Interview with author of Two Performance Artists Kindap Their Boss and Do Things With Him, by Scotch Wichmann!

BLURB

Hank and Larry are performance artists in San Francisco’s underground performance art scene. But when the mind-numbing grind of their corporate jobs drives them over the edge, they plot the ultimate revenge: to kidnap their company’s billionaire CEO and brainwash him into becoming a manic performance artist.

Fueled by the author’s performance art background, Two Performance Artists is a screwball dark comedy about best friends determined to tackle the American Dream with fish guts, duct tape, and a sticky AK-47.

Two Performance Artists is the first performance art novel by a working performance artist, tackling themes like fame, narcissism, and criticism, which are all timely in our “watch me!” age of reality TV, Instagram, and YouTube.

A first-round finalist in the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest, the book straddles several genres—it’s a madcap adventure, a pulpy action novel, a caper comedy, and a “bromance” for sure. One early reviewer called it “Office Space meets Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets Jackass.”

PURCHASE

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Interview:

Where are you from? Tell us a little about yourself!

I grew up in Fresno, California in the 1970s. It was a dusty, rural, bible belt town, and I loved it. It wasn’t cosmopolitan—there wasn’t much going on—so you had to get creative as a kid or you’d go insane from boredom. So, I spent a lot of my youth deep in make-believe.

While studying writing and film in college, a famous performance artist, John M. White, became my art mentor in Los Angeles in 1991. Inspired by John and a long list of intensely creative performance artists who went before me, I started doing performance art at venues all around town—little experimental pieces like shaving the back hair from a mouse and then snorting it, putting razor blades in my underwear, putting on testicle puppet shows—that sort of thing. I loved performance art because of its raw creativity; when you create a new piece, it’s like inventing an entirely new art form.

I started to become known for my performance art style, which was a mix of magical realism, schizophrenic texts, ragged staging, hyperactive physicality, and Dadaist pranks—and I’ve been going ever since, performing at galleries, museums, colleges, and other venues from L.A. to Scotland. Most recently, my performance troupe was nominated for Best Comedy and Best Stunt at the 2013 Hollywood Fringe Festival. Not bad.

Tell us about your book? How did it get started?

Sometime in 1999, it occurred to me that nobody had yet written THE performance art novel—that is, a first-person account of what it’s like being a performance artist in the gritty, uber-creative world where performance artists regularly strap meat to themselves, wrap themselves in cellophane, fill their underwear with razor blades…. Why do artists do that? How do people become like that? What’s it like doing an art form that’s viewed by many as a kind of cultural joke in America? And, given that we can trace performance art—as a ritualized kind of performance—back 10,000 years to shamans in a cave, does performance art possess a kind of magic?

Realizing nobody was probably going to write a book like that—much less one wrapped around a comedy caper about two crazy guys who kidnap their billionaire boss—I realized it would have to me. That very day, I sat down and began outlining the story.

The novel, Two Performance Artists Kidnap Their Boss And Do Things With Him, is a comedy caper about two madcap performance artists in San Francisco who hate their computer day jobs so much that they cook up the ultimate performance: to kidnap their billionaire boss and turn him into the wildest performance artist the world has ever seen.

Kill Radio L.A. called it “possibly the funniest caper ever written…what you’d get if Fear and Loathing, Office Space, and Jackass made a baby.” I’ll take that!

You can read more about it online at: www.2p4m.com

How do you create your characters?

I work on back story first. I’ll write out the essentials of what I need from each character in terms of plot movement, emotion, age, physicality, and so on.

Next, I’ll begin diagramming lists of associations that come to mind from each essential. For example, if a character needs to be emotionally unstable, what form would that take? Let’s say he’s paranoid. O.K., what makes him paranoid? And how can that paranoia trigger be used to drive the story forward?

I’ll continue this associative mapping until I have branches upon branches of interconnecting spidery lines of ideas, which I then begin whittling down until I can summarize a character, more or less, and his/her back story.

Finally, I try writing scenes with that character, and I don’t stop until I find the character’s voice. That’s important—to stick with the character until his/her voice emerges naturally, unforced, on its own. Once I have that, the character tells me what she or he is supposed to say. Nothing’s forced; the character comes alive and begins dictating, having been birthed in my unconscious.

What inspires you and got you started in writing?

My mother would take me to the public library every week when I was a kid, which inspired me initially for sure. At some point, I realized that being a writer meant I could do anything, go anywhere, in my imagination. And that was the beginning.

Today, I find inspiration everywhere. When I’m working on a new performance piece, book chapter, article, or whatever, I just begin listening with my psychic antenna. I open myself up to whatever might come and prove useful for what I’m working on. And come it does. It might be a newspaper article, or something on the radio, or a piece of graffiti, or some dude’s mumbling on the street; there’s no telling where it might arrive from. But when I open up, it’s uncanny what serendipitous bits of inspiration arrive from all over that are perfect fits for the puzzle I’m trying to solve.

Where do you write? Is there something you need in order to write (music, drinks?)

I prefer writing and editing while seated at a desk when nobody’s around. Silence and solitude are best for me when I’m trying to concentrate on crafting sentences. When it comes to brainstorming and outlining, though, I like being in cafes and bars; something about the chaotic stimulation lets my imagination stretch in new and unpredictable directions. And for me, caffeine is best for writing; booze is best for brainstorming.

What do you like to read?

I love reading manly fiction with action most of all. So, Louis-Ferdinand Cèline, Hunter S. Thompson, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Charles Bukowski, and Robert Ludlum are favorites.

In non-fiction, I’m all over the library, but books about performance art, espionage, conspiracies, stage magic, the occult, cosmology, religion, psychology, history, film, and literary theory take up the most room on my shelves.

What would be your advice to aspiring authors?

Write about what you love. You’ll need that passion to really plumb your emotional and creative depths, and if it’s a long project, to go the distance of months or years. I started Two Performance Artists in 1999, and didn’t finish the first draft until 2006. Without my having been an absolute performance art freak, I doubt I would’ve finished as quickly as I did, even though it still took me six years.

Second, cross-pollinate your imagination. Be open, and read from different subjects before and during your writing; you might be surprised by the ideas that land magically in your lap just when you need them to add depth and color to your story.

Finally, set aside a regular time to write. Having regularity lets you identify what does (or doesn’t) work about your writing habits, and gives your muse time to show up.

Two Performance Artists novel website: www.2p4m.com

For more about Scotch, visit:

            Website and blog: www.scotchcomedy.com

            Twitter: @scotchwichmann

            Instagram: instagram.com/scotchwichmann

            Facebook: fb.com/scotchcomedy