Doors

 

Brendyn Schneider

“Is that really an emergency exit?”

 

It certainly looked the part: a white steel door with the panic bar and red-letter decal warning “Emergency Exit Only, Alarm Will Sound.”

Still, I had to ask. This is writer Brendyn Schneider’s apartment, which has all the off-the-wall visual stimuli you might expect to find in the home of a truly creative mind. There’s the sign in the bathroom that was (pick your verb: pinched, liberated, borrowed on a long-term basis) from a hotel that says, “This room has been serviced and reserved for our nonsmoking guests.”

There’s the coaster from the DeCordova Museum with a (rather effective) built-in illusion that makes unsuspecting guests fear that their drinks will surely tip over. The walls feature paintings by legends like Edward Hopper, as well as those done by Brendyn’s friends. And then there’s the case — yes, a solid case — of Spam.

Brendyn said all that is missing now is the M-80s. “What else do you do with a can of Spam?” he asked.

So I didn’t know what to think about the emergency exit in the kitchen. Yes, in the kitchen. Who besides some hapless schmuck on a Gordon Ramsay show needs an emergency exit in the kitchen?

Maybe that should have been my clue to ask him about his cooking. Instead we talked about his writing.

Two novels and more than 50 short stories. And counting. And that kind of prolific output comes from a steady stream of ideas.

“It really comes from everywhere,” Brendyn said. “You’ll hear dialogue on the train. Somebody will say something in a particular way, and you’ll develop a character around it.”

Of course he also finds inspiration from places you might expect: J. R. R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Kurt Vonnegut, H. P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker and Stephen King. And there’s the bands: Depeche Mode, the Doors, and Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd. Not to mention the dictionary and thesaurus — “words are a huge influence,” he said — as those two resources have phrasings and information not found anywhere else. He also likes the out-of-the-box thinkers: Artist M. C. Escher, Nikola Tesla, Stephen Hawking and Far Side creator Gary Larson.

At any one time, Brendyn is juggling three or four story ideas, but “there’s always one that’s ahead of the others,” he said. And in case the well ever ran a little dry, he’s got a book filled with ideas he has jotted down over the years. It’s his version of a little black book, which he carries around constantly so no good idea goes undocumented — and forgotten.

But that habit only hints at Brendyn’s attention to detail. Brendyn could give Microsoft employees clinics on how to use Excel spreadsheets. He charts everything meticulously, from his search for an agent to his live readings of his work — complete with notes on what did and did not work. While some people scratch their heads at the layers upon layers of data contained in the multi-colored rows and columns, Brendyn says that being that organized helps him focus on whatever task is at hand.

Lately, one of his projects has been to put more of his work in front of more eyes via his web site. Visitors can quickly see that his talents include tapping familiar but deep-running and hard-to-articulate sentiments. His stories put these feelings in a new context, making them suddenly understandable and relatable. Examples include comparing a relationship to a hometown with that of a long-time friend; and finding the parallels (such as the harried nature and sense of being overwhelmed) between the first day of school and the first three decades of life.

His goal is simply to get to the point where writing is all he does. “That’s riches to me,” he said.

In the meantime he will keep knocking on doors, leaving the honest-to-God emergency exit door in his kitchen closed, writing about what’s behind the doors he finds open, and documenting all of it in an Excel spreadsheet.

FIRST TIME
“My dad would buy me these five subject spiral notebooks while I was in grammar school. This way, every subject would be in one notebook, y’know? Well, that meant four subject separators. These became canvases for really elaborate drawings that were kinda like Where’s Waldo but without the Waldo. There would be a slew of people in a scene. One scene was this craggy mountain with a pot of gold on top and everyone was climbing up to get it using all manner devices. Some were using rope, others had jetpacks, heli-packs. Some were double-crossing each other, some were helping each other, some were punching each other out, some were being eaten by these sea creatures in the water on the bottom. These sea creatures shot lightning from their mouths.”

WORST TIME
Yes, Brendyn has lived the pain of an untimely power-outage, costing him hours’ worth of unsaved changes and edits to stories. But that pain pales compared to what a girl can do in high school. One particular girl, whom Brendyn liked, had expressed great interest and appreciation for a poem he had written and shown to her. Later that night he hand-copied the poem to present to her the next day. He did, and her immediate reaction seemed good — she thanked him and repeated how much she liked the poem. Then the bell rang, and as the girl got up to go to class, Brendyn saw his poem left there on the floor where she had been sitting.