Best Selling Author, Screenwriter, Bruce Cameron
Interviewed by Carol Wood

I received an email from a writer friend with a really funny story in it, The Chili Judge, but there was no author listed. When I read it, I laughed so hard tears squirted out of my eyes like a cartoon. When my husband came home, I read it out loud to him. We laughed hard again, and I wet my pants!

So, I decided I needed to find out who this terrifically funny writer was. By using Google.com, I found Best Selling Author and Screenwriter Bruce Cameron and bravely decided to email him and ask for an interview. "I'd love to meet you, Bruce. You will know me easily, I'll be the one wearing Depends."

Much to my surprise, Bruce said that he was happy to do an interview! That was August 9th. Well, then he became very busy, went out of town, came back in town and I went out of town, John Ritter passed away and Bruce didn't answer any of my emails...I was about to give up when Bruce emailed me.

"If it didn't happen, please forgive me, I in no way meant to avoid you. If it DID happen, please forgive me for not remembering."

The interview below is the result.

I was sorry to hear about John Ritter’s death. His work on your show 8 Simple Rules was as funny as ever. I know he did the voice on your video book, but how did you two hit it off?

It’s hard not to hit it off with John Ritter. His personality just made every single conversation a joy, and he was warm and very receptive. My son and I went to a play that John Ritter performed in and John came out and talked to us. He was so nice to my boy. John just gave of himself. He shared himself. John Ritter seemed to communicate with ever gesture. He felt blessed and lucky with the world and he didn’t see any reason to horde that. He was a great guy.

Are you involved in the process of the direction of where the show goes now?

No, that’s entirely up to the producers of the show.

Is that usual?

ABC’s position on this was they had the book and that’s what they paid for.

Many of us have watched the touchtone label scroll across the screen and we’d like to know what it’s like to be a part of the machine. Are you allowed to visit the set?

Sure! But, my career out here in Hollywood, I’m trying very much to direct it away from having the entire town identify me just with 8 Simple Rules. I didn’t insinuate myself into the process. I don’t hang out with the writers. I’m really not a part of the machine. I’m trying to build my own machine. I’m trying to get some shows on the air that I want to produce.

What do you do to keep your voice fresh?

You don’t think it is? I think my voice is my voice. Sometimes I write from the position of sort of an aloof, clueless boob and sometimes I’m much more like a clueless dad, but clueless seems to come to mind as a word to describe me always. I rarely write my column from a position of being really smart and self-aware. I’m usually writing from a voice of being unaware of my own short comings, faults and misconceptions.

Now that your girls are grown up, how can you write about them being teenagers?

I’m not sure what I’m doing there. I’ve written columns about my daughters going to college and moving out of the house and getting their own apartment. But there’s nothing to prevent me from writing a good teenager column as it occurs to me or even a toddler column if it occurs to me. I wouldn’t write it like it was happening right now. I’d use past tense.

Did you keep journals when your kids were little? It’s like you are experiencing it right now.

It’s just from memory. My brain is like a really poorly organized attic. I throw everything in there and look around. I never know what I’m going to find, then I open up a box, “Oh, look at this, it’s Christmas 1968!"
I can never remember anything important. I remember odd details and funny little things that happened. But the causes of the First World War just went in and out. I’m a well-informed person, but I just didn’t remember any of the information. Consequently, I sound like I’ve never taken a history class or anything.

How do your children react to having their lives flashed on the TV screen for the whole world and Texas?

Ha! They are so blasé about the whole thing. Because, you see, as far as they’re concerned whatever dad does CAN NOT be cool. They’ve been on national television; they’ve been on CNN and other shows. They couldn’t care less. My son says people stop him in the hallways, and they want to talk to him about the show. He thinks they're crazy. He’s totally disassociated himself from the Rory character on the show.

Do you play tennis with your son? Is he now 13 or 15 and do you often forget his age so that you can appear younger?

Ha-ha! I do play tennis with him. He’s much better than I am now. He went to State this year; he’s in high school. He’s 15 he’ll be 16 in a couple of months. It’s really frustrating to me that he’s much better than me because I have to cheat very obviously in order to win.
I don’t forget how old he is. I do tell people how old my children are, but that doesn’t mean I’m particularly truthful about how old I was when they were born.

You really are cagey about how old you are, aren’t you.

