When I called Mr. Allen to ask for a copy of THE CREED OF VIOLENCE to read and write about, I was not sure he’d be that generous. I thought I’d track my way to that question by talking up all the e-mails and replies to the article I’d interviewed him for, THE AUTHOR WHO DOESN’T EXIST, but he was already well aware of the responses.
“You and writers like yourself,” he said, “are the future. The world you inhabit, using the internet as a launching pad for ideas and careers, that’s the future.”
He went on. “The whole system of submissions to editors and agents, where you have to wait for as long as a year before you get a response to your work, if you get one at all is, in part, a graveyard. It is, was, a hierarchic chain that can leave the writer helpless and forever waiting, forever struggling… I am firmly convinced that system kills more good writers than it creates.”
He kept on with unreserved enthusiasm about the internet being the modern battlefield where writers get to test their craft and ingenuity through connection with an audience. And that a Blog or a Facebook can break through the silence of the world and begat a writer as reliably as the published word. That, in effect, is a good thing, and the effect of which will, in the end, create more good writers, because it is still, and for always, about words.
It was also, he believed, important for a writer beyond the opportunity to glamorize oneself. It was a way to muscle up your thoughts. To practice self reliance. And self reliance is important in fine writers. And no less important than sincerity.
It was also a means to sincerely scrutinize comments and differentiate between the good and the ill. A way to discover one’s voice and point of view. To get in touch with the rhythm of your talents as they wash upon the shore of a reading public.
And most of all, it forces the writer to test being unafraid, unafraid of who you are and unafraid of being different. Even at the risk of being wrong, or misunderstood, or overlooked.
“There is beauty,” he said, “in all that, because all that is a conscientious assault on the existing status quo. The internet gives you the ability to present yourself in an intelligent and impassioned way. To propagate changes in style and approach, in theme and content. And these are assaults on the status quo, that will in time reinvent the status quo.”
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As we concluded up our conversation I asked, “How is Boston doing?”
He answered, as always, “Boston is fine.”
“You still never say he’s doing fine. Or---“
He interrupted, “Or she’s doing fine. Nor, for that matter, they are doing fine.”
He laughed whimsically. “Right?” he said.
He had taken direct aim at my article.
“Right,” I said.
“Before I get off the phone, let me tell you a story,” he said. “It’s about The Creed of Violence, which, by the way, I will send you to read and write about. In your fashion.”
