[Archive 2008-04-17] Eric Bogosian on writing and the creative urge

Historical archive — originally published 2008-04-17. This report records what was known on that date. It is not current news; subsequent events may have changed the situation. Wikinews closed in May 2026.

Currently at work on his third novel, tentatively titled The Artist, Bogosian spoke with David Shankbone about the craft of writing and his life as a creative.

Eric Bogosian: The Talk Radio role was pretty significant, I mean, that film is still out there. And it continues to draw attention to itself. I pretty much starred in three movies; Talk Radio, Under Siege 2, and a film called Wonderland with Val Kilmer that I did a few years ago, in which I played a--anyway, you can look it up on IMDB. But it's, um--that was a pretty insane role.

EB: Well, I'll play anything if I like the role, if I like the writing; if I think that the character has a real agenda, is an interesting character. I avoid what I think of as "furniture roles,"--I don't care how large or small the role is. For instance, my part in the Woody Allen movie Deconstructing Harry on the page is a small role. It's only a few pages long. But it's a great character, and it's a memorable character.

EB: And it's Woody Allen, yeah. I'm three of the voices on Beavis & Butthead Do America. I have had this really exciting time of being working with Taylor Hackford and Woody Allen and Robert Altman and Paul Schrader. But also, Mike Judge, Frank Zappa, Sonic Youth... These are wide-ranging in the different kinds of things I've worked on. Those are some of the more prominent things. That play in 1994 was a big deal; the film that came out of it is a big deal. Around 2000 I started doing the books, and now I'm on my third novel. That's sort of the overview of the whole thing, at least from my perspective.

EB: In temperament, I'm best suited to the writing, but it isn't what I enjoy the most. I mean, I really enjoy acting, because it's a lot of fun. But there's a certain self-involvement that's required with acting, and a certain thick skin that I just don't have. I'm much more a writer, because I can have a homebody quality, and I can be in the house; I can be away from people. I have sort of a problem in that I like people a lot, and I really hate people, and so it's kind of difficult to decide where I'm at on any given day.

DS: When you tackled your first novel, was there ever a time when you were like, 'I don't even know how people get an entire novel out of their heads,' and you had to actually sit down and plot it? How did you approach your first novel?

EB: Well, my first prose book wasn't a novel; it's a novella called, Notes from the Underground. The way I did that--and this is a long time ago--I wrote it by creating diary entries and just filling them in every day. So every day, I would give myself the assignment of writing a diary entry for this character. And I'd say that that's pretty much the easiest way to sit down and write a book, because you say to yourself every day, "I'm going to write one of these things," and one day it'll be long, and another day it'll be short. I eventually found out what that character was about. My current book I'm writing now is also written in journal entry form, although in a much more complex way. When I sat down to write Mall, which was really my first novel, I wrote it by understanding that I'm not the most sophisticated prose writer. I had been writing a lot of screenplays and even some television, so I had learned a lot about how to tell a story. I decided to create a very clear spine on which to hang a lot of things, a very clear arc. That arc was kind of a thriller. Mall is about a guy who's a disgruntled employee and he goes to a shopping mall to shoot the place up. And it was just kind of strange, because since I've written this book this keeps happening! This happened a few days ago.

EB: What the book's really about is people who are there at the mall at the time. There's some kids in the food court; there's a woman shopping; and there's another guy shopping for something else. A security guard. All these people get pulled into what happens, and that affects them. That system of writing a story--it's a pinwheel narrative, which has become very popular in movies these days, where you go from character to character to character; all the stories are happening at the same time--that was a great way for me to focus on what I do best, which is to sit with each character, but at the same time have a very clear story. The reason that I went into the prose book world was the nature of audiences. I mainly had written theater, and that audience is such a narrow bandwidth of people, as in those who actually go to the theater at this point. You know demographics and age and so forth, I--they don't actually really reflect even my tastes. Because it's generally theater's for sort of an upper middle class--

EB: I think of people like myself; people who like the kind of movies I like, the kind of people who read the kind of books I read and listen to my kind of music. contemporary, you know, just like what somebody who maybe is in their thirties might be going to see or something, because it's got more energy and action and--that's the kind of stuff I like. I like louder, stronger, more edgy kind of stuff. That doesn't exist in the theater for the most part, I think because of Amazon.

EB: No, with the advent of online bookstores the audience exploded about ten years ago. All of a sudden there were audiences for books that weren't upper middle class audiences, but a younger audience that wanted to read more edgy stuff. And you saw the rise of [Dave] Eggers and David Foster Wallace; really interesting writers suddenly came to the fore and I thought to myself, I can write a book and find an audience--they can be out there anywhere. They can be in Alberta, Canada, and they can get my book. But if I write a play--the play world is just a really different world. I discovered that when I wrote a book, that the book world is very crowded. And in fact, I'm already a member of the very-hard-to-get-into theater world, so I have a greater edge; I have a greater sort of built-in advantage when I work in the theater, because I'm a bona fide theater guy. You can walk into any bookstore, and you will see in terms of literary fiction that there's going to be twenty new titles every two weeks. They're going to be there for a few weeks, and then they're going to be gone and there will be twenty more titles. And every once in a while, one breaks out, but they're all competing with each other.

Source and licence

Text adapted from Eric Bogosian on writing and the creative urge by Wikinews contributors under CC BY 2.5. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. Contributor history.