THE PRO FILES
When The Golden Liquid Shite is Flowing
Writer Q&A with Frank T Bird
Interviewed by Ben Human
The Pro Files interviewed Frank T Bird as part of our series of writer profiles. This is an unedited excerpt of everything more or less writing-related that came out of the entire drunken argument.
Is Frank T Bird for real, or a homage to Grease?
I have watched Grease many times, Pal, but if I wanted to pay homage, I would have called myself Dave Zuko.
What?
Names aren’t real, anyway. It’s like someone points at an object and blows air out of their mouth in a particular shape, and then we remember that object as that specific sound. It’s bullshit, and yet it’s our entire damn world. It’s both stupid and amazing.
Right. So anyway, on your About tab it says you’re an Aussie author of urban stream-of-consciousness fiction and psychedelic short stories. Who is/was/remains your inspo?
That needs updating. Inspo? Erm, I hate them all.
Who?
All of ’em. I try not to, but everything is so fucking boring, especially the so-called classics. I find the older language irritating to read.
I read a lot of military books and assassin shit like Day of the Jackal when I was young. Then, in my twenties and thirties, all I read were Buddhist texts. Reading fiction became a struggle during that time for some reason. Movies and TV and comedians like Bill Hicks inspired me instead. Still, I’m reading American Gods by Neil Gaiman to help me write my next book. It (Gaiman’s book) started great but now it's gone to shit.
I just finished Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by PKD. I should have read it years ago. It’s brilliant. But non-boring books are rare. I also enjoyed the Harry Potter series but people will stick their noses up cos it's not fancy enough.
It’s cliché, but I was probably drawn to my kind of internal writing through Salinger. I loved the way Holden Caulfield wandered around bitching about everything. The problem is, I think, as authors, we can become addicted to a particular POV. I just finished a 60k-word novel which is all first-person headcase, as I like to call it. (FYI it’s more like Psychological fiction.) Now, I’m trying to move on and write a third-person limited POV book, and it feels just about impossible.
Who’s hands down the best short story writer you’ve ever read? Link to an awesome story, if possible.
I wish I were one of those writing geeks that could say I like this and I like that, but I’m not. Reading is a proper chore for me. If I’m reading a book, it’s usually under duress or because I’m looking to learn something. That doesn’t mean I don’t like books. I love books, and I’m always buying them. I just never read them. If yer talking films, though, it’s different. The greatest movie I’ve ever seen is Memento which I believe may have started as a short story.
What gets champagne in your creator's veins? I don’t care if it’s drugs.
It’s not drugs at all, nor booze. Weed can be interesting here and there for generating ideas, but for the work of writing, it’s rubbish. Like most writers, I’ve pondered this question again and again. Is it drugs, diet, exercise, environment? I never found an answer.
When I’m in it, I’m in it; when I’m not, I feel like I never will be again, but it always comes back. So, I try not to think about it. I dumped a lot of stuff on Medium at one stage but realised it’s just about impossible to be a proper author and a blogger simultaneously. Cos when the golden liquid shite is flowing, you have to put that toward what you want to do for the rest of your measly life and for me, that’s writing books, not blogging.
There is success creatively, and there is blogging success. At the start of last year, I earned $800 in a month for the first time on Medium and thought I’d fucking made it. It came off the back of two months of publishing every day. But I realised at that time blogging was a full-time job. I don’t mean full-time time-wise. I mean creatively. You get eight hours of work time but only so much creativity each day. So there was no room for writing books, which is what I wanted to do.
I think to be successful as a blogger, you have to do just that. And believe me, you don’t need much talent. I have read multiple 10k-plus bloggers on Medium, and they are almost all shite. I don’t include Wildfire in that. I pull the piss out of her sometimes, but you can’t dispute that she is a good writer. Her articles are very engaging.
You gotta let that go. Do you think she talks about you in her articles?
I don't give a fuck Mate. Why would she? It's just that everyone goes on about her like she is fucking Hemingway or something cos the standard is so low. Hemingway is probably a bad example cos he is boring as fuck.
Anyway, nobody can say you need talent to be an influencer, but you do need to commit to publishing every day. Give it about four years doing that, and believe in what you are doing. Find your style, stick to it and learn along the way. Now I sound like that dodgy Ferrari monk prick telling people what to do. Thanks a lot.
I don’t know what you’re talking about. What writer do you rate highest on Medium? Which one is closest to your style?
There aren’t many. And it’s not because they aren’t good (probably). It’s just that I find most things incredibly boring. Mike Knittel is perhaps the writer I have enjoyed the most. But even Mike is heading toward writing books now rather than blogging. Some people have said Mike and I might be the same person. And that’s not true unless I have had several Fight Club moments when chatting with him. I consider Mike a friend. Our styles are very different. I would describe Mike’s style as depressing, honest, true American sarcasm. His writing is brave and funny, like Bukowski’s.
You are responsible for making me ugly laugh with the best fiction/nonfiction question I’ve heard all year: “Are you a horse?” What is the secret to humour? And how important is it?
Thanks, Pal. And now yer asking me for the keys to the kingdom. And I can’t tell ya, cos I don’t know. Yer write, and it’s either funny or bullshit. And yer don’t improve by Googling how to be funny or doing some damn course. You improve by hanging around with funny people for a long time. It’s an osmosis thing. If yer googling ‘How to be funny,’ or that kind of crap, you probably need to fuck it off and do something else.
