My ALLi author guest this episode is Mark David Gerson, an award-winning author of more than twenty books spanning fantasy, memoir, and writing guides. He once avoided writing, but eventually embraced it—and now helps others do the same through his coaching, workshops, and books. He’s also a screenwriter and visual artist who sees writing as both a creative and spiritual act.
Listen to the Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Mark David Gerson
Inspirational Indie Author Interview: Mark David Gerson — About the Author
Mark David Gerson is the founder of The Mark David Gerson School of Writing and award-winning author of more than 20 books. As a novelist, he is best known for his Legend of Q’ntana fantasy series. His nonfiction includes classic titles for writers, compelling memoirs, and inspiring self-help books. When not writing, Mark David coaches an international roster of both first-time and seasoned writers to help them get their stories onto the page and into the world with ease. Learn more at markdavidgerson.com or follow him on Facebook.
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About the Host
Author Howard Lovy has been a journalist for 40 years, and now amplifies the voices of independent author-publishers and works with authors as a developmental editor. Find Howard at howardlovy.com, LinkedIn and X.
Read the Transcripts
Howard Lovy: My guest this episode is Mark David Gerson, an award-winning author of more than 20 books, spanning fantasy, memoir, and writing guides.
He once avoided writing, but eventually embraced it and now helps others do the same through his coaching, workshops, and books.
He's also a screenwriter and visual artist who sees writing as both a creative and spiritual act. I'll let Mark David Gerson tell his story.
Mark David Gerson: Hi, my name is Mark David Gerson. I'm the author of more than 20 books that span a bunch of different genres. Fantasy, books for writers on writing, on creativity, self-help books, memoir, inspirational, spiritual books. I'm also a writing coach and writing workshop facilitator. Something I've been doing for more than 30 years, and I've taught in two countries and multiple colleges and universities.
I teach basically people how to get through their books and find new ways of writing more easily and naturally and authentically.
Howard Lovy: Great, sounds like you've got a lot going on. I call it multiple genre syndrome. To some people it's a handicap, but I think it's a strength.
So, let's start at the beginning.
Mark's Early Life and Initial Aversion to Writing
Howard Lovy: Where did you grow up and was reading or writing always a part of your life?
Mark David Gerson: I grew up in Montreal and writing was definitely no part of my life and no desired part of my life, but reading was. My mother was a voracious reader. She always had a book on the go when she introduced me to the public library and took me to the library, and I was a huge reader, but I was also very, self-conscious is probably the wrong word, terrified is probably the right word, of my own creativity.
I gravitated away from anything involving creativity, anything involving writing. I hated English class. Not because of the reading, but because of having to speak up and give my interpretation of things.
I gravitated toward maths. I liked math at the time because math had one right answer. If I got the right answer, I was good. Whereas English, it was all shades of gray.
So, I like to joke that my muse tricked me into writing and over the years nudged me in that direction in various ways until it was too late to work back.
Howard Lovy: You're an anomaly already because you're good at math and most writers are not.
Mark David Gerson: I'm not so sure I'm good at it anymore. I think they have traded one for the other. I'm not sure.
Howard Lovy: You ran away from it in the beginning.
The Turning Point: Embracing Writing
Howard Lovy: Was there a particular moment when you realized, no, let's try this writing?
Mark David Gerson: What happened was, the first funny story is back when I was in high school, way before computers, I was given a typewriter. It wasn't to write compositions and school assignments, and it wasn't a Smith Corona, and it wasn't an Underwood, it wasn't a Royal, it wasn't any one of these major brands. It was a Swiss typewriter called a Hermes, and of course, Hermes like Mercury is the God of communication. So, that was the first little nudge, that I didn't even realize I was getting.
Later, when I was in high school, I agreed to do publicity for the musical that was being put on.
Who I am today can't imagine how or why who I was then would've said yes, but I did. So, I had to learn how to write press releases and things that were a little more formulaic, and I began to do more publicity and PR work in college.
My first jobs out of university were in public relations, so I began to write then.
I like to say I was writing other people's stories to other people's deadlines. I wasn't writing anything that was all that meaningful to me.
Howard Lovy: What did you study in college?
