Tom Comitta
/How did you become a writer? Until I was 22, I identified as a songwriter/composer. One friend in college said that I wrote “absurdist rock,” but the songs also incorporated country, folk, funk, experimental music elements, samples, and even sound poetry—a term I didn’t know at the time, but later found to resonate with the percussive word play in my music.
My path to writing began when I moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina a few months after college. I spent the summer living at home in West Chester, Pennsylvania and working for my father. Then in August I sold my car and got a one-way ticket the city where I’d visited briefly when I was studying abroad in Santiago de Chile and where I’d heard was a magnet for international artists. My goal was to work on my Spanish and meet musicians to collaborate with.
About a month into living in the San Telmo neighborhood, I started to feel crammed in my small apartment, working away for hours on solo recordings, meeting few people, and seeing little of the city. Soon I started to get out of the house more, taking buses to different neighborhoods and writing lyrics or poems in cafes and parks. In retrospect, it all sounds grossly romantic, like a bad Bertolucci movie. And in many ways it was. While in Buenos Aires, I was thrown into a tumultuous romantic relationship and regularly stayed up all night drinking heavily, doing cocaine, and partying with local and international artists—a virtuosic preamble to the exciting but destructive lifestyle that would force me to get sober years later.
Still, it was an important transitional period. Two months into my time in Buenos Aires, I left music behind completely, preferring writing not only because it got me out of the house—I wrote on buses, in bathrooms, even while walking—but because I found it was the words I was most interested in all along. While still in Argentina, I penned a poetry manuscript and sent it to MFA programs. Within a year I was back in the States again, living in a residential hotel and delighting with my new writer cohort in that great American tradition: a decent literary education funded by crippling student loan debt.
Name your writing influences (writers, books, teachers, etc.). My mother, my father, my sister, my mom’s mom, my mom’s dad, my mom's step dad, my dad’s mom, my dad’s dad, TV shows when I was a kid, Broadway musicals my mom would play in the car, the Cyprus Hill, Right Said Fred, and B-52s albums my dad would play in the car, X-Men comic books, Jim Morrison’s shitty poetry, my uncle—the only other openly queer person in my family—who killed himself before I could know him but who has obsessed me much of my life, the Flaming Lips, three high school teachers: Victoria Croul, Anthony Rotondo, and that awful teacher whose name I forget who made us answer pop quiz questions about what clothes the characters wore in the novels we were reading and who made me despise English classes and novels for over a decade, the end of Camus’s The Stranger, early Arcade Fire, the Three Colors trilogy by Krzysztof Kieślowski, Funny Games (the original), other foreign films I watched in college like Underground by Emir Kusturica, Epitaph of a Small Winner by Machado de Assis (tr. William L. Grossman), Gabriel Matthey Correa (teacher and friend), Chilean poets and novelists including Nicanor Parra, Elvira Hernández, Raúl Zurita, and Roberto Bolaño, Martin Kippenberger’s bad paintings, Gerhard Rühm’s poetry and pencil music and his idea of a non-communicative writing, ubu.com, Fluxus word scores and John Cage’s music as described in Words to Be Looked At by Liz Kotz (a gift from author Kevin Killian), Jacques Rancière, Tino Sehgal who I danced for while in grad school, Kota Ezawa and Emily McVarish (teachers and friends), Philip Glass (everything through Einstein on the Beach), Vicki Bennet aka People Like Us’s Welcome Abroad album and particularly “The Sound of the End of Music,” George Kuchar's Weather Diaries, Komar and Melamid and Dave Soldier’s People’s Choice Music akamy favorite album of all time, Rick Prelinger’s writing and films, Michelangelo Antonioni’s films and writing, my partner Medaya Ocher who taught me how to read novels, A Tribe Called Quest’s first two albums, Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and its nearly Oulipian symmetrical framing structure, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, Fiction for Dummies, Cixin Liu whose work I loved until I read “The Wandering Earth” which is the most pro-authoritarian literature I’ve ever read, free and spiritual jazz particularly Pharoah Sanders, Yusef Lateef, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra, Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World, the Sespe Gorge north of Ojai for thirteen weekends the first summer of the pandemic, César Aira’s Conversations, Jean-Patrick Manchette’s lefty crime novels, everything by Muriel Spark and Percival Everett, Beverly Glenn Copeland, Wendy Carlos, my child Simone.
When and where do you write? It depends on the project. Writing the first draft of my novel, The Nature Book, which just came out from Coffee House Press, I wrote in a large studio at the Bemis Center for the Arts in Omaha, taking advantage of the many disposable tables they had on site. Because they offered an honorarium and I didn’t have to pay rent at the time, I worked from 10 am to 8 or 10 pm each day, collaging thousands of found nature descriptions into a single novel.