If Madonna and Sam Smith turned the very act of rock and roll rebellion into conformist attention seeking, who fucked up comedy?
I don’t think they did. Madonna and Sam Smith are pop stars. They have fuck all to do with rock n roll, Mate. And sadly, we live in a world where cosmetic habits and bin-liner outfits of random idiots make the news.
We all wonder why we’re on the verge of WW3, and we blame ‘them’, but we shouldn’t because we’re the ones falling for the shite misdirection. We’re too busy doing fucked up dances on Tiktok or discussing gender politics to give a fuck that corporations are destroying the world.
Put it there.
I don’t think comedy is fucked up as such. The problem is it’s become another career path where you can learn it and shit. You can do a degree in stand-up these days. It’s too much about the self — about career progression and fame. And people think it’s just about being funny, but it isn’t. You should have a message. Otherwise, you might as well go into the woods and take a shit next to a bear with one arm clapping or take up doing no-arm pull-ups with yer damn teeth.
We should all look to guys like Bill Hicks and George Carlin back then for inspiration — and people like Dave Chapelle today. They aren’t afraid to send a message to the people. Somehow, they deliver those messages through comedy. It’s a dying art.
I heard ChatGPT is writing comedy for people these days, and that sums it up for me. The world is getting lamer daily, and it’s sad to watch.
Make a sentence containing the phrase ‘they is’.
No.
Whatever. Are pronouns that important?
Arguing about pronouns is like arguing about the qualities of fairies.
A few years ago, we were arguing about the qualities of marriage. Neither pronouns nor marriage have a scrap of reality to them. They are just ideas.
To ask if pronouns are important, therefore, we have to ask if they are important to the individual. And the answer, in many cases, is obviously yes.
So we begin by acknowledging that instead of trying to prove whether these imaginary objects mean anything on the material level.
When we say Mr, Mrs or Ms or our names, such as Ben or Frank, they also do not exist but are just ideas, and yet, we can say they are important — they mean something. And we need to respect that.
Still, I hear that people are getting in trouble for incorrectly assuming someone’s gender, and that is just fucking stupid. If someone clarifies their pronoun to me, I will respect that, as we all should. But if they have tits and a fanny and I’ve never met them, I will assume they are a woman until they let me know otherwise, and intelligent people should be okay with that.
Do you subscribe to the Harry Styles / Harry Windsor school of thought, which defines ‘writing’ (e.g. a song or an autobiography) as saying or writing down some shit so someone else can fix it and put it to music or into some other publishable form?
I have no interest in any of that shit, Mate. Life is hard enough without having to think about useless shit. It’s like when people are writing a novel and they call it a WIP. Humans are knobheads.
Is technology important, or are we past that now? (Try to keep ChatGPT out of it. You can’t.)
The saddest thing about the development of technology is that it will make it virtually impossible to stop climate change. Next, in third-world countries, cobalt mining for our electronics is the modern-day slave trade (besides the prison system). So there are many devastating aspects of it.
Still, it could be used to create a utopia in the world if this planet wasn’t run by greedy clean shaven fucks in suits.
If we were more intelligent as a species, we have the resources to live for a long time in a god realm. Unfortunately, we are just creating a hell-realm instead cos white men in suits like getting their cocks sucked by expensive hookers while they drink Johnnie Walker purple and read the Wall Street Journal.
Why do you swear so much? How important is it for a good boy to have a good vocabulary?
I write as I speak, Pal. It’s how I hear it as it comes out. I’m originally from the North of England, so it’s my natural language. My latest book has 782 instances of the word fuck, which accounts for around 1.4% of the book. I think it’s time people realised that swear words are part of primary language, and we only cringe at them due to our Christian shame-painted conditioning. I considered toning them down once, but then I thought, fuck it.
What did you publish most recently? Where can we find it? Anything you’d like to give away for free? What else have you published, book-wise?
Subscribe and get my short story collection BALLBAG for free. Or buy The THERAPIST, my novella. I have another book I just finished, but I’m sending it to bastard literary agents so yer can't have it.
How long did it take you to write? How long should it take to write a book?
My last book meant sweating my cock off for at least twelve months, which is why I’m pretty much dead now from a literary standpoint and it’s only 58k words. It’s a damn grind to keep pumping out books. I suppose you could pump out shit, but it’s hard if you want to bleed something out that actually means something.
Then again, the book I am writing now I started one week ago and I’ve written 37k words. I feel like I am getting faster. Sometimes I just wake up and write until my balls start shrinking and then I just meditate for the rest of the day.
Are you British or Australian? Do you think it’s more important to root AGAINST these teams or FOR their opponents in a cricket, rugby or tennis match? (Unless that opponent is Djokovic.)
I’m from the North of England originally, but I use the term Australian author now as I’ve been here longer than there. I only follow Premier League football, and I’m an Everton fan, so that keeps me occupied without much time for other sports. Sometimes I play golf.
Would you rather be Nick Cave or Quentin Tarantino?
Neither, although I do like them both. Tarantino films are a massive guilty pleasure for me. I’ve seen them all many times. I rarely listen to Cave, though when I do, it’s maybe two or three particular songs. He’s a real depressing bastard.
I think we really raised the bar with this one. Cheers, Frankie.
No problems, Pal. You’re one of the better writers on here BTW. You’ll probably get famous forty-two years after yer die so that's something to look forward to.
Can’t believe you made me submit this myself though, you bastard. Now I look like I interviewed myself. Fuck it.
