Describe your perfect book hero or heroine.
Someone who goes deep inside themselves to face their pain and ambivalence and comes out on
the other side with greater self-awareness and a revelation of their inner beauty.
When did you first consider yourself a writer?
I don’t think I really have, lol. I always want to, always have wanted to, but Toni Morrison said
she didn’t really feel that she could call herself a writer until she had published several successful
books and she started work on Beloved. She is one of my writerly role models, so I take her words with a lot of weight, but essentially if someone works at something they are that something.
If someone works in business, they don’t have to become the CEO of a major corporation in order to be called a businessman/woman. There is a lot of pretense in the writing world in which the self-appointed elite negate the work of the less successful or less skilled, as well as the pretensions of some people calling themselves writers when they have never even
read a book--and a lot of people have the idea that you can’t be called a writer until you have a
successful book published by a house.
In order to avoid confusion I call myself a writer of literary fiction and poetry, but I am most comfortable with just saying that I am working on xyz project which is the essential thing—working and engaging with your material. The literary world is so fickle and unpredictable that if you aren’t centered in working for the sake of working and exploring life and your own depths through it that you can get lost before you even
get started.
Do you hide any secrets in your books that only a few people will find?
No. I’m very heart on your sleeve, and my essential desire is to communicate. There is no way
to communicate if you are withholding information unless you are doing it to enhance the plot and will reveal it eventually.
How many hours a day do you write?
I shoot for three, but as I mentioned before, I struggle with depression as I have bipolar disorder, and between depression-induced lethargy and often medication side effects, I can go for days without writing which is very against my work ethic but I can only do what I can. But generally,
three hours until my cognition starts to dwindle. Though when I am revising I can work for eight
or nine hours at a time.
How many unpublished and half finished books do you have?
The one I am working on right now, which is about the desperate effort to achieve a sense of
wholeness against the limitations of racism and grief; that first one I told you about which I
really hope to finish some day if only to prove wrong a teacher in college who tore up my
manuscript and shouted that black people are destroying the English language and also shouted
in my face that I don’t have the capacity to write a historical novel instead of showing me how I
could learn to write one; a book about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots; and the one I hope to complete
next which I started drafting about seventeen years ago which is a compilation of short stories
held together by a central theme and witnessed by a central character through which he learns
about the meaning of life.
Does writing energize or exhaust you?
Both. Writing is the only time I feel really connected to myself, and at least the prosidy part comes very easy to me, and that makes me feel good about myself as well as intensely excited by the creative experience, or gestalt if you want to get philosophical. But I write from my gut, and my material is generally regarding issues and experiences that are a matter of life and death for me, so I can be in a lot of turmoil. But even that can be cathartic at times if I am lucky.
Unbearable Beauty was extremely energizing for me, very uplifting for the most part, but My
Soul Is Deep And Wide was daily torture during which I wept every time I thought Of Terrance.
I conceived it upon hearing of the murder of Nipsey Hussle which to me was yet one more in a
countless string of the unnecessary death of blacks, mainly men, and it also reopened my grief
over Tamir Rice’s death. He was just a child--just a child. And I can barely imagine the immensity of his mother’s grief. That is what compelled me to write My Soul Is Deep And Wide, and Terrance and his mother, Clarissa, are my homage to Tamir and his mother, Samaria Rice.
The day I finished it I felt like a two ton brick was lifted off my shoulder. I was so relieved to have finished it and wouldn’t have to be dredging up such pain every day.
Writing can be an emotionally draining and stressful pursuit. Any tips for aspiring
writers?
Do your best to set a reasonable time to write five or six days a week and approach it like you
would a job, though a job that you love. Even if it’s just two hours a day, or even one, try to be
as a consistent as possible. Write down ideas as they come to you during the day in a notebook,
though try to get some kind of emotional distance from your material when you are not working.
Go for a walk, lift a few weights, or cook dinner or whatever. And definitely read other books so
you can improve your skills as well as get some detachment from what you are working on.
Don’t ever take away from yourself your permission to write! You should always be reading
books in the genre you are working in as well as others.
Don’t just read for enjoyment, but be aware of how a certain character or plot or line of prose affects you emotionally and determine to understand how you can put those elements into your own work. But most of all, don’t ever let anyone tell you that you aren’t good enough or that you aren’t a real writer or you can’t write, or anything other than well-informed constructive criticism based solely on the technical aspects of your work—which you can always improve on by studying, through your next work, and even through rewrites of your current one.
Live by the dictum that any good writing has been revised
a number of times and that at the beginning you are writing down your ideas and impressions
and they don’t have to have any real cohesion until rewrites. Also, don’t follow other people’s
self depreciating comment that what they wrote at first is shit.
Every single thing you write,
every idea, every turn of phrase or description, are the seeds of something unique and incredible.
Most ingredients for a food recipe generally taste terrible when eaten alone, but when they are
joined together with effort and time result in a delicious meal or treat.
The one thing I learned
from my few writing classes in school was Henry James’ statement that a writer is someone upon
whom nothing is lost. So be aware about the world around you and what makes people tick.
There is a very good book on story structure regarding development of character and plot that I
have begun to work out of. The Anatomy Of Story, by John Truby. I wish I had this book twenty years ago. It would have saved me a lot of time not wasted on pure trial and error, and I could have finished more writing by now had I read it back then.
Both books are available on Amazon.
My Soul Is Deep And Wide:
https://www.amazon.com/Soul-Deep-Wide-Mark-
Mobley/dp/B08HTBWT6K/ref=sr_1_1dchild=1&keywords=mark+D.E.
Mobley&qid=160478
6618&s=books&sr=1-1
Unbearable Beauty:
https://www.amazon.com/Unbearable-Beauty-Mark-D-
Mobley/dp/1098919246/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=mark+D.E.+Mobley&qid=160478656
8&s=books&sr=1-2
