Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest John Blumenthal. John is a former editorial staffer at Esquire Magazine and an editor/writer/columnist at Playboy Magazine.

He is the award-winning author of the novels, What's Wrong with Dorfman?, Millard Fillmore, Mon Amour, Three and a Half Virgins and The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird

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He has also written for television and co-authored the movies Blue Steak (Sony) and Short Time (Fox).

His work has appeared in Esquire, Playboy, TV Guide, American Woman, Publishers Weekly, Punch, Salon and The Huffington Post.

Norm: Good day John and thanks for participating in our interview.

John: Thanks for inviting me, Norm.

Norm: How long have you been writing? And how long did it take you to get your first major book contract? As a follow up, was writing always a career move for you or did it grow into one?

John: It feels like I’ve been writing since the advent of papyrus but I actually began scribbling when I was about seven or eight so there was real modern paper and Wite-Out.

I had a Royal typewriter at the time. Weighed a ton. Photocopiers did not exist. If you needed to cut and paste, you had to use scissors and glue. Totally primitive compared to today. I would attempt to write novels but seldom got past the words “Chapter” and “One.” Eventually, I made it to a first paragraph but I could never figure out where I was going with it. 

My first serious book contract was with Simon & Schuster but I’m not sure you could actually call it serious because the advance basically amounted to cab fare from La Guardia to Manhattan. I was in my late 20s. The book for which I received this paltry advance was titled The Official Hollywood Handbook.

It was a spoof of just about every aspect of Hollywood from agents to prestige cars to the ABCs of Advanced Pretense.

I had been an editor for Playboy for five years, which is another story, and they transferred me from Chicago to Los Angeles because I’d been doing a movie column and it made no sense to write it in Chicago.

Once I got to LA, I started writing screenplays on the side like every other wannabe schmo and, although success eluded me for the first five years, I learned enough about the film Industry to lampoon it. 

As for the third part of your question, writing wasn’t really a career move for me in the usual sense. My writing was considered clever by my elementary school teachers; in prep school I founded a humor magazine and was associate editor of the school newspaper; at 23, I managed to land a job in the editorial department of Esquire and they let me contribute to the famous Dubious Achievement Awards.  Then there was an eight-year stint at Playboy where I was considered to be the funny guy, followed by books, then TV, then movies, then novels. So, I suppose it was an ambition from the start. 

Norm: Why do you write? Do you have a theme, message, or goal for your books? What do you think most characterizes your writing? Do you write more by logic or intuition, or some combination of the two? Please summarize your writing process. 

John: Why do I write? My primary goal was to attract literary groupies and librarians but, alas, that never happened. The other glib answer would be because it didn’t involve commuting or that I’m not much good at anything else.

Did you now that Mark Twain wrote in bed? But, the true answer is that I just love doing it. Not screenwriting as much because scripts are collaborative and I am way too egotistical to like collaboration, although I di collaborate.  

But I think I’m happiest when I’m writing a novel. After the novels are done, everything that happens after that doesn’t even come close to the joy of writing. It’s with great reluctance that I hand over the manuscript to my agent and then wait for rejections or sales. I’m not wild about having to promote it either. Nowadays, publishers are very concerned about your social media exposure as if that’s going to actually help you sell books. They ask you about it and if it’s insufficient, they instruct you to enlarge it. 

According to Wikipedia, I’m a humorist and I suppose that’s true—the movies were both comedies—but although there is lots of humor in my novels, there is also drama and emotion and, in some cases, an actual message although I never plan that and in fact it often surprises me. 

I suppose I write intuitively in that I don’t use outlines or plan things out much. I like the uncharted journey. I usually have a basic structure in mind and a voice in my head, but never complete plots and seldom an ending. Sometimes just an opening line. The first line of my new novel, The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird is “Call me Ishmael.”

When I wrote that, I had had no idea that some unknown wannabe author named Melville, had already used that line. Live and learn. 

As for the actual physical process, I generally start writing at 9:00 AM and stop at 1:00 PM. If I go longer than that I get diminishing returns. When I sit down at the computer, I usually know where I’m going in terms of the next stage of the plot, although I’m not sure why that is. I seldom stare at an empty screen. Yet, throughout the day, if an idea occurs to me, I will make notes and then integrate them into the novel if they turn out to be worthwhile. Occasionally, I even wake up at night with an idea and write it down. 

I’m a fairly fast writer. I think that ability originated from my experience working for my county newspaper during several summer vacations. As it was a daily, the deadlines for stories forced us to write as fast as we could---there was no time to sit in front of a blank piece of paper. You wouldn’t last long.

This carried over to my days at Playboy and Esquire and also with scripts and books.  I can do a first draft quickly but I spend months rewriting.

Most amateur authors or wannabes don’t understand that rewriting is nearly as important as creating the first draft.

(Fun fact. The newspaper I wrote for, the Middletown Times-Herald Record was Hunter S. Thompson’s first writing gig. He was a reporter there 10 years before I was. My understanding is that he was fired for breaking the paper’s vending machine twice.) 

