Inside the Writer’s Studio

Photo by Tsuyoshi Nishiyama

Skaters Can Read A Room With No Windows David Couliau made a short doc about Scott Bourne, if you want to watch it. VICE: Do you keep up the happenings in skateboarding? Scott Bourne: That map of Paris behind your desk I saw in David Couliau video, are those skatespots that are marked? A Room With No Windows Does writing afford for you to live? I saw you’ve become somewhat of a known model in Paris. How did that come about? How does it differ from being in front of a skate photographers lens? Photo by Tobin Yelland It’s the 4th of July. I believe you to be a patriot. In the video by David Couliau you say America has failed. I agree. But I’d like to know your take on how so. What do big computers have to do with anything? How long did you live in the room with no windows without hardly any light? And what physical and mental effects did it have on you then? And which still linger? After reading about your time in SF it seems like we had uncannily similar runs in California with the isolation and the booze and the women. They’re comical in their tragedy. I find that some of my fondest memories of that time for me are of the most miserable moments. How about for you? What’s a SF story that warms your heart every time you think of it? Scott Bourne jumping freight trains. I told you I’ve been working on a script for my book Skinema. It takes place in 2000. Roughly the same era as when your book begins I believe. Was it hard writing this book from the point of view of your younger self? I feel like some chapters have old man wisdom of a modern Scott in 2013 and others are so simple and pure like that of a younger man’s thinking. I find that’s the issue I’ve been having with my script. A young and much stupider man wrote my book. In what ways are you the same/different as the kid in the book all these years later? Do you ever wish you had the opportunity to apologize or explain yourself to the women that loved you back then while you were running wild on the city? I always feel like I should go through old phone books and cold call the women and apologize for all the nights of limp dicks due to pills and disinterest. How did you meet your wife? How did you know? How much does she know of the old you?

Do you ever look into the eyes of your beautiful children, as I do, and hope they never read your book so as to never learn just how dark and destructive their father once was?
No…it’s the opposite for me. I am thrilled that my son may one day be interested enough in my life and work to spend the time needed to read a 300 page novel I wrote. Besides, it’s just life. There will be pain!

Why the typewriter? I understand the romance of the machine and the music it makes as you dance along on the keys but to write, how many, ten, drafts of a book on a typewriter seems like pure madness and honestly a waste of time because of the speed of technology. I feel like I’m living on borrowed time and trying to make up for my years in California and time is the one thing I can not afford to spare.
That’s it. It’s all about the romance. Never before have we lived in a time of greater anti-romanticism than now. Everything is instant and valueless. I need romance. I mean I really do. I don’t need speed that is often careless and blind, we’ve both done that. I have a reward when I sit at the typewriter and work, which is unlike spending hours staring into a mind numbing computer screen. I write everything by hand. Second drafts come out of the typewriter. I am not skipping a step in the process. You look at the work of any great sculpture, Dalou, Carpeaux, Rude, or my personal favorite Fremiet, and these guys have tons of sketches and drawings before they ever make a model. Then they make tons of models before they take to the stone. Modern man just takes to the stone. If you have written a novel on a computer the truth is that you only have one draft and you are really just proof reading, which is far different than writing. But when you rewrite an entire work, you find things you forgot, you transform the story and find the essence of the work, you carve your novel into stone where it stays forever. I have an original manuscript of my novel and even if it had never been published I could one day pass it on to my son and say something romantic like, “Son, here is the book your father wrote when he ran off to Paris and tried to be a writer… don’t show it to your mother!” But that is not the story I have to tell. In fact, by the time my son gets that manuscript, it may be priceless and the most valuable gift I have to give… now that is romanticism and it’s my reality!

So is A Room With No Windows the next great American novel? Are you following in the footsteps of so many other American writers who made Paris their home? And for someone who road the American rails like a hobo and saw the heartland of the country and enjoyed traveling so much will you make a return or is Paris now and forever home?
I don’t know what A Room With No Windows is and it’s not up to me to say. Only time will tell how it affects its audience or if it has an audience at all. But you are a fool if you think that by simply following “The Greats”, will make YOU great. No great man has ever been a follower. You have to do more than cast your line out into the same water that Hemingway fished, to pull up The Old Man And The Sea. You have to do more than move in beside F. Scott Fitzgerald if you want to meet The Great Gatsby. But more than any of this I think that I did come to Paris looking for a life like I read about in so many wonderful novels that did take place in this city. And in all honesty, what I found or created for myself is far greater than anything I ever read about. So if my novels are a flop… who cares! I have my life! As for a return to America, well, I don’t foresee a move anytime soon, but I have begun a book of short stories based around my restless youth, travels, California, trains, running from the law, and the fist fights with a thumb to the freeway. I think it is going to be called Short Stories From The Long Road.

Finally, what’s next for you?
I have several completed books at the moment that I am just sitting on. I need to find and agent I can deal with for the simple fact that by publishing with an independent you are basically losing money, and I’d like to continue writing! I am spending a ton of time with my son and have begun a children’s story, and Todd Bratrud and I are also working on a project together. He is illustrating a long poem I wrote called Sooth Song, which is basically about the future. I am also doing an eyewear collaboration with Vuerich B. that will have quotes from my book laser-engraved on the inside of the ear pieces. There’s a lot happening and I am happy to have so much work.



Order Scott’s A Room With No Windows from Amazon or from the 1980 Éditions


Previously – Help Put Strippers Through College

More stupid can be found at Chrisnieratko.com or @Nieratko