After that residency, I rented a much smaller office space in Los Angeles where I wrote the remaining six drafts of the book while juggling graphic design work. I kept a strict schedule, going to the office four nights a week (Monday, Wednesday, Friday, Sunday) for six hours at a time. I hardly had a life while working on that book.
Since finishing The Nature Book, I work in an even smaller office in our apartment or even on our couch or bed. Now that I do less collage work, I don't need as much space, and I find lying down to write for hours on end leads to less back pain. I write when I can—we have a ten-month-old baby and I still support myself with design work. This means I usually write at night or whenever freelance work runs dry. I pray for grant money to regain the flexibility that I had back at the Bemis.
What are you working on now? I’m currently deep in a two-book project in which I use the results of a public opinion poll—the kind employed by marketers and politicians—as literary constraints. I spent a year designing a “National Literature Survey” with a Johns Hopkins survey design expert and then polled a representative sample of the United States in December 2021, asking everything from favorite genre to setting to characterization to verb tense. With the data in hand, I’m now writing two novels: one with all of the most desired results, The Most Wanted Novel, and another with everything few people or no one voted for, The Most Unwanted Novel.
The Most Wanted is a 250-page traditional thriller about a woman fighting a murderous spiritual tech leader with a quantum computer. The Most Unwanted (but in my opinion better book) is a 500-page experimental epistolary novel that blends romance, horror, historical fiction, and classic literature. Set on Mars on Christmas Eve after talking cats take over Earth (since people don’t want to read about talking animals and largely prefer dogs over cats—sorry cat lovers!), The Most Unwanted is about elderly aristocratic tennis players searching for love, venturing down harrowing VR rabbit holes and into the darkest caverns of the macabre.
Have you ever suffered from writer’s block? No. I call it taking a break. All writers need breaks. MFA programs teach us that we must operate like a factory, regularly cranking out pages and always staying productive. But that’s not how writing actually happens. People take breaks for months, years. Every project I’ve ever worked on has benefitted from long stretches of time when I’ve abandoned it, worked on something else, or convinced myself I’ll never return to it again. In moments when writing feels stilted, I give myself the task to intentionally write bad (I mean very bad), which is freeing. The gears get moving pretty soon after.
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever received? I’ve found some great advice on YouTube: Laurie Anderson, in a 2012 address to the New School, suggested that creative people shouldn’t wait for an invitation to present your work; you could be waiting forever. She talked about her first European tour and how, without actually booking any tour dates, she made a press release that said “Laurie Anderson is going on tour” and sent it to every performance venue she could find. Because she asserted herself and put herself out there, venues booked her, and the tour came to fruition. I can count on one foot the times that anyone has solicited my work; I’ve gotten all of my successes by being persistent and learning to live with rejection. I don’t know how you get it done any other way.
John Waters, in a Brown commencement speech, talks about the joys of keeping track of your expenses for tax purposes—particularly in the ability to write off bad movies as an expense. Even if you have a full time job, if you bring in a little bit of money for your writing or for readings or are writing a book that might make money one day, you can expense the books you buy as well as movie, music, and museum tickets; streaming services; paying your friend to edit your manuscript; and more (a quick online search will give you the full list). It’s so hard to make ends meet as a writer, and this is one of the few benefits.
What’s your advice to new writers? Write a novel in one night. I’m serious. Take three hours. Take five. Whatever time you have. Open a Word document and change the page size to 6 x 9. Figure out a way to fill 200 pages in one night. Copy and paste from websites, from Project Gutenberg. Play the computer keyboard like a piano. Increase the text size if you have to. Just stick to the 200-page goal and use your intuition. Think quantity, not quality. Once you’ve filled the pages, design the cover. Don’t forget to put your name on it. Then publish it on a print-on-demand site before you go to bed. Order a copy.
As of that night you will be a published writer—no waiting necessary. You’ve written a full book, published it, and learned something about writing, design (which more writers should know about), and what it feels like to finish a book. When the book arrives, give it a look. Smell the pages. Hold it in your hands. How does it feel? What has this process taught you about books, writing, design, publishing? Is this book actually a novel? Is it any good? What is “good”? Now get to work on your next book.
Tom Comitta is the author of The Nature Book, recently out from Coffee House Press. Their other books include O (Ugly Duckling Presse), Airport Novella (Troll Thread), and First Thought Worst Thought: Collected Books 2011–2014 (Gauss PDF), a print and digital archive of forty “night novels,” art books, and poetry collections. In 2015, Royal Nonesuch Gallery installed these books in a multimedia exhibition containing drawings, video, vinyl window installation, and a sound poetry computer program. Comitta’s fiction and essays have appeared in WIRED, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Kenyon Review, BOMB, Joyland, The Brooklyn Rail, and BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2020. They live in Brooklyn.