Mark David Gerson: Business. Not because I wanted to do business, but because I didn't know what the hell I wanted to do, and that just seemed like, for somebody who was then way more sensible than I probably am now, that seemed like the most sensible thing to do.
Howard Lovy: But through business, you began writing more and more press releases, and was that sort of your gateway drug into more writing?
Mark David Gerson: It was my gateway drug. Then my second job out of university was in fact working in the PR office of the university I graduated from, and I had to write not only press releases, but I had to write interviews and feature stories. So, that began to expand.
Then, a few years later, I was living in Toronto, and I was freelancing as an editor at a magazine, and I was in house. One Monday morning, one of the staff editors came rushing to me and she said, I just took this amazing creative writing workshop this past weekend, you've got to take it. And I made this sign of the cross and backed away very quickly, because the whole idea of a creative writing workshop or any kind of creative writing class, just terrified me.
But she was uncharacteristically persistent. She was such a soft spoken, not at all pushy person, but she really hammered me that day, and in the end, I did agree, and I signed up and it changed everything.
Howard Lovy: That was your eureka moment. Had you always secretly had a story in the back of your mind or was this a complete 180 for you?
Mark David Gerson: It was a complete 180 for me.
I guess actually that's not entirely true. I have a kind of peculiar part of my own history that at one point I thought I would try to write a story about, and this was before the creative writing workshop, because it would just seem like a compelling story idea.
I never got very far; I never was able to go very deeply into the emotion of it. It was all very surface, and I gave up on it. That particular part of that storyline turned into part of the plot of a later novel, but I didn't really have any compelling story. In fact, I was so busy running for my own creativity that even if there had been something, I would've replaced it.
Journey to Becoming an Author
Howard Lovy: So, eventually you wrote a novel and that was Moon Quest. Did that come after you started taking the class?
Mark David Gerson: Yeah, so what happened was that one workshop turned into two workshops, turned into a series of workshops. About a year later, the woman who taught those workshops, who had become my mentor, the first workshop was a non-credit workshop offered at the University of Toronto. She had two other people who were teaching sections of that course, and she called me one day and she said, would you like to teach my course? And I said, no way in hell.
She said, fine, and a few months later, she called me again and again, I said, no way in hell. The third time, and by then I'd also had not only a creative awakening, but I had a spiritual awakening, and I was actually paying a lot of attention to my dreams. I was journaling my dreams. I was actually seeing a Jungian therapist to talk about my dreams, and I had an amazing dream that I remember so clearly, even all these years later.
Without giving you all the detail, the dream ended with one character saying to another character, and I wasn't physically in the dream, but one person in the dream saying to the other person in the dream, I have to teach. And I woke up with a start and I called Carol. I said, yes, and it was in one of those workshops that I was teaching that The Moon Quest was birthed.
I led my group through a writing exercise. I do a lot of guided meditations and guided visualizations when I teach, and this one time, a little voice in my head said, okay, now you do the exercise, which I'd never done before, because I'm always keeping an eye on the people in the room, making sure they don't need any help.
I began to write and what came out of me was the strangest story about a weird looking man in a weird looking horse-drawn coach pulled by two strangely colored horses, and that became the first scene of the first draft of the novel I had no conscious desire to write and knew absolutely nothing about.
Howard Lovy: Wow. This was before indie publishing. You went the traditional route and got an agent early on. What was that experience like?
Mark David Gerson: I did have an agent, and this was in the days of mailing out query letters, if you can remember that far back. There was email, but in those days, most agents said, do not email us. Now, it's the other way around.
I sent a whole bunch of query letters and one agent in California got back to me. She was one of the only ones who said, please email me your query. She got back to me almost immediately and didn't say, send me the first 30 pages, which is standard. She said, send me the novel.
Sent her the novel. She absolutely loved it, which of course, thrilled the hell out of me. We signed a contract. over the next two years, she was never able to place it, and at one point she reached out back to me and said, look, I've pitched this everywhere I know. I'm happy to hang on to it in case you find somebody and need to negotiate a contract, or we can just end our relationship.
