Original subtitles

WALTER MOSLEY: Fiction is one of the few things

that we can do in the modern world in which you

make something from nothing.

You could be the grandmother of four children living in a cabin

up on top of a mountain.

And the four children or visiting you, and they say,

"we're bored."

And you say, "Well, let me tell you

a story about a little girl who that set upon by a bear."

Now, there's no little girl.

There was no bear.

It's just this woman making up a story

for these little children who in turn are making up

a story in their own minds.

That's making something out of nearly nothing.

Writing and storytelling, everybody does.

Without the fictive imagination, there is no growth.

Everything remains the same.

When you're an artist, when you're

a writer, when you're making up different ways of seeing

the world, understanding the world,

considering what happened, what didn't happen,

you are actually changing the world whether they know it

or not, whether they read the book or not.

The beautiful thing about any day is it can happen.

Today, all of a sudden you realize, hey,

my wheels aren't spinning anymore?

They are spinning, but I'm actually moving forward.

I'm not sitting in place.

My name is Walter Mosley.

I'm a Black man in America.

I'm an artist.

I'm a writer.

I guess I mostly think of myself as a novelist, because that's

what I do day in and day out and have done for nearly half

of my life.

I think in this period of time that we have together,

you will learn how to plumb the depths of your intellect

and your soul to find the right words, the right structure,

the right story, the right characters

to create the novel that's in you

and that will take you forward into the world.

I wanted to teach this MasterClass

because I want people to understand that a novel isn't

putting the left front tire on the Volkswagen

on the production line.

The novel is creating a whole new mode

of transportation, a whole new mode

of understanding the world.

And I think that over the last 30 years of being a novelist,

I've learned how that's worked and I've

made a commitment to it, and I would

love to talk to you about that commitment.

The hardest thing you're ever going

to face in writing a novel is believing

in something that has come from seemingly nothing.

I hope what you take away from this experience

is the confidence that if you do what we've talked about here,

the novel will appear.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I'm Walter Mosley, and this is my MasterClass.

I was born in Los Angeles, California, 1952 on January 12.

I lived in what they called South Central back then

in Watts.

And you know, I had a Jewish mother, a Black father,

pretty good life, very easy, pretty simple.

We were poor, but not that poor, kind of lower-working class,

and we had a really good time.

Both my parents worked for the Board of Education,

and so they sent me to a private school.

But when I say private school, it

was a school called Victory Baptist Day School.

I think it cost $9 a week to go there,

and they taught me way back then,

you know, African-American history,

African-American literature, all that stuff, you know,

plus everything else that you needed to know.

As an only child in Los Angeles in the '50s,

television was a big part of my life.

I watched a lot of television.

I learned a lot from television.

It kind of guided me in many ways.

I used to sit-in there and watch TV and draw pictures

and tell myself stories.

And I often think to myself that that moment of telling myself

stories, of putting myself into books that I read

and comic books that I read and television

shows that I saw, making that a part of my life I think

is a lot of me making myself into a storyteller,

though I had no idea that that's what I was doing.

I went to school at the University of Massachusetts

in Amherst.

I graduated and I just was a programmer.

I lived in Boston.

I lived in New York.

One day I was at a job.

I was working for Mobile Oil in New York.

It was a Saturday.

Nobody else was there.

So instead of writing programs, I wrote a sentence.

I wrote, "On hot sticky days in southern Louisiana,

the fire ants swarm."

And I went, wow, that sounds good.

I've read many books that start like that.

And it's fiction because I'd never been to Louisiana,

nor had ever seen a fire ant.

So I was making it up.

I could be a writer maybe.

And so I started writing, and I think

was the first time I ever really started doing anything.

When I wrote the sentence on hot sticky days

in southern Louisiana, the fire ants swarmed,

I was 34 years old.

In my head and in my heart, my life was a failure.

I was never going to get much beyond where I was,

but that's OK.

I wrote the sentence, and I wanted to write then.

But I never before thought of myself as a writer,

certainly not a novelist, some gigantic, you know,

tome of words that told a story.

But that didn't matter because I wasn't

expecting to get published.

I wasn't expected to get love.

All I wanted was to write the beginning, the middle,

and the end of a story.

I knew that that's how stories were structured, most stories.

I wanted a beginning, a middle, and an end.

If I could do that, then I felt, well, I succeeded at something.

Even if nothing else ever happened,

I was a programmer for the rest of my life,

it didn't matter because I had written a story.

A lot of people who become writers,

who want to become writers, they've

been wanting to be writers since they were six years old.

They've been writing little stories in their notebooks,

and they've been writing in their journals, and doing this,

they're doing that, and they want to get published,

they want to get published, they want to get published.

At the age of 20 or 21, they're in graduate school

and they're studying writing, and they

expect very much to get published

and to be out there in the world.

It's great that people want this.

It's quite problematic, though, because when

you're 20-21 years old, you haven't had

a lot of experiences in life.

And so I find that coming to writing at the age of 34,

I had already done most things.

I had already been through a lot of experiences.

I had, you know, been a hippie, been poor, lived, you know,

like in a tent, hitchhiked back and forth across country.

I'd done a lot of things, not everything,

but I had done a lot of stuff.

And so when I was writing, it felt more

like a full experience.

And so if somebody comes up to me and says they're 30 and 40

and says, you know, I'm too old to be a writer,

I say, no, no, no, you're just the right age.

It's time.

And if you're younger, you know, you

might want to give yourself more time because it's not a race.

Probably you're not going to be the greatest mathematician

if you started in your 50s or 60s.

Probably you're not going to be the best boxer if you

start in your 50s or 60s.

But most things, most things that

take the mind, the heart, and what is creative, you can do.

I can become a writer at 34.

I'm could have become a writer at 44 or 54 or 64.

I've published just about 60 books.

It is my hope that if you take this course of study

seriously, that you will be able to write

the novel that's in your heart.

If you're afraid to start writing the novel, OK.

Write the novel.

I'm not asking you to not be afraid.

That's not going to help.

Be afraid, but take the jump.