We recently connected with Jason Kapcala and have shared our conversation below.
Jason, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I can’t tell you how many times I have had people find out that I am a published novelist and respond, “Oh, yeah, I probably could have done that, too. I have tons of stories to tell.” It’s so common it’s nearly a cliche. And I can’t help but wonder where this impulse to create equivalencies comes from. It’s a phenomenon that separates the world into two camps: “writers” and “those writers who just never got around to it.”
In those moments, I nod and smile, say, “Maybe you should write.” I resist the urge to rattle off all of the effort it has taken just to get to this point–years spent reading, studying the elements of craft, earning two advanced degrees (which isn’t strictly necessary but is a part of my journey), writing and then rewriting and then rewriting some more. I know that it’s not what people want to hear, even if it’s what I most want them to know.
I do believe that writing creatively is a learnable skill, like anything else. Consider: with enough intentional practice and education (whether it be formal or informal), anyone can become a guitar player.
Will you become the next Jimi Hendrix or Pat Metheny if you practice at it? Maybe–that’s kind of a loaded question. Perhaps we don’t jump directly to mastery, skipping every step in between.
Can you get good enough to make a living at it? Maybe–but that depends on a lot of factors that are adjacent to the playing itself. Anyway, there are plenty of people who practice art without any aspiration of making a living at it.
Our question was “with enough practice, can you reach a point where you are making something that might reasonably be called ‘music?’ A point where you can call yourself ‘guitarist’ (and not just guy or gal with a guitar)?”
Absolutely–you work at it over the course of years, learn how to play different chords and then how to lay down a chord progression, learn different techniques for playing, develop an understanding of rhythm, refine your craft, and so forth, until the playing opens up for you and provides you with opportunities for creative expression.
Described this way, most people will accept what I’ve just said. They don’t think of themselves as guitarists-waiting-to-happen. And yet, when it comes to writing, there’s a sense that “everyone is a writer.” The criteria is somehow watered down: You just need the will to write and the means to do so–a handful of interesting stories, your basic vocabulary, a computer (or pen and paper, if you are old-school), and a bit of uninterrupted time.
This mentality isn’t helped by writers who describe (I’d argue: misdescribe) their process in exactly these glib terms–“the muse” descends upon them, it flows through them.
What bothers me about this isn’t even that it takes what is often a rigorous and challenging task and oversimplifies the amount of effort that goes into it. It’s that it makes the act of writing trivial and frivolous by removing all artfulness and skill from the equation–that is, everything that makes writing meaningful to me. The understanding of how the use of a single word can change the tone of an exchange, which can in turn shape the direction of a scene, the development of a character, the entire trajectory of a novel. Too much? How about the use of free indirect discourse instead of straight narration, how that might alter the experience of reading a particular scene? These are the sorts of craft elements I consider–perhaps not when I sit down to draft, but definitely when I return, over and over, to revise what I have written. And they are the sorts of things other writers consider, too–even those who don’t know what the term “free indirect discourse” means. (What of it? There are many musicians who don’t read music. That doesn’t prevent them from engaging with the elements of music.)
For me, it’s this engagement with craft that defines my experience as a writer. I can remember writing my first story–that is, the first arcing, fully self-contained, character-driven piece of fiction that I could, as a young adult, actually call a “real” story. I knew that somehow I had achieved a base level of competency in that moment. And I recall a writing mentor, someone I looked up to, telling me, “Great, that means your 15-year apprenticeship starts now.” That may be a bit of an abstract statement, but it has been a little over 15 years since then, and I am two books in and still learning my craft. Mostly, I appreciate the underlying point of that writer’s message: that it takes years of intentional practice to really get good at this thing we call writing. Opportunity is only one small part.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’ve published two books, most recently, HUNGRY TOWN (West Virginia University Press, 2022), a rustbelt noir novel that starts with a tragedy in an abandoned steel mill and follows the crisscrossing stories of two police officers, a young boy, and a woman on the run from her violent ex-boyfriend.
What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?
This is a tough question but an important one. Artists used to have wealthy patrons. I’m sure that came with its own problems, but it ensured that people could continue to make a living through creating their art. In some ways, I am skeptical that we, as a society, will ever invest in the ways necessary to support artists. Look at the recent screenwriter’s strikes, the attempts to replace writers with AI. If those artists can’t get fair compensation working within a thriving billion dollar industry, then what hope is there for musicians, writers, etc.?
I think as artificial intelligence becomes trendy, we need to take a good look at what it is we value, and to make sure that we aren’t settling for less, promoting derivative art designed by an algorithm. There’s something to be said for valuing quality over novelty, and if a purpose of art is that it helps us humans to navigate what it means to be human, then maybe it would be wise to not simply hand the keys over to non-human intelligences that can’t imagine that experience.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I had a fiction instructor in grad school who would ask us to consider our motivations for writing. For him, stories depicted the world and wondered about it. Every other form of writing is trying to teach you a lesson, tell you how to live your life, self-help you to death, provide you with some sort of instruction or guidance, sell you a product, sell you an ideology, and so forth. Stories depict and they wonder. And they invite their readers to picture the world and to wonder, as well. And there is value in that–in seeing your experiences validated or reflected in the story of someone else, in imagining the suffering of others, or just in putting yourself in someone else’s shoes for a bit. Writers often talk about how that builds empathy, but I think it also makes people feel less lonely. In my first book, I wrote a story about a woman who experiences a miscarriage under unusual circumstances, and I had someone tell me once that it hurt to read that story because she had experienced a similar situation. She called it a “welcome” sort of hurt, because the story made her feel as though someone else out there understood the way she felt. That, to me, is the best incentive to write.
I may never have a bestseller or a book on a big press. Most writers don’t. My books may never touch the hands of more than a few hundred people. But if a couple of people read them, and if the reading makes them feel less lonely, then that’s probably good enough for one life’s work. Perhaps it’s idealistic of me to say, but that, to me, doesn’t seem insignificant.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.jasonkapcala.com
- Instagram: @kapwv