Talking “Sideways” and “Vertical” with Rex Pickett!

Rex, what was your unique, inner motive to become a writer? I know you made other things, such as film directing and screenwriting.

I've often said that a writer doesn't choose writing, writing chooses a writer.  I grew up in an emotionally repressed family, and I think -- since I can't play music or draw -- that writing became for me a way to disinter those emotions.  I also grew up in San Diego, a beach community in southern California.  By age 17 I realized I wanted to do something more with my life than just be a stoner surfer, so I started to read great literature and see great films, and those writers and filmmakers really inspired me to aspire to something greater than manage a grow house.

How it feels to become so famous with your first novel?

I don't think I'm as famous as others do.  When I'm alone it doesn't feel any differently.  Sometimes when I'm out in the world I'm aware that people perceive me differently.  I'll admit that I enjoy when people recognize the movie "Sideways" -- never me physiognomically -- and gush about it as though it had come out yesterday.  That makes me feel proud, that I really achieved something, that all the suffering was worth it.  But fame does not the next novel, or screenplay, or stage play, write.

How you handled the huge weight of success as writer and how can you unlock your creativity after such strong dose of fame for such a long time? I mean Sideways became a best-seller, then a movie – I would dare to say it became ‘classic’, won literally hundreds of awards and you initiated all that with the novel… I wanted to know as I am a writer myself!

I just rolled with the accolades.  Maybe being a little older I was more immune to some of the trappings of fame that befall other artists.  As far as writing post-"Sideways":  I didn't feel any pressure.  In fact, in some ways I felt less pressure because "Sideways" validated me.  For whatever reason, writing comes very easy to me.  Having to listen to others after I'm done, that's the hard part.  But, when you've been rejected as much as I've been, then suddenly get validated it's as if:  no one can say anything that hurts me because how could so many people be so wrong?  And they were.  I write with a lightness and an ease that I've never experienced before.

How it felt to face a blank page when you decided to create again?

As I said:  not hard.  As the great golfer Lee Trevino once said:  "Pressure isn't having to make a par on the 72nd hole to win the U.S. Open.  Pressure's having to make an 8-foot putt for $100 when you only have $7 in your pocket."  Certainly, after a big success you feel there are more eyes looking over your shoulder than when nobody knew who you were.  But that doesn't really bother me for some reason.

What is your writing method/procedure/ritual?

I wait until an idea builds inside me and becomes a whole world replete with characters and settings that have the ring of verisimilitude.  Then, I must have an ending because I want a destination.  I will not write without an ending.  Then I go.  I write very fast.  I don't worry over a paragraph all day like some writers.  I want to get the story out first, then I'll go back and clean it up, if necessary.  I write in the morning for a couple hours, take a lunch break, write until maybe 2:30 at the latest, and then stop.  I never write more than 4 hrs. a day.  Let me rephrase that:  I never physically write more than 4 hrs. a day.  When I stop, the writing continues in my head.  I'm constantly working on things in my imagination.  Sometimes I'll wake in the middle of the night with an idea and I'll jot it down.  Sometimes it's only a word.  Sometimes it's an idea for something inside a scene.  I always know where I'm going when I wake up.  I never have writer's block.  In essence, I write 24/7.  I like this quote:  "Writers are like thieves; they are always working."

And you published in 2010 your new novel ‘Vertical’? As you say it is a continuation of the old story. Why you decided to continue, instead of writing something brand new or irrelevant to the old story? And why Vertical? Is there a symbolic approach of the story?

I initially signed a deal with Knopf to write something else, but it wasn't working so I took some of the story -- the personal one I was writing -- and turned it into the "Sideways" sequel.  And I'm very happy that I did.  "Sideways" and "Vertical" are both written in the first person from the standpoint of Miles, so they're both very personal journeys for me.

You told me about the success your playwright ‘Sideways’ has… why you decided to have it as a playwright, as well? You considered that it might lose its novel or on-screen charm?

My play is based on my novel, not the movie.  The novel is very dialogue-driven, so it lent itself to the play.  I love the movie, but the movie, in Alexander Payne's head, cast my novel in a slightly different light.  Payne viewed my characters as more pathetic than I did.  He thought -- and told me to my face -- that they were losers.  I didn't.  Hell, one of them was me!!  I saw them as lovably off kilter, both of them frustrated, in their discrete ways, and both of them at that crossroads in their lives that a lot of people, men and women, find themselves at.  The play is a purer distillation of my novel than the movie.  If it were just the stage version of the movie it would have been a disgrace, and a rip-off to the paying patrons, to have done it.

I totally understand what you are saying about characters ‘based on the book’ and I know many writers, who take their books one step further, into a playwright. What are you writing right now? What inspires you? Why?

I'm going to the country of Chile to write Part III of the now "Sideways" trilogy.  I'm not finished with these characters yet.  They have so much more to give.  I also wrote the screen adaptation of "Vertical," and I very well might adapt "Vertical" to the stage if Fox Searchlight and Payne don't get their heads out of their asses and see that it could be a huge, hit movie.

·         Interview by Alexandra Belegrati 

Rex Pickett's Bio:

Rex Pickett is the worldwide known, critically-acclaimed author of the novel Sideways, upon which the critically-acclaimed Oscar-winning film of the same title by Alexander Payne was based.  Sideways went on to win over 350 awards from various critics and awards organizations.  It is enshrined in the Writers Guild of America theater as one of the 101 Greatest Screenplays of All Time.  The film changed the international wine world indelibly and time has only burnished its reputation into the now iconic.  

 

Website: http://rexpickett.com/