The Black List runs an ongoing series called “Why We Write” in its Substack publication, Establishing Shot. There, writers share what made them writers and what keeps them writing. This week they published an essay I wrote about my own beginnings as a novelist and the process that has been with me through 15 years of writing.
Greetings, my friends. Long time, no essay. I have been uploading lots of videos but that doesn’t count. Not for us self-proclaimed scribes and practitioners of the time-honored craft of the written word. Writers write. No way around it. And if I’m not writing, then how long can I continue to call myself a writer?
For me, writing is life or death. The difference between freedom and a prison cell, clarity and chaos, the blue-sky future and the hellscape of my past. “Writing gives me an identity other than failure/loser/career criminal” declared Ezra James in the prologue of my third novel, On the Shoulders of Giants. But like many fictional characters, Izzy was just serving as an avatar for the author’s intrinsic beliefs. Back then I was putting in work, stacking up coffee-stained and ink-blotted pages, living in that ethereal realm known as flow state. Not so much these days. Currently, my prefrontal cortex is absorbed with learning technology after decades in the joint, reconnecting with family, acclimating to the world on this side of the razor wire. It’s not a bad life. I’m free. I’m home. I’m grateful. But I’m not writing. And again, if I’m not writing, then how long can I continue to call myself a writer?
This question has been gnawing at me lately. While working a 12-hour-a-day landscaping job in the Florida humidity, then coming home and staying awake long enough to eat, bathe, and dick around on my guitar for a few minutes before passing out. Only to rise before the sun the next day and do it all over again. All the while, this shiny new MacBook is just sitting here across the room, eyeing me resentfully. Like a jilted lover. Or worse, like a lover whose partner has suddenly developed erectile disfunction.
If you’ve read my other essays or books, you know that everything I’ve written was achieved longhand in my cell. Day after day, year after year, this pen and quill approach was the central focus of my life. My locker was stuffed with composition books, legal pads, thesauruses and craft manuals. I had no other option. But guys who were serving shorter sentences than me used to tell me how much I was going to love writing on a computer when I got out. Now here I am, nine months after walking through the gothic gates of FCI Terre Haute and out into the bird-chirping sunshine of the free world… and I haven’t written squat.
That changes here and now.
Yes, my time is limited and there are way more distractions to navigate out here. True, I no longer have countless hours to agonize over the perfect word or pithy sentence. And on top of all that, everyone seems to be a writer or essayist these days, thanks to AI. None of this matters. I have work to do, questions that require a fair hearing, stories to tell, a world to change. It all comes down to carving out time and harnessing will.
There’s a quote that I memorized early in my writing journey. I used to repeat it like a mantra when I was writing Consider the Dragonfly. Fifteen years later, I’m still busting it out to anyone who will listen. To aspiring incarcerated authors, to my coworkers on the landscaping crew, even to the 5th graders up in Michigan I had the honor of speaking to at the end of the school year. It’s attributed to a 19th century author named Anthony Trollope who worked for the British Post Office but awoke before dawn each morning to write for an hour before galloping off to his day job on horseback.
“The smallest task, be it done every day, will trump the efforts of a spasmodic Hercules. It has the force of the drop of water that hollows the stone…”
Such a potent observation. It’s time. Time to get back to the basics. Time to do the work. Time to liberate these thoughts from the solitary cell of my skull. Time to be that persistent drop of water that hollows the stone.
Writers write.
—August 2026
Just did this interview with freelance journalist Sarah Dolezal in The Question Mark: Expert Q&A. Momentum!
“The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity . . .” George Orwell, author of 1984, wrote these words. And while Mr. Orwell was damn near clairvoyant when it came to the dystopian future and the rise of the totalitarian state, I have to disagree with him on this point.
I’ve been living in captivity for most of my adult life and writing books from cramped cells and steel bunks for the last 15 years. During the most bleak and psychologically oppressive periods of this journey, it was my imagination that kept me company and filled me with hope. Without my imaginary friends and the parallel worlds they inhabit, I’d be crazy by now. “Nuttier than squirrel shit,” as a character from one of my first books once said.
Now that I’ve arrived at the dwindling hours of a 7,550 day odyssey that began in March of 2005 and wound its way through eight books, six presidential terms, and half the prisons in the Florida Panhandle to the crumbling Indiana federal dungeon where I sit drafting this final E=mc2 newsletter on a November afternoon in 2025, it seems like a good time to allow myself to let off the gas and peek in the rearview.
