Thank you for inviting me to participate in this interview. I’m pleased to be here.

I would describe my passion for writing more of a drive to tell stories. I love a great story, and I especially gravitate to those that are high-concept versus character driven. They get my attention, and I find them inspiring and exciting.

Ever since I can remember, stories have always found me. They’ll wake me up in the middle of the night and occupy my thoughts until I pay attention to them. For me, stories are real, living things. I can’t rest until they’re written. I wrote my first story at the age of seven and funny enough, it was about Advertising. Throughout my career as an Advertising Art Director, (yes, ironically, I was on the art side of the writing team) I’ve always churned out commercials with a story. It was my trademark and landed me a truckload of awards. I started out as a kid, with no college education, and relied on my storytelling skills to get by. Though I don’t know where the inspiration comes from, I’d like to blame it on growing up in a family rich with colorful storytellers.

While by day, I was ad gal, by night I had become a self-inflicted writer, pounding out screenplays, novels, short stories, and short films until the wee hours of the morning. After too many years of burning the candle at both ends, I wound up with terrible insomnia. So, I figured the day job just had to go. In 2000, I left my position as Senior Vice President, Group Creative Director at Darcy Worldwide Advertising to pursue my dream of writing full time.

I write a lot of screenplays. I love movies. Writing in this format has taught me "character is action." I’m very much a visual writer. When it comes to writing novels I usually start with an image.

The most valuable thing I learned from the screenwriting process is: Show, don’t tell. I’ll only leak out information on a need-to-know basis. It’s more interesting to keep people guessing. This process of discovery keeps the story exciting, especially for me as a writer. If I get too bored, poof, there goes the story. And, I figure, if I’m bored, then my reader would certainly fall asleep. As in screenplays, dialogue is a powerful tool. I love a good subtext. It’s getting to know a character by how he says something, rather than what he’s saying. It makes for a fun writing process.

The Road To Jude is about a wondrous journey into the afterlife, set against the backdrop of September 11^th. In this story a young woman wakes up into an existence she can’t explain. Without memories or belongings, she ventures out into this world made of nothing but concrete. Along the way, she meets a fireman she calls Hero. He names her Pretty One. Together they begin on a road into a reality filled unusual things: paper snow, a thinking tree, a little boy named Possibility, and a deserted city where shoes fall from the sky. It’s a place where every encounter is symbolic.

I’m a native New Yorker, and I live in Manhattan. When tragedy struck my city, I really wanted to do something to help. I brought food to the firemen. I volunteered at the Red Cross to log in names of those who were missing. And I couldn’t believe how many people there were. Banks of volunteers worked everyday for weeks, typed in the details of someone’s life into a database. It was amazing how a person could be reduced to a single sheet of paper. The fact that none of those people were ever found, really struck me. It meant that there were so many families in pain. I wanted to do something personal, from my heart, something that would somehow help comfort these people. My small contribution was this book, The Road To Jude.

The inspiration for the story came from an image. For weeks after 9/11 I noticed an odd cloud hovered above the place where the towers had once stood. It just hung there for weeks, luminous and heavy, sitting over the city. I started to think that maybe it wasn’t a cloud at all, but the collective spirit of all those who died that day, looking down on us.

I’m fascinated by the mysterious and unexplained. I believe there are such things as ghosts, the impression of a life passed on. Pealing back the layers of daily existence makes me wonder what’s beneath the mundane and the routine. Why are we here? Who are we really, underneath the skin and bones, name and memories? Is everything we see, hear and experience really a shared reality? Or, is reality different for each person, in each situation? I know, it’s kind of heady, but for me, it’s brain candy for the imagination.

I think Hermann Hesse said it best when he said, "There is no reality except the one contained within us."

All these thoughts helped shape and create the underpinnings of story, The Road To Jude. September 11^th is a powerful backdrop to set this premise against, since it was an emotionally charged event that sent ripples around the world. Tragedies of this scale, and most recently with the Tsunami, make us question our existence. Why are we here and what does it all really mean?

Michelina Pagano -2 (Continue)