What DO you believe?

We atheists get that question a lot. Most people are incredulous that someone could not believe in God. Atheists are a tiny minority in the world, clutching reason as closely to our breasts as the faithful do God. I think maybe there is a gene that codes for faith or the need to worship, and some few of us are just born without it, like albinos, lacking the deity that allows us to walk in the crowd accepted and comforted.

What do I believe? I believe the unembellished, unambiguous truth is that we float through cold space, unique in the universe, short lived, in various states of denial of the irreducible fact that each of us, in our deaths, is alone.

While belief is as variable as individual human beings, human need is not, and staring at the flint-hard truth I just wrote, I know that what I need is pretty close to what all people, everywhere, have always needed: to feel that I am not alone, that I matter greatly to someone, that my life is not a flicker of candle light in a galaxy of suns.

I need stories that give me hope. A story that ends on a hopeless note is anathema to me, and to all but the most sneering and cynical critics. Hope cannot save anyone. But without it, why would we hang on long enough to see if someone might save us? Or that we can save ourselves.

And I need a warm hand to hold, a hand to squeeze mine when the winds of fate howl outside our door, a brush of lips on my ear and a whispered “everything will be all right.” A soft and lovely lie full of all the kindness and empathy of which we are capable in our best moments. And I will believe.

Real Love

I rarely put up another writers words in my blog posts, but this is perhaps the greatest love poem I have ever read. While we all hope never to be afforded the chance to demonstrate love in such a fashion, even the non-believers of us pray to find love so deep and sacrifice so unconditional.

Quarantine
by Eavan Boland

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking-they were both walking-north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and a woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Found Another One!

Juliet, Naked, is Nick Hornby’s newest novel. I loved High Fidelity, so in a minor fit of extravagance, I bought Juliet in hard cover because it isn’t out in paperback yet. Hard cover lasts longer passed around among friends, and I certainly want to pass this one around. As a lesbian trapped in a redneck ex-jock’s body, I just can’t resist a good romantic comedy, and Hornby is an insightful investigator of the unending permutations of one heart’s attraction to another.

A common motif in Hornby’s writing is the influence of and obsession with music. In this case, we have a man obsessed with a reclusive rock star who hasn’t recorded in twenty years, the fixated but formal stalker’s long suffering girlfriend, and a bitter, retired musician with too many ex-wives, children he doesn’t know, no money and a creative well run dry.

I read the 406 pages in two days. I just don’t do that. Not since Lonesome Dove, anyway. Hornby manages to explore the role of artifice in art, the question of whether obsession can be benign, and the possibility of romance anchored in the messy real world, all while making me laugh out loud nearly every other page.

Buy it now. Hornby deserves to be rich for helping renew my faith in fiction. If this isn’t in production as the third Hornby screenplay adaptation (About a Boy, High Fidelity) then it will be soon.

What's Behind Me

My blogger friend over at The Writer’s Closet has put up a list of things she likes. I like lists. I’m a list maker. Usually, it’s things to do. I once made a list of every sport I’ve ever played. I listed all the cities in which I’ve lived. All the jobs I’ve had. And, like every pig-of-a-man I have ever known, a secret list of women with whom I’ve slept. It’s way shorter than my friends' lists. I also made a list of all the liars I know.

There’s all kinds of top ten or twenty or hundred lists, like lists of the best cities to get a latte, the best women’s shoe brands, the nineteen best beaches in the world for seeing men in Speedos without gagging. The fifteen mistakes men make in relationships. (Are you sure it’s just fifteen?) But being that I am middle aged and my tank full of youthful optimism is down to reserves, I thought I’d make a list of everything that is behind me, the things I will never experience again. That’s the list I’m in the mood for tonight.

1. I will never hike the back country of Yellowstone again. This one hurts. Even more than the knees that make it impossible to see that tiny fraction of unsoiled America again. There can be no joy like a first cup of coffee made over burning Lodge Pole pine branches, the smell of wood smoke in my hair, as the sun creeps over the ridge above Howell Creek. I rose before the others to just sit with the wind and Mountain Bluebirds.

2. I will never hit another home run. My days as an athlete are over. Sports defined me for three decades. Even now I coach. But the sound produced when the barrel of a thirty-five ounce bat makes contact with a low, outside fastball is one I will never hear from the batters box again. The solid jolt that shoots through the hands and wrists, the sudden tremor, gone so quickly, but filled with so much meaning as the ball takes off. Only a memory now.

