Craig Nova

Tolstoy says that the one item a writer should do is to explain the circumstances of the writer’s birth, but the more interesting question is just why someone became a writer.

As for me, I am unsure why I ended up spending so many years in a room, trying to write well, but I think it has to do with some basic facts, such as growing up in Hollywood, going to school at Berkeley and Columbia, and living in New York city.

My parent’s house was a little north of Mulholland Drive, and from there I could see the Universal back lot, and through my father’s field glasses I could see movies being made. This ruined going to the move theater, since I would go to the movies and see some guy slogging through what was supposed to be the savannah of Africa, but which I knew was just across the Hollywood freeway from my parents’ house. Surely, I learned that the elements of story telling were infinitely adjustable.

And, to be honest, growing up in Hollywood comes in handy for the book I am writing now, Double Solitaire, which is about a man who fixes the messes of famous people.

In New York, I thought of myself as a sort of young Balzac, that is, I was invited to fancy, black tie dinner parties on Park Avenue, and would then go home, change, and go to the Bowery to drink with the Hells Angles. The stories one collects doing this seem to want to be written.

My father in law was a fighter pilot who got shot down in WWII, and he spent three years in a German Prison camp, and he liked telling stories about this experience, and they just begged to be put into a book.

Jean Stafford, a Pulitzer prize short story writer, took me under her wing when I was in New York, and she had a profound influence on me.

Underneath it all, though, I think the critical moment was this. Up until I was fourteen, I was desperate to be a surgeon. Then, I read a book by Albert Camus, and that was it. I knew what I wanted to do.

And, of course, the actual writing life is addictive. The time spent writing a book is so enjoyable, so much like a drug, that after a certain point, you can’t live without it. And, of course, if you tell a story that you think is true, you have discovered something you believe. So, the writing life becomes a way of organizing many things, morality, loyalty, and what one should do with the time one has.