Self-Publishing and Lessons Learned
Mark David Gerson: I did nothing right away, but ultimately, I ended it, and I had come into a little bit of money at that time, and about a year or two later, I decided to self-publish before POD was quality.
I had a bunch of copies printed by a book printer in Michigan and began to sell my book that way, and of course, as the years passed, POD became a much more viable, much more quality operation, and I've done all my books that way since.
Howard Lovy: Right. So, that was the stone Age.
Mark David Gerson: And it wasn't that long ago, but it was the Stone Age.
Howard Lovy: So, then you invested in book designing and in cover designing, and in print runs and everything else. What were some of the biggest lessons you learned from that first experience?
Mark David Gerson: I had a very bizarre experience with the cover designer. The book designer was fabulous. The cover designer was very gifted, but horrible to work with.
But just to back up to the genesis of the story, the exercise I gave those people in the group was, I was using a tarot deck and I had them pick a card and led them through a kind of open eye visualization based on the card they picked, and then I picked a card and that was what kicked off the writing.
No, this cover designer would not have known a deck of Oracle cards if it hit her over the head, but the cover she came up with had elements of that card in it. So, whatever triggered the story triggered her as well.
But what I did learn after having published two books, both The Moon Quest and then my first book for writers, The Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write, was that I could do all this stuff myself just as well.
I can do graphic design. I'm a photographer as well, and every other book, those are now in later editions, but every other book I have self-published, I have done the design myself. I designed the book myself, and I have designed the cover myself.
So, I actually learned that I'm way more creative and I ever thought ever thought I was.
Howard Lovy: After, initially writing away from it.
Creative Process and Spiritual Connection
Howard Lovy: It sounds like you run on instinct, and there's this almost spiritual element to what you're doing.
Mark David Gerson: Absolutely. I would say that there's a reason why my creative and spiritual awakenings happened more or less hand in glove, is because they were always the same thing for me at their core.
When I teach writing, it may not be from an overtly spiritual perspective, but it's certainly spiritual principles at play.
Howard Lovy: I completely understand. When you tap into your creativity, you're not necessarily tapping into your logical mind; it's a feeling and that's when the best writing happens, in my experience anyway.
Mark David Gerson: Yeah. With The Moon Quest, of course, I knew nothing about the story, except as I was writing it from one day to the next, which totally freaked me out, because I had no clue what I was doing. As whatever kind of control freak I was back then, this was the biggest challenge to that, and I've never outlined a book since. I still write all my books the same way. I have no idea the story except as I write it, and in those instances where I've thought I have known something, I have inevitably been wrong.
Howard Lovy: I think I recognize your name also from, I did a blog post for ALLi on Plotters versus Pantsers, and I think you came down firmly on the side of pantsers. You're by the seat of your pants. To you, is that the only way to do it? Or do you have an idea of where you're going?
Mark David Gerson: I jokingly have rules for writing in all my books for writers, and the first rule is that there are no rules. What I say is, whatever works for you is what works for you, and whatever works for you today may not work for you tomorrow. So, just be present with that.
For me, the idea of planning and plotting everything out ahead of time, first of all, it takes some of the fun out of the experience.
Also, I feel like it puts me in a box from which there is no escape. I've set out the parameters and that's where I am.
In my experience with all my books, and some of the non-fiction as well as the fiction, is that the stories become journeys of discovery for me. Take The Star Quest, which is the next book in the series that The Moon Quest unintentionally started. It wasn't designed as a series.
I had, and it's a fantasy, and you figure in a fantasy, the bad guy's going to come to a bad end at the end of the story because that's way these things work. And I didn't know how it was going to happen, but that was certainly in my mind as I was writing the story. And on the very last day that I was writing one of the final scenes of that first draft, that isn't what happened. Something else wrote itself onto the page, onto the screen, a different kind of ending altogether that my conscious mind could never have conjured up. It was just way beyond anything I could have thought up or planned ahead of time and it was way truer to the theme that I discovered the book to have, the story to have, than the original ending that I would've thought of.
So, I like to say that my stories are smarter than I am.
Howard Lovy: Was it the benefit of being an indie author? If you were with a traditional publisher, you'd be expected to follow certain fantasy tropes.
