Meet John Young

 

We were lucky to catch up with John Young recently and have shared our conversation below.

Hi John, thanks for sharing your insights with our community today. Part of your success, no doubt, is due to your work ethic and so we’d love if you could open up about where you got your work ethic from?

I relate to what Kurt Vonnegut said: “I spend a lot of time farting around.” Friends and family point to my daily routine of getting to my desk between 6:00 and 7:00 each morning and my three published books (and a fourth about to go out to seek a publisher) and admire my work ethic. But I spend a lot of time looking around, listening, talking to people, paying attention to things–in other words farting around.

I suppose it does take discipline to get up and write five or six days a week. My example came from my mother who was a self-taught, self-employed fashion designer. She was up and working before I got ready for school every day and was back at it after dinner most nights. She never got to attend college, but she put four kids through college, mostly by herself. (My father wasn’t exactly the most reliable partner or parent, but that’s a story for another day.)

One of the most important lessons my mother taught me was to pursue work you can love, and then do it with passion. She put in the effort and embraced both the artistry and the craft of her work.

That’s what it takes to write fiction too. Embrace the art as well as the skill. You have to want it deeply, and you have to pursue it with passion and effort. It’s too hard otherwise. The world is full of unfinished novels because it’s damn hard to finish one.

When I struggle with a writing project, I think of my mother–Charline Cain Young Turner–and I get back to work.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I write literary fiction. People ask me what that means, and I end up defining it by what it’s not. It’s not romance, not mystery, not horror, not suspense, not sci-fi, not historical.

At the same time, my three books–the novels Getting Huge and When the Coin is in the Air, as well as Fire in the Field & Other Stories–have love and romance (and a little sex), slices of history, and suspenseful scenes as well as surprising, even mysterious, twists. And always bits of humor.

Sometimes find myself saying the terrifying thing (terrifying because it sounds so arrogant and pompous) that my writing strives for the artistic, and even–oh, God, here it comes–something people might read a 100 years from now.

At the same time, I want more readers and would love to see big sales. Still, I can only write the stories that are in me and hope they connect with readers.

Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?

Be willing to write poorly in order to revise and write well.

Embrace effort because inspiration doesn’t show up every day.

Read a lot and learn what good writing looks like, also pay attention as you move through the world. See, hear, smell, feel.

Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?

There’s a lot to unpack in this question. When you’re young, it’s best to be broadly curious and learn about everything you can. Be a generalist. Then as you get older, develop a speciality where you have natural talent–and layer on skills to go deep and become an expert. But always remain curious and seek to learn new things outside your expertise. Never stop growing. (Otherwise, you’ll bore people to death at parties.)

When I was a teenager, I loved nature and wanted to study forestry in college. Then I discovered theater and Shakespeare. Through that, I fell in love with literature and studied English and theater in college. And then writing in graduate school.

Today, when you glance at my novels Getting Huge or When the Coin is in the Air, nature and science keep surfacing in my writing–as do bits of history. That’s certainly true of the novel I’m finishing now. For any artist (or for anyone who wants to be interesting at parties) a lifelong, broad curiosity is key.

Contact Info:

Image Credits

All photos by Michael Wilson

Book Cover designs by Nick Young

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