3. I will never be “so full of potential” again. That is for college kids clutching a new diplomas, a newlywed couple, a highly recruited high school quarterback. Or a smart kid with no direction and no family history of success. The problem with being so full of potential is, if you don’t reach it, you are the protagonist in one of the sadder stories in the world.

4. I will never have another chance to straighten things out with my father. He died almost three years ago. I was going to say I’m sorry. So was he. We never did.

5. I will never fall in love again. Well, I guess I can’t say that for certain, but if ever something felt like it belongs on this list, I guess this does. I have found about every way a relationship doesn’t work and can’t last—and none that do work or do last. Testosterone and ego drove me past failure in one love after another, blinded to pain, incompatibility, or even the notion that it might not be love, but a potent amalgam of raw sex drive, pathetic need for validation, and loneliness. It could just be that I don’t really know what love is at all. Now that age has lowered the flame on the sex kettle, and my ego has less need for validation, there’s just loneliness. And that’s not much on which to build a relationship. It’s barely a decent reason to date.

6. I’ll never go pheasant hunting with Zack again. Best dog I ever had. (Yeah, I made that list, too) Not even a bird dog. A German Shepherd. Stayed close, pointed like the best Springer Spaniel. Loved people like they were made of bacon. Goddamn good dog.

I think that’s about all of this kind of list I can stand for tonight. What’s on yours? Aren’t we all just a little tired of the “best” lists and the “top 10” lists and the “five-ways-you-can-intensify-your-orgasm” lists? Lets have a little melancholy in this joint! Let’s look back, not forward. Let’s look in the dark corners, not toward the light. Just for a night, now. Then we can go back to Disney-fying our lives. Then we can be thankful for walking, breathing, brothers and ice cream. And I am. Just not tonight.

The Value of One Life

I haven’t posted in a long time. There are days when I feel pretty worthless, and sometimes those days string together until everything I touch feels empty and valueless. I fall into self-pity. I dwell on love I’ve lost or never had, on misty dreams burned away by the uncompromising light of reality, on all the ways and times I have fallen short. My failures rise to the surface like an oil leak from a long sunken hulk. Slowly, imperceptibly, a pall settles over me. I can’t write. I can’t see why I should write. In my worst moments, I feel my life hasn’t amounted to much and never will. But one thing I can’t diminish or dismiss, cannot minimize or forget, is that I saved a man’s life once.

I was on a boat with several friends, a big charter yacht. There were four women and five men. Three of the other men were friends of mine and one a friend of a friend whom I had just met. We cruised out to the Gulf Stream from Key Largo, far out of sight of land, and anchored in about 90 feet of clear water. My three friends donned scuba gear and went spear fishing for our dinner. There were only three sets of scuba gear aboard, so I stayed on deck with the new guy. All the women went to the foredeck to lay in the sun and tan. The man I had just met—and I don’t even remember his name—decided to go snorkeling. I told him that in 90 feet of water, with no reefs around, there was nothing to see. I told him the current was pretty strong. It had pulled the boat taught on the anchor line. The divers used the anchor line to haul themselves to the bottom, where the current was slower. He had no experience away from a beach and ignored me.

I worked for a while in a scuba shop, taught scuba diving, and worked as a dive master on many group dives. I had been trained to look for trouble and the signs of trouble. A big red flag is when someone surfaces with their mask on top of their head and no regulator or snorkel in their mouth.

I watched the guy I had just met dive next to the boat. He came up twenty yards astern. He dove again, surfacing farther away. On his third or fourth dive, he came up fifty or more yards from the boat and began trying to swim back. The current was far stronger than he imagined. He swam in place and went under. When he came up, his mask was on his forehead, snorkel lost, and he gasped, unable to yell or talk. He stopped swimming and began to drift farther away with the current.

I was taught that all cushions on a boat have to be floatation devices. I ran to the foredeck, where one of the women lay on a bench with her head resting on a large, round cushion. I jerked it out from under her head to curses and ran down the gunwale walkway. I gave the cushion the heave of my life, for the guy was far off, now. It skipped on the water once, twice, and hit him right in the face. He grabbed the cushion like the drowning man he was. Nearby, down-current from him, was a channel marker buoy. I yelled at him to swim to it, as the current would help, rather than hinder him. He gathered his strength and did so. He clung to the buoy, letting the cushion drift off. It disappeared in the chop in just a minute or so, going north with the Gulf Stream.

