My dad was really into World War II movies and when I was a kid I used to watch them with him. We saw all the classics - Von Ryan's Escape, The Dirty Dozen, Bridge on the River Kwai- but his favorite was The Great Escape. I probably saw this movie 5 or 6 times as a child.
Which makes it so strange that I only remembered half of it. I rented the movie as an adult and realized that, as a child, only the first half of the movie had made any impression on me at all. In my memory the whole movie was the POWs digging a tunnel in an effort to escape the Nazi internment camp. I was especially gripped by the image of Charles Bronson, who did most of the digging and was in fact dubbed "The Tunnel King" even though he - irony alert - was horribly claustrophobic. When the tunnel was complete and the night for the long-planned escape arrived he panicked and refused to go back into the tunnel this one final time. A friend had to drag him.
I suppose all this would make an impression on an impressionable child such as myself. I liked Charles Bronson. I identified with him. To the degree that all I really remembered about the movie, despite multiple viewings, was him on his belly in the tunnel. I forgot the whole half where they got out and scattered across Europe with the Nazis in hot pursuit. I even forgot Steve McQueen on his motorcycle, which was a seriously kick-ass sequence.
Now why, you might logically ask, is all this in a blog about writing? When I speak to MFA students I always mention this movie as the perfect analogy to writing. The process of writing (especially something long - like a book, like a novel) is much like digging a tunnel out of a POW camp. You work alone, at night, crammed into tiny spaces and moving in small increments, digging your way forward with any tool you can find. Hell, half the time you're digging with a spoon, like I think poor Bronson did at the end. Would any logical person try to dig a tunnel with a spoon? Periodically the tunnel collapses on you and your friends have to pull you out as you sputter and cough up dust and curse the fact all your hardwork was for nothing. And then you start again. The Great Escape people started three tunnels - the Nazis found one, another collapsed midway through beyond repair. Despite their careful calculations, the third tunnel came up 20 feet shy of the woods and they had to, at the last minute, change their plans and just make a run for it.
So many analogies to writing. The solitude of the work, the endless digging, the claustraphobia, the need for faith even when 2/3 of your projects don't come to any fruition at all and even the measly 1/3 that you do complete don't end up remotely like you'd planned. You dig for months and still end ups 20 feet shy of the woods. You plan and plan and end up making a run for it.
And I think most writers and teachers of writing focus on this process because you have to, it's compelling. The digging of the tunnel is so compelling that they forget the last half of the movie. They talk constantly about writing but never about selling, about publication. Maybe they can't bear to. Maybe the second half of the movie is just too upsetting. Because it seems like after all you've gone through to get to that point, life should pat you on the back a little. It seems like when you stick your head up from the tunnel with your completed book under your arm, the world should applaud and say "Nice job, man...you dug all that way! With a spoon! In the dark!"
But they don't. You finish digging and you stick your head up and the first bullet comes whizzing by your ear.
You spend the rest of the movie trying to get to Switzerland, to the promised land of peace and plenty - or at very the least, good reviews and a book that stays in print. Your friends are shot. Captured. Disappeared. The odds are astronomically against you...
Because here's the second way that The Great Escape is a perfect analogy of writing. There's attrition at every point. I'm going to get the exact numbers wrong, I'm sure, but the percentages I'm getting ready to quote are pretty accurate. The Great Escape was based on a true story, an actual breakout. Originally they planned to take 200 men out but that soon proved impractical and the planned number dropped to more like 100. The Nazis caught them a little over half of the way though the breakout so only about 60 actually went into the tunnel. Of those sixty about half were captured and returned to the camp. About half were killed. Three escaped.
Again, much like the numbers for publishing a book. Of all the people who talk about writing a book, only half actually start one - and that's probably a generous estimate. Of the people who start one, maybe about half finish. Again, I'm bordering on the wildly opptomistic with that estimate. Of those that finish, a fair percentage of them are gunned down (i.e., their books never get sold at all) and another large chunk are returned to the POW camp (i.e. the books do okay, but not great, and the authors end up right back where they started, spoon in hand.) Maybe about 3 out of 200 make it, i.e., are successful enough in the marketplace that they can be said to have won the war and these - another irony alert - are known as breakout books.
