Alan Sincic

A Conversation with Alan Sincic

What advice would you give to somebody who is beginning their journey into the arts?

There are those who say that, in order to be a great artist (a visionary the term they use), you need to explore “altered states of consciousness” – drink or drugs or dangerous escapades out beyond the border of civilized society. They celebrate the tortured genius. I understand the dramatic appeal – Van Gogh with his bloody ear, what a great bio-pic – but I have always felt that we’re far too eager to embrace a logical fallacy here. Correlation is not causation. Hemingway and Woolf had turbulent lives that ended in suicide, but that turbulence is not what makes their writing memorable. In the end, what makes a writer great (or not so great) is their facility with words. Yes, life can be hell, and certainly everything you experience can serve the story, but – when all is said and done – you do your best work when you’re sober and sane. I’m with Flannery O’Connor here: Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.

What advice would you give to somebody who has already been writing for some time?

If you’ve been writing long enough, you’ve learned to be wary of would-be mentors. So call this an observation, an offhand remark from one ink-stained wretch to another. Do what you can to preserve that sense of wonder you had when you were a child. It’s all too easy for people who are clever with words to slap a label on every mystery, then spend the rest of their lives arguing about the label. The sun is not a curvature in the space/time continuum. The sun is a ball of fire.

How do you feel the future of writing will be affected by AI, in light of how quickly it is developing and being utilized in the arts?

It’s a bit like the question they asked painters at the advent of photography, or photographers in the era of the cell phone. If you’re out there selling a copy of what already exists, there’s no way that you can compete with a machine. Nor would you want to.

Which is why, when the machines arrived, the folks who’d been crafting faithful copies of functional items – the potters and the weavers and the smithies – either moved on to other endeavors, or clamored onto higher ground to lay claim to the mantel artist. Which makes a lot of sense. We have no heroic John Henry stories of a scrivener in a head-to-head battle with a xerox machine. Why? Because a scrivener is little more than an automaton. An artist, on the other hand – a literary artist – pours the whole of himself into every page he writes. If you think of a work of art as a re-creation of the cosmos as seen through the eyes of a fellow participant – a window into and through the mind of another – then art is, by definition, personal.

Why does this matter? Because, for good or for ill, we are each of us a cosmos unto ourselves – a singularity. Which sounds awesome until you realize (a) you are the only inhabitant in this little goldfish bowl of the brain, (b) you are surrounded by other singularities equally imprisoned, and (c) we’ve all been dropped into a much larger cosmos over which we have little control. Think of all those mornings you wake with a shock of discovery. I am not God. The world does not obey me.

What a boon to the spirit then to visit, now and again, a poem or a story or a novel hand-crafted by a fellow prisoner, a little pocket cosmos over which you exercise – open, close, pause, repeat – a godlike power to explore at will. In the act of reading, we commune with the mind of another. I’m less alone when I encounter, on the page, another I.

Where does AI come in? Well, what is AI? AI is a chorus, an amalgam of a billion voices. Not much consolation when what I’m yearning to hear is the voice of another loner, like me.

What was it that made you decide to start writing?

Let me go way back here, long before I could even hold a pencil. I’m safe on my mother’s lap, her arms around me. The object in our hands – the big volume of Childcraft that comes with the set of World Book Encyclopedias on the shelf – seems to possess a power of its own that travels, like gravity or magnetism, through the invisible air. It sounds out – the words, they sound out -- not from the painting on the page, or the binding, or the red leather bookmark with the embossment of the bear claw in the foil of gold, but, as if by magic, from out the very center of my mother’s body. Nursery rhymes and stories all buzzing with danger – the witch in Hansel and Gretel, the wolf in Little Red Riding Hood, the Jabberwock. I can feel the hum – my little body a sounding board – even before the syllables all round up into shape. Once upon a time…

How do you get yourself through a period of writer’s block?

If you assume that you need to be in a writing mood to write, then woe betide. I have to keep reminding myself that no, I am not a seer, a pipe for the gods to play through. I’m a craftsman. An architect some of the time, sure, but much of the time, a simple bricklayer, one word at a time. There’s always a task at hand. After all, this whole business of assembling sentences is so devious, so hypnotically intricate, you can walk up to any pile or stack or rubble of words and set to work. Many times I begin by fixing things – sharpen the image, quicken the rhythm, untangle the syntax – only to find in the end that, without even realizing it, I’ve broken new ground. Maybe not a cathedral, okay, but look at that bed of mortar there where the stretcher and the header meet! Not so bad for a day’s work.

