I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.
I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.
I do a first draft as passionately and as quickly as I can. I believe a story is valid only when it's immediate and passionate, when it dances out of your subconscious. If you interfere in any way, you destroy it.
I always give my students exercises where they really have to open a vein and bleed all over the paper and that's the way you get the important characters. Sooner or later every writer worth reading writes a story his mother wouldn't read and having to get that stuff out is part of one's growth as a writer.
When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don't let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.
My writing is jagged and harsh, I want it to remain that way; I don't want it smoothed out.
The kind of true-life writing that is fun to read - that makes an ally of the reader - is the kind that you are so nervous about putting down on paper that you lock the Word file with a secret password and encrypt it - and all of it.
Sean Black writes like a punch to the gut.