By this point in my little pep talk most of the students are looking at me like I'm nuts. Or at least very mean. But I don't consider this analogy particularly depressing. It's just the way it works. Writing a novel is hard. Publishing it is harder. If you can't accept that truth you shouldn't go into the tunnel in the first place. The men in the Great Escape knew it wasn't going to be easy to break out of a Nazi POW camp but they tried it anyway and there's a certain nobility in that, a nobility that makes the title apt. It was a great escape, with the greatness based more on the vision they shared than the numerical results of the breakout. And besides, I belatedly learned that this whole escape was designed to coincide with D-Day, a created distraction to pull the Nazis away from the coast and have them chasing down these prisoners all over Europe. There was a hint of self-sacrifice about the whole mission from its inception and yet they went into the process with heart.
I try to be one of those writing teachers who talks about the last half of the movie, who discusses the realities of not just writing, but what happens after you write. I try to tell the students things I wish somebody had told me. Still, I know every writer has his or her own path and no one can really tell anyone else anything...it's a ridiculously individuated process. But I hope that there are certain times in their own process whether it's at a point of despair that the damn book will never be finished or a point of overwhelm that seventeen agents in a row have rejected them that they remember the analogy of The Great Escape and know that a) they are not as alone as it seems they are and b) there is something noble about this mission, no matter where you end up.
And it's not like there's absolutely no hope. Charles Bronson was one of the three who made it.
Sunday, January 25, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
The Muse Comes at Three
Yesterday morning at 3 am I was awakened by a smell. My dog Otis had dropped a pile of poop of such malodorious magnitude on my bathroom floor that it actually woke me out of a dead sleep. I tried to ignore it but finally got up and started cleaning, scolding, dragging towels and bathmats to the washing machine, scrubbing my hands and arms with antibacterial soap, throwing my nightgown in the laundry too....in short I was throughly awakened. Awakened in the worst way. Four hours of sleep wouldn't be enough to see me through the day but it was just enough to make me pretty sure I either couldn't go back to sleep at all or, if I did, I would fall asleep about 5 and then doze away half the morning.
Otis, needless to say, was happily snoring on the pillow beside me.
Damn Otis.
But the muse comes in many forms. As I was lying there in the dark, wondering if I should make coffee, walk out for the paper, cut on the computer and officially begin the day I suddenly began to have a rush of insights about the second novel. A literal shitload of ideas. Four or five plot points - a couple of them quite elegant - came to me at once.
I cut on the light and began to scribble notes.
What exactly is this strange aspect of the creative process? Why do we sometimes work and work on some aspect of our stories without really getting anywhere and then suddenly have these moments of clarity when we can see exactly what needs to happen?
And can these moments of seemingly random inspiration - my grandmother's best friend, an elderly and over-the-top poet, used to call them "wooing the muse" - be more predictable, and thus more productable, than we think?
For the last three days I have been working on a chapter summary for my second novel. Hard work. I went to bed the night before my 3 am fit inspiration having just wrapped ip a 3500-word plot synopsis, wondering if it all held together. I had shown it to Laura, an editor friend with a good sense of the linear, and she had pointed out that I had a character in the story that might not need to be there. I knew what she meant - the character shows up, says some stuff, does a few things, but doesn't really tie into the resolution of the book. But I wanted Tory in the story. On an instinctive level I thought she had an important role to play. There were a few more dangling plot threads....things that, like the character of Tory, were in at the beginning but didn't seem to have any crucial function by the end. But once again I was loathe to cut them out.
In the creative process, I strongly believe that our subconscious minds run ahead of our conscious minds. They rush forward, preparing the way, clearing the forest and leaving trail markers for our slower-moving more cautious conscious minds to follow. Novels really point out this out to you because they're so long and have the potential for so many dead ends. Several times while writing I have put something into the story without knowing exactly why it's there. And early readers (who constitute only my most trusted friends) have done just what Laura did, gently pointed out that this material doesn't fit. Most of the time, I nod and cut it. At other times I have left it in....not knowing exactly why. I am not in general a stubborn writer. Not a prima donna. Over my long years as a nonfiction writer I have been both edited badly and edited well and I know that work exists to be changed. When people give me feedback, I do not throw up my hands and shriek "But I am an artist!!!"
So these periods of stubbornness are selective. I think they mean something. I think they mean that my subconscious mind has put this seemingly random material in for a reason and it knows that my conscious mind will figure it all out at some point down the road.