When my friends came up from spear fishing a few minutes later, we quickly got the anchor up and drew along side him. He was cold and shaken, but all right when we pulled him aboard.

At my worst times, I remember that had I not been there, knowing what I knew, doing what only I could do in that instant, a man would have died. Waiting a few minutes for my friends to come up would have had him a mile from us, lost in the chop or already drowned. I mattered more than anything in the world to one man, for one moment.

So what? Doctors, EMT’s, Navy corpsmen, firefighters and many others do it every day, all over the world. Some have saved thousands. It does not make me special or particularly important in any way. Except to that one guy. And I try not to think about it much, because it feels inappropriate, like bragging, even to myself. I’ve told a few people, I think. And these days, if that guy is still alive, I’d bet he thinks about it less often than I do. But that few seconds of my life are at times as much a lifeline for me as I threw to him. When I remember it, I don’t feel as worthless, as helpless, as doomed to fail. I wish I remembered that guy’s name. I’d like to call him and thank him. I saved him once, but he has saved me many times over.

Death of a Rival

A man I never knew is being buried today. I didn’t get a chance to know him, but I had quite a bit of contact with him—violent contact, on a high school football field. The same age as me, we faced off over three years as starters for our respective teams. I have never been hit harder in my life than Taylor Pniewski hit me. He figured in many of my circle’s “Pniewski hit me so hard . . .” football war stories. Taylor and I split each others helmets open. We caved in face masks. We shed blood together in a ritual that bonds rivals as well as teammates. I never knew him but I will remember him until I am the subject of an obituary.

On most high school teams, there is at least one guy for whom you must account and adjust. I was one of those guys for my team. So I always drew that guy from the other team. For Ledgemont High School, that was Taylor Pniewski. He was all of 5’8”, but about that wide as well. I remember him being so much faster than he looked, and that blocking him was akin to pushing a dump truck. When I was on defense, he neutralized my quickness and forced me to beat him on even terms. He changed my goal from domination to don’t-embarrass-myself. He forced me to dig deep for strength I didn’t know I had. He beat me and forced me to forget my defeat by the next play and try again. He gave me the chance not to quit when confronted with what seemed an impossible task—beat Taylor Pniewski the next play. Not the entire game, not for a series, but one play, beat that one guy whose nose was twelve inches from mine, one time. Then I could think about the next play.

I thought about that lesson today as I struggle to write my second novel. I have three long starts on the second book that have all petered out by page 100. I have been forced to set them all aside and figure out how to proceed. I have to figure out how to get one page at a time and keep going, no matter how confusing and impossible the task seems. I don’t have to write an entire novel today. I have to write a good sentence and then another and another, and maybe get a page at the end of the day.

And it won’t be a perfect page. There will be some blood and sweat on it. But I will have pulled off that one page because people like Taylor Pniewski helped me see I could do it if I refuse to quit. Guys like Taylor taught me that even if I am beaten this time, and the time after that and the time after that, I can triumph on the next if I just get up off the ground, scrape the mud out of my eyes, and know that I can succeed.

That is how people accomplish things. They accept that there is no success without trials, no wins without losses, and they keep going. They get smacked down and they keep going. The get told they aren’t smart enough or old enough or experienced enough or talented enough and they keep going. By doing so, they often , in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “. . . meet with success unexpected in common hours.” Taylor Pniewski was one of my important teachers of that lesson. I didn’t know him, but I would never be who I am without him. Rest in Peace, my rival.

Finally! A New Novel I Can Love

As my four regular readers can attest, I do not have much good to say about the contemporary novelists held in high regard by literary critics and prize juries. As a rule, I don't trust the taste of book critics. Too many have joined the Cult of the Sentence, deeming that fiction best that piles up the most standout sentences, imagery and “lyrical” language, the accumulated weight of which apparently makes a novel literature with a capital L. It's been a long time since I picked up a book from the New Fiction shelf at the bookstore, read the first page and walked to the register with it. The triumph of style over story in modern literary fiction leaves me cold, bitter and buying classics.

Then I read a couple of reviews of American Rust. (Yes, I still do read reviews, even the New York Times Book Review, hoping against all evidence for change, going back again and again like an abused spouse.) The only thing in the reviews that got me looking for the novel was the subject matter: the effect of industrial collapse on American workers. Being from a long line of working class rednecks, I decided to give another new author a chance based on that alone.

