Throwback recap: Episode 4

Back when I first started doing episodes of the UPcoming, I was recording them from a dorm room at Fordham School of Law in Manhattan, New York. Still, it gave me memories I could never forget. One of them was interviewing one of my closest friends, Harrison “Harry” Shaw, in episode 4. Some background, Harry’s from Westminster, California, an aspiring novelist, like me, and a big history buff, and we talked about both in the episode.

As a writer, the story he’s writing is something he’s been writing and rewriting to perfection for a long time, and I know the pain and necessity of scratching out every word to put in a new one. We talked about our lives as writers and it was amazing how similar we were in getting ideas. Listening to him, I’ve come to consider writers a lost cause; we know we might never get the revenue we want, or any at all despite our years of hard work, and we write anyway. Maybe that’s the blessing, and curse, of having a dream.

In any case, we moved on Harry’s time studying history. I asked him why he found history so intriguing. “If you wanna see something stranger than fiction, look at history… It actually happened in all of the good, the bad, and the ugliness of it all.” Historical times and events have been what inspired fiction. People in the Cold War, Segregation, or Holocaust eras took everything they’d seen and experienced and tied them into themes for stories. It’s why we have the classic saying, “art imitates life”.

Sitting with Harry was fun in talking about the joy and pain of being writers, but also just hearing more about him, some things I didn’t know. No matter how long you might know a friend, you’ll never know everything, and I definitely learned something. Also, as creatives, it’s imperative that we meet more fellow creatives, because then inspirations and ideas come together, and our work gets stronger than staying isolated.