Because I went to bed that night thinking I didn't want to cut Tory out of the story and that I should leave in a couple of the other seemingly non-essential scenes as well. Went to sleep mulling it over, exhausted and sick of working on the scene sequence. I slept. Otis pooped. I woke up. I cleaned. Otis slept. I got back into bed and suddenly saw how the Tory story fit into the whole and how one of the questionable scenes was indeed her logical route back into the book.
It's exciting when this happens. It's why we write. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to happen more. And I suspect that taking the time to write out plot treatments and chapter summarys, tedious as these activities may be, are actually the ways in which we build bridges between the conscious and subconscious minds. The way in which we allow them to - at least for a few hyper-productive minutes - walk the same path. Because I think that's what preciesely these moments of "effortless inspiration" are, a link up between the conscious and subconscious minds. We not only know what we should do next, we see clearly how to do it.
If I had not done the chapter summarys in sequence I would not have known where the holes in my story were. A major event happens to my heroine at about 2/3 of the way through the book. I knew I needed to show how this event changed her, to put a little rest beat into the rhythm of the book, a sort of pause-and-reflect chapter. So I wrote in my plot outline that chapter 17 needed just that and moved on to chapter 18, picking the story back up.
But if I hadn't known exactly where that hole in the plot was, would I have so easily come up with a way to fill it? It's one thing to know what something is missing....it's quite another thing to put the conscious mind to work outlining your plot and seeing exactly where the gap is. At that point I believe my subconscious mind sprang to work sorting through the options, shuffling a sort of metaphorical deck of cards, until it found the right material. Material which came directly from those "loose thread scenes" I had been reluctant to cut.
Speaking of metaphors, have I mixed up enough of them for you? Walking in the forest, leaving clues, building bridges, shuffling cards... It's hard to write about this. We don't write or talk or even think about these things very often and it's hard to find the words. But I do know this. The subconscious mind wants to help the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is stuck it tries to send it hints. We need to listen to these hints, sure, but I suspect we can also be more proactive and actually invite the subconscious mind to dialogue with the conscious mind. I think I did just that with my chapter summary outline. In essence I said to my subconscious not merely "I'm stuck" but instead "I'm stuck right here. Can you come help me?"
I'm pleased to have my new scene. Pleased that Tory is back in the book. Pleased that waking up at 3 am resulted in scrawled pages of very good notes. But there's one more thing I have to wonder. I don't want to wonder this because it seems like a direct contadiction of what I wrote above, i.e., that creativity is the result of cross-pollenation between the conscious and subconscious mind and therefore not only within us but something we can learn to cultivate. But what if there's another component, something beyond our own heads? If Otis had not taken a poop when he did, and if that poop had not been quite so pungeant, would I have missed my moment of inspiration? Would the same thoughts have been patiently waiting for me when I woke at 7 am... or were they just there, floating by, momentarily up for grabs in that silent stream of early morning? It's strange to think the role Otis might have played in all this (should I mention him in the acknowledgements?) and even more strange to comtemplate that my writing process might be helped along by unseen forces. When my grandmother's friend the poet used to talk about "wooing the muse" I always that she was affected and silly. But then I sit down and write for 30 minutes about how dog poop gave me the missing chapter of my novel.
Otis is usually very regular.
Otis, needless to say, was happily snoring on the pillow beside me.
Damn Otis.
But the muse comes in many forms. As I was lying there in the dark, wondering if I should make coffee, walk out for the paper, cut on the computer and officially begin the day I suddenly began to have a rush of insights about the second novel. A literal shitload of ideas. Four or five plot points - a couple of them quite elegant - came to me at once.
I cut on the light and began to scribble notes.
What exactly is this strange aspect of the creative process? Why do we sometimes work and work on some aspect of our stories without really getting anywhere and then suddenly have these moments of clarity when we can see exactly what needs to happen?
And can these moments of seemingly random inspiration - my grandmother's best friend, an elderly and over-the-top poet, used to call them "wooing the muse" - be more predictable, and thus more productable, than we think?
