Remember, if you're out there writing, don't give up. I had to post this cartoon; it's just too funny. It's funny because the satisfaction is in the writing, not in being "rich and famous." Charles Schultz knew that, too, of course.

First, for interested readers, I will soon (probably in early September) post another interview as part of my Ask the Writer series. This installment will feature a longer, more informal talk with Brian Shawver, author of Aftermath and The Cuban Prospect.

In other news, I will send off the final re-writes for The Memory of Liars: An Evening with Grigori Efimovich Rasputin to Boston this week. Andrew Paul Jackson, who has been setting the text to music, tells me the opera will premiere in Boston (at the Conservatory) next April. His talented girlfriend Erica Spyres will be directing the show.

If you're not familiar with the history, the story takes place on the night Grigori Rasputin was murdered. The history is mixed up in mythology, so this opera will tell the true story of what happened -- and reveal the nature of the men involved. I'm really excited about the final product, because I know the extent of Andrew's and Erica's talent.

Also -- this is very exciting -- for those interested in writing and therapy, I am pleased to announce the launch of a national program, Read My Story, brought to you by the good people at the Mental Health Center of Crawford County, Kansas.

The idea is simple: People dealing with mental illness, alcohol and drug addiction, and other behavioral challenges can give each other hope.

One of the most valuable things we can do to help one another is to listen to each other's stories. --Rebecca Falls

The CMH has asked me to coordinate the web design and posting of submissions for Read My Story. If you or someone you know has an experience to share with readers, please, send in your narrative. Contact me at ReadMyStory.CMH@gmail.com.

Dennis Lehane is the bestselling author of Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone. Mr. Lehane graciously agreed to take some time and answer a few questions for "Ask the Writer," including his thoughts on the movie business, his upcoming novel The Given Day (Sept. 2009), and whether there is in fact any hope for the aspiring novelist.

Just what does it take to make it as a writer? What are the perks and pitfalls of a writing life? And, perhaps most importantly, does Dennis Lehane hate ballpoint pens? Read on to find out.

Q:  In your forthcoming novel, The Given Day, you vividly bring to life an expanse of Boston history, from the Spanish influenza outbreak to the Police Strike of 1919. What was it like to write such a sweeping, complicated, and intricate novel?

A:  The short answer is it sucked. I would strongly recommend nobody ever attempt a historical epic. It's for crazy people. Way too much hard work. I'm glad it's done. I hope it's good.

Q:  What is your favorite aspect of writing, or of being a writer? Can you think of a specific story to go along with that part of your writing life?

A:  Sometimes, you go to your desk first thing in the morning and there's nothing in your head but the lyrics to Viva Las Vegas. Yet, somehow by the end of the day, you've created characters from nothing but ether and had them walk around doing interesting things. That "somehow" is why I love what I do. I also like having a job that doesn't require shaving. I enjoy being able to crack a beer at work if I feel like it. If I wore pajamas, I could spend my entire work day in them; I don't wear pajamas, but the principle still applies.

 Q: Events in The Given Day sometimes eerily parallel 21st century America. As I read the book I came to understand that this is not the first time America has faced such broad insecurity. To what extent did these parallels--the immigration tensions, terrorism threats, and economic uncertainties, to name a few--inform your writing for a contemporary audience?

A:  The parallels reared their head very early. I had no hand in that; the gods wrapped me a gift. All I had to do was put it to paper; editorializing or commenting on the parallels in any fashion would have been redundant. History proves that, time and time again, fear or the perception of powerlessness produces fascist impulses in people and societies. The more afraid you are, the more vicious and infantile you usually become. I don't think I say anything revolutionary in that regard with The Given Day, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be said and said as much as possible.

Q:  Two of your previous novels--Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone--were made into major Hollywood films (to critical acclaim). How was your experience with those films, from preproduction to premier, and how do you view the relationship between film making and publishing?

A:  Film and books share a narrative identity, but that's about it. Film is passive entertainment; books are active. Film is interpretative of the book it adapts, but the book itself is procreative in a way that film can't be. Put another way, if a film is an omelet, the book is the hen. My experience with film, thus far, has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been blessed with two terrific scripts, two exceptionally talented directors (who, oddly, both came from an acting background) and their interpretations have been respectful of the source material without making the mistake of being reverential. Can't say enough about Señors Eastwood and Affleck really--both were true gentlemen in every sense of the word, both were very determined to deliver visions of my novels that were decidedly un-Hollywood, and both invited me into the process at the earliest stages and kept me involved through the premieres and, in the case of Mystic River, well into awards' season. In both cases, outstanding omelets.