And I'm glad I did. Philipp Meyer has produced a book that, by the end, had me comparing his novel to Richard Wright's Native Son and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Like them, he masterfully weaves into the story the socioeconomic and political pressures that bear on the lives of his characters without preaching, without beating us over the head with a morality tale. Yet you can't come away from it without knowing in your bones the corrosive effects of industrial decline on the lives of his working class characters. He has deep sympathy for all of his characters, the “good” and the “bad.” Each character has their own trajectory, and Meyer makes it inseparable from the collision that sent them on their way.

While Meyer does have one stylistic quirk I found annoying—he sometimes drops commas and periods that interrupt the natural flow of his sentences—for the most part the writing is straight forward, lacking the self-conscious poetic flourishes so much a part of contemporary literary writing. His prose serves the story rather than call attention to the author.

Buy American Rust. Don't take it out of the library. The author deserves the royalty, and I don't say that about many authors these days. I look forward to more from Philipp Meyer.

Fear and Work

What if I don't make it as a writer? That is the terrifying question that pops into my head every morning I don't write, every time I intend to work on my second novel and find a way to avoid it. I check my e-mail with a deep undercurrent of dread, knowing that I'm checking it for the fifth time in the hope that there will be something to which I must respond, so I might duck the writing I should be doing. I check my friends' blogs to see if they wrote anything of interest, rationalizing away my need to tell the story I set out to tell. I will be sure to get a lot done on it tomorrow. I just have to think about the characters a little more. That's actually part of the writing process, isn't it? And another day of writing disappears into a past from which it cannot be retrieved. And at some point during that day, the question that freezes my guts makes it's way up from the chilly depths of my personal hell: If I'm not a writer, what am I?

Thirty years ago, my possibilities were endless. I was smart and strong and healthy and capable. I had a future to fill with nearly anything I chose. So I chose to dabble in nearly everything, never mastering anything. I squandered opportunities, spit on good luck and assumed there would always be a second or third or tenth chance. I attended and quit college so many times I can't recall each instance, but I never did finish a degree. I moved from job to job to job without ever holding one for two full years. I expanded the breadth of my experience to the horizons without ever going deeper than the grass at my feet. If for nothing else, it was ideal preparation for writing fiction. But what if I don't use it to write and succeed as a writer?

I'm fifty-two, single, and broke, having accumulated none of the limited wealth that even the lowliest laborer expects by this age. My joints are trashed from years of manual labor and a passion for the slow demolition of the human frame that is sports. I can scrape by suffering through days of construction and handyman work for another decade or so, but to what end? The end? I cannot simply make a living anymore. If I have amassed nothing else in this world, I have accrued expectations of myself that I cannot shake. Having lost much, I am still a smart guy with some writing talent and broad experience to draw upon. I can use that to write and, if I work hard at it, write well.

I hope I am not too lazy to do that. Recent evidence leads me to believe it sometimes. Long and hard work can lift the less talented. Sloth and procrastination have bedeviled the talented and left them anonymous since we started scratching on cave walls. I think it is fear that keeps me from working hard, however. In the past, I have thought that passion dispels sloth. Perhaps I was wrong. I am passionate about writing, about fiction, about storytelling in any form. Do I fit the classical mold of Talented But Lazy? Maybe. But I think its more about being scared to find out I don't have the Talent part of that equation. Which leaves me back at the beginning: If I'm not a writer, what am I? And here is where I merge with the fears of every person who has ever been born or ever will be born. I fear that if I am not a writer, my life will not have mattered at all. If I cannot become an accomplished writer, I will fade to insignificance without ever having the compensations of love or wealth. I will die having been nothing special at all.

Can a guy have a deeper motivation to write than that?! I have been reading John Steinbeck's letters to his editor during the process of writing East of Eden. The man who had previously written Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath was scared he wasn't up to the task. He admitted to his hope that writing a novel would get easier with each success and his realization that this was a false hope. It is never easy or effortless. But he put his head down and marched forward anyway. For which we can all be thankful. So I suppose I will put my shoulder into it and work. Work and hope. But as has been said by many before me, I must never hope more than I work. I have to trust that work will dissipate my fear.

