When a writer writes a short story about a writer, there’s always a temptation to read it as autobiographical.
“I hate stories about writers,” Bissell acknowledged during a recent call from his home in Laurel Canyon, where he’s lived for seven years.
What he has done, with “Creative Types,” is found a way to address his long and unpredictable career as a writer — which has taken him from a rich travelogue about the disappearing Aral Sea with many detours along the way.
“‘Oh, he’s a creative type.’ What does that imply? It implies flight, it implies indecisiveness.
The story “My Interview with the Avenger” adopts the freewheeling style of an Esquire magazine piece circa January 2007 .
For many years Bissell subsidized his literary fiction by writing long travel pieces for magazines, but after the recession in 2008, those assignments vanished virtually overnight.
After publishing the book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter,” Bissell received opportunities to work in the industry he’d written about.
In “Extra Lives,” Bissell wrote about falling into a state of dissolution while living abroad, playing video games and doing lots of drugs.
I write because it pleases me and I write stuff that I would want to read and I don’t really think terribly much about how other people think of me.
Inhabiting the minds of people who care a great deal what others think of them became a way of working out what Bissell calls the “residual shame” of falling short of some impossible standard.
This kind of career serenity prayer led to Bissell’s biggest breakthrough: “The Disaster Artist,” which he co-wrote with the actor Greg Sestero about Sestero’s experiences making the cult film “The Room,” which many regard as the worst film ever made.
Bissell had never written a book with another writer before.
After his heartfelt memoir, “The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of Vietnam,” performed poorly despite favorable reviews, it took many years for him to accept that sales weren’t a reflection of a book’s merit.
More recently, Bissell experienced another radical pivot.
Although the creative types in Bissell’s book are often subject to the unspeakable horror of the literary life, for an author who puts so much of himself into his characters, they serve as an affirmation — “a reminder about how open we need to be as creative types and how wildly unpredictable your life can be and your work can be.