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Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Walter Mosley back to this program. The acclaimed writer has penned nearly 30 books during his stellar literary career. His most recent is a novel called "Killing Johnny Fry," which came out late last year. And in April he's out with a new nonfiction book called "This Year, You Write Your Novel." Walter Mosley, nice to have you here.

Walter Mosley: It's great to see you, Tavis.

Tavis: Can I start with the book coming out later? 'Cause I'm really fascinated by that. We'll come back to "Johnny Fry."

Mosley: Okay.

Tavis: "This Year, You Write Your Novel." What's behind Walter Mosley encouraging other folks? You're encouraging competition. Not that there are many Walter Mosleys out there.

Mosley: Well, I don't see it as encouraging competition. Well, now, it was fun to write the book, because it's very short - like a hundred pages. It's everything I know about writing novels. It's very pedestrian, it's very - I'm not talking about great literary lights, and all that sort of stuff. I'm just saying, "This is how you write a novel. This is how you can finish writing a novel in a year."

I think that that’s really important, because people always ask me when I'm writing, "How do you do this? How do you do that? How can I do this?" But the other thing is, I think if I create writers, at the same time I'll be creating readers. Because the more people know about writing, the more they're going to be interested in reading. So, I don't think that I'm creating competition. I think that people wanna know, and so the way I'm doing it hasn't been done, so.

Tavis: Let me ask whether you think - could a guy like me write a novel? And I ask that because I'm such a nonfiction guy. Are there certain characteristics, in other words, that make people better novelists?

Mosley: Well, I think that there are probably some people who are better novelists than others. I think anybody can write a novel, anybody can tell a story. Like if…

Tavis: You believe that?

Mosley: Oh, if you ever - well, I believe it, and I think that you do, too. If you're someplace and something happens, a series of things happens over a period of three days, and at the end of it something big happened, you'd be telling people that story. Say, "Well, I went down to Acapulco, and first I was there with this one and that one, and then they did this and they did that. I woke up the next morning and this had happened," and you would tell that story. Well, that's a novel, right?

Tavis: But the difference, though, Walter, is that - and that's why I have such great respect for novelists, because I'm a good storyteller, I do it for a living every day. I could tell a story about what I saw. I could even perhaps embellish that story. But it starts with something that I actually saw. Novelists create stuff oftentimes completely out of the ether. I don't think I'm creative in that way.

Mosley: Yeah, novelists create things out of the ether, but the novelist isn't created out of the ether. You have to do the work. It's like you wanna box, but you’ve never boxed before. Well, there's certain things gonna have to happen. Now, are you gonna be the champion boxer? Are you gonna win the title? I don't know. You could learn how to box. (Laughs) You know what I mean?

You know what I'm saying? But I really don't know. Archie Moore was once asked what he thought about Rocky Marciano. They said, "Well, Archie, did you always respect Marciano?" And he said, "I respect every boxer." He said, "'Cause you can never tell at which moment they may burst into bloom." Meaning to say, "When they might knock me out."

Tavis: And it just takes one punch.

Mosley: Right. And it could be anybody. So the thing is is that I don't - and even in that book, in the very beginning, I say "I don't know if you're gonna get this book published. I do know you're gonna write it. Are you a great novelist? We'll find out."

Tavis: Let me jump from that, then - I look forward to reading that. Maybe I do have a novel in me.

Mosley: Oh, I'm sure you do, Tavis. (Laughs) No, that's the other thing. I know you’ve got one. I know you can.

Tavis: Well, with your help, maybe it'll come out. That said, let me go back now to "Killing Johnny Fry." I read a number of reviews, and I'm not big on reviews. I just saw one about some of my work in "The New York Times" the other day that I wasn't terribly happy with, (laughs) which raises another question I'll come back to. How you deal with bad reviews.

Or reviews that you don't like - not even bad, but reviews you don't like. But with regard to "Killing Johnny Fry," the critics, I think, were - many of them, at least - a bit taken by what I would term a departure from what they expected from Walter Mosley. Is that fair to say?

Mosley: Yeah, that is…

Tavis: Is that a kind way of saying it?