It's About Me

Since my not-so-glowing review of Wally Lamb’s novel I Know This Much Is True, I’ve been thinking about the kind of story I do like and why. I got a clue listening to the radio the other day. Trace Adkins said it in a song that is brilliantly honest and succinct in expressing the reason for his love of country music: “because they’re songs about me.”

Watching Trace’s stage persona, it would be easy to take that as mere narcissism, but that would be a mistake. Country music’s themes are few, simple and personal. Even the rare political songs rely on personal touchstones. Heartbreak, faith, nostalgia, love, sacrifice and the comforts of home bring those songs right into country fans own lives. Even rich and successful professionals like Trace Adkins don’t leave the poverty, hard work and disappointment behind when they make it big. They make art with it and touch others like them.

Two of my favorite novels are Nobody’s Fool, by Richard Russo, and Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry. It has been years since I first read them, but I still think about the protagonists in these novels often. The “hero” of Nobody’s Fool is Donald Sullivan, a.k.a. Sully, a broken-down, small-town carpenter on the wrong side of fifty, a failure in marriage, business and fatherhood. He has made bad choices at nearly every turn in his life, yet the character is charming, genuinely loves women, is a loyal friend and a worthy opponent for his sometime boss. The inseparable partners and friends of Lonesome Dove, retired Texas Ranger Captains Augustus McCrae and William F. Call are two sides of the same stubborn, independent coin, wanderers by nature and the most unnatural of businessmen. McCrae is the charming ladies man who blew it with the love of his life, Call is taciturn and repressed, unable to express even the simplest of emotions except frustration with his longtime Rangering partner. Their attempts at settling down and living a normal life are half-hearted and often pathetic. But they are each endearing for their courage, sense of duty and justice, their respect for even their enemies, and their awkward expressions of affection.

I love Sully, Call and McCrae more than any other characters I’ve encountered in literature. After much thought, I know why. I am late middle aged, a broken down carpenter and, like Sully, limping into what little future remains to me. I have the business acumen of Sully, McCrae and Call. I can be charming like Augustus McCrae—and as non-committal. I suffer from Call’s inability to express intense emotion and share his reluctance in the face of any confrontation that is not violent. I am also a loyal friend and, like Augustus, would rather spend my time with women than men, with a couple notable exceptions.

These three characters encompass much of what I see in myself, or in some cases dearly hope is there, my good points and my flaws, my rare successes and my failures, my potential to do the right thing or become what I have not so far been. No one character is all me, but significant aspects of their made-up personalities reflect my own. While McMurtry’s and Russo’s writing styles differ significantly, what they had to say with and about their characters struck the same chords in me.

I hope I can make some good stories of my missteps and failures, my ragged attempts at love and moneymaking. I want to write stories that touch others’ lives the way Russo and McMurtry have touched mine. If I work long and hard, I think I can take this misspent life and create something good, a novel of which someone can one day say, “that story’s about me.”

I Tried. Really.

Right off I have to apologize to my writers’ group for this review of Wally Lamb’s I Know This Much is True. I gave it a shot. I did. I wanted to take one of you guys’ recommendations to heart and really try to give the author a good reading. I made it to page 81. It’s not like I didn’t give it a sincere attempt.

Like David Gutterson’s 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars, Lamb’s book is about twice as long as it needs to be at nearly 900 pages. Lamb spends WAY too much time in the characters’ heads, the almost inevitable result of the way modern authors abuse first person point of view. J.D. Salinger managed to tell Holden Caulfield’s story in 288 pages with no less depth. Then Lamb’s first fourteen page digression into childhood memory—in an age appropriate voice, no less—stopped me mid-sentence. The author set a pattern I knew I would not be able to slog my way through: lengthy detours into the protagonist’s memories that ever so slowly explain his present circumstances and those of his brother, first in a child’s voice, then, I assume, a teen’s, etc.

Can’t do it. I can’t. Maybe it’s too many years of reading the great authors of the 20’s through the 50’s. Maybe it’s too many movies—which I love—and their necessary third person point of view and commercially imposed time constraints. But I simply cannot hang with a modern first person novel for so long. I cannot tolerate fifty pages of psychological set-up for two pages of action. Faulkner is downright concise when compared to authors like Lamb and Gutterson.

