Today I am super stoked to have Andy Marino on the blog.  Andy Marino’s debut novel, Unison Spark, will be out November 8th from Henry Holt.  It is a fantastic book and if you don’t take me at my word, check out my review tomorrow!

When I was a teenager I had my sights set on art school. I wasn’t planning to be a writer because what I really loved to do was paint. In high school I spent free periods in the art room and after-school hours haunting the backstage storage area that contained the crusty old brushes and a paint-flecked industrial sink. I learned the songs for the high school musicals by sheer osmosis, just from hanging around and painting a cornfield backdrop or faux-Victorian cityscape while the cast rehearsed a stubbornly infectious song from OKLAHOMA! or OLIVER for the millionth time. In an emergency show-must-go-on situation, I probably could have been an understudy.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but joining a team of set designers was a way to make a mostly solitary art form collaborative and social. Whenever the cast wasn’t rehearsing, we’d get to blast music and run around in the surreal mess of the half-finished sets. This kind of painting didn’t feel like work, and it didn’t really feel like “making art” either. It just felt like fun.

What I’m getting at is this: if you’ve never burst out of a fake door onto an empty stage accompanied by the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, you haven’t truly lived.

When I decided to become a writer (painting didn’t stick), I learned pretty quickly that there was no other way to finish a novel except by sitting alone for a few hours every day. The two-step process I developed involved 1) staring at a blank Word document and 2) occasionally typing something on it. This went against everything I’d discovered to be fun – namely, creating stuff with other people. Not only that, but writing fiction required actively avoiding people in favor of being alone. It required a degree of rudeness. Most importantly, it required ignoring the sweet embrace of social media, the ultimate modern-life distraction that inspired UNISON SPARK in the first place.

Once I became a part of the publishing process (getting an agent, selling the novel, receiving editorial feedback, revising), the things I had been teaching myself to accept about the lonely grind of writing no longer applied. Being the absolute god-like ruler of a fictional world is pretty cool, but relying on criticism and advice to make that world a better place is an amazing and unique experience. It’s not the same kind of collaboration as creating a stage set or playing in a band (unless you’re doing something deeply weird, your agent and editor aren’t sitting at the computer with you, pressing the keys) but it can be just as awesome when some tricky bit of narrative falls into place because of an open exchange of ideas.

It’s this falling-into-place (the notorious click!) that makes writing fiction so interesting and worthwhile. And it’s made reading more fun, too: whenever I come across an ingenious convergence of events or stunning revelation, I send a little psychic shimmer of congratulations to the author because I recognize the click.

So grab some friends, crank up the Mortal Kombat soundtrack, and make some art. Let me know how it goes.