Vincent Panella

          This is what writing is to me, first, a compulsion. It starts with the love of words, their sound and rhythm, their music and associations. The need to write is strengthened with reading, then with writing, and above all rewriting. How many times can you rewrite a sentence or a passage until it rings true? Twenty? A hundred? A thousand? Raymond Chandler said that a writer who hates the act of writing and who gets no joy from the magic of words isn't a writer at all. An element of any important life decision — getting married, having kids, taking a particular job — is whether the writer will have time and a place to write. When a writer doesn’t write, or can't write, there's a feeling in the in the pit of the stomach of having screwed up. But maybe the writer hasn't screwed up. Maybe he's thinking. Maybe he's thinking at almost every waking moment of what and how to write.
          My writing room is an ex-tool shed sixteen feet square. Inside are desks for a computer and a manual typewriter. There are surfaces to spread out my pages. Posted on the  wall are inspirational words from Kerouac, Milton, and Henry Miller. They all have the same advice: write what's true. I've also tacked up Miller's work schedule. His first rule is to work on one book at a time. Another is to relax and work "with joy." The writing room has a cot for naps. When I come to a hard part in the writing, my impulse is to sleep, and so I sleep. I wake up fifteen minutes later and get back to work.
          I have been writing in this room for nearly thirty years and I never tire of the routine. I write in longhand. If that doesn't work I switch to the typewriter or compose on the screen. Sometimes I use a notebook which is a combined journal and workbook. Talking to myself in this way can lead to scenes or stories. There's a mystery to it all. Luck is involved. Norman Mailer called writing "the spooky art." Images float like ghosts, sometimes out of grasp, but sometimes they settle and won't go away.
          I write in the morning. When I head for the writing room I conjure up my two grandfathers who worked in the railroad yards in Long Island City. Every morning they went to work with their potato and egg sandwiches, and every evening they rose from the depths of the Roosevelt Avenue subway station and walked home with their lunch pails. I would wait for them on the corner of our street in Jackson Heights. Year after year, no complaints, happy to work. I invoke these old men of my youth as the caffeine takes hold and I push the pen or bang on the typewriter. I think of their regularity, their repetitions, and something harder to emulate, their ability to relax.
          My fiction is rooted in time and place. I need to know where my characters are physically located, and when they exist in real time. My characters are made up of people I've known, have briefly met, or simply observed from a distance. I mix them in a bowl and come up with new batter. I imagine them sitting in the writing room like manikins to play with. Put one body into another person's mind and vice-versa.Turn a carpenter into a lawyer, a New Yorker into a Vermonter. Move that apartment I once rented in Los Angeles over to New York. This is my way of turning life into fiction. My influences are many. Along with the classics and the major American writers, a short list includes C.P. Cavafy, Chester Himes, James Jones, Mario Puzo, Raymond Chandler, B. Traven, John Fante, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Leonardo Sciascia, Thomas Berger, and J.M. Coetzee. I could go on.