No, I haven’t been until this week. I made a decision that I'd better stop telling my real age because this is Hollywood. There are writers who have lost jobs because, as they’ve been told, “We need someone who has a younger perspective.” It’s illegal but it’s accepted. Ageism and sexism are rampant and there have not been a lot of lawsuits.
I’m old enough to have a twenty-two year old daughter. What’s scary for me is she’s around the age when I had her, and I’m not at all ready to become a grandparent. She’s not married or anything yet, but I remind her at every opportunity that I do not intend to become a grandparent and I expect her to cooperate in that effort.

Are any of your children writing?

My son wants to be a movie director. He’s very interested in how TV show or movies are put together. He’s never written a script. He’s written a couple of short stories. He’s not like I was. When I was his age I couldn’t stop writing. I wrote almost ever day, even at age 16. But he does occasionally dabble in it. The other two aren’t interested. They’re good, but they aren’t interested.

How do you react to people emailing your work or listing your work on the web without crediting you?

I lie on the floor and tear up my clothes. It is so frustrating. It seems like it would be so simple to leave my name on there. And I really get frustrated when people change it. It seems like there is a particular type of plagiarist out there who not only wants to take my work and put his name on it but also to make changes. It seems like those adulterated versions get much more play. I think it’s because those people are more aggressive at getting it out there. I don’t understand how people can plagiarize.

Have you ever hired a hit man?

Actually, I spoke to an attorney. I could cause a lot of financial damage to people, especially to those who own or run the websites, but I have a reputation of being a nice guy. My children don’t think this is deserved, but I do. I think I am a nice guy when it comes to helping other writers and being cooperative with their efforts. It wouldn’t be in keeping with that nice guy approach if I went after websites like Grandma and Grandpa Davis in Wyoming, which talks about their Winnebago, and I wind up suing them and repossessing their Winnebago. That’s just not what I want.
One time I had a staff who worked for me. They pursued this and said, list me as the author or cease-and-desist, but it just felt like I was trying to stop the common cold. I’d find one or two websites and overnight five or six more would pop up. I eventually decided this is what happens in today’s world. Until the Internet becomes more secure for writers, all of us are going to have to face this.
I have some real horror stories. I have one writer friend who had a columnist from a college paper take my friend’s columns and publish them under his byline, under a plagiarist's byline!
The college administration wasn’t particularly alarmed. There attitude was, “Well, he got it off the Internet.”
It’s just a very strange thing. Most people don’t understand the Internet. They think it’s the Wild West, where anything goes.
They fired the student from the newspaper, but they didn’t pursue any further disciplinary action. When I went to college, if you were caught plagiarizing you were kicked out of school. End of story.

Do you have siblings who forced you into comedy?

Yes, I had two younger sisters, which I felt was a redundancy which was unnecessary. Both of these sisters think they are smarter than I am, and they’re both incorrect. They make the effort to drive me crazy, or did when I was growing up. It turns out, where I’m funniest is on paper.

You say that you wrote your first book, Bad Luck W. Bruce, as a precocious ten-year-old with, I assume, a losing batting average or a horrible acne problem (why else would you be hiding in your bedroom writing when you could be out playing?)

Yeah! I was in fourth grade. The reason is real simple. I was driven. To this day I don’t quite understand what it is that makes me want to write. I have trouble believing that I’m so different. It just feels to me that everybody should be like this. That everybody should have these stories in their head that need to be told, and the characters whose voices need to be expressed. I wrote 26 pages long hand. That was my first book, then I gave up and went and played baseball. I wrote a real novel is high school. I was unstoppable. Just could not and would not give up on my dream of being a writer.

Do you have an excerpt of Bad Luck With Bruce?

I remember I set it in a small town in Chicago because I didn’t know what Chicago was. I remember it wasn’t very good. It mostly had to do with terrible sisters. I can sort of remember it was a very complicated thing. My son does this. You get bogged down. It’s a wonder that not every book you read is as long as War and Peace. It just seems that once you get started you have all these characters whose lives need to be fully explored. How to end the story is the biggest skill that you can learn.

Have you written any poetry?

Yeah! I’ve written a few poems. I certainly haven’t written enough for a book.

Are they more comic or… love notes?

