The loneliness of the long distance writer

Bluntly put, Michael Collins's bio beggars belief. Here's a 46-year-old Limerick-born emigrant who, after he was stabbed one night in Chicago in 1995, took up extreme marathon running as a means of rebuilding his confidence (Collins is currently a member of the Irish National 100K Team); a man who was making six figures a year working for Microsoft and now teaches creative writing to war veterans in a community school in Dowagiac, South Michigan; a writer whose books (eight to date, the latest, Midnight In A Perfect Life, being an existential/crime novel in the Dosteoevsky-meets-Easton-Ellis mode) have been nominated for the Man Booker and the IMPAC. And yet even he is not immune to the vagaries of publishing trends, having weathered a mid-career twilight zone, struggling to stay in print.
"I broke out of it but I don't think it's ever been far away from me," Collins says over coffee in Brook's Hotel in Dublin's city centre. "I'd done a PhD in English Literature and had written three books, published in ten languages, making no money, when I got involved in computers. You get paid two or three thousand (for a book), and then in computers people were saying to me, ‘Here's a couple of hundred thousand bucks, if you stay here for four years you'll be a millionaire'. I had written a book which I liked and was popular in France but wasn't even published in America, and then I turned away from writing completely, I couldn't get into the despair which this guy (Midnight's protagonist Karl, a peevish middle-aged novelist) was in, where you're just banging your head off the wall. And I just happened to have this talent in computers which allowed me to live a normal life. Otherwise I would have been hamstrung."
There are more than a few transparently autobiographical passages in Midnight – Karl has a series of conversations with his agent and editor that would chill the heart of any aspiring writer.
"All those things have happened over the years," Collins admits. "In the beginning of this book when he's lonely and he meets a fellow in the porn industry, I really met a guy like that out in Seattle. He'd read something I'd written over the years and he went, ‘You're smart, but you're also an asshole. You don't know what you want to do, what your audience is. No one does it for themselves'. And he went through this whole mantra of porn and what people want, in a very clinical way, and that this was a vehicle for money, and what he wanted to do outside of that was in its own space. And I listened to him, and was slowly co-opted into working for Microsoft, but late at night I got involved in writing The Keepers of Truth, about dismantling American society, and it was the first time I ever put a murder in, and it brought a certain structure or discipline. The book came out in England and nowhere else, and then it was up for the Booker. So this book is sort of reflecting on which camp you want to be in."
This hybrid of (so-called) high literature and (so-called) genre fiction, Collins admits, causes marketing-driven editors no end of headaches.
"I have an awful lot of problems with American editors going, ‘All those Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky references are high literature and you're losing a whole pile of people'. But it's a psychological novel, as you said, in the Dostoevsky tradition – there's a murder, there's alienation and crisis going on. There can't be a CSI guy. It's not really about the crime, it's about the psychological distortion of everything. But if it doesn't make the cut in terms of being a crime book with resolution or addressing the central death halfway through – have a nice day."
Collins, who once remarked that he's seen more mental illness in the arts than anywhere else, says his extra-curricular activities act as a form of pressure release.
"You need an escape valve," he says, "like working in Microsoft, or teaching, currently. Just put on a suit and reconnect. Down where I am in Dowagiac, the average income is $12,000. That group in Michigan, a lot of them have been to Iraq, Afghanistan, all over the place, coming back looking for a sense of direction. Guys who were in fire-shoots up in the hills, guys dropped in from a helicopter, holding a fort while the Taliban were attacking them with mortars, there for two weeks and all they have is porn and cigarettes and bullets, and now they're back in the town. They weren't readers because none of it had any relevance to them, they're untutored, and I say to them, ‘You're going to die in six months: what would be the things that flash through your head? Bring it down to arbitrarily ten things you want to tell somebody before you go'. And very quickly those ten burgeon into 20 and 30, and all the experience rushes back in."
Marathon training, Collins says, also reflects the various disciplines required to write a book: stamina, focus, a certain amount of testing one's capabilities to the limit.
"One guy who went to the University of Notre Dame with me and was a phenomenal success, Nick Sparks, he got seven million for a book," he recalls. "We would run 20 or 30 mile runs and tell stories, and I think he had the same sense of discipline. He was talking about the process of getting up, just like you'd get up for a morning run, writing yourself into a place where you're in the story. In sports you basically say, ‘I'm going for the FA Cup, I'm going for this season,' and then it's over, there's a definitive ending in sight. A lot of unsuccessful writers never finish, it's just this amorphous blob, you lose focus. But writing is just like a race. With the books, you write semi-autobiographical pieces that will configure into a novel eventually, and that's like training for a marathon."