Q:  John Gardner once wrote that the question he was most asked was, "Do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what?" He said he thought this question delved into the mystical aspect of writing, and questions, at its deepest level, whether there is in fact any hope for the young writer. So I have to ask, do you write with a pen, a pencil... or what? Is there any hope, and, if there is, what is your best advice to students and aspiring authors?

A:  Why wouldn't there be hope? You wake up, you decided you want to tell a story, you try that thing. Right from Jump Street, you are involved in an act of creation and what's more hopeful than that? Where people make a potentially catastrophic mistake is to think they can take shortcuts. Sorry, but there aren't any. No matter what the How To Write a Bestseller books tell you (normally written by people who've never written bestsellers; interesting) or the "10 Tips to Writing the Perfect Thriller Every Time!" articles in writers magazines, the truth is that this is hard, hard work. It is not for the lazy or those who confuse wanting something with earning it. Good writing is about depth--depth of character and structure and insight and language. If you're not willing to accept that and earn your keep, well, maybe there is no hope. But if you are willing to work, then, heck, there's no reason you can't be the next Toni Morrison.

      I write with a pen and it's got to be a rollerball. I hate ballpoint like I hate cilantro. In fact, if ballpoint was all that was left in the world, I might never produce another line.

Я пишу роман о Сибирь. Как раз на потеха i думало что я напишет этот столб и после этого переведет его в русского. Кто знало Cyrillic смогло быть настолько приятен? Я не мучение то из вас которые, как я, не может действительно прочитать его. Это последняя вещь я вывешу этот путь, если, по какой - либо причине, я не буду приобретать большой русский следовать за.

Если вы заинтересованы в Григо́рий Ефи́мович Распу́тин и вы живете в Бостон, то вы должны рассматриваете присутствовать на premier «памяти врушок,» которые осуществят на консерватории Бостон в апреле 2009.

Детали, котор нужно последовать за, в русское и в американца.

Today I finished the first draft of The Memory of Liars: A Night with Grigori Efimovich, which will be performed next April (2009). My close friend Andrew Paul Jackson, who is finishing his master's at the Boston Conservatory, asked me to write the libretto for his senior opera.

Both he and I are greatly interested in Russian culture: He in the composers, I in the writers. When he said to me, "I want to do an opera about Grigori Rasputin and the five conspirators who killed him, I said, "Sign me up."

Writing the script has been one of the most enjoyable projects I have taken on. The characters interact with each other in such striking ways. Here, dear readers, is the cast, based on the definitive scholarship of Andrew Cook:

Felix Yusupov - The spoiled, pampered Count fancies himself the savior of Russia, and his fanciful account of Rasputin's murder reads like an early draft of Bram Stoker's Dracula. He is a homosexual in love with Grigori Rasputin, whose sexual magnetism was legendary. Also, his wife, Grand Duchess Irina, was a large factor in luring Rasputin to his death.

Dmitri Pavlovich - Dmitri Pavlovich was a close friend (and possible lover) of Felix Yusupov. He was a Romanov by blood, and was once in line to marry the Tsar's niece or daughter (reports conflict), until Rasputin revealed his homosexual tendencies to Nicholas II. Rasputin also helped to undermine Dmitri's uncle, a field commander in World War I.

Vladimir Purishkevich - The speaker of the Duma, a pompous leader, and the man who ultimately revealed to authorities that Rasputin had been murdered. Purishkevich's bumbling -- along with the screw-ups of Felix and the rest -- would be comical, except it is so inexcusable.

Lt. Oswald Rayner - an English agent for MI-5, Rayner is concerned primarily with Russia's involvement in the Great War. He cannot afford to have Rasputin convince Tsar Nicholas II to withdraw troops. Therefore, Rasputin must die.

Stanislaus Lazovert - Army doctor and close friend of Purishkevich, it is he who provides, allegedly, the cyanide which fail to poison Rasputin. Insubordinate and resentful of his lowly position as driver and accomplice, Lazovert mocks his superiors even as he works with them to bring about the final solution.

Grigori Efimovich Rasputin - Friend or fiend? Angel or devil? Rasputin remains one of the most complex historical figures scholars puzzle over. A sexual deviant and man of God, Rasputin is said to have healed Tsarevich Alexei and, while unable to rid the boy of hemophilia completely, at least saved the boy from death by the blood disease. While most doctors today attribute his "cures" to psychological calmness, etc., Rasputin is said to have healed Alexei at least once from 1,000 miles away! No one has ever explained this dramatic "cure."

By the end of the previous semester I began to realize, with the dim-witted expression of a horror movie's stock character, that I had let my students down.