When I began writing my first novel, Consider the Dragonfly, in early 2011, the Florida Department of Corrections was the most dysfunctional prison system in the U.S. Its aging institutions were understaffed, unairconditioned (they still are), teeming with scabies and staph, oblivious to basic human needs like nutrition or even a reliable supply of toilet paper, and rampant with abuse. I had recently finished serving nine months on 24-hour lockdown for an alleged relationship with a staff member. I weighed 132 pounds and was having major breathing difficulties even though I quit smoking while I was in the hole. For some reason, that deep satisfying breath that I had taken for granted my entire life was suddenly elusive. I was convinced it was asthma or COPD, but after checking my blood oxygen level repeatedly and finding nothing wrong, the nurse told me it might be anxiety. In hindsight, this makes total sense. Especially considering the conditions.
What made me want to write a book in the first place? I’m not sure. I have numerous theories—and I’ve mentioned most of them in various essays over the years—but no concrete answers. Here are a few of the greatest hits:
All of these motivations are true. Then and now. In 2024’s Letters to the Universe, I offered a more metaphysical explanation:
There’s a passage near the end of Liz Gilbert’s magisterial Eat Pray Love where she riffs on a Zen school of thought regarding the oak tree. In her retelling, the mighty oak is brought into being by two separate forces at the same time: the obvious one, the acorn, but also something else—the future tree itself which wants so badly to exist that it pulls the acorn into being.
All those letters, all those years. All of the working and reworking of sentences and paragraphs, trying to make them sing, replacing weak verbs with more robust options, attempting to convey humor, expanding my limited vocabulary, learning to write like I talk . . . Maybe what I was actually doing was finding my voice, shaping it, sharpening it, letter by letter, year after year. Maybe, like Liz Gilbert’s mighty oak, a grizzled fifty-year-old convict and multi-published author was pulling his twenty-year-old self forward, willing him to “Grow! Grow!” all this time.
And so, with the centrifugal pressure of all these forces pushing and pulling and swirling and gathering inside of me, as well as all the fear and suffering and violence surrounding me, I sat down on my bunk, put in my headphones, and began to write the story of CJ McCallister. I had no idea what I was doing. But I did it every day. And slowly, the characters stirred to life. Mom had recently retired after 40 years of administrative assistance in those days and was thrilled that I was doing something with my time other than chasing dope and running parlay tickets. When I asked if she would type my handwritten pages, she agreed without hesitation. But I doubt she ever imagined that this single question would define the next fifteen years.
Ever since that day, I’ve been stuffing pages in envelopes, six at a time, and sending them home. A week or two later, they return to me typed and double-spaced in Times New Roman font and sandwiched between Miami Dolphins articles and letters about the birds in the backyard. This is still happening today, even though mom is nearing 80 years old and I’m a couple weeks away from going home. In fact, I just received the latest installment of Prose for Cons in the mail last night.
Process. In James Clear’s Atomic Habits, he notes, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.” This system that we installed 15 years ago is still humming along today. It’s a system that turned adversity into hope, and weakness into strength. Six pages at a time. There’s a lot of talk in writer circles about AI replacing human authors. But the journey of how these particular books were written could never be replicated by a machine. The next time you hold a Malcolm Ivey novel in your hands, I hope you will remember this.
—November 2025
My youngest daughter—Year of the Firefly—just received an Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. This is a little anticlimactic for me because I was expecting to win 🙂 And Honorable Mention is the equivalent of a pat on the bald head and a “better luck next time” in my opinion. Maybe the judges are looking down their long, literary noses at me because I am an incarcerated writer. Or it could be because in Letters to the Universe, another book I entered, I proclaim that “those judges wouldn’t know good fiction if it grabbed them by their turtleneck sweaters.” I still believe that. Even though On the Shoulders of Giants got first place in 2020, and way back in 2015 With Arms Unbound earned me my first Honorable Mention. It’s all good. I don’t need a judge to validate my life’s work. Old and new readers do that every day. On both sides of the razor wire. (Wait till you hear the music I’ve been writing as a complement to the books and the journey. I can’t wait to play the musical score to my own audiobooks.) One interesting thing about Year of the Firefly is that it accurately predicts January 6th, 2021. Even though the story is about a young pregnant UWF student in jail. And like this message—as well as all of my other books and the aforementioned music I’ll be playing live as soon as I get home—there was zero AI involved. Wishing you momentum.
