I try to impart to writers who work with me is that the craft isn’t something you learn once, but something you commit your life to–if you want to raise yourself out of the amateur ranks. In order to get free, I teach writers to overcome fear–the greatest fear being fear of success. It’s strange but fear of success often means fear of failure so the writer never tempts the market, but holds back, never commits that masterpiece to the market. I have learned that many good books–novels, stories, poems–stay hidden in desk drawers out of fear. I also teach writers to handle the three hard problems with being a writer–How to Start. How to Keep Going. How to Finish. I joke about it, but it’s true: if you master those three problems, you’ve got it. And it works–if the writer commits. Many of my “student writers” have committed and you can read their work–novels, poetry, stories. Part of my own commitment to writing is to run a Masterclass in Interactive Rewriting that I offer free of charge to writers eager to stretch themselves. I demand hard work from those who come to me, but I also have two rules. 1) Honor your words and remember that the art is in the rewrite. 2) Never hurt another writer. To keep the latter, I have to tell you that I do not practice “critique.” Sounds strange, right? A writer who doesn’t critique? Instead, I teach writers to love the work, to help other writers, to keep a steady pace and to pass on to others what they know. In the screenwriting world, there is a saying: Be kind to those you meet on your way up because you will meet them again on your way down. Honor the craft. Be kind. Never give in.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can provide some insight – you never know who might benefit from the enlightenment.

The first question I have to answer from non-creatives is “why do you write?” The answer is at one and the same time enigmatic and perfectly clear–I write because I have to. I have to because when I don’t write, I get weird. I get weird and I get crazy. People around me know it, I know it. To be a writer, you have to be a little bit crazy, but it’s a “good crazy.” I have read dozens of books by other writers about why they write and while there are many who say they do it for the money, if you look harder, you will also read the subtext…I write for the money and because I have to. Writing isn’t a profession that yields its treasures immediately so there is this hidden drive that makes writers stick to it. There is this feeling that comes when you, as a writer, create a sentence that not only makes sense, but gives something to the world that cannot be achieved any other way. There are writers, for example, who bring new words to the language. Think of Robert Heinlein and the word “Grok.” A word Heinlein created in “Stranger in a Strange Land.” Here it is now, in the vocabulary of millions of people and their lives are enriched because of it. Remember Jonathan Swift? He gave us the word “Yahoo.” Millions of people, every day, use that word in its varied meanings without knowing that a novelist gave it to us. I write every day and I hope someday that I too will bring forth a new word that will make the lives of readers and non-readers, richer. You see? I have to write. I love the quest. The journey.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Yes there is a goal. I have written a lot of novels, story collections, poetry works. I am a writer who doesn’t like to repeat himself. When I write, I take a journey into another world–granted it’s a world I have helped create–because I want to explore possibilities. What if I change one thing in the created world, make one shift that moves the shared world to another plane? Then what? In a way, with each book, I explore the world of human imagination. What can I bring back to our shared world that will add to the “artistic” inventory in the museum of words? I tell myself–don’t go in search of another Greek amphora or another Roman coin because we have a lot of those–but bring back something new, something more powerful than what you saw before. For example–my novel Gabriela and The Widow. In that novel, I found two characters who did not exist before my imagination gave them to me. They are wonderful characters–an old woman, The Widow, and Gabriela, a young Mixtec girl who was driven from her village by a nasty war. Wow. A guy writing a novel about two women–how dare he? Well, I took the risk of entering their world and I found so much beauty, so much feeling, fear, love, trust, betrayal–all that I brought back from their world so that readers who cannot go there can feel a world that is unavailable to them. As a writer, I enrich not only my life, but the lives of any readers who pick up Gabriela and The Widow. In the process of writing those two women, I am changed, and I know that readers’ lives too will be changed when they experience Gabriela and her journey as she discovers the hidden world of the Widow.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://jackremick.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jack.remick/
• Other: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWBy8VMwhck https://jackremick.com/podcasts/

Image Credits
Jerry Jaz