Mosley: …how a lot of people responded. Which is funny, because I always have departures, and many of them are just as big. For instance, I wrote "What Next," criticizing Americas' so-called war on terrorism, which came out the week that we attacked Iraq. That was a big jump, too. Nobody seemed to say anything about that, though. But sex upsets people, so I'm writing about sex and people will say, "Whoa, oh my God. He - ooh." But I knew that was gonna happen.

Tavis: As a matter of fact, this subtitle here, "A Sexistential Novel."

Mosley: That's right.

Tavis: "A Sexistential Novel."

Mosley: Yes, absolutely.

Tavis: Tell me about "Killing Johnny Fry," and why Walter Mosley decided to write about a subject matter like sex that he knew was gonna upset people, by his own admission?

Mosley: Well, this book is about many things. It's about melancholia, which I think our whole nation is suffering from. It's about loneliness, which I think most of our nation is suffering from. It's about a Black man having a midlife crisis, which many people have. And it's also about an existential crisis, which as I wrote the book I realized, well, there are parallels between them.

There are many ways that you try to work out these crises in your life. One of them is sexual. And nobody seems to ever write about the sexuality of that, of how one tries to imagine themselves as something different through their experience sexually. And so I said, "Well, I'm gonna write a book about a guy going through an existential midlife crisis, sexually." And what does that mean, where does it take him, what does he find out, where does he end up? And I had a lot of fun writing it.

Tavis: Part of what makes this brother unique - I hope unique - is that it's not just his wife who's having an affair. She's having an affair with a White man.

Mosley: Yeah, it's his girlfriend.

Tavis: His girlfriend, rather. Yeah.

Mosley: But she's having an affair with a White guy, which is true. Which actually, in the end, turns out to be less important than the fact - other things that he learns. But not only is it an affair, he sees them and they don't see him. And he realizes that the intensity of their sexual connection is more than he's ever had with anyone, including this woman.

And it underscores the fact, not only that he has never really been there with her, has never really known her, but that this is his only friend in the world. And in losing her, he not only gets upset about her having this affair, but he loses everything. And when he understands that, he tries so hard to find a new life for himself.

Now when it comes to critics and stuff, critics get so upset with me. They come up to me and they say, "This novel has no plot," or a razor-thin plot. I need to tell them to read my book, 'cause they don't know what a plot is. A plot is, in short, (laughs) the structure of revelation. Any novel that works at all has a plot. Whether it's a complex plot or a simple plot, that doesn’t matter.

What matters is it's the structure of revelation. When do you reveal truths in the novel? But I think that what has happened to a lot of the reviewers - not all of them - they're just afraid of the sexuality. This is too much, this is too graphic. And it is graphic. Anybody who's watching you who reads "Zane," I make "Zane" look tame in this book, and I know that.

Tavis: Indeed.

Mosley: And did it on purpose. I said, "If you're gonna write it, you're gonna write it."

Tavis: I love how you did this. You slid right on past the fact that the girlfriend's having an affair with a White guy.

Mosley: Well, I don't think that it's…

Tavis: And that's why I wanted to come back to it, yeah.

Mosley: Yeah, I don't think it's all that important. I think that when you read this book, you'll say, "God, what's really important is what's going on inside of him, not outside of him." And when he finally understands what's going on between her and him, it's - there are other issues. There are a lot of things that transcend race. African Americans, Black people here in this country, not only are we overwhelmed by being forced to be Black, 'cause we weren't Black when we were in Africa, right?

We were just people. We were Africans. We came here, and people made us Black. Okay, fine. And there's all this racism against us. Okay, fine. But one of the things that we do is we build it up in ourselves. There's all kinds of other stuff going on in our lives, around our lives. And there's all kinds of stuff for this character to learn.

This is a Black man who at one point has an affair with a 20 - he's about 45. He has an affair with a 23 year old White girl. She's been to Darfur. She's taken pictures of kids in Darfur. She wants to save those children. He doesn’t even know where Darfur is. So calling himself a Black man is one thing, but he doesn’t even know who he is or what he is or what his world is yet.

