Interview: Seth Greenland, writer of novel The Bones

If you made a graph of Seth Greenland's writing career, it would look like an Escher drawing: apparent dead-ends emerge as new beginnings. A novelist who is also a television writer, Greenland has tried his hand at just about every kind of writing except poetry - which is the avocation of the protagonist of his new novel, I Regret Everything . In the novel, Jeremy is secretly a poet (in his real life, he's a lawyer) but after a cancer scare he begins to reconsider his decisions. He's also met Spaulding, his boss' enchanting and wild college-dropout daughter, who narrates about half the chapters as the two dance and fall in love. Greenland, who survived his own bout with cancer in the 1990s, talks to .

Some. I had stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It never recurred, and that was 20-some years ago. I've been trying to figure out how to exploit it for my writing ever since. You gotta use everything - I try to be a nose-to-tail writer, you know?

I met Richard Belzer - I'd written about him for the Soho Weekly News - and he hired me to write a radio show he was doing for WNBC in the 1970s. It was like a Howard Stern show kind of a thing, pre-Howard Stern. He needed gag writers. It was a great way to make money, I was funny and it was easy. Here's the thing: if I had thought in my 20s I had the talent to be a novelist, I would have skipped that whole phase, I think, and just become a novelist. But it was too intimidating at that point. Having been an English major, you're in school studying Faulkner and Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and you think, man, that looks impossible, really. Whereas scriptwriting, comparatively - I mean it's hard to write a great screenplay, too, but it's a lot easier doing that than writing a great novel.

It's a really circuitous route, and I'll tell it quickly. I came out here [to Los Angeles] in '82, and Norman Lear gave me a job writing on a show he was doing, a.k.a. Pablo, for ABC - it was the first show about a Mexican-American family and was meant to be a big thing, which it alas did not turn out to be. But it was a great opportunity; I was 27 years old and writing for a network show. After it was cancelled I moved back to New York and was able to get work writing screenplays. But I was not getting a lot of creative satisfaction doing that and I taught myself how to be a playwright. My first play was a comedy about the CIA's attempted assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected president of the Congo; it was in the vein of Dr Strangelove. The play Jungle Rot won two major awards.