Mark David Gerson: And that's probably why the agent, Nancy, could not place The Moon Quest all those years ago, because it didn't fit into the mold.
Years ago, many years ago, I don't even know if Harlequin Romance still exists, but when I was a freelance editor back in Toronto, I had the, I was going to say misfortune, the experience of editing a silhouette Romance, which is one of Harlequin's imprints at the time, and copy editing it.
The manuscript came with a very strict list of requirements as to what had to happen when in each story. The formula was that strict.
Howard Lovy: I've never understood that, as a reader and also a writer. Why do you want something predictable?
Mark David Gerson: I guess for that genre, the readers want the same thing, that's why they keep buying them. But as an editor, it was a horrible experience. I never did another one because it was a paint by numbers experience, is really what it was, and why would I want to write that?
As you say, why would I want to write that and why would I want to write the same book over and over again?
Howard Lovy: Because money.
Mark David Gerson: If it is only about the money, I could get a better paying job than being a writer.
Howard Lovy: Now, your work spans fiction, memoir, personal development, writing guides. How do you decide what kind of book you're going to write next?
Mark David Gerson: The books decide.
I have more books in my queue than I may still have left years to live, but I have this vision of the books, the stories, in a queue, fighting each other to be next. So, whoever gets to the front of the line, that's the story I write next, and sometimes I have stopped one book to pick up another one and finish that before going back to its predecessor. That has happened a few times. So, whatever story calls to be the strongest is what I write.
Howard Lovy: What do you say to people who might advise you to have your own author brand? What is your brand if you write a little bit of everything?
Mark David Gerson: My brand is me. It's not a genre.
Because I also teach, and all my books in one way or another are about the power of story and storytelling. So, my brand is, I'm a storyteller.
Screenwriting Adventures
Howard Lovy: Now, you've also adapted one of your stories into screenplays that are in development as feature films. What's that experience like and how's that different from writing a novel?
Mark David Gerson: I adapted all four of the existing Legend of Cantana stories into screenplays.
It's funny. I had no screenwriting experience. Of course, I had no novel writing experience either, and between the time that I let go of the agent and decided to self-publish The Moon Quest, I had a friend who kept saying, this would make a great movie, why don't you write a screenplay?
I kept saying, I don't know how to write a screenplay, but she was like the colleague at the magazine who kept pushing me to take this course. This friend kept at me and one day I thought, you know what, maybe I can do this.
So, I went into Borders. So, you can see this is going back a few years, to look at screenwriting books and discovered, to my, not surprise, but still to my horror, that all these screenwriting books pretty much were all very kind of engineered. They were teaching how to write a screenplay in a very engineered kind of way, which is not how I write my books, and I just didn't feel like I could write anything that way.
So, I did pick up a couple of books, mostly for formatting and less for anything else. And said, okay, like I just said a moment ago, I didn't know how to write a novel, though I had read many novels, obviously, and I have a story.
How did I write the novel? I let the story tell me how to write it, so I do the same thing with a screenplay. It's the same story told in two different ways, really. So, it wasn't so much adapting the novel as a screenplay, it was taking the kernel of the story and finding a different way of telling it.
So, I had a few drafts of the screenplay done and by now, The Moon Quest was out. I was doing one of my very first book signings at a Borders in Albuquerque. A woman comes up to my table. I had this big poster of the original cover, and she picks up the book and she looks at the cover and she turns it over and she reads the description. This is my favorite part of the story. She says, oh, are you the author? I'm thinking, who else would be insane enough to be sitting here in this Borders, being avoided by everybody who walks by, than the author?
So, I said, yes. And she said, this sounds like a great film. I said, as a matter of fact, I've just written a screenplay. She said, as a matter of fact, I've just started an independent production company, if I like the book would you send me the screenplay? And I said, absolutely.
She loved the book; she loved the screenplay. Now, it's fantasy. It's not cheap. Will it ever get made? I don't know, but it proved to me that I can write a screenplay or anything else.
Howard Lovy: You've gone farther than most people. I hear from clients all the time, I'm also a book editor, this would make a great movie or great Netflix streaming series; how do I do that? And I'm like, I don't know. I have no idea how to do that.
