Interview With Paco Patag
We recently got a chance to sit down with the 2nd place winner of our January Short Story Contest. In this interview, Paco Patag talks with us about road trips, cargo pants, and Distributism.
Upliterate: Tell us a bit about yourself.
Paco Patag: I’m an electromechanical engineer in training at Cincinnati State, with a focus in lasers and renewable energy. Also a major fan of The Oh Hellos, my Mom’s Mushroom Orecchiette, Kevin Heider, board games, Tow’rs, the great outdoors, Roo Panes, and the Holy Family.
U: What got you started writing?
Short stories? I started writing them as a joke, actually. A friend and I were texting one day and they asked me to tell them a story, so I went for it, and it ended up being a series of super-long texts — I probably wrote at least three through my high school years. One time another friend and I tried a back-and-forth, where we would take turns writing a paragraph or so and then building off of each other’s contribution, which was a ton of fun but the story was never finished. While we were on a road trip about two years ago, some of my friends pulled out that first story I had written, which was three years old by then, and I remember half laughing, half cringing while they were reading it out loud. I couldn’t help thinking, “Oh good grief, this is so laughably bad, I could do so much better.” And I’ve finally gotten around to working on proving myself right.
U: What are you writing these days?
Haha, mostly papers and lab reports for school. Sometimes I’ll spot an article that makes me think and I can’t help but write a paragraph or two to go along with it before I click the share button. I’ve been reading quite a bit on Distributism recently, and I’ve got some notes on how the underlying principles could benefit our society today. A full piece might not get finished until the summer though — I’ve realized by now that the 23 credit hours I’m taking this semester are not at all conducive to fun writing. Other than that, I’m still working on short stories, and pulling together thoughts on songs and/or poems.
U: Why do you write?
I have a pretty vivid imagination, fueled by a childhood diet of Tolkien, Chesterton and Lewis, and it’s always been a fun challenge to share some of the stories of the multitude of scenarios that run through my head on a daily basis. I think that stories present a unique opportunity to connect with people and communicate truth, beauty and goodness, and I enjoy trying to build those bridges.
U: What writing advice can you give our users?
Just begin. Writing, especially when it’s purely for yourself with no deadlines or anything, is so easy to push to the bottom of your to-do list until you forget about it. I’ve found it helpful to keep a notebook and pencil on me (cargo pants, for the win) just to jot ideas down whenever I can — if phones work for you, then use them, but I’ve always found it too easy for me to get distracted by the internet. Even if it’s just one vivid scene in your head and you have no idea about the story surrounding it, writing out that one scene can do a lot to help kick things off.
U: What was the inspiration behind your story?
The last act in Harmonics, with the two friends hiking up a mountain in the middle of winter to see the sunrise, was originally a scene that I had written for the story that I had half-finished for the December contest. I liked the idea of those two friends, and the idea of them helping each other live up to the greatness that they know the other is capable of. Once I got the prompt of “resolutions, resolved” it simply went from there.
U: What do you hope readers will take away from “Harmonics”?
I hope that people wake up a little bit more to the people around them. I look around at school, and there are people sitting at the same table scrolling through Facebook instead of interacting with each other — and I know I escape to the internet far too often myself. The internet is great for keeping in touch with people far away, but I worry that it’s sometimes used to the detriment of the people sitting right in front of us. It’s friendship that helps wake us up to the wonder of the life that we’ve been given, and most of all through being fully present to each other in the times that we have together.
U: Where do you want your writing to take you? Any long-term goals in writing?
I’m working on finishing a novel-length story within the next few years, hopefully sooner rather than later. In any case, I don’t imagine that I’ll ever stop writing, whether it’s stories for my friends or articles for some groups that I’m a part of. Whatever I write though, I hope that it has a positive impact on those who read it and the lives of those around them.
You can find Paco Patag on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can read his winning story, Harmonics, on Upliterate.com.
