NAked Warrior - ZANDERBILT

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T H E P U R P O S E F U L P R I M I T I V E
ing tales in 1500 to 2500 words and the plain-speak short stories of Turgenev, Tolstoy, and
Chekhov (to lesser degree Dostoyevsky) gave me a template for my own Iron Tales.
Most people hear “Russian Literature” and mistakenly think it dense and obtuse, akin to
wading through Emanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or James Joyce’s Finnegan’s
Wake. Not so. The Russian Masters were plain-speak writers who told their tales quickly,
efficiently and with great economy and precision.
I stumbled across Turgenev’s “A Sportsman’s Notebook” early on and his compact density
and passion for his subject matter made him my article writing mentor. Tolstoy’s Hadji
Murid and Dostoyevsky’s The Gambler provided further literary benchmarks for my own
tales. Later Anton Chekhov had a huge impact on me: his ability to underplay, his subtleness,
his humanity, his humility, everything about the man moved me deeply. I read a quote
of his I use to this day as a guideline. “One should write so that the reader requires no
explanation from the author. The actions, conversations and meditations of the characters
need be sufficient.” I took that to heart. In the Iron World where I lived there were plenty
of great characters and I needed to let them speak, unimpeded, without any of my feeble
embellishments.
Another great writer, Truman Capote, gave me another applicable writing formula when
he talked about writing In Cold Blood.”I am bringing fictional techniques to reportage.”
I immersed myself totally within my chosen field. I was passionate and knowledgeable
and continually excited about my little pie sliver of expertise: muscle, strength and how to
acquire it.
I wrote of the men and events that populated this strange uber-masculine world. I was
able to get paid to quiz my strength idols about how they morphed themselves! I was an
insightful interviewer. I had a real point of view and I was, as Alfred Kazin once said of
William Blake, “Like so many self-educated men, he was fanatically learned. But he read
like a fundamentalist—to be inspired or to refute.” That was me cubed. I had a voice and a
viewpoint and considerable life experience at a young age. Some writers are incredible technicians,
but have no worthwhile life experiences to draw upon; others are real adventurers
with tales worth retelling, yet they can’t communicate.
I never sought to write “over my head” and I never sought to write about anything that I
was not intimately familiar with. I wrote of the world of weights and lifting and men who
excel at it and my episodic training treatises were recognized and well received right from
the start.
For complete information on Marty Gallagher’s The Purposeful Primitive, or to
purchase the physical book, visit http://www.dragondoor.com/b37.html now