Mark David Gerson: I get asked similar questions and my experience was not a conventional one.
I remember going to a writer's conference, also in Albuquerque. This was before this experience, and I was pitching it to pub to publishers or agents or editors, and everyone I pitched it to said, you know what, you should get it made as a movie first.
Then I went to a screenwriting conference, and they said, oh, you should get the book published first.
Howard Lovy: I guess there's no single formula. Some luck, some connections, but at least you had the screenplay ready.
Coaching and Teaching Writers
Howard Lovy: Let's talk a little bit about your other life, which is coaching and teaching. What's the most common issue that you deal with in terms of the creative process?
Mark David Gerson: I wouldn't say there's one particular one. I guess one of the big ones I get is, I don't have time to write, and I actually have created a whole course around finding the time to write, because that is a common one.
I think the other one is, I don't have any stories or have too many stories. I don't know what to write or I don't know what to choose.
The other one would be some sort of creative block.
I find myself, I won't say uniquely, but very well placed to deal with that, because I had my own issues with that. Having overcome my own creative blocks now, I think I'm in a really good place to help people with theirs.
Howard Lovy: In 30 seconds or less, what's the cure for creative block?
Mark David Gerson: Trust your story and don't get in the way of it.
Howard Lovy: Good advice. Excellent.
The time thing, I had that issue for years until I decided, okay, even if I just do 500 words a day, after a few months, I'll have a few thousand words, and that's what I did and that's how I wrote my first novel.
Mark David Gerson: My story with that was, I gave myself 15 minutes a day, because that's all I could manage. Again, even 15 minutes a day is better than no minutes a day. Whatever words you get are better than no words. Everybody can find 15 minutes in their day, everybody.
So, in those situations, that's my starting point.
Howard Lovy: Is that primarily the way you make a living, through teaching, or is it a combination of your writing and your teaching? Is this your full-time work?
Mark David Gerson: Yeah, I definitely make more money from the teaching and the coaching. Obviously, like every writer, my dream would be to make gazillions of dollars just from the books and I could still live long enough for that to happen.
But I love working with writers. I love helping people find their own creative power and get that out there. That's exciting to me.
That's expressed in my fiction and my nonfiction as well. As I said before, a lot of my work is about the power of storytelling. In fact, The Moon Quest, in a current events irony, even though I conceived it 30 years ago, or it beat me up and dragged me into the writing cave 30 years ago, it's a story about the silencing of story, and it's just stunning to me how relevant everyone has said it is over, not the 30 year span, since it's been out, I guess for about 17 years, 18 years. Everyone has always said how relevant it is through that time, and I would say it's even more relevant now.
Howard Lovy: Without getting overly political here, I know what you mean by the silencing of stories.
Mark David Gerson: Again, it was a story that I really had no choice but to write. It wasn't a story that had any political agenda.
In fact, for me, it was a story about the unblocking of my own creative blocks. That was the metaphor for me.
Howard Lovy: That's the great thing about novels. You can write it with one intent and reading is a participatory sport. They can bring to it their own issues, their own baggage, and it can morph over time too.
Mark David Gerson: For sure, and if you read it multiple times, each time can be a different experience as well.
Advice for Aspiring Authors
Howard Lovy: You have more than 20 books behind you. What kind of advice would you give to new authors starting out?
Mark David Gerson: Don't give up. Write the stories. Write the stories you can't not write. Write the stories, and only you can write the stories that you're passionate about.
You asked the question before about writer's block. When you're writing what you're passionate about, you're much less likely to have writer's block. When you're writing what you're thinking you should be writing, then you're more likely to get writer's block.
Howard Lovy: That goes for fiction and nonfiction too.
Mark David Gerson: Absolutely, for anything. For any creative enterprise actually.
Howard Lovy: Thank you, Mark David. This has been a very informative. We've talked about the spiritual practice of writing and of the logical brain versus the creative brain, and how I think your creative brain in the end won.
Thank you for appearing on the show. I appreciate it very much.
Mark David Gerson: Pleasure. Thank you, Howard.
Howard Lovy: Thank you. Bye.
