Although I was not planning to go listen to Walter Mosley, I’m glad a friend encouraged me to do so. He’s a prolific writer and of course a fantastic speaker–very down-to-earth and entertaining just like his books. I arrived at the bookstore early enough to get a good seat and briefly talk with a woman who had been on the Austin Writers Roulette once, back when it when it took place in the capoeira studio. My friend and her family came just before he started speaking and I teased her about being “Black,” that is, coming to an open event just before it began and expecting to get 5 seats altogether. She and her husband sat with me, their daughters sat together in the row in front of us and I never found out who the 5th person was. I learned to my grief that my friends were making plans to return to South Africa, both because of the public educational system here in Austin and the financial offer they’ve received to finish their latest production back in South Africa.
I showed them the latest picture of the painting that I’ve been working on and my newest brainchild of having the paintings represent the work of the main character in the book rather than making the story part graphic novel. I even told them of my upcoming photoshoot on Sunday to compose the second painting in the series.
After a rather long and rambling introduction by one of the bookstore employees, Walter Mosley finally took his place behind the lecturn. Here are the notes that I took during his wonderfully inspiring and humorous talk:
1. He initially killed off one of his most popular characters, Easy Rawlings, because writing those stories began to get stale for him.
2. Out of all of the struggles in the writing process, he finds PUBLISHING the most challenging–mainly because every publisher wants to lock him into writing just one genre.
3. He has been criticized by many black women about not having a black female lead detective, but he defends himself by stating that he’s one of the few black men writing about a black male detective; so he wants to write as many as possible to make up for that.
4. He believes in the saying, “If you’re not happy today, then you’ll never be.” Meaning that if you cannot find something to be happy about now, why should you expect tomorrow to be any different.
5. He set out to write six sci-fi novellas where black men destroyed the world in six different ways.
6. He feels that for a writer, social media is like working in a rice paddy. He doesn’t bother with it since that’s one of the reasons why he has a publisher.
7. One of his favorite characters is a sociopath because Mosley believes in order to function in this world, one has to be a sociopath, but one still has to have understanding.
8. Initially, Mosley had a hard time getting his first novel published because the publishers told him that white people don’t read about black people, black women don’t like black men and black men don’t read.
9. Once during an interview, Mosley was asked what does every black man need. His flippant response was “a white man in his basement.” Soon after, he wrote “Man in My Basement.” (Which I checked out of the library this past Saturday!)
10. He claims not to research anything because he’s a fiction writer; so he feels at liberty just to make everything up.
11. When participating in a critique, Mosley advises not to listen to other’s opinion about your own work, but rather to listen to how you critique others and what other people say about another writer’s work.
12. He doesn’t bother to teach writing because teaching uses the same energy as writing and he doesn’t have enough energy to do both.
13. Mosley stated that by the time he started writing in his mid 30s, he was already a failure in life; so he figured whatever became of his books would be extra.
14. He expressed an interesting theory on racism: Before people came to “the new world,” “white” people did not exist. Mosley said that if someone went up to a Viking and said he was the same as a Greek, he’d cut his head off. If someone said to the Greek that he was like the Viking, he’d cut off his d*ck. Yet, when they came to America, in order to steal the land and enslave Africans, they all had to agree to be “white” to make the arrangement successful.