To continue--Generally, my primary goal is to invent an engaging plot and sympathetic characters but I suppose that’s every writer’s objective. I am not wild about description. I hate it when authors go on and on about landscapes and the weather and the sky and so forth, especially if that stuff takes up the first 40 pages of the book. Generally, if I am reading a novel and nothing happens for the first 40 or 50 pages, I will usually toss it because, in my opinion, the writer is not doing his or her job, which is to grab the reader. I prefer interaction between characters, which is often achieved through dialogue so there is usually a lot of dialogue in my novels.   

Norm: What trends in the book world do you see and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?

John: Like a lot of veteran authors, I think Amazon may be hurting the publishing business. It is certainly changing it. Of course, there’s no denying that ebooks and Kindles are ingenious because there is no longer any real need to spend huge amounts of money on printing books. or on fulfilment and it appears that more people are reading. All of that is good.

But the problem is that, due to the ease and low prices of self-publishing, everybody now thinks they are an author. I see Facebook profiles in which the person refers to him or herself as “John Doe Author” or “Author Jane Doe” as if the title is actually part of their names.

Most of them are not authors---in most cases you can’t spend your whole life working as a bus driver and then suddenly call your self an author. You have to earn it. Besides, what is so glamorous about being an author? It’s lonely, tedious and often heartbreaking. I don’t see anybody on Facebook calling themselves “John Doe Neurosurgeon” or “Jane Doe Rock Star”. Why just Author? 

Of course, some of these self-proclaimed authors can actually write well but most of the time I see self-published books with horrendous grammatical errors or stories that make no sense.  

I think self-publishing probably diminishes the reading audience as well because there are so many more books available. Also, bookstores seem to be disappearing—the chains anyway. There are still a lot of independents but I‘m not sure how they can continue to exist. 

That said, I confess that I have self-published in the past, once in 2011 and once in in 2015. The first was a novel called Three and a Half Virgins. My agent said she probably could have sold it to a mainstream publisher but a few writer friends of mine convinced me that there was more money in self-publishing.

I’m not in it for the money but, as I mentioned before, my advances up to that point had been awful so I decided to give it ago. I think I ended up making about $1000. 

The second time, it involved and ebook of  a novel called What’s Wrong With Dorfman. St. Martin’s Press had published it in 2003 but there were no ebooks then and St. Martin’s was not interested in doing an ebook version in 2015 so I got the rights back and self-published it. Again, I got bupkis. I will never do it again. 

On the bright side, as I said before, I believe there are more readers than ever before. Social media has given birth to Goodreads which has millions of readers; Facebook literary groups have sprung up—in fact I started my own group some years ago called “Author, Author!” There are over 2300 members and the posts and comments are quite lively.

In fact, the Acknowledgments page in The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird is dedicated to readers. In fact, here is an excerpt:

“Since The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird is the story of two people whose lives are utterly consumed by classic literature, I think it appropriate to pay homage to those who love to read, that noble minority of souls who still look to books for engaging stories and endearing characters, for clever turns of phrase, for the joys of well-wrought interior monologue.” 

You can read the rest of it on my WEBSITE  or at the end of the book of course. 

As for the second part of your question, I really have no clue where the book industry is heading. Will it somehow involve Artificial Intelligence or microchips implanted in your brain so that you can read a 1000-- page book in 3 seconds? Who knows? 

Norm: What has been your greatest challenge (professionally) that you’ve overcome in getting to where you’re at today?

John: I suppose my greatest challenge was getting a job in the publishing business. It was in 1972, I had just graduated college and there was a recession going on.

Jobs in publishing were hard enough to get even in the best of economic periods so the recession just made it harder. I wrote letters to Time and Newsweek and more than a few newspapers but I received nothing but rejections. The interesting thing was that I actually received personal letters from Managing Editors of fairly prestigious magazines. That would  probably not happen today. 

Anyway, with no publishing jobs on the horizon, I went to Nantucket Island and started a house-painting business which was lucrative but not my idea of an exciting career. One day, during a bookstore visit, I noticed that Esquire had a cover story on Groucho Marx. I was a huge fan so I bought it and read the piece.

Later, flipping through the pages of the magazine, I happened to come upon the Editor’s Column and it was about how Esquire was looking for a new editor and that anybody interested should send a letter or suggest ideas and so on. I figured what the hell and wrote a letter about how I was totally unqualified for the job. Weeks passed with no answer and I had forgotten about it but one day at the end of August, I received a reply from the Editor-in-Chief of Esquire, the famous Harold Hayes. He liked my letter and flew me in to New York for an interview. I started as a fact-checker but the understanding was that I would be groomed for the editor job. The rest is history. 

Norm: Please tell our audience a little about your most recent book, The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird. As a follow up, how did you become involved with the subject or theme of your book?

