How Mateo Askaripour Sits Down & Writes
'Black Buck' is a sharp, fast-paced, satirical debut that is an absolute must-read.
An unambitious twenty-two-year-old, Darren lives in a Bed-Stuy brownstone with his mother, who wants nothing more than to see him live up to his potential as the valedictorian of Bronx Science. But Darren is content working at Starbucks in the lobby of a Midtown office building, hanging out with his girlfriend, Soraya, and eating his mother’s home-cooked meals. All that changes when a chance encounter with Rhett Daniels, the silver-tongued CEO of Sumwun, NYC’s hottest tech startup, results in an exclusive invitation for Darren to join an elite sales team on the thirty-sixth floor.
After enduring a “hell week” of training, Darren, the only Black person in the company, reimagines himself as “Buck,” a ruthless salesman unrecognizable to his friends and family. But when things turn tragic at home and Buck feels he’s hit rock bottom, he begins to hatch a plan to help young people of color infiltrate America’s sales force, setting off a chain of events that forever changes the game.
Black Buck is a hilarious, razor-sharp skewering of America’s workforce; it is a propulsive, crackling debut that explores ambition and race, and makes way for a necessary new vision of the American dream.
Black Buck is perfect for fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street.
We got to chat with Mateo about how essential music is to his writing process, about finding story inspiration everywhere, and about pacing.
Q: Where do you like to write the most?
At a small black desk that faces a white wall in a somewhat well-lit corner of my apartment. After years of trial and error, I’ve found that I can only write in the room I’m living in at the moment—no coffee shops, libraries, parks, or any other public place for me.
Q: When do you like to write the most?
I usually begin the actual act of writing around 1 or 2 pm, but my routine begins the night before and resumes around 9 or 9:30 am the next day.
Q: When it comes to drafting, do you prefer writing on a computer or freehand?
Computer, for sure! I’ll only go freehand for notes or to work out something that’s easier to visualize on paper than in a Word doc.
Q: Are you more of a plotter or pantser?
85% pantser, 15% plotter. I plot as I go, typically only knowing a day or two in advance of the turns a story will take.
Q: Stephen King has a great line in On Writing that says “the scariest moment is always right before you start. After that, things can only get better.” That scary pre-start moment often inspires procrastination in writers. Suddenly, you have to clean your entire house, do the laundry and play Candy Crush for an hour before you can actually start writing. Is there anything you need to do before you can actually sit down and work?
I agree with a lot of what Stephen King says in On Writing, but, for me, the scariest moment isn’t always before I start. Sometimes it comes after I complete the entire work, or if I can’t easily figure something out plot-wise while writing it.
But, yeah, I’ve trained myself to follow a somewhat specific routine before writing, so that there’s little opportunity for procrastination. In my opinion, procrastination, writer's block, or whatever you want to call it, starts in the mind and spreads, like a cancer, to the heart. In order to get through it, you have to make sure you’re in the mindset that allows you to do your best work. There’s no one route or foolproof method, but it takes unflinching honesty with one’s self, the freedom to experiment without judgment, and courage, which we are all capable of.
Q: Do you listen to music while you write? If so, what music? Is your choice of music inspired by the project you’re working on?
Thanks for the question! Music is essential to me and my work, which is to say, yes, I do listen to it before, while, and after writing. But the exact type of music depends on what I’m writing. I listen to a ton of hip-hop before I actually bring my fingers to the keyboard, and I always listen to something without words while I’m writing, which could be anything from instrumental hip-hop to classical to jazz to ambient music to sounds I’d be hard-pressed to classify.
I view music—as I do movie trailers, music videos, food, meditation, dancing, and more—as a tool to help me get to a place where it’s just me, a word document, and my characters. That’s it. No agent, editor, random reviewer, bookstagrammer, critic, journalist, other author, podcaster, or anyone else taking up space in my head.
Music works as a form of self-hypnosis, and it’s in this state that I can better commune (I know, sounds satanic) with the world(s) I’m creating and the characters who live there.
Q: Some writers believe you have to write every single day. Is that true of your process?
Definitely not. If I’m working on a novel, I like to write every weekday. Before I had more time to write, I’d write any day where I could carve out six or seven hours to go through my routine and then write. There was a stretch of time when I was writing seven days a week, but it’s not how I do my best work—building in at least two days to do other things allows my story and characters to percolate in the background, and when I return to the page, I have more ideas and ways to make the work even better.