Here’s one for you.
It’s called

The Penny

I dropped a penny into the well
For quite some time that copper fell
Without a sound returned to ear
And just when I began to fear
Such small impact I’d never hear.
A tiny call from down below
Announced arrival of my throw.

That’s really good. I really like that.
How many manuscripts and corvettes did you have to send out before you met your agent, Judy Rein?

I wrote 9 unpublished novels. I spent 20 years trying to find an agent or a publisher. Of the 9 I sent 7 of them combined 50 or 60 copies each. Do the math. 500 times. It’s a really hard thing to do. It’s all hard. Writers are predisposed to believe that their words are what is going to launch them. They feel like they can put a note in a bottle and throw it in the ocean. They think they will actually get somewhere at some point and make their career.
It turns out that getting someone to represent you or publish you is, in essence, selling your book to them. Sales are very ineffective if you just simply rap up the sample of your product and mail it to somebody. That hardly ever works. This is a rather intimate purchase because if you’re going for an agent, she’s buying a relationship with the writer. The idea that you can form a relationship based on a sample is laughable. So my advice to writers is to recognize that you have to sell yourself. Sales people sell themselves first before they sell their product. It’s not easy. Writers like to hide and be alone. They do this sole and isolated work on the printed page. That’s what writers like to do. Well, great but that isn’t selling. You can’t market your book from the comfort of your living room. You have to really get out there and be aggressive. The writers who I’ve met who have ever done well have been good marketers with a few exceptions. We all have our eyes on the exceptions. Focus on the rule. The rule is: most writers work relationships first and then get published.

Is there anything that gives you an edge? Or are there any suggestions you would make for writers to make themselves more sellable.

Yeah, be aggressive! We all of us have read repeatedly that agents don’t like to be solicited. Tthat’s absolutely true, but it’s also true that people don’t like to receive telemarketing calls at their house. But telemarketing must work or they wouldn’t do it. What happens is that something in your pitch will catch the ear of an agent who, despite the formerly promulgated policy of not accepting solicitation from writers, they will listen anyway.
You have to ignore their requests the way telemarketers have to ignore the fact that you don’t want to talk to them when they call you. It’s a terrible job. It’s really hard to go up to someone who’s going to be unreceptive to your approach. Anyone in sales will tell you that. If it were so easy then they wouldn’t be able to make any money. Sales is a very highly paid profession.
That’s what writers have to learn to do until they are being sought after. Also, being aggressive shows an agent and shows a publisher that you are marketable. Nobody wants to publish a book for an author who’s going to read from the page and avoid people’s eyes. They want an author who's going to greet people as they come in the door and handle the book and chat with them and push sales. They are much more likely to sell you. They can put you on a TV show in the morning in Cincinanti and you’ll chat engagingly about the book you’ve written. If you are very retiring and not able to do that then you’re not as good a product for them. Writers have to acknowledge, it’s not all about the written word. It’s all about the books you sell.

If that’s your approach, now, there are some writers who write for themselves and they don’t care about the money.

Your first book took off so well. Was this due to the book tour?

My publisher did pay for a book tour. I think we started out with 8 cities, and we added 8 more when it started to sell so well. It was well marketed, well positioned. It hit the target exactly right. It’s a funny gift book. I had to spend a lot of time on the road. Take a lot of flights, and sort of, wear myself out promoting it.

How long was that promotion?

We started in May and I really kept doing this until mid-July on a steady basis and then it was sporadic. Three straight weeks of travel initially. I’m really still promoting [ed: in October].

Have your previous works been sought after since you book hit the bestseller list?

I don’t think I am going to publish any of the early novels. I didn’t know I was going to write funny stuff. My earlier works were horror stories and none of them ever got published.
I said to myself, “I’m never going to be published, so I might as well write a book for me that is not for public consumption.”
And I wrote this mammoth book; a 750 page book that turns out to be funny.
I didn’t really know I was going for funny. I was just going for fiction and wound up writing something that’s funny. When I realized that’s what I had done, I thought I was in a really strange place with it. But it turned out that this book, as a writing example, serves me very well. I’m actually rewriting it because I don’t like how long it is, and I don’t like how slowly the plot builds. I’m writing it for myself. I’m not writing it with the intent to sell it. Those other novels, those first 8, they’re not funny, and they’re not Bruce Cameron books. If I published them, people would pick it up and say, “Oh, it’s Bruce Cameron! It’s going to make me laugh.” And then they’d say “What? It’s like a serial killer novel. ”

You could do it in a pseudonym.

