Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest Jay Bushman author of Novel Advice: Practical Wisdom for Your Favorite Literary Characters.

Jay writes for many kinds of media. Jay works at the intersection of traditional and emerging formats, reinterpreting and reimagining classic stories in new ways.   

He won an Emmy for his work as a writer and transmedia producer on the groundbreaking series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, an interactive adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

He was the co-creator and co-showrunner of the sequel interactive series, Welcome To Sanditon.

As a writer and producer at Fourth Wall Studios, Jay helped to create the Emmy-winning series Dirty Work, and wrote and created the show Airship Dracula. 

For his experimental work in social media storytelling—including writing one of the first Twitter novels—he was dubbed as “The Epic Poet of Twitter” by New Scientist Magazine, and an “Enterprising Fabulist” by Vanity Fair.

Norm: Good day Jay and thanks for participating in our interview. Was writing always a career move for you or did it grow into one?

Jay: My original background is in the theater and then film. When I started out, I thought of myself as a director, and I started writing to have my own material to make. But gradually I became more interested in the writing processing moved my focus to that.

Norm; What does your workday actually look like and where do you write?

Jay: I live in Los Angeles, and even before the pandemic, I usually wrote in my home office. I used to write in various coffee shops around town, but over the past 2 or 3 years, I’ve moved away from that.

My workday is variable, depending on the particular projects I’m working on, but in general I like to start work around 10 — which usually means sitting down at 10:30 and not really starting until about 11:30.

I’ll usually work with a few breaks straight through until about 5:30 or 6. I try to make sure I call the day to a close around 6 — it’s useful to have a clear demarcation between work time and home time, especially when you’re stuck at home all the time.

Norm;: Do you think about your reading public when you write? As a follow up, do you feel that writers, regardless of genre owe something to readers, if not, why not, if so, why and what would that be?

Jay: I’m always thinking about “the reader,” but often that reader is an imaginary construct based mostly on me and what I think and feel.

Often times I need to walk away from something I’ve written and come back later to see it with fresh eyes and try to imagine how the reader would see.

I’m not quite sure how to answer the question about what writers do or do not owe readers — something about the question seems inverted. The reader ultimately has all the power in the relationship — because they can always choose to stop reading. So perhaps I think the writer owes the reader their best attempt to create something that gets them to keep turning the page.

Norm: What do you think most characterizes your writing?

Jay: I would hope empathy and clarity. But ultimately that’s for the readers to decide

Norm: What advice can you give aspiring writers that you wished you had received, or that you wished you would have listened to?

Jay: I’m a recovering perfectionist. But what nobody could tell me, and what I had to figure out on my own is that perfectionism doesn’t look like what we thinks it does.

We believe the perfectionist looks at their work and thinks “This is good, but I can’t stop until it’s perfect.” But what actually happens is the perfectionist looks at their work at thinks, “everything I do is terrible and I can’t show this to anyone.”

Learn how to cut yourself some slack. And once you have, cut yourself even more.   

Norm: Do you write more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two? Please summarize your writing process.

Jay: A couple of years ago, I was diagnosed with ADHD. The discovery helped me to approach my process differently that’s led to a whole new way of working.

So now, I have a heavily structured and very rigid process in place to keep my projects moving forward. But within that process it gives me a ton of room to work intuitively. I find I need both in order to work effectively.  

Norm: How do you deal with criticism?

Jay: I try not to. If a project is done, it’s out of my hands and the experience belongs to the reader. There’s nothing I can do to change it then. I hope people like it, but if not, it’s not really any of my business. Which is what I keep telling myself, anyway.

Norm: What is the most challenging about your writing?

Jay: Getting my fingers to keep up with my brain (I’m a terrible typist)

Norm: Please tell our readers a little about your book, Novel Advice: Practical Wisdom for Your Favorite Literary Characters.

Jay: Novel Advice is a collection of advice columns from people writing in to an “agony aunt” for help with the issues they’re struggling with in their lives. But it just so happens that the people writing the letters are characters from across famous literature, and their problems come from their stories.