I have stayed with long novels that were not action or adventure stories. I loved Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, whose protagonist is an aging carpenter. He’s divorced, a bad business man and feuding with his boss. I could relate. The character had a rough charm and humor that took hold of me and made me want to see what happened to him. This was, of course, before Russo took to writing fifty page prologues. In his most recent books, he too has fallen into modern “writerly” technique. It’s as if contemporary novelists are conducting an experiment to see how long and boring they can make each successive novel, attempting to nail down precisely at what number of pages they lose readers. For this one subject, that would be 81.

I am truly sorry to report that I would rather have a testicle chewed off by a wolverine than finish I Know This Much is True. I’m sure it will be a welcome addition to the resale bin at my local library. Some woman with much more spare time and patience than me will love to get it for a buck. And I’m happy to have contributed to the support of a living author by purchasing it. I only wish some contemporary author out there would write a book I can love. I want to love a book again. It’s been a while.

Yesterday I picked up Philipp Meyer’s first novel, American Rust. That he spells his first name with one L and a pretentious second P made me a little leery, but it is written in third person, has a blue collar protagonist, and is a “slim” 367 pages. I’m gonna give you a chance, Phil. Don’t let me down, buddy.

Change

Poor people have a different relationship to change than the middle class and rich. For those of you still chest deep in the last election, I’m talking about the shiny kind of change that jingles in your pocket and collects in a jar on your dresser top.

In the last few days I have been rolling my quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies for gas. How many times I have done this I couldn’t begin to guess. I’ve been poor for so long . . . actually, I guess I’ve always been poor. I have been digging change out of couches, glove boxes and car ash trays, pants pockets in the laundry basket, off dresser tops and out of Ball jars for as long as I can remember. When I was a kid, it was for fudgesicles, then for parts to repair my bicycle. When I got a car, it was to put in gas and oil, usually more of the latter. I’ve counted out change for food, dates and a lot of cheap beer.

For my educated and well employed friends, change is an annoyance. It piles up on the dresser, overloads pockets, spills over SUV cup holders and falls out of their hands at toll booths. For folks like me, it is money. Just like the folding kind. That jar on the dresser is a savings account. The car ashtray full of silver is an emergency fund. The pants pockets in the dirty laundry provide the gallon of gas necessary to get to work. Enough may be harvested from couch cushions to get a quart of milk for the kid’s cereal. Change is the bridge fund that gets you to payday from broke.

And speaking of broke, that word also means something different to the poor than it does to higher socioeconomic classes. A lawyer friend wanted me to go out for a beer with him one night. I told him I couldn’t, I was broke. He said, “Write a check.” I told him my account is empty. He said, “Take some out of savings.” I told him I have no savings. To a lawyer, broke means no new car this year. To an owner of a construction company, broke means no ski trip. To a CPA, broke means the kids don’t get braces right away. To me, broke means I have no money. None. Nada. Not even change. Broke means I don’t have enough for a bad cup of coffee.

I know almost broke when I’m behind her in line at the convenient store. She spreads quarters out on the counter and starts counting them out for gas, because she only had 38 quarters, not even enough for one complete roll. She does this with her head down, a whispered apology on her lips for the clerk, and for me and the others waiting behind her. I don’t mind the wait. I stand patiently and fight the nervous need to jingle the quarters in my own pocket.

Writers' Quid Pro Quo?

Us low level and/or self-published novelists have a conundrum when it comes to others of our ilk. We often swap novels, and I have swapped with a few authors now. I have been fortunate that all the novels I have received in exchange have been good books I could gush over with sincerity. We’d all like to get reviewed and we’d like those reviews to be positive, but what if I don’t like the book? Those happy days of getting good novels, days that could not last, have not. They ended yesterday, when I finished the novel of an acquaintance with whom I traded inscribed copies.

One of my intentions when I started this blog was to review new novels that get ignored, get too much—and usually undeserved—praise from the usual New York suspects, or don’t get the kind of review that is of any use to the common reader of fiction. I didn’t anticipate that I could end up reviewing books by people I might have to look in the face one day, or that those people would be in a position to publish a retributive review of my novel. Guess I should have thought of that.

I don’t have to write a review at all, of course. It wasn’t an expectation when we swapped novels. What I’d like to do is write several pages of editorial suggestions directly to the author, instead. But I fear I may be perceived as presumptuous and condescending instead of helpful. What author who has finally produced a novel—an effort and accomplishment unknown even to most who love books—wants to be told there is much work yet to be done, much left to learn about writing?