Yeah, well, I don’t know how that would happen and I don’t even know if they are that good. I’d have to read them. I think most writers might agree that their books don’t age well. That you write a novel and when you're done you're really happy with it and then you put it on the shelf and the longer it sits there the more it becomes like stinky cheese. You pull it down, and you read it, and you think, well, this is just sheer crap.
That’s certainly the reaction I’m having to this one book I was so proud of - the 750 pager. I read that one and say “I would never say that! ”

How many papers are now supporting your columns nationally?

I have no idea. My column went national in October of 2001 and we remember what was happening in October. We were still reeling from 9/11 and advertising revenues plummeted and newspapers panicked. I was supposed to open in 50 papers, and I think I opened in four. It has ever since then been a battle. Most newspapers regard humor as being this thing that Dave Barry writes. They use Dave Barry and that’s their white guy who writes humor and that’s it.

Now that you are a huge success, do you get more control over how your movie will be produced? Are you more involved? Do you get to choose the actors?

No, my deal with Disney is I turn in the screenplay and they pretty much get to decide what they are going to do with it. Odds are very much against them actually making a movie. The reason for that is they commission an awful lot of these screenplays. It’s such low risk compared to the ultimate investment they must make. What’s the problem with paying a few thousand dollars to a screenwriter to get a screenplay compared to hiring a director for 7 figures? It was always understood by me that the odds of seeing this made into a movie were very slight.
But things are actually going pretty well for me. I did sell a show to NBC this fall. Getting a show on the air is very difficult.

You wrote the pilot for that show?

I will be, I sold the concept. I have two other shows that I’m pitching. Both of those have received favorable responses. One, gosh, I really feel that the network is going to green light the pilot, but we’ll see. So now that, they call it heat out here, I’ve got some Heat on me, so I’ll have more control. The writer, it’s funny, is very well respected in television. In features, the writer is pretty much the lowest level animal. Despite the fact that he writes all the words, that’s not considered the most important part of the feature.
That’s just the way the town breaks out the power system. Oddly enough if you are the writer director, you’re at the top of the heap.

That will be your son.

Yeah, I’ll write, he’ll direct.

I heard about your run in with John Travolta. Was that on purpose? Is he a candidate for any of your enterprises?

I ran right into him physically. I rolled right into him on my roller blades. It was such a slow speed. He had plenty of time to get out of the way.

Oh, So he tried to get in your way?

He was sitting there eating, and he watched me come and I said “This is the part of your day when a complete stranger runs into you on roller blades.”
He said, “I gotcha buddy.”
That was my first hour on roller blades. I haven’t been back on them.
I paid for them but I haven’t used the lessons. When I signed up I said, “I can’t be sure if John Trivolta will always be there for me.”

Supporting a column online and in print while writing a new book and a screenplay makes me think that we’ll know you’re finished when the ambulance arrives.

Well, I’ve got more than that going on. I have another spec screenplay that I’m writing, and I’m developing three other television shows.

Are you going to be more involved in more of the work on the television shows? Or are you talking the concept?

On all three of the shows I would be the producer. If I were to do the impossible and sell all three shows that got on the air. I’d be…

Writing your butt off?

Yeah, that would be really hard. It’s a high class problem. I won’t regret having it. I probably have some money to be able to hire someone to cook my breakfast and …

So, you don’t have anyone to pour your bowl of rice crispies?

No, I’m on this awful tasting steel-cut oatmeal because of my cholesterol. I liked it for the first year.

How many pages do you average a day?

That’s so totally unknown. When I’m focused on just writing the book I have a very rigid schedule and I probably average 8 pages a day, but that’s when I’m writing a book. But I’ve got so much other stuff going on now. What I’m working on now is trying to come up with a column. So I probably write the first draft one day and the final draft the second day. So it takes me about two days to pop one of those out. But during the process I’ll do different…like this afternoon I’ll sit down and do some hand-editing. I have all kinds of different phases, so it’s really hard to say.

Do you hand your pages over to a trusted friend or a high paid editor?

