Film Courage: You say a writer should be writing every day?
Author and Instructor Jonathan Blum: Yeah.
Film Courage: Do we always need to know what the story is?
Jonathan: Hmm I always need to be writing a story I love being in it. I mean it is my favorite thing
it does bring me happiness it doesn't bring me happiness every second but when things are going
well and when I'm interested in a story and excited and eager to find certain things out
and how I connect one thing with another thing I love being in it that's like that's what I like to
do with my time I mean essentially since I was like in my late teens time has always been the
most important thing to me and when I say time I mean time to write so I've always had jobs or I've
always made my living in such a way that I could at least have maybe a couple hours in the morning
like I worked for nine years teaching ESL but I taught you know like afternoon and
evening classes so that I could maybe have a little time in the morning or
you know it doesn't work out every day I mean but most days it does and I
love spending my time that way I love seeing where stories are gonna go I love sort of technical
challenges I love trying to write different kinds of stories than I've done before and
like I was saying earlier like the improvisational nature of storytelling is very attractive to me
and it's a way of dealing with both difficult parts of life and also joyful parts of life
recently
recently I was reminded of this Hasidic saying that I read about many many years ago in a Heschel
book and it goes basically like this there are three ways that a person expresses deep sorrow
on the first level the person cries on the next level up the person remains silent
and at the highest level the person knows how to make his sorrow into a song
and I think when I read that 20-30 years ago or whenever it was
I thought that's it you know like that's what I would like to spend my time doing is trying to
write songs and for me stories have something in common with songs like it's it's it's the thing
that you're trying to do so that your sorrow will have a form and a melody and I don't know,
stories are built on many things other than sorrow but to have a place for that when
there often doesn't seem a place for it in real life is it's very dear to me like writing is
it's in many ways the most precious thing to me and off topic topics for a moment you came to
LA to be a songwriter yeah did you read that in an interview a little birdie told me yeah okay
so you flew to L.A and I did I bought a one-way plane ticket I was 18 years old
and yeah I wanted to be a songwriter I already was writing songs they weren't
very good they were terrible but yeah and what style sorry everything folk rock blues
yeah but I mean what happened what that was you know there's so many talented musicians in
Los Angeles and I was taking guitar lessons from a very talented musician and I had to you know
accept that I don't have the talent to do this like I may enjoy playing music for myself but
in terms of you know being able to do this as a vocation I don't I don't have it
and it wasn't that long after that that sort of short stories presented themselves to me
in a literature class at a community college and it was like an immediate match like I felt
like I can do this and it's very it feels very related to what I was already doing but you know
I don't know it seemed like something that I could be cut out cut out for and
you know I've had a lot of losses as everyone does
but I've fortunately held on to this you know for all of my adult life and it's been the thing
that's giving given me sort of a continuity not to mention you know like this underpinning of meaning
have you ever written a short story about the music industry God you know that first
that I was telling you that the what happened was I took a fiction writing workshop with
Marilyn Robinson at Skidmore College One Summer and she's the one that gave that prompt write
something from the point of view of an unreliable narrator and I had been writing a story about
a jazz pianist but the story wasn't working for many reasons and I had been working on
it for years and when she gave that prompt I thought aha I'm going to have this jazz pianist
be the narrator because what I was doing is I was it was a third person story and he was one
of the characters in the story but what's special about him is in his mind and I wasn't capturing
that using this particular third person point of view we're back to structure right like you have
to find the structure that's right for the story not a pre-existing structure but the structure
that works for that particular piece and once I realized ah it's his story he's you know because
he's bipolar and his wife has committed suicide he he's had a lot of difficulties and the story needs
to come from inside of him and once I understood that that was what was necessary to tell the story
I think I wrote it in like three days I mean it was it was very it was I knew exactly what
had to be done but again if I hadn't spent all of those years trying to write it in other ways
you know it's paying your dues you gotta work at it and then yeah.