I’ve written dozens of manuscripts in cafés. I found it a matter of convenience at first, and after a while, I realized I did my best writing in cafés, so I continued. Magic happens when I write in cafés. Creative ideas spring to mind—plots, characters, dialog—from out of nowhere and I insert them in my books.
Somehow, cafés facilitate literary inspiration. And many famous authors agree. J.K. Rowling is said to have written much of the Harry Potter books in cafés. And Ernest Hemingway wrote his early stories in Parisian cafés in the 1920s. I’m not sure I feel any sort of connection with Hemingway and the other Paris writers of a century ago (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce) just because I write in cafés, but I’m hoping some of their literary magic will rub off on me—despite the intervening century and my location on another continent 4,000 miles removed from Paris.
Along the way to writing my manuscripts, a few scattered oddities presented themselves for my attention. Strange events didn’t restrict themselves to the pages of my stories and they are described herein. This book contains my own personal experiences in cafés, my thoughts about them, what they mean to a writer like me, how I write in cafés, my reminiscences, and my advice for other writers or readers.
Although much of this book is autobiographical, I am still unsure if this work ultimately should be considered fiction or nonfiction—the reader, as always, is the final decider. My entire life won’t be found within my pages. There is nothing from my childhood, for example. It’s a tunnel-vision account of a narrow slice of me—my thoughts about writing and my time spent in cafés. I’ve left out all the salacious aspects of my life for another book.
Some of these essays first appeared on the internet in different forms, but I’ve revised and revamped all for the purpose of this book. What you have in your hands is part biography, part advice, part boasting, and part I’m gonna be a big writer, wait and see.
Leading each chapter is a short “Textual commercial” as a way of introducing the contents and describing my thoughts about it and what my intentions were (or are, if it’s totally new) in writing it. In this era of Every Man a Book Self-Publisher, a writer must campaign for himself, advertise himself, create and star in commercials about himself—both graphic and textual. He must impress upon the public the highlights of his own personality, and urge them to care, and to eagerly await his next book.
The strange attraction of cafés for writers, and writers for cafés, as if they need each other, and give each other what each must have, is a symbiotic relationship, but a dangerous one as well. It’s a dangerous idea, writing in cafés, because a pleasant environment can be reversed in a flash, leaving the wordsmith unable to compose anything of value as a result of variables he can’t control. But I find it’s worth the risk, and the stellar literary results of café-induced manuscripts can’t be denied.
This work is about 65,000 words in length. Several photographs are included.