Let me be clear: This is according to my personal standards and not to those of the department's. My students had learned to write. They knew dramatic structure, the tenets of fiction theory, the basic vocabulary. Most of all they wrote some fantastic stories. By anyone else's standards (including their own, if my glowing evaluations are to be trusted) I had done a wonderful, even exceptional, job of teaching them. Three of my students even switched their majors to creative writing.

But whose evaluation matters most to me? My own. And I received only passing marks in my own gradebook, not outstanding ones. I earned from my own hard conscience a C+.

I failed to return substantive comments on each of my student's stories. In addition to my students, I am constantly sent manuscripts by friends and acquaintances, more than you might think, and so I commented where and when I had time, but the praise and criticism was uneven. I tried to succeed as a commenter, but did not. I promised I would send them comments over the summer. I have not done this to any significant end. Some stories I did, but most have been lost in the digital tide of files ebbing and flowing over my desktop.

Now the new semester is na-nasu, which translates as "on the nose" in Russian, and figuratively means "upon us." My desk is filled with work and I don't have time to make it up to those students who deserve it.

This backward-looking approach to regret and self-pity won't do, and since I've taken the time to air my feelings -- and, I hope, to apologize -- I have a new strategy. It is, I am confident, the best approach to all mistakes, failures, missteps, and catastrophes.

It's secret can be found in three places.

The first is a creed from Thich Nhat Hahn's Living Buddha, Living Christ, where to calm an emotion, Hahn suggests mindful breathing. The exercise is in the thought behind it: "Breathing in, I recognize and accept my emotion. Breathing out, I calm my emotion."

Scholars may not often hear an echo of Jimmy Buffett in Buddhist/Christian meditation, but his songs have a calming effect on me, especially Track 13 on his album Take the Weather with You, "Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On." The message is remarkably similar to Thich Nhat Hahn's suggestion...

I bought a cheap watch from the crazy man /
Floating down canal /
It doesn't use numbers or moving hands /
It always just says NOW /
Now you may be thinking that I was had /
But this watch is never wrong /
And if I had trouble the warranty said /
"Breathe In, Breathe Out, Move On"

The final piece of the puzzle is in my evaluations themselves. While positive, a clue had been left in the free comments, and, as evaluations should, the advice will benefit my future students. "Be more organized," one student said. "That's the only thing."

And I am confident I will be more organized.

"I do not follow the fashions in politics, letters, religion, etc..." Ernest Hemingway wrote to Paul Romaine in 1932. "If the boys swing to the left in literature you may make a small bet the next swing will be to the right and some of the same yellow bastards will swing both ways. There is no left and right in writing. There is only good and bad writing.... I'm no goddamned patriot nor will I swing to left or right."

Hemingway was notorious for his dislike of politics. His ideas stemmed from concern, of course, about a lack of understanding on either side of a political debate.

"Books should be about the people you know, that you love and hate, not about the people you study about. If you write them truly they will have all the economic implications a book can hold.... Read another book called War & Peace by Tolstoi and see how you will have to skip the big Political Thought passages, that he undoubtedly thought were the best things in the book when he wrote it, because they are no longer either true or important, if they ever were more topical, and see how true and lasting and important the people and the action are. Do not let them deceive you about what a book should be because of what is in fashion now."

That said, I politely agree, since politics is all wrapped up (especially today) in hurt feelings and resentment and misunderstanding. The lack of give and take in American political dialogue is frightening. But how much of this is true. Hemingway's own writing, including his epic novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, echoes through with political implications.

America was founded on politics and on politics it continues forward, through corruption, disillusionment, disappointment, hope, triumph, and redemption. In fact, if the mindfulness of fiction and poetry were brought to the political arena (as in Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men), perhaps our political system would not suffer, but would be reformed.

The trick, I think, is in choosing a subject of politics and then draining the prose of idealogical bullshit, talking points, lies, and other distortions. If one writes about politics and "gives everyone an even shake," as Hemingway liked to say, even the people he or she despises the most, then  two sides might reach some kind of understanding. Dialogue implies give and take on both sides and not just shouting of positions. As Jon Stewart once pointed out, shows like the canceled Crossfire are not honest debate. They are partisan hackery. If you have time, you can watch Jon Stewart scold the hosts of Crossfire below, shortly before the show was canceled forever.

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit, (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency towards churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, and unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good. Not all writers have exactly these same virtues, of course. Occasionally one finds one who is not abnormally improvident.