For the last three days I have been working on a chapter summary for my second novel. Hard work. I went to bed the night before my 3 am fit inspiration having just wrapped ip a 3500-word plot synopsis, wondering if it all held together. I had shown it to Laura, an editor friend with a good sense of the linear, and she had pointed out that I had a character in the story that might not need to be there. I knew what she meant - the character shows up, says some stuff, does a few things, but doesn't really tie into the resolution of the book. But I wanted Tory in the story. On an instinctive level I thought she had an important role to play. There were a few more dangling plot threads....things that, like the character of Tory, were in at the beginning but didn't seem to have any crucial function by the end. But once again I was loathe to cut them out.
In the creative process, I strongly believe that our subconscious minds run ahead of our conscious minds. They rush forward, preparing the way, clearing the forest and leaving trail markers for our slower-moving more cautious conscious minds to follow. Novels really point out this out to you because they're so long and have the potential for so many dead ends. Several times while writing I have put something into the story without knowing exactly why it's there. And early readers (who constitute only my most trusted friends) have done just what Laura did, gently pointed out that this material doesn't fit. Most of the time, I nod and cut it. At other times I have left it in....not knowing exactly why. I am not in general a stubborn writer. Not a prima donna. Over my long years as a nonfiction writer I have been both edited badly and edited well and I know that work exists to be changed. When people give me feedback, I do not throw up my hands and shriek "But I am an artist!!!"
So these periods of stubbornness are selective. I think they mean something. I think they mean that my subconscious mind has put this seemingly random material in for a reason and it knows that my conscious mind will figure it all out at some point down the road.
Because I went to bed that night thinking I didn't want to cut Tory out of the story and that I should leave in a couple of the other seemingly non-essential scenes as well. Went to sleep mulling it over, exhausted and sick of working on the scene sequence. I slept. Otis pooped. I woke up. I cleaned. Otis slept. I got back into bed and suddenly saw how the Tory story fit into the whole and how one of the questionable scenes was indeed her logical route back into the book.
It's exciting when this happens. It's why we write. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to happen more. And I suspect that taking the time to write out plot treatments and chapter summarys, tedious as these activities may be, are actually the ways in which we build bridges between the conscious and subconscious minds. The way in which we allow them to - at least for a few hyper-productive minutes - walk the same path. Because I think that's what preciesely these moments of "effortless inspiration" are, a link up between the conscious and subconscious minds. We not only know what we should do next, we see clearly how to do it.
If I had not done the chapter summarys in sequence I would not have known where the holes in my story were. A major event happens to my heroine at about 2/3 of the way through the book. I knew I needed to show how this event changed her, to put a little rest beat into the rhythm of the book, a sort of pause-and-reflect chapter. So I wrote in my plot outline that chapter 17 needed just that and moved on to chapter 18, picking the story back up.
But if I hadn't known exactly where that hole in the plot was, would I have so easily come up with a way to fill it? It's one thing to know what something is missing....it's quite another thing to put the conscious mind to work outlining your plot and seeing exactly where the gap is. At that point I believe my subconscious mind sprang to work sorting through the options, shuffling a sort of metaphorical deck of cards, until it found the right material. Material which came directly from those "loose thread scenes" I had been reluctant to cut.
Speaking of metaphors, have I mixed up enough of them for you? Walking in the forest, leaving clues, building bridges, shuffling cards... It's hard to write about this. We don't write or talk or even think about these things very often and it's hard to find the words. But I do know this. The subconscious mind wants to help the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is stuck it tries to send it hints. We need to listen to these hints, sure, but I suspect we can also be more proactive and actually invite the subconscious mind to dialogue with the conscious mind. I think I did just that with my chapter summary outline. In essence I said to my subconscious not merely "I'm stuck" but instead "I'm stuck right here. Can you come help me?"
I'm pleased to have my new scene. Pleased that Tory is back in the book. Pleased that waking up at 3 am resulted in scrawled pages of very good notes. But there's one more thing I have to wonder. I don't want to wonder this because it seems like a direct contadiction of what I wrote above, i.e., that creativity is the result of cross-pollenation between the conscious and subconscious mind and therefore not only within us but something we can learn to cultivate. But what if there's another component, something beyond our own heads? If Otis had not taken a poop when he did, and if that poop had not been quite so pungeant, would I have missed my moment of inspiration? Would the same thoughts have been patiently waiting for me when I woke at 7 am... or were they just there, floating by, momentarily up for grabs in that silent stream of early morning? It's strange to think the role Otis might have played in all this (should I mention him in the acknowledgements?) and even more strange to comtemplate that my writing process might be helped along by unseen forces. When my grandmother's friend the poet used to talk about "wooing the muse" I always that she was affected and silly. But then I sit down and write for 30 minutes about how dog poop gave me the missing chapter of my novel.