The thing is, even when I’m not writing, I am. I know it sounds like one of those corny things a writer says to sound cool, but it’s true. If I am completely invested in a project, which I am if I’m working on it, I can’t help but think about it when I’m away from the page.
Q: How often do you write/how long for each session?
Building off the previous question, if I can write every weekday, I’m usually writing for two to three hours, four max.
Q: What’s one piece of advice you’d give an aspiring author?
Don’t judge yourself or your work while in the act of writing—do it after the entire work is finished.
Q: Where do you normally find story inspiration?
Everywhere. My past, the present, obsessive thoughts about the future. Whenever I have an idea, I write it down in Evernote, a notes app on my phone. If I continue to jot down ideas for it, and am just as excited, if not more so, as months pass, then I know it’s an idea worth pursuing.
Q: Black Buck was truly hard to put down. The pace is rapid, and I devoured it with the same intensity that I would a thriller. How did pacing come into your writing process?
Ah, I’m happy to hear that! I also appreciate you using the word “thriller.” That element, which comes toward the end of the book, was completely unplanned.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to write a book that had multiple climaxes, would increase in intensity as it went on, and had so much going on that, even after 20 or 30 pages, the reader would be in too deep to stop.
So when it came to pacing, the idea was to pique the reader’s interest ASAP, and increase the speed of what happens to Buck, and what he does to other people, with each chapter. If the book starts at about 15 MPH, it ends at 250, with crashes and pit stops built in.
Q: I read that Black Buck takes place in the same building as your publisher, did that feel serendipitous or fateful? What made you choose that building for the story to take place?
Ha, it felt fateful, yes. Even though I’m a pragmatic person, I don’t believe in coincidences. This was meant to happen. But I chose to set the story in that building because I’d worked there without ever knowing my publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, was also there.
There’s so much that goes on in the book that I didn’t think I needed to set it in unfamiliar territory, which is to say I made it easier on myself by having the novel set in places that I knew well, including those blocks in Bed-Stuy, which I lived on for a year when I was starting out at a startup myself.
I also chose those places—the building where the book takes places, Bed-Stuy, and other points of interests—because I associate certain emotions and points of my life with them, which made it easier for me to imbue them all with specific feelings that I wanted the characters to experience.
Q: Buck experiences not only overt racism, but near-constant microaggressions and internalized racism. He also witnesses how companies appropriate Black culture in everyday activities, like naming sales teams after NWA and other hip hop groups. But Buck's character eventually just leans into his new corporate life despite that. What made you want to explore corporate racism and how easily it flows in the start-up culture?
I wanted to write something that was true and honest to what so many Black and brown people experience in and out of the workplace, something that was true to the nation we live in, as well as something that was true to parts of my own life and the things I have witnessed and felt.
Given that I worked in sales at a startup and have been a Black man in America for my entire life, writing about systemic racism in the workplace, and specifically at a startup, was the entry point that felt most natural. I could have written a modified version of this story at a law firm, laboratory, engineering firm, or a handful of other workplaces where Black and brown people are the resident others, but I would’ve just been making it unnecessarily hard on myself.
Sales and the startup world have enough incredible and devastating elements inherent to them that to not mine my own expertise and experience in them would’ve been foolhardy, especially when I was figuring out what it meant to write and be a writer. I still am, but was more so back then, before I had an agent, book deal, and team beside me.
Q: There's a twist in the story that I won't spoil for anyone, but how does a plot twist come into your outlining process? Did you always know how the book was going to end?
When I began writing, I knew that the big twist was going to happen, but I had no idea how I was going to get there, and even if that twist was still going to be in the book. As time went on, I had to make sure all of the plot elements made sense to get the reader to that twist in a powerful way, which meant going back and reengineering certain parts to make it work and hit hard.
Q: All of the characters in Black Buck are so vivid and real. Aside from our main character Buck, did you have a favorite character to write?
Oof, another great question. I feel like these characters are my children and a parent isn’t supposed to have favorites, right? Still, Frodo was fun as hell to write, as was Rose.
What's the last book that kept you up late?
How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by Jerald Walker. Not only is it a unique and masterful work, full of both the comedic and cruel elements of what it means to be a Black man in America, but it also makes a good companion book to Black Buck.
Pick up your copy of Black Buck at bookshop.org, IndieBound, or Barnes & Noble.
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