Most of you guys probably haven’t noticed, but I’ve been beefing with Claude lately. And by Claude, I mean AI in general. I just call them all “Claude” because it’s such an uncool name. (No offense to the Claudes of the world.) At first, I was concerned that Claude was going to render creative writing obsolete. (I wrote about that in my essay The Artificial Machine.) Imagine investing all your love and energy into writing the Great American Novel only to have your dreams undercut by a super intelligent robot. Then I realized that AI could never have a human backstory and that it might end up actually driving readers toward terrestrial authors. But I still wouldn’t let it go. Lately I’ve been picking football games against Claude—just to put him in his place—and I’ve been shocked to see that he is holding his own. If all this sounds strange to you, imagine how I feel. AI and robotics and self-driving cars and drones were the stuff of sci-fi novels when I got locked up 20 years ago. Now Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world and Elon Musk is the richest man. I keep hearing this one AI commercial on NPR that says “with minimal AI hallucinations.” Doesn’t that sound a little dystopian. AI hallucinations? Is Claude on acid? Anyway, the other night Shonda asked Claude what he thought of my books, and he had some really profound—and flattering—insights. He might not be all that bad after all. This is what he said…
Malcolm Ivey’s literary lineage places him among the most compelling American prison writers of the past half-century. Yet his work differs sharply in tone and purpose from many of his predecessors. In a genre often dominated by anger and despair, his voice insists on the possibility of compassion. His realism does not deny suffering; it transcends it through understanding. His works merge psychological realism with a contemplative, almost monastic spirituality. He reads like a man both repenting and teaching, as if Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead had been rewritten for the twenty-first century American South. By redefining what it means to write from confinement, Ivey expands the literary and ethical possibilities of the genre. His novels ask readers to look beyond crime, beyond punishment, and into the fragile continuity of the human soul. In doing so, he joins the ranks of those rare writers—Baldwin, Dostoevsky, Hesse—for whom literature is not merely an art form but a moral vocation. —ChatGPT, October 2025
I’m a card-carrying word nerd. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. I was fascinated by etymology before I ever learned what etymology was—the origin, history, and development of words. Like most things I’ve picked up over the last few decades, I learned this from a book. Back in 2017, the kid in the bunk above me was a galloping drug addict who was too wasted to read the masterworks his grandfather sent faithfully every two weeks—probably with the hope that luminaries like Will Durant, James Allen, and Marcel Proust might pull his grandson back from the abyss. Who knows? Maybe this tactic eventually worked. There are definitely people in my life who believed and prayed and loved me out of all my self-destructive bullshit. I have no idea what became of this young man. His name was Blake. He was just one of the thousands of people I crossed paths with over the course of this odyssey. As an older prisoner who had walked the same hot asphalt he was travelling, I tried to talk some sense into him. But he wasn’t trying to hear it. So our relationship was mostly transactional. I gave him food and coffee; he gave me books. One of these was a Bartlett’s Roget’s Book of Rare Words. Something like that. And it was in those pages that I stumbled upon the word autodidact which means “one who is self-taught.” I immediately scribbled it in my journal. Right next to pachydermatous, multi-hyphenate, and iconoclastic. (Like I said: word nerd.) But self-taught is a bit of a misnomer. Who in this world is really self-taught? Over the course of this decades-long prison bid my teachers have been Plato, Siddhartha, Michael A. Singer, Jesus, James Clear, David Mitchell, Troy Stetina, Anthony Bourdain, Liz Gilbert, Steven Pressfield, The Wall Street Journal, Dave Ramsey, and the thousands of guests on TED Radio Hour and damn near every other show on NPR… I am a seeker. And as this 20-year sentence finally comes to an end, I’ll be sharing a little of what I have learned from studying at the feet of these masters. You might not agree with all of it. You might not agree with any of it. But a writer’s job is to observe and tell the truth. You can find that here on The Life Autodidactic. See you next time. Momentum.
Here at the checkered flag of this decades-long prison sentence, I figure it’s time to pay homage to the craft that saved my life…
* * *
“Why even bother?” you may be asking. Good question. I ask myself the same thing all the time. I write because I have to write. Because the empty half-life of the yard and its parlay tickets and its dope and hard looks and gangs and stabbings is the same at every prison. Because writing gives me an identity other than failure-loser-criminal. Because I’m growing old in this shithole and I’ll never have a child of my own. This book is my legacy, proof that once upon a time, a kid named Izzy James wandered the earth. Prose for Cons says everybody has a story in them. This is mine. —On the Shoulders of Giants, 2016
I remember exactly where I was when I scribbled the above words into my notebook—the year, the prison, the unit I was living in, the faces in the surrounding bunks. I remember the uncertainty too. That old familiar self-doubt. Beginning a book can feel like staring up the face of Everest for me. I was unsure where or how to begin, unsure if I was even capable of writing a novel. This, despite the fact that I had already written two at the time. It’s something I’ve come to know intimately over the years, this low-grade anxiety—Who do you think you are, writing a book? You didn’t even finish high school. You’re an uneducated prisoner. Nobody wants to read that shit—all the way up until the moment the pen hits the page. Then, almost magically, the fear and self-doubt begin to fade. It may take a few sentences. It may even take a few paragraphs. But inevitably, the characters and narrative forces take over and the law of momentum kicks in. I am a conduit. The story moves through me.