Otis is usually very regular.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Feeling Like a Cop
Somebody once told me that being a writer is like being a cop - long stretches of boredom periodically punctuated with little blips of pure terror. That's been re-proven to me in the last couple of days.
To recap: I have one book "in the works" that my agent sold about a year ago and which is due to publish about a year from now. In other words I am at the exact midpoint of a two year publication process. I have no idea why it takes this long. My editor required virually no rewrites and just a couple of small additions which I had in within a month of the purchase. But never mind, everyone assures me that this is how the process works. So in the meantime I'm sitting in my squad car, eating donuts and casing the joint.
Uh oh....movement. This could be good or bad but either way it feels a little surreal because after hours and days and weeks and months Something Is Getting Ready to Happen.
There's two reasons why this shouldn't surprise me. For starters I know that the publishing world works like this. On the Thursday before Christmas someone at my publishing house wrote me an email saying they needed a picture of me for the catalogue. A picture with all these stipulations about pixel size and high def and all these photographic terms I didn't get....but suffice to say not the type of picture a friend takes out in the yard with her iphone. A very high tech specific type of picture and they needed it the next day.
Luckily, I had exactly what they were looking for, since just the month before I'd been at MacDowell Colony and part of the deal there is that they send a very nice photographer named Jo around to take professional pictures of the artists "at work." In some cases, I imagine this could lead to cool pictures - a violinist or sculptor at work might actually be an interesting sight to see. But what could be more boring than a picture of a writer writing? Jo had been doing this for years and she was great - helped me to relax, kept snapping while we were chatting. And the the result was several nice pictures of me gazing out at the distance with a kind of alertness, sort of like the expression of a coon hound on the scent. I bought a few copies of them, one for my mom for Christmas. So I happened through the wildest of coincidences to have a recent picture of the type they needed but this is just how it all works. You don't hear from anybody for forever when you get an email on Thursday saying they need something by Friday. Nothing....nothing.....emergency.....nothing.
The second reason I should have seen this present situation coming is that I invited it on myself. I want to sell my second book, the one I'm working on now and I would dearly love to sell it off a proprosal and sample chapters, i.e., to get enough money in the hopper to sustain me while I finish the book. Not only would this help my cash flow situation (which is at present pretty stagnant) but it would also ensure that the second book would be locked and loaded and ready for release fairly soon after the first one. My fantasy is that the first book will be popular with book clubs - I think it's slanted toward that kind of reader - and I know from past experience with my own book club that once people read an author that they like to read something else by that author in pretty short order. My book club got on jags where we'd read four or five books by the same person in a row and I don't think that's uncommon. So it makes sense to me that by the time Love in Mid-Air is ready to go into paperback, I should have The Gods of Arizona ready to come out in hardback. Which means it's time to get moving.
Of course a lot of things that make sense to me don't seem to fly in the world of publishing so I ran this idea by my agent without particularly high hopes. Sent him an email yesterday asking if he'd like me to come up with a proposal and sample chapters for the second book with the idea of showing them to my existing editor. The second book is a sequel to the first so it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be willing to at least look at the proposal....
So I sent my agent an email and he wrote back pronto and said yeah, to come up with a proposal and sample chapters and we'd take it from there. And now I'm in a tizzy. Not so much the samples - I got a couple of chapters in pretty good shape for my reading at MacDowell, but writing a plot summary is tough. I asked for this job but when he said yeah, go ahead, I felt a little freaked out. Makes no sense, I know, but welcome to the glamorous world of being a novelist. I'm excited. I'm edgy. I want to show the second one. I'm scared to show the second one. I have plenty to show. I don't have enough to show. I want them to commit to me. I don't want to be locked in. Sometimes I think I became a writer only because I'm not sure how to spell the word "schtizophrenic."
