Who are you?
I go by the author's name J.E. Tolbert, my first two initials and my last name. I work as a graphic designer in the Washington D.C. area in the US and am the author of Arsalan the Magnificent.
What do you write?
I write novels of fantastical and philosophical fiction. This includes surrealism, magical realism, and fantasy fiction. My works typically involve an exploration into the self, soul, or mind as symbolized by a main character's wanderings through confounding, dreamlike, or absurd situations. I tend to use an elaborate verbal style to convey a subtle feeling of strangeness or wonder. This includes some complex sentence structures and the occasional antiquated or obscure vocabulary, when necessary, which defies some modern literary conventions. Also, I generally avoid using slang or other commonly used phrases that suggest too many cultural assumptions. I use complete sentences and avoid splitting infinitives and verb phrases. One might conclude from this that my books are difficult for the average reader, but, on the contrary, these choices have the curious effect of clarifying the language. One might detect a playful love of language in my works, but the vivid language does not bog anything down but rather elevates it, in the same way that the bold brush strokes and intense colors of a van Gogh convey not just its obvious subject matter but something much more. This approach to writing is due to the trajectory I followed into it. I started by writing poetry while in college. Over the years, these poems expanded into short stories, which themselves swelled into novels. So far, I have written three novels and Arsalan the Magnificent will be launched early 2024. Arsalan the Magnificent is a fantasy story about a bad-tempered wizard who must wrestle with and emerge from a mid-life crisis to try to save the world. However genre-specific my works might be, in my mind, I see all my writing as works of poetry, or at least extensions of it. I love writing. I've always been pretty good at writing given the purposes toward which I've had to employ it. Story-crafting and editing do have their challenges, but overall, I find the pure act of writing easy. One might think I would have become a professional writer for this reason much earlier in life than a graphic designer, but I was also realistic about the economic prospects of such a choice. It may be a surprise to know that graphic design pays better. I hadn't had the ambition of becoming a professional author until relatively recently, after 2016, and since then I've found that I love writing novels. This was surprising to me, because before then it seemed like a curiously toilsome task to assign oneself.
Where do you write?
I write at home on my computer using Microsoft Word. Quite often, however, I will use an email to myself or my Notes app to capture ideas and phrases that come to my mind while away from my computer. This happens throughout the day.
When do you write?
I type in the evenings on the weekends. Typically, I will type for one or two hours. Sometimes, I will type for as little as fifteen minutes. I write gradually, sometimes so gradually that I will spend an entire week refining a single paragraph. I don't set any time limits or word counts for myself. The amount of work I accomplish that day depends solely on the level of energy available to me at the time for writing. I divide the writing process into thinly sliced increments of feasible attainability for each day, the quality of a day’s outcome being more important than the quantity. This may sound like an excruciatingly slow process, but it is not particularly slow at all, in fact. This is because, in a way, I am writing all day. I think constantly about my writing as I go through my day, editing and refining the sentences in my mind and writing notes to myself. The time I spend at my computer at night is really the transcribed outcome of the day’s thought. I don't need to be sitting at my keyboard to write.
Why do you write?
I write because I like to read the types of stories that I write. I become frustrated that the kinds of books that interest me don’t exist, so I feel my job is to create them. It’s that simple. I have so many ideas for stories in my head that part of the purpose of writing them into novels is to stop thinking about them. I write also because I like to explore the diverse possibilities of any art medium—in this case, the possibilities inherent in language and storytelling. I see these possibilities as limitless, the only real limit being marketability. I feel that when I am experimenting with the boundaries of literature, I am also experimenting with ideas of philosophy, spirituality, society, culture, and whatever else literature may touch upon. Authors who explore these boundaries are the ones who inspire me the most: Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, Leonora Carrington, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien, Thomas Mann, Virginia Woolf, Julien Gracq, and many others. I love literature also because it is a highly efficient and compressed conveyor of experiences. Painting, drawing, moviemaking, and animation, for instance, are exponentially harder than writing because of the labor involved with depicting every visual detail, but the writer doesn’t have to be so laborious or fastidious. All a writer must do is to write a few sentences, paragraphs, or pages, or to use a certain turn of phrase or metaphor with just the right finesse, and the theater of the reader’s mind constructs the rest. I don’t think any cinematic experience can match the deeply immersive experiences generated by the human mind in the act of reading literature.
How do you overcome writer's block?
I have never experienced writer’s block, so I don’t have a good answer for this. I have no idea what it’s like. As soon as I sit at a keyboard, the words start flying out of my fingers, whether the writing is good or bad. I suppose this is the key to avoiding any creative blockages. I just write things, regardless of how appropriate the writing is to the implied constraints of the task. Sometimes I go crazy and write nonsense. I can always edit it later to fit the necessary constraints, or I can disregard those constraints altogether and create something entirely new. Perhaps this is from all those years of writing surrealist poetry. I’m bold in my experimentation. If I feel a rule is pointlessly restrictive, I take pleasure in disregarding it.
Bonus: What do you enjoy doing when not writing?
When not writing, I’m walking on nature trails, drawing in pen and ink, producing graphic design, composing music, or reading. Sometimes, when I’m really bored, I’ll study math, because I feel it sharpens my mind.
My thanks to J.E. Tolbert for today's interview.