About Chris
CHRIS ORCUTT is a critically acclaimed and bestselling American novelist and fiction writer with over 30 years’ writing experience. Besides novels and short stories, Chris has written journalism, scripts, plays, and speeches.
The Books
For the past decade (since 2015), Chris Orcutt been working exclusively on his magnum opus. Bodaciously True & Totally Awesome: The Legendary Adventures of Avery “Ace” Craig is a 9-episode novel about teens in the 1980s. It’s about ’80s teens, but for adults (in other words, it’s decidedly not YA literature), and he’s applied this epic storytelling approach to the least examined, most misunderstood, most marginalized narrative space in American literature: the lives and inner worlds of teenagers.
The 9 episodes or books of Bodaciously tell the story of Avery and his high school friends against the vibrant backdrop of the Reagan era with seminal events including the return of Halley’s Comet, the Challenger explosion, the Chernobyl accident, the Reykjavik conference, the “Garbage Barge” fiasco, and President Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech. Over the course of two years, Avery goes on adventures across the United States and to Europe; interacts with a variety of ’80s celebrities and political leaders; navigates the perilous, tempestuous seas of sex and romance; learns the nature of true love; endures death, loss, and hardship; and transforms from a teenage boy into a young man.
Like other groundbreaking novels, Orcutt’s new work transcends existing labels. It’s a coming-of-age story, a love story, historical fiction, and an odyssey, offering readers a truly immersive experience: immersion in the music, culture, fashion, lingo, customs, and everyday details of teenage life in the ’80s. Truly, what he’s offering readers is a time machine back to this magical era—possibly the greatest time ever to be a teenager in America. Indeed, Orcutt has created a new genre in American literature—what he’s calling an “episodic novel” and “teen epic.”
“In fact, in terms of my ability to work on long projects for a very long time, I consider myself the American Tolstoy. The ten, almost eleven, years of isolation during which I was crafting Bodaciously made me reflect on what an accomplishment it is. Regardless of how it performs commercially, critically, or what honors it might or might not receive, the work is intrinsically monumental and unique, and it required a special combination of gifts to write, including facility with language, yes, but also persistence, stamina, self-discipline, and self-direction. I know that Bodaciously is my magnum opus, and I know that I was born to write it.
“Finally, I consider the writing of Bodaciously—a million-plus-word, 9-episode novel—to be a literary accomplishment on par with summiting Mount Everest. However, because I wrote, edited, laid-out, proofread, and polished every draft on my own, I consider what I’ve done analogous to mountaineer Reinhold Messner’s climbing of Everest in 1980—when he did it solo, without oxygen and without a support team.”
Orcutt’s earlier fiction, including the critically acclaimed Dakota Stevens Mystery Series; One Hundred Miles from Manhattan; The Man, The Myth, The Legend; and Perpetuating Trouble has received critical acclaim from a host of professional reviewers: Publishers Weekly, Chronogram, Midwest Book Review, Hudson Valley News, IndieReader, and Kirkus Reviews.
The Bio
Born in the State of Maine, Orcutt lived the majority of his childhood and early adulthood in Dutchess County, New York. He attended college in Boston, Massachusetts, graduating summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in philosophy. Orcutt’s first job after college was for the now-defunct Taconic Newspapers (including The Millbrook Round Table, where he was awarded by the New York Press Association), and later on writing as a freelance reporter for The Poughkeepsie Journal (New York’s oldest newspaper) and as a freelancer for magazines. Through his 20s into his early 30s, after journalism and before becoming a full-time novelist, Orcutt earned his living as a high school American Studies teacher, corporate communications executive, college writing instructor, and speechwriter.
Philosophy & Process
Throughout his career, Orcutt has written with one guiding principle: “I write books that I would want to read,” he says. “When I’m reading a novel, I’m always looking for surprises—the plot twist, the beautiful scene, the quirky character, the memorable line of dialogue, or the gorgeous, picturesque sentence. So those are the things I want to give to my readers.”
Like a samurai sword-maker who forges, folds, and hammers a length of steel until it becomes both a perfect weapon and a piece of art, Chris Orcutt invests thousands of hours in every one of his novels—writing, researching, rewriting, and editing—to make them the very best they can be.
While other authors might focus on book marketing and self-promotion, Orcutt is constantly honing his storytelling craft and his facility with language. He strives to give readers an immersive reading experience that will stick with them: great lines of dialogue, words they’ve never heard before, and gorgeous sentences. Indeed, Orcutt’s credo is a quote by Ernest Hemingway: “It is your object to convey everything to the reader so that he remembers it not as a story he had read, but as something that happened to himself. That is the true test of writing.”
An old-school novelist who writes his first drafts with a Palomino Blackwing 602 pencil or one of his many vintage typewriters, Orcutt believes in hard work over talent, substance over hype—rising every day at 5 a.m., making coffee, and pressing on with his latest work in progress. If you are a young or aspiring writer, you have come to the right place. Based on his wide-ranging writing experience, Orcutt has written a number of pieces on his blog about the writing process—including hints, tips, and instruction. These blog entries have been curated on his Thoughts on Writing page.
Orcutt’s favorite writers (in alphabetical order) are Jane Austen, Bill Bryson, Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, John Cheever, Anton Chekhov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ian Fleming, Charles Frazier, Ernest Hemingway, Henrik Ibsen, John Irving, David Mamet, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert B. Parker, William Shakespeare, John Steinbeck, Leo Tolstoy, and E.B. White. His goal as a writer is lofty, but one that keeps him motivated:
“There are lots of good writers out there, but I hold myself and my work to a higher standard. I want to become a great writer. I want to summit Mount Everest as a writer and stand up there with Tolstoy, Chekhov, Nabokov, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. And I’m going to make it up there, or, like George Mallory on Everest, die trying.”
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