To recap: I have one book "in the works" that my agent sold about a year ago and which is due to publish about a year from now. In other words I am at the exact midpoint of a two year publication process. I have no idea why it takes this long. My editor required virually no rewrites and just a couple of small additions which I had in within a month of the purchase. But never mind, everyone assures me that this is how the process works. So in the meantime I'm sitting in my squad car, eating donuts and casing the joint.
Uh oh....movement. This could be good or bad but either way it feels a little surreal because after hours and days and weeks and months Something Is Getting Ready to Happen.
There's two reasons why this shouldn't surprise me. For starters I know that the publishing world works like this. On the Thursday before Christmas someone at my publishing house wrote me an email saying they needed a picture of me for the catalogue. A picture with all these stipulations about pixel size and high def and all these photographic terms I didn't get....but suffice to say not the type of picture a friend takes out in the yard with her iphone. A very high tech specific type of picture and they needed it the next day.
Luckily, I had exactly what they were looking for, since just the month before I'd been at MacDowell Colony and part of the deal there is that they send a very nice photographer named Jo around to take professional pictures of the artists "at work." In some cases, I imagine this could lead to cool pictures - a violinist or sculptor at work might actually be an interesting sight to see. But what could be more boring than a picture of a writer writing? Jo had been doing this for years and she was great - helped me to relax, kept snapping while we were chatting. And the the result was several nice pictures of me gazing out at the distance with a kind of alertness, sort of like the expression of a coon hound on the scent. I bought a few copies of them, one for my mom for Christmas. So I happened through the wildest of coincidences to have a recent picture of the type they needed but this is just how it all works. You don't hear from anybody for forever when you get an email on Thursday saying they need something by Friday. Nothing....nothing.....emergency.....nothing.
The second reason I should have seen this present situation coming is that I invited it on myself. I want to sell my second book, the one I'm working on now and I would dearly love to sell it off a proprosal and sample chapters, i.e., to get enough money in the hopper to sustain me while I finish the book. Not only would this help my cash flow situation (which is at present pretty stagnant) but it would also ensure that the second book would be locked and loaded and ready for release fairly soon after the first one. My fantasy is that the first book will be popular with book clubs - I think it's slanted toward that kind of reader - and I know from past experience with my own book club that once people read an author that they like to read something else by that author in pretty short order. My book club got on jags where we'd read four or five books by the same person in a row and I don't think that's uncommon. So it makes sense to me that by the time Love in Mid-Air is ready to go into paperback, I should have The Gods of Arizona ready to come out in hardback. Which means it's time to get moving.
Of course a lot of things that make sense to me don't seem to fly in the world of publishing so I ran this idea by my agent without particularly high hopes. Sent him an email yesterday asking if he'd like me to come up with a proposal and sample chapters for the second book with the idea of showing them to my existing editor. The second book is a sequel to the first so it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be willing to at least look at the proposal....
So I sent my agent an email and he wrote back pronto and said yeah, to come up with a proposal and sample chapters and we'd take it from there. And now I'm in a tizzy. Not so much the samples - I got a couple of chapters in pretty good shape for my reading at MacDowell, but writing a plot summary is tough. I asked for this job but when he said yeah, go ahead, I felt a little freaked out. Makes no sense, I know, but welcome to the glamorous world of being a novelist. I'm excited. I'm edgy. I want to show the second one. I'm scared to show the second one. I have plenty to show. I don't have enough to show. I want them to commit to me. I don't want to be locked in. Sometimes I think I became a writer only because I'm not sure how to spell the word "schtizophrenic."
Friday, January 2, 2009
The Greatest Fiction About Fiction
A couple of days ago someone said to me "Now that the novel has sold are you still going to do non-fiction?"
Which may have been an understandable question for a civilian but the person who asked me this defines herself as a writer. She is also independently wealthy which may account for the fact she can literally afford to be unaware of the financial realities of publishing. The question still irritated me.
Of course I'm still going to do non-fiction. For one reason, I like it and find the research - which involves traveling and interviewing, i.e., leaving my house and actually talking to other people - a good counterpoint to the solitude of fiction writing. But the reason I found my friend's question astounding is that of course I'm going to continue to write non-fiction for another reason as well : the regular sale of non-fiction is the only way a writer can financially survive.