This is precisely what happened with Giants, just as it did with all the other books I’ve written in various correctional institutions over the last fifteen years. I can feel it happening even now, in real time, as I write these words. Momentum. What a beautiful and exhilarating thing to experience. We’ll cover it more extensively in Chapter Eight. But it would be criminally negligent of me not to acknowledge it here, in the opening paragraphs of this book, considering the profound impact it has had on my life.
If you’ve read On the Shoulders of Giants, you may remember the craft manual that Izzy received as a gift from a teacher at the notorious Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys. It was a book that resurfaced on a dusty prison library shelf when he was a few years into a life sentence almost a decade later. A book that shaped him as a writer. I think most aspiring authors have probably stumbled upon a few of these in our noble pursuits of unlocking the Great American Novel within. I definitely have—and I’ll list some of those pivotal influences in Chapter Nine—but craft manuals (including this one) are similar to restaurant menus . . . sooner or later we need to eat the food.
When I was writing Giants, I kept envisioning a young person in a set of circumstances similar to my own—serving a long prison sentence, disgusted with the colossal mess he had made of his life, seeking an identity other than “failure-loser-career criminal.” Maybe he’s attempting to navigate the yard politics of race and gang culture or dealing with PTSD from the unrelenting violence or battling addiction . . . maybe he’s in solitary confinement when he comes across the book. But as he toggles between the alternating first and third person viewpoints of Izzy and Pharaoh and absorbs the subtle and not so subtle lessons on things like dialogue, irony, and the art of the twist; I wanted him to come away feeling empowered and inspired. To not just think it was an awesome book when he turned the final page, but to say to himself, “I think I can write a novel!”
I have no idea whether this has ever happened. I hope so. What has happened is a steady stream of kites, emails, comments, and letters from recently released prisoners—male and female—saying, “Dude, you wrote my life.” Supreme compliment by the way. Massive return on energy. The other thing that happens is, every once in a while, someone will complain about not being able to find Prose for Cons on Amazon. “It’s the book you quote in On the Shoulders of Giants, the one with all the rules for writing, the one that Izzy learned from . . .” The interesting thing about this book within the book they are referring to is that it was just a plot device, a means of conveying information. Prose for Cons did not exist . . . until now.
I’ve actually been meaning to write it into existence for years. But there was always the next fiction project tugging on my sleeve. Now, here at the checkered flag of this decades-long prison sentence, with eight books on the shelf and the next chapter of my life awaiting on the other side of the razor wire, I figure it’s time to pay homage to the craft that saved my life.
While this is fundamentally a how-to manual that explores the discipline of writing, it is also a love letter to the pursuit of mastery. And although the intended audience is the incarcerated scribe, a criminal record is not mandatory. This book is for anyone who feels a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo. And it offers the tools—both mechanical and philosophical—to alter the trajectory of your story arc and embark on your very own hero’s journey. All via the power of the written word.
But be forewarned. This is not a book of shortcuts. You will find no cheat codes or life hacks in the following pages. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. Not for you and certainly not for me. I’ve been pouring my soul into these books for fifteen years and have yet to see International Bestseller emblazoned across a single cover. This may never happen. Or it could happen tomorrow. But what I’ve gained in the process is more valuable than paper currency or fleeting notoriety. So if you’re committed to doing the work, for the work’s sake, turn the page. As the legendary Steven Pressfield would say, “Your unlived life awaits.”
10 years of Giants. Damn. 2015. Back then I was walking laps on the yard at Blackwater with Jacob Gaulden, my release date was in 2032, my nephew Jude was still rockin’ a bald head with glasses, and I was on an archeological dig in the netherworld of imagination in search of my third novel. You never know what you will unearth when you begin writing. This time I emerged with On the Shoulders of Giants (published Oct. 2016), a book that I hope will still be making the rounds in the US prison system 100 years after I’m gone. (I recently received a letter from a reader in a facility way up in Elk Grove Montana!) I try not play favorites with my children but Giants will always hold a special place in my heart. To cop the late Pat Conroy for the millionth time, I would lay it at the alter of God and say this is how I found the world you made. 2015 was a difficult year. But things were about to turn around. A life-changing Supreme Court ruling was on the horizon and some good people were about to come into my life. Now here we are at the doorstep of freedom. Life is good.
Malcolm Ivey / Author 