It is a first book by the author in question, and he makes many of the classic rookie mistakes: a weak protagonist who is more observer than instigator of the action; dialog used for info dumps, making it affected and unnatural; an intriguing opening with conflict and action, but little development or follow up; a protagonist that virtually disappears in the middle of the book, only to reappear late; dramatic situations that should have an emotional impact on the reader, but don’t for lack of proper set-up; scenes and characters who don’t advance the story; little or no discernible plot.

So what do I do with that? I can’t even e-mail him and say, “Loved it.” I guess I just duck him online and, if possible, in person. Worse yet, what if he liked my book? It would be easier if he hated it. Yes, I’ll root for that outcome. Although most people who have read and commented on the book have liked it, some very much so, I can hope he’ll be an exception, a deeply perceptive reader who ferrets out its many flaws. I won’t feel so bad about hating his book if he hates mine.

Trouble is, he has written wildly successful non-fiction books and has a wide readership to whom he can comment. And if he hates my novel, he may just do that. Especially if I write an honest review of his.

So this is it, my official non-review of his anonymous novel, to be shelved next to my other inscribed copies, a place of dust and honor, never to be mentioned again, with the hope that he will do the same.

It's the Writing, Stupid

A good friend of mine had an interesting e-mail exchange with a successful author and writing teacher at a well known MFA program. In the back and forth, the teacher lamented the loss of students that may befall many creative writing MFA programs. The traditional publishing model of large advances for many authors is ending. Ending as well is the large publishers desire to publish a certain number of “good books,” that is, those considered to have great literary merit but little commercial potential. My friend asked me to comment on the exchange. What follows is more rant than direct response to that teacher, but perhaps edifying, nonetheless.

We may lose many MFA programs? Fucking hooray! There are several factors that have led to the decline of publishing, but among them must be counted the proliferation of Purple Patch Factories, everywhere giving succor to impatient or untalented writers willing to fork over tens of thousands of dollars to feel like they are progressing in their dream, and encouraging and propagating a terrible style of writing These ubiquitous MFA programs allow naïfs to rub shoulders with “real writers,” defined as such by four figure hardcover sales of their only published novels.

I don’t think writers should be teaching writing at all. MFA programs have sent thousands of mediocre or untalented writers into the world to teach writing at other MFA programs, the unsellable teaching others to be unsellable. Editors should be teaching writing. They were the defacto writing teachers back when editors were more than underpaid talent scouts. In the old days it was the editors who shaped talented writers into the accomplished authors we know. They did not try to push the writer toward a certain style, but reined in creative excess, taught the writer how to better tell their story, and made sure there was a story there to begin with. . . .

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it’s the writing, stupid. Storytelling has always been a meritocracy. While the vehicle for delivering the story has changed again and again, from oral storytelling around campfires to epic poems to novels to films, the best storytellers rise to the top. If there is a message or moral or a deeper understanding of the human condition to be had, it had better be wrapped in a good story that people want to read or hear. Even traditional mythology wraps its moral or societal lessons in great adventure.

Some of the authors we most admire—and still want to read—wrote to make a living. To do that, they had to be mindful of their audience. Dickens wanted to be read and make money. Melville and Maugham and Conrad, too. They are thought of as literary greats now, but they sold, they were popular writers, because their styles served great stories. They didn’t expect to sell on style or demand that their audience change and accommodate them. They had to find a way to do great work and sell at the same time.

While there is definitely a place for experimental writing, one of the worst things to happen to the novel was the deification of experimental writers by literary critics. Virginia Wolfe, James Joyce, et al, tried to follow in Flaubert’s footsteps, expand on the internal focus of Madame Bovary, but left the story behind. Cheever and Updike followed suit, stripping the last vestiges of adventure and action from their novels, forcing us to slog through the mundane stories of suburban life already too well known to their audience. Then Roth and Barthelme dragged us further down the path to abstraction and irrelevance.

And now it has all filtered down to MFA programs as the unquestioned aim of those writers who wish to write “good books.” When these books don’t sell, their writers and enablers look everywhere to lay blame but at their own feet. They bemoan the degradation of the culture at large when their masterpiece doesn’t sell but Harry Potter sells 100 million copies. The public who reads Twilight are unsophisticated consumers of the inane, boors with no taste. Writers on the outside of this phenomenon don’t stop to examine what it is in their own writing that is lacking. They don’t consider that they can write great books that have adventure, action, a strong story, but can go deeper than Harry Potter and Twilight.

