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Interview: Seth Greenland, writer of novel The Bones

Greenland has tried his hand at just about every form of writing except poetry.

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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, . 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 - 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, , 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 . The play won two major awards.

By the early noughts, I thought, "I've done this and I've wanted to do a book, and I'm in my 40s now, and maybe I should write a book while I still think I have time." You have your ups and downs as a screenwriter, and I was in a down period, and I thought it might be my final down period. I mean, you're always checking to see if your career has a toe tag. I thought, "Well, it's now or never, I want to write a novel." It took me six months to write the first draft. I had a manager who was an English major at Wesleyan, so I trusted his taste. I gave it to him - he later told me his reaction was, "Oh, good God, please tell me you didn't write a novel". But he really liked it. That was (2005), then came out in 2008. Then all of a sudden, I'm a novelist. I'm not some guy whose career in Hollywood was OK for a while and then petered out. Then the guys at read the books and said, "Geez, you should come write for our show."

Hard. Really hard. I had never been in a room like that. I had been in comedy rooms, which is its own level of anxiety, because everything you say has to be funny. Because this room was so intensely story-driven, and I didn't really know how dramas were put together, the first six weeks were very difficult for me. They had just been nominated for an Emmy for best drama, so I really got thrown in the deep water. It was a great job, and it was a chance to reinvent myself, so I embraced it. And came home and had a really stiff drink every night - I drank a lot of Scotch that summer.

by Michael Tolkin is a really good Hollywood novel. by Nathanael West holds up really well. F. Scott Fitzgerald's - he so gets the sweaty desperation of what it is to work in Hollywood. Although the trappings are different, everything else is the same. It's just unchanged.

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Everything but poetry: how Greenland became a writer
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