How has your time on the stage impacted your perspective on the world at large, and writing in particular?

It got me to thinking about what the stage and the page have in common. Playwrights economize their words, set designers their materials, actors their action. Unlike the moviemaker, for example, who sweeps everything — from the Himalayas to the dimple on the grain of pollen — into the eye of the camera, the set designer sifts. From out the avalanche plucks the items — and only those items — that serve the story. The shadow of a windmill conjures a prairie. In a billow of fabric the swell of the sea. In the palm of his hand Hamlet lifts the skull of Yorick. Alas…

It’s amazing, our ability to pick up on a simple visual cue. The moment we see the set, we complete the picture -- instantaneously fill in the missing pieces. It’s that same bit of evolutionary engineering that gave our apey ancestors an edge in the battle for survival. Look. Twitching up top the shrubbery there. Little black-and-orange strip of fuzzy rope that — Tiger! Run! It’s a tiger!

Writers practice the same bit of wizardry, but with even less to build on. No flesh-and-blood actor. No set. No sound. No lights. Nothing but marks on the page that stand for syllables of air. Out of a million possibilities, we pick the one gesture that reveals character. The chit-chat we sharpen to swordplay. Tuck a decade of battle into a parenthetical aside (I came, I saw, I conquered). Not that everybody has to play the minimalist, like Emily Dickenson with her poems no bigger than a doily. It simply means that every word is there for a reason. After all, when you think of Queequeg and Ahab and the whale – the universe he managed to cram between the covers of a book -- Melville was wonderfully succinct.

What are some unexpected challenges you’ve encountered in your career thus far, and what advice would you give to new writers as they encounter them?

There’s a temptation to daydream that when you finally -- after arduous effort -- write something really good, readers will, like bees to the bloom, magically gather. Good luck with that. But rather than talk about how difficult it is compete in the somewhat chaotic marketplace today – plenty of articles about the world of publishing – I think it’s worthwhile to ask what nudges any of us to write in the first place. For those who write for the money and the fame – for whom writing is the means to that end – the only relevant question is what does the market say? I wish them well, and among them are some good writers, but for those of us who are driven by other desires, who wouldn’t turn down the Maserati if offered, but who’d continue to write even if it led to a life of Ramen dinners and rattle-trap cars, what are we hoping to achieve? When you take the earthly rewards off the table, the question becomes a spiritual one.

Kafka despaired of an answer but continued to write in spite of the silence. Tolstoy set out to save the world. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote to glorify the Maker (The world is charged with the grandeur of God) even though in the end (typical writer) he declared himself inadequate. Something tells me that, if I’d been around back in the day, some fifteen thousand years ago, when a few oddballs with torches were crawling into the bowels of the earth to airbrush the imprint of their hand on the wall of the cave, I’d be among that cohort of the deranged. Something impels me to make stories that bear the print of my hand, regardless of how impractical or absurd it all seems. Why? Since I believe that there is something more than this life, I can answer, without irony, God only knows.

What advice would you give yourself today?

Think beyond the moment. Imagine the world one hundred, two hundred years from now. Will what I write today still be worth reading?

Also, regarding the dynamic between you two --what is the story of how you became acquainted? What is something that you admire in the other’s writing?

If I say at the coffee shop you’ll think we lead such dull lives we couldn’t possibly be real writers, so I’ll let you choose your own adventure – on a tramp steamer off the coast of Indonesia, in a brawl with Hemingway out back of a Parisian Bistro, selling encyclopedias door-to-door in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown. Go for it.

As for the writing, we both admire (for example) the poetry of Billie Collins, in particular the way he conjures up a speaking voice that echoes everyday conversation, or lands on metaphors that capture – in a few choice words – the flavor of a scene or a moment or a mood. It’s no surprise then I like the way Cole, in his poetry and prose, operates in much the same way: a voice that’s vernacular and, at the same time, witty and playful and deft. The poetry percolates up into the prose.

What are you working on now? Tell us a little about it, what makes it important for you to share?

Go to alansincic.com for links and a full accounting. Recent online publications include a nonfiction piece (The Greyhound) at The Plentitudes, a couple of stories (Eva and Mend) at Terrain.org, a sci-fi story (One Shot Beetle) at Hunger Mountain, and a comic/satirical piece (Congratulations) at Azure. Upcoming in print: short story The Winners in New Ohio Review, short story Roger Babson in The Florida Review, short story Potato Boy in Orison’s Best Spiritual Literature Anthology, and novel chapter The God Of The Gator in The Thomas Wolfe Review.