I think there's a myth out there that if you sell a book, you get a big chunk of money - or at least enough to change your life. And that does happen to a sliver of the population. It happened to two of my close friends and for a while it affected my own thinking. If selling their first novel gave them enough cash to live on for years maybe lightening will strike a third time right over my head. But rationally you have to step back and see how rare that is. Most novels sell for an advance of less than $100,000 and in fact most of them sell for a lot less than that. And most authors have spent 4-7 years writing that book. Do the math. You'd make more money working at Starbucks.
I know all this well, but my reaction to my friend's innocent question is telling. I was able to calmly respond "Yes, of course I'll keep doing the non-fiction as well. I like it. I like talking to real people." And she nodded and I smiled. Grimly. There are so many myths about writing, especially about the writing of novels. Such as....
1. All it takes is a "good idea." In fact, if you ever hear a story about anything odd happening to anybody, the person telling you this story will inevitably add "You should write this down. It would be a freakin' best seller."
2. There's something romantic, perhaps even magical, about the process. The muse lands upon your shoulder. You go into an altered state of consciousness and awaken to find 350 well-typed pages on your desk. Or, my personal favorite, your characters speak to you and tell you what they want to do. They take over the book and in essence write it themselves. (This has never happened to me. I apparently have lazy characters. They seem to clock out the minute I do.)
3. People in New York are very enthused when you tell them you have a novel. They urge you to fly up immediately so they can take you to dinner and hear all about it.
4. They then give you lots of money for it. Enough money that you end up in a Hamptons white beach house somewhat like the one where Diane Keaton lived in "Something's Got To Give." Or maybe an upscale cabin in the Vermont woods with a big hairy dog or on a houseboat in Key West. Somewhere cool, that's for sure.
5. And you write the second one in about a week and a half.
Oh well. My friend's question was innocently meant. And, as I said, I look to non-fiction and fiction to give me entirely different things, both mentally and financially. So it's hard to say why I was so irritated....
More to mull.
Which may have been an understandable question for a civilian but the person who asked me this defines herself as a writer. She is also independently wealthy which may account for the fact she can literally afford to be unaware of the financial realities of publishing. The question still irritated me.
Of course I'm still going to do non-fiction. For one reason, I like it and find the research - which involves traveling and interviewing, i.e., leaving my house and actually talking to other people - a good counterpoint to the solitude of fiction writing. But the reason I found my friend's question astounding is that of course I'm going to continue to write non-fiction for another reason as well : the regular sale of non-fiction is the only way a writer can financially survive.
I think there's a myth out there that if you sell a book, you get a big chunk of money - or at least enough to change your life. And that does happen to a sliver of the population. It happened to two of my close friends and for a while it affected my own thinking. If selling their first novel gave them enough cash to live on for years maybe lightening will strike a third time right over my head. But rationally you have to step back and see how rare that is. Most novels sell for an advance of less than $100,000 and in fact most of them sell for a lot less than that. And most authors have spent 4-7 years writing that book. Do the math. You'd make more money working at Starbucks.
I know all this well, but my reaction to my friend's innocent question is telling. I was able to calmly respond "Yes, of course I'll keep doing the non-fiction as well. I like it. I like talking to real people." And she nodded and I smiled. Grimly. There are so many myths about writing, especially about the writing of novels. Such as....
1. All it takes is a "good idea." In fact, if you ever hear a story about anything odd happening to anybody, the person telling you this story will inevitably add "You should write this down. It would be a freakin' best seller."
2. There's something romantic, perhaps even magical, about the process. The muse lands upon your shoulder. You go into an altered state of consciousness and awaken to find 350 well-typed pages on your desk. Or, my personal favorite, your characters speak to you and tell you what they want to do. They take over the book and in essence write it themselves. (This has never happened to me. I apparently have lazy characters. They seem to clock out the minute I do.)
3. People in New York are very enthused when you tell them you have a novel. They urge you to fly up immediately so they can take you to dinner and hear all about it.
4. They then give you lots of money for it. Enough money that you end up in a Hamptons white beach house somewhat like the one where Diane Keaton lived in "Something's Got To Give." Or maybe an upscale cabin in the Vermont woods with a big hairy dog or on a houseboat in Key West. Somewhere cool, that's for sure.
5. And you write the second one in about a week and a half.
Oh well. My friend's question was innocently meant. And, as I said, I look to non-fiction and fiction to give me entirely different things, both mentally and financially. So it's hard to say why I was so irritated....
More to mull.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