John Gardner
On Becoming a Novelist

"You have to say 'this is what I intend; this is what I will do if the universe is willing for me to do it.' So an intention is not a wish, and it is not a hope, it is the conscious use of your will." ~Gary Zukav

The words above are taken from what Gary Zukav told me when I asked him how people achieve fame. First, he taught me an important lesson. Being famous, he said, is not important. Not in the slightest. Being a positive influence in the world is important. Then if the universe wants you to be famous it will make you famous.

At the time I didn't know if I believed him. I was 17 years old. Mind you this was years before Oprah popularized The Secret, although she was friends with Mr. Zukav. For years motivational speakers have espoused the benefits of positive thinking. Mind over matter. Intention. But is any of it true? Although I deplore that some would capitalize on it as self-help authors and self-appointed gurus, I have come to believe it is true.

Years later, when I revisited the interview, I began to understand what Gary Zukav meant. This is what people speak of when they talk about the Law of Attraction, or about things seeming 'meant to be.'

Almost everyone I know can think of a time when things started to fall into place. When the pins and tumblers clicked and the locks opened. When things were going right. I would wager everyone who reads this can think of some time like that, and, probably, the feeling of rightness will be coupled with extraordinary coincidences.

It isn't magic. It is what it is. And, as Alexander Pope said, "What is, is right."

Many people don't believe in the law of attraction, even though they succeed by it. There is no need to. The universe doesn't care whether or not you believe. It cares about what you do. The key is posture, and -- you guessed it -- intention. Not to mention, I think, humility. Being humble may be the most important component of all.

And one more thing...

To make dreams a reality, something more is needed by the dreamer. Some internal harmony. Intentions within and without must coincide. And there must exist a drive. I will call this force Torque (known as intrinsic motivation to psychologists). Without torque, intention is nothing. If intention is a conscious use of your will, then torque is the energy that translates into willpower.

For my intention,

I will write as well as I can, as much as I can. People will read my stories for mindfulness; I will communicate with them. In the Fall of 2009 I will, if the universe is willing, attend a writer's workshop at the University of California - Irvine, or at the University of Iowa. I will be a positive influence in the world. I will be mindful. Above all, I will try my hardest every day to reach these goals, especially watching, as my father reminds me, for signs that I'm traveling the right path.

This is what I will do, if the universe is willing for me to do it.

Benjamin Percy is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf in 2009), and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007), and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction appears in Esquire, Men's Journal, the Paris Review, the Chicago Tribune, Glimmer Train, and Best American Short Stories, among other publications. His honors include the Plimpton Prize and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches in the MFA program at Iowa State.

In the final chapter of his book On Becoming a Novelist, John Gardner addresses a question often asked by aspiring writers. "Do you write with a pen, a pencil, a typewriter, or what?" He says, and I agree, that the question is more important than it appears.

It calls to mind the kind of things professional gamblers are said to worry about, Gardner writes. Should one where a lucky hat? Which color of shirt is best when playing poker? And so on. It asks (without asking) if there is any hope at all for the beginning writer.

Desktop computers and blogs have made writing fast and easy. Is this a good thing? Yes and no.

Remember, just because you can write easily doesn't mean you should. Our world is fast-paced, chaotic, and always has been. But writing is not. It shouldn't be. Writing requires slow, careful concentration. This is as true for you writing e-mails in the 21st century as it was for Lev Tolstoy writing War and Peace.

I compose my stories, articles, syllabus, and  blogs on a Sony Vaio laptop computer. Usually I write in Microsoft Word 2008, and I keep the files on a titanium jump drive that, if not on my person, is usually close to me (on my desk, my bookshelf, something like that). Most people write on computers, these days, whether in the library or at home or at work.

It's important to remember (this is a friendly reminder) that writing is a process, a habit, and an act of mindfulness. It is not a physical process. Writing with a pen may be different in some ways than writing on a laptop. The important difference in the physical process, or the actual activity of writing, is a difference, too often, of quality.

Pencils and pens force us to go slowly. To think, compose in our heads, and to move forward with ideas instead of going backwards. Who wants to rewrite the first chapter of a novel 100 times in ink?

Yet computers are important. Remain mindful of computers and research venues (Google Scholar, Lexis Nexus, etc.) as tools. Only tools. A computer may help you write a novel faster, and it may even be good, but in some ways it may also harm your ability to write.

The best artists in this age of technology (and here I mean graphic designers, painters, sketch artists, photographers, and writers, too) understand the power of tools like Adobe Creative Suite and Microsoft Office, but they never forget that the programs cannot make the art for them. They still pour in the attention of Tolstoy or Picasso, and the new technology takes them in different directions. In all its complexity, this is the one element that will never, ever become digitized.