John: I’m incredibly bad at summing up my books in a way that will inspire people to read them so if you don’t mind, I’d rather just give you the official synopsis. I wrote about half of it; my editor wrote the other half. Here it is: 

“Beset by a profound lack of social skills, an obsession with classic literature, the inability to resist beginning his narrative with the words “Call me Ishmael” and the peculiar speaking style of a Dickens character, Ishmael Archer seems destined for the lonely life of a literature professor at the academic backwater of Longfellow College. While he yearns for female companionship, a recent acrimonious divorce followed by a series of romantic disasters have left him in a state of emotional fragility. 

Struggling to pay his rent, he is obliged to undertake the dreaded task of teaching a summer creative writing class. Convinced that he will be saddled with a group of student malcontents who care not a whit for Tolstoy or Dickens, Ishmael is delighted to encounter the luminescent Abigail Bird, whose passion for literature equals his own. Unfortunately, her past failures at love also equal his own so their budding romance proceeds undeclared as they both dance around the subject. 

This undefined relationship is cut abruptly short when Abigail suffers an accident that causes fiction to become fact and vice versa. Although his she is inexplicably changed, Ishmael decides to continue his courtship but must find a way to connect with the Abigail Bird with whom he had originally fallen in love. Will Ishmael’s strange new courtship of Abigail succeed? Will she change back to her original state? Will he find the nerve to risk rejection and declare his love? Did she love him prior to her accident? The novel is peppered with a cast of eccentric characters—a college dean obsessed with orchids, a Greek landlord with a deep affinity for the works of Ernest Hemingway, and a self-important writer who vies with Ishmael for Abigail’s affections.” 

How did I become involved with the subject or theme of the book? I’m not sure actually. I wanted to write a love story about two people who are obsessed with classic literature. Most of my novels are in some ways autobiographical---in this case, I too am obsessed with novels in general. All of my fiction is in the first person. I don’t know why that is but I knew I wanted to come up with a narrator whose voice resembled that of a Dickens character---I thought that would be fun and it was. This was one of those cases in which I loved writing in Ishmael’s voice so much that I didn’t want to stop. My agent convinced me that it was time to stop and let the novel go. I almost never contradict my agent.  

Norm: How did you go about creating the character of Ishmael Archer? Is there much of you in the character?

John: Oops, I think I just answered that question. My bad.

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

John: My goal, as always, was to write an entertaining, quirky book that readers would find engaging. I wanted them to love the characters so much that they wanted to keep reading. I wanted there to be both humor and drama. I wanted people to laugh and cry. My greatest fear is that readers will become bored so I try very hard to engage them from the start, either with irresistible characters or some mystery hidden early in the plot. I find that some authors forget that their primary job is to entertain.

Did I accomplish that? I don’t know. I suppose ultimately the reactions of readers will determine that.

Norm: What has your other work taught you that you have been able to apply to The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird?

John: I did learn something important about endings. In the past I have struggled over endings. In several cases I was totally unable to come up with a suitable ending and eventually abandoned those books for that reason. What I learned was this: throw a lot of balls in the air while you’re writing. In other words, construct enough plot points so that at least one of them could serve as an ending. I was surprised at how well that worked with Abigail Bird.

Norm: Did you see your book from an outline or did it come from a completed manuscript?

John: As I said earlier, I never use outlines but let me elaborate. Outlines work for some people but not for me. For one thing, I don’t like to be restricted. More importantly, I figure that if I know what’s going to happen every step of the way, the reader might too. If, on the other hand, I surprise myself, the hope is that the reader will be surprised as well.

Of course, you probably need an outline if you are writing a mystery. I can’t imagine doing it without one.  And film producers will usually compel you to come up with an outline before they allow you to commence writing the script. They’re paying you a lot of money for writing the movie so they don’t really want any surprises. They want the story that you originally pitched. 

Norm: What was the most difficult part of writing this book and what did you enjoy most about writing this book? 

John: To be honest I’m not that great at plotting. I think I’m pretty good at character, style and dialogue, but plotting does not come naturally. I try to compensate for this by creating stories that are more character-driven. So plotting was sort of difficult for Abigail. Love stories are hard to plot anyway---the pacing has to be right---so it was doubly hard with this one. 

I think the thing I enjoyed the most was writing in Ishmael’s voice. I truly love this character and his verbose, archaic style of speech. It was hard for me to stop when the book was done, although books are never really done—you can always find ways to make them better. Some readers have found Ishmaels’s mode of speech difficult at first but eventually most of them have found it charming and original. At least that’s been the reaction so far. 

Norm: Where can our readers find out more about you and your work?

John: Far be it from me to boast (that’s a lie) but there are numerous sources. MY WEBSITE is a good source. (My blog is attached to it.)

Also, my GOODREADS  AUTHOR  PAGE

My WIKIPEDIA PAGE

My HUFFINGTON POST PAGE that contains over 100 pieces.

My FACEBOOK PAGE

John: The near future? Trying to promote The Strange Courtship of Abigail Bird. A few years from now? Hopefully writing the movie version of Abigail. After that, writing my acceptance speech for the National Book Award. The immediate future? Possibly a nap. 

Norm: As this interview comes to an end, what question do you wish that someone would ask about your books, but nobody has? 

John:  Hmm. You just asked it, Norm. 

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

John: Thank you.