Ophelia needs help figuring out what to do about her boyfriend. Dr. Jekyll is trying to find work-life balance. Victor Frankenstein is thinking of dropping out of school. Mrs. Bennet can’t get her husband to take their family financial problems seriously.

The person who is answering their letter isn’t just any agony aunt — she’s Aunt Antigone, who gives them the benefit of her long expertise in living a tragic life. 

The book is grouped into chapters about various topics — young love, marriage, career, education, health, etc. — and each chapter contains letters by characters from all across the canon.

Dr. Watson, Boo Radley, and D’Artagnan all ask for help with navigating friendships. Anne Shirley, Holden Caulfield, and Candide have school troubles. Gregor Samsa, Captain Ahas, and Patrick Bateman all write in looking for medical advice.

Aunt Antigone responses to all of the letters by treating their problems with the utmost seriousness, as if the writers were real people grappling with real issues.  

The book is structured like a low-key guessing game. None of the characters use their actual names, but sign their letter with pseudonyms, like “Mirthless in Manhattan,” “Hiding in Plain Sight” and “Fourth Wheel.”

You can read the book like the letters are riddles, and see how long it takes to figure out who is writing. Or you can skip all that — all the characters are clearly labelled in the table of contents. It’s not meant to be super challenging. (But there is a secret message hidden in one of the letters. Let me know if you find it.)

Norm: What motivated you to write the book?

Jay: I’ve always loved adapting classic literature and retelling classic stories in new ways.

One of my pet peeves is when we as readers or audience members allow ourselves to think of classic characters without empathy or understanding — it’s not Hamlet’s fault that we’ve been hearing him trying to answer “to be or not to be” for 400 years, for him it’s always the first time!

I liked the idea of writing something that would approach each of the characters as if their story problems had the same weight as real world problems.

Norm: What were your goals and intentions in this book, and how well do you feel you achieved them?

Jay: I wanted to create something that would give book lovers a way to interact with their favorite characters in a new and fun way, while also using their stories as a way to approach universal themes that we all still grapple with today.

I also hope that someone much pick up the book because they like one character, and then  get introduced to another character they don’t know very well and get inspired to read  the story they come from. I hope I’ve achieved this, but again, that’s up to the readers to tell me

Norm: What kind of research did you do to write this book?

Jay: A ton of research — I read, re-read and studied several dozen of the greatest novels, plays and short stories in the western canon. Some I was very familiar with but others I did not know at all. 

Norm: What challenges or obstacles did you encounter while writing your book? How did you overcome these challenges?

Jay: With such a wide palette to choose from, there were challenges to make sure that the selection of characters was broad enough. I could have written the entire book from Shakespeare or Dickens characters. But I felt it needed to have a wider range and I wanted to try to get some more contemporary characters in, too.

I also wanted to push myself to not just rely on my favorite characters and books. I have a lot of strong feelings about characters from Austen and Melville, but less so with Hemingway and Steinbeck. So it just meant reading and research a ton, and remembering that there are no weak characters in the book — for every one of these characters, there’s someone out there who loves them and I wanted to make sure I didn’t do anything to make them feel like I was criticizing them for caring.  

And while I was writing this book, the pandemic started, we went into quarantine. The whole final part of writing the book happened while my father was dying from covid. I wrote about it in the afterword, and dedicated the book to him.  

Norm: If someone can only buy one book this month, why should it be yours?

Jay: There are 73 stories in one book. So you really get your bang for the buck.

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and Novel Advice: Practical Wisdom for Your Favorite Literary Characters?

Jay: You can find out more about me at my website, jaybushman.com. I also have a newsletter, Fabulist Rabbit Holes, at jaybushman.substack.com 

Norm: What is next for Jay Bushman?

Jay: I have several projects in the works at the moment including another book, which will be a radical modernization of a classic story that stars one of the characters in Novel Advice…but I’m not saying which one yet. 

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, if you could invite three writers, dead or alive, for dinner, who would they be?

Jay: Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, just to watch all the uncomfortable sexual tension between them. And Mary Shelley seems like she’d be a good hang.

Norm: Thanks once again and good luck with all of your future endeavors.

Jay: Thanks!