It depends on what the pages are. My column, I’ve got a friend who does proofreading for me, but I also have a writing partner on two of the three shows I’m developing with. I give her my stuff and she reads it and gives me a different kind of read. She gives me one based on the comedy and not much about punctuation and things like that. I do have friends who participate, but mostly it’s a solitary profession.

Does she get credit for what she’s helping you with?

It depends. On the TV show most assuredly. She’ll be co-executive producer if the show gets on the air.

Is your new book How to Remodel a Man in print yet?

Nope, it’s coming out from Saint Martins in the fall of 2004.

What’s your next book? Finding the Perfect Woman?

Oh, all women are perfect!
I don’t know. Really, I got two novels that are in process of being written and I’d like to do a book of my columns. In an ideal world, my next book would be a book of columns and then a novel and then some concept of high comedy that I haven’t even thought of yet and then a novel, and that’s how I would space it out. That’s how I would schedule the next ten years. But we’ll see. If I don’t get any of these shows on the air, I’ll have a lot of time. If I get two or more on the air, I’ll have very little time, so it will really change the nature of what my book schedule will be like.

What about book signings?

Book signings are interesting animals. They don’t really sell any books but engender a lot of support in the bookstore, which is really what sells your book, oddly enough. I would recommend authors do a lot of signing but not because they are going sell hundreds of books. I just did a book signing in Champagne, Illinois and I sold 90 books. It’s not that great. It’s nice, but it’s not that huge.

What advice can you give to the millions of people who want to be Bruce Cameron?

Ha Ha! There are not millions of people…

Yes, there are! Anyone who has read your book does!

Anyone who wants to be me, my advice to them is set higher standards.

How has being THE Bruce Cameron affected you?

It’s the only thing I’ve ever been, so I wouldn’t know any different. Oh, golly, my story is a long story. You think of me sitting down in fourth grade and then you think about it happening in 2001. That’s a long dry spell. I feel like it took my whole life practically to get where I am and I still don’t have it. I’m not Tom Clancey. I’m not someone who can sneeze on a napkin and sell it. I wrote a proposal for a book after 8 Simple Rules came out after (that book) was a best seller. I sent it to the same publisher who published 8 Simple Rules, and they rejected it. It’s not as easy a business as you think. You do a hit and people think he’s the one-hit wonder.

Satisfaction in seeing your words in print is one thing, but the big, big question all of us writers are really wondering is:
We know your talent is big, really big. We know you are funny, but are you supporting the demands of your teenage son and his older siblings on your abilities as a writer? Or are you living in your brother-in-laws garage like the rest of us?

Ha Ha! In November of 2001, I quit my day job. I have been solely a writer ever since. I’m supporting children and an ex-wife and an ex-dog and bunch of other characters are all living off the revenues I make on my writing.

Is there anything you’d like to tell the writer audience?

I guess I would say, remember it’s not going to be easy, and that you are going to experience a lot of failure which is, oh, by the way, how life works. You have to regard every failure for what it is, which is an opportunity to learn something about what you are attempting to do. It was a shock to me to not be able to just write a two-word proposal “Uh, the next book will be uh…Funny”, and have them say, “Okay, here’s a $100,000 dollars.”
It was a shock to me to write up a well-thought proposal and have my publisher say, “No, this doesn’t sound right. This is not the book we’re looking for.”
I always assumed that, once I sold that first book that everything would work for me. You would think that a guy who has a hit TV Show on the air, which is really the only hit that ABC had, uh, would be able to walk into ABC and say “Well, I’ve got this idea for a show…” and they’d say, “We’ll buy it! You can tell us the idea later!”
Well, that’s not the way it happens. This show went to NBC; ABC didn’t seem interested.
It’s really different than you think it’s going to be. Really, it’s not going to be different than anything you’re doing in your regular life. Writers should have no reason or right to expect it would be easier for them in writing.

If you woud like to read some of Bruce's columns like "The Chili Judge" go to www.wbrucecameron.com

You can purchase his book, 8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter through www.amazon.com or at Barnes & Noble.

We'll all be looking forward to your new book, Bruce, How to Remodel a Man!
Not that I need to remodel anyone, I just want to read it purely for the comedy. No, really!

Carol Wood (I'm the one with the fur on my shirt) is an author of fiction and non-fiction short stories and is currently co-authoring a travel memoir book with her daughter, Renee Albe.

Contact - Carol Wood
Carol@hazelst.com