Culture Zohn: My Sneaky Uncle, A Soon-To-Be-Hot Young Writers Collaborative Debuts

Do you believe that writers are born not made? Do you believe that people have some kind of innate gift for storytelling, for stringing words together, for capturing dialogue, for getting under the skin of their characters and readers at the same time?

Or do you realize that writers go to writing workshops (guilty), take classes (guilty) and hang around with other writers (guilty) all in hopes that something is going to rub off?

Like the nature/nurture arguments that roil the genetic conversation, the opinions about writers are sharply divided. But even with masses amount of innate talent, the gift must be honed and whittled, the precision of each word and sentence inspected, the cadence of a sentence adjusted, just so, to please the auditory palate.

It's total agony. Do not imagine for one second that your favorite author just rolled out of bed one morning in a fit of invention and wrote that book you love. Chances are, years of torture are behind every, single word.

Five young writers have banded together in a kind of mini-collective, not only to palliate this arduous journey but to be each other's first readers, and then to watch each other's backs as the work makes the leap into public view. Absent agents or editors, they have fallen back on their own resources. One day, they will have people to hold their hands: right now, they are holding each others and jumping off the cliff.

We are lucky that they have landed at the Huffington Post.

My connection to this group is Liza Kaplan who grew up with my son Patrick (soon to be a HuffPost Green blogger). Liza always knew she wanted to be a writer, but she had other ambitions, and she has meandered through show biz a little too, to pay the rent and buy some time to figure it out, to learn how to stop sweating the smaller stuff (rent, parents opinions, peer pressure) so she can tackle the really big stuff--the ability to put words on a page and get somebody excited.

As Liza says:

While the aspiring Apatows and Reitmans of the world have YouTube, and the blogosphere is often used as platform for self proclaimed "celebrity experts" to comment on everything from Lindsay's latest DUI to Mischa's cellulite, there is no place in the vast forest of the internet for the fledgling fiction writer to tell their version of Once Upon a Time. Well, there was no such place, until we created our ideal short storybook hero, SneakyUncle.

About a year and half ago, I casually contacted Estella Soto, a former USC classmate in Marianne Wiggins' Advanced Fiction Workshop, to see if she would consider giving me some feedback on a short story I was writing. We traded fiction, notes, and emoticons until one day I asked her, "Are you in a writers group or workshop? Maybe we should start one..."

Luckily for me, she said yes and had more writer friends from Aimee Bender's and T.C. Boyle's workshops. With an inaugural meeting at my West L.A. apartment, the seeds for SneakyUncle were planted. We are now five aspiring-to-be-published-writers who get together once a week to hash out our opinions on contemporary published writers and workshop our own pieces. In the cozily eclectic setting of Stella's downtown apartment, right in the middle of Art walk, we guzzle diet coke or wine depending on what induces creative inspiration in each of us, and we recover our voices that have been stifled by the tedium of day jobs and long hours spent staring at that eternal nemesis: our computer monitors. To mix it up, we go on "cultural" excursions to the MOCA, LACMA, art walks, and book readings in order to be students of the world, one of the most essential aspects of Being a Writer. Since beginning our Thursday night "Party of Five" meetings, we have seen each other's writing grow immensely as we continue to challenge and push each other to the next level.

Mysneakyuncle.com was born because I was reading daily in The Hollywood Reporter about some movie or TV show picked up off someone's blog or other online post. I knew that in order to jump start our literary careers, we needed to get our fiction and our names out in cyberspace. The short videos are Generation YouTube's (link to you tube video) version of the book reading. Instead of just reading straight from our written words, we've created highly stylized short films/marketing promos to entice the average internet video junkie to actually sit down for a full read. Five samples of what goes on in our crazy, angsty, funny, sweet, sad, ironic, paranoid, confused twenty-something minds are now on our site.

Take a look at the website Liza and Co have developed with their short stories and the edgy video that has just gone up on You Tube.

Writers are just as cool as musicians or visual artists, every bit as talented and have way fewer venues to get their stuff out to you, unfiltered. Let's support the fledging efforts of My Sneaky Uncle by visiting with them, first, online, and then by buying their stuff when it eventually gets published.

Which I know that it will.

My Sneaky Uncle can be found at www.mysneakyuncle.com.

Comments

[jesdakota]

Aw man, every Thursday I'm at the waterpark. Have fun, ladies! I'll be rooting for you!!

[cktirumalai]

Shakespeare had the benefit of a good grammar school education in Stratford, which included great writers of the past, but unlike the University Wits of his age he did not attend university. His contemporary Ben Jonson was a formally educated man, who nevertheless recognized the Bard's "natural" genius. But, characteristically, his response to actors saying that Shakespeare never blotted line (never revised anything) was to wish that he had revised many. Would the Bard have profited fron courses in creative writing? No. But many lesser writers always can.
To cite an analogy fron another field: Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz genius, went to the principal trumpet of the Chicago Symphony for instruction, who told him after a time that formal training would only blunt his great, explosive gift.

[ORSunshine]

My dad was born a writer... he's never been published because he doesn't play the game right.

A good friend of mine can't stop herself from writing. She has entered the internet book publishing industry to get what she seemingly can't stop herself from doing out in public.

If you want to support a talented writer who doesn't need a support group, check out her web site for her sci-fi space opera, Racing History.

It's a natural talent... just like the wannabe singers on American Idol, you can't train or manufacture it... it either is or it isn't.

[Billie]

I always prefer writers who have a healthy caution about joining "groups" and have the guts to say so. I am especially leery of ones who tout how supportive they are of each other. All writers aren't cool. All artists aren't cool. Some are, some are not. This post sounds phony and culty and totally uncool. It's like slap happy cheerleading without a bs detector. The vibe I get here is Disnified aggressively cheerful generalizations. Charles Bukowski would have puked (even if he hadn't been drinking) if he read this post. So would Pinter and any other serious artist. Don't even get me started on what Gore Vidal would probably say! Hashing out opinions together. . .eeeeeeeeeeek!

[Zackdog]

Everybody thinks they are a writer. They aren't. Most are young people that don't want to work, and can't draw, or carry a tune. Getting and keeping a real job is much harder than pretending to be a suffering writer. Forming a support group to keep up this ruse is carrying the gag a bit too far. I believe any real writer would be embarassed to be associated with this silly post. A support group for scapbookers would make more sense.