This White guy actually has more interest White guy actually has more interest (laughs) in Black people than he does. And I think that that's - so I'm making these statements so as not to be kind of simpleminded about it. I think that by the end of the book, most readers - I haven’t had one reader, one Black male reader who's mentioned it. Because by the time they get to the end, they say, "Damn, man, this is hard."

Tavis: Let me ask you, then, let me switch gears somewhat dramatically before I go here. So you got an interracial thing going on in the text in the novel, you are the product of an interracial relationship, and there's a guy running for president who is the product of an interracial relationship.

Mosley: Oh, in America today.

Tavis: In America today, yeah.

Mosley: Not in my book.

Tavis: No, no, no, no.

Mosley: Okay.

Tavis: (Laughs) In America. That's why I said, “I'm switching gears here.”

Mosley: I must have written that in my sleep.

Tavis: No, no, no. (Laughs) I'm switching gears here. So what do you make of this interracial brother who's running for president, and all these questions about whether or not he's too White for Black folk, and too Black for White folk?

Mosley: Give me a minute to answer that question, 'cause there are two sides. Number one, there are very few Black people I know in America who are not interracial.

Tavis: (Laughs) Point well taken.

Mosley: I could look at a man and say, "That man's from Africa." And I can look at another man and say, "That man's from America." Because all of us, Black and White, are interracial in America. To say that okay, so maybe there's not somebody you could name, but they're there.

Tavis: I just read that Al Sharpton and Strom Thurman are related.

Mosley: Yeah, well, I believe that.

Tavis: Did you see that?

Mosley: I'll believe that in a minute.

Tavis: To your point, go ahead, I'm sorry.

Mosley: But on the other hand, let me say, Tavis, I love what you're doing. I love how you're trying to organize and make Black people think about who they are and what our responsibilities are in this country. When anybody - people come up to me and they think they're brilliant. They say, "Barack or Hillary?" And I'm thinking, man, I think Malcolm X. You’ve been bamboozled. If you think that you can tell me two names of two people you never met and are never going to meet and don't know anything about, and you think it's a question, it's not a question.

The question is, we live in an oligarchy. That means that our country is of and by the wealthy and the corporations. What we need to live in is a democracy, where a country is of and by the people. What I'm interested in, I'm interested in us removing ourselves from the Democratic and Republican parties, and voting according to our personal interest, which they don't represent.

They represent interests of the rich. And so Barack, if he is - he's a brother as far as I'm concerned, that's fine. But that's not the question. The question is if he's a Democrat, well, then he's gonna represent that.

Tavis: Let me follow up right quick, though, and then I gotta let you go here. I agree with you wholeheartedly that it's not about - there's an old adage in Black America, as you know. We don't have any permanent friends, we have no permanent enemies. We only have permanent interest. It's a great saying, but it ain't true.

'Cause you're right, we are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Democratic Party. That is to say Black folk, by and large. To your point then, is it possible to stay as a Black person inside of that two-party system, and still vote your interests? In other words, you don't actually have to leave that party structure to vote your own interests, do you?

Mosley: I don't believe that we can stay within the two-party system and have a democratic nation. I don't think we have a democratic nation today, and after the next election, if there's somebody who calls themself a Democrat or somebody who calls themself a Republican in office, I don't think that we'll have it then. I don't believe it.

It hasn’t been true so far, and I don't see how it can be true in the future. One of the reasons that our development (sounds like) is African American, some of the oldest Americans, is the way we've been so retarded politically and economically in our development in this country is because the parties represent the rich. They don't represent us or anything that our interests have to do with.

Tavis: This is why I love having Walter Mosley on the program. He is a true renaissance man. Not with every guest can you talk about novels, nonfiction, politics, global affairs, and anything else you wanna raise. Walter Mosley, I love you, glad to have you here.

Mosley: Great to be here.

Tavis: The latest novel from Walter Mosley, "A Sexistential Novel: Killing Johnny Fry." And that book about how to write your own novel coming later this year. That’s our show for tonight. Catch me weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Our radio podcast available at TavisTalks.com. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A., thanks for watching, and as always, keep the faith.