The business model of publishing is changing. The way stories are bought and sold and disseminated will change despite all the kicking and screaming. In what other artistic endeavor does an artist get paid before his or her work sells? Yes, the days of huge advances may be over, but great stories will always be at the heart of the business and will always sell. There was always a market for pulp writing, just as there is today. I don’t think that has changed. Citing the popularity of pulp writing as evidence for the decline of civilization and culture is self-defeating. Guys like Dickens and Maugham and Conrad and Hemingway had what audiences loved in pulp writing—action, adventure, danger, romance—but gave them so much more besides. Perhaps all the whining from “literary” writers has more to do with their inability to do great work than the deterioration of culture.

And since when is producing a great book and having it sell supposed to be a smooth and well known path? No one has a right to produce great work. No one has a right to huge sales. No one has a right to have fewer obstacles to publication or fame or riches than the generations before them. Writing a great book is incredibly hard. Getting enough people to read it and recommend it to others is even harder. That there was a short time when someone else—the great publishing houses—shouldered many of the burdens for writers was nice, but not sustainable. There will always be a market for great writing, no matter how it is delivered to the audience. The delusion sold in MFA factories is that there are far more potentially great writers than we previously believed. It’s a fucking lie. Publishing lowered its standards for a long time because a booming economy allowed them to do it. Well, now the economy can’t sustain the literary dreams of every high school English teacher who thought they had a novel or two in them. If they can’t abide the time, practice, poverty, disappointment and risk of utter failure that is inherent to the process of becoming a great writer, then they can get a regular job. There’s a good goddamn reason so many writers develop into alcoholics.

Invulnerable

I never pick up a novel or walk into a movie wanting to hate the protagonist. The central character may be an anti-hero, they may have significant personality flaws, but a deft writer or director gains our sympathy for that character anyway. I have rooted for hit men, conmen, hookers, drug addicts, corrupt cops, Mafiosi, adulterers, thieves, liars, gun runners, and Nazis. Conversely, I’ve had kids, moms, priests, quarterbacks, teachers, grandmothers and doctors lose the default sympathy I bring to the protagonist at the outset. I want to cheer for the hero, but some writers won’t let me.

I have been trying to rent the lone copy of The Foot Fist Way at the local movie rental place for months. The premise seemed ripe for belly laughs, but the movie was always out. (Turns out a long haul trucker lost it in his cab, finally found it) The Foot Fist Way was produced, in part, by Will Ferrell—which is part of what drew me in—and was written by Ben Best, Jody Hill and Danny McBride. McBride plays Fred Simmons, an inept Tae Kwon Do instructor with no sales ability, limited social skills and an trampy wife. Right away I want this character to turn his life around, to learn and grow and change. I want to stay with him through his trials, self-generated or not. I couldn’t. I only made it half an hour into the movie before I turned it off.

Fred Simmons is an unrelenting asshole. He verbally and physically abuses his students, mostly kids, sexually harasses his female students, inflates his few minor accomplishments, insults and belittles his wife, and generally blusters and swaggers his way through the first thirty minutes, seemingly unaware of what a dick he is. Perhaps the character softens a bit later, but I’ll never know. The writers and director lost me, hard as I tried to stay with them.

In his book How to Grow a Novel, Sol Stein identifies candor and vulnerability as essential elements for a character to gain readers’ sympathy. Fred Simmons exhibits no vulnerability whatever, nor any level of self awareness or candor about his character flaws, at least not early enough in the movie to make me care. His sad situation might have drawn me in had the character shown, even once, some openness, some hint that he was aware of his shortcomings, some regret or helplessness in the face of his liabilities. But he didn’t. The funny bits were there, the comic situations set up right, except that from scene to scene, Fred was always an asshole. No matter how heartbreaking the situation, Fred was an aggressive, clueless dick unable to garner pity or empathy.

It wouldn’t have taken much. I know right where I would have made a change that could have hooked me, at least. Fred’s wife comes home with a folder from work, in which Fred finds photocopies of his wife’s tits and ass taken at an office party. It leads to his wife’s confession that she gave her boss a hand-job. Fred’s shock is clear, his anger and disgust made obvious, but not his pain, his sadness at his wife’s infidelity. A single tear might have done the trick. But no, we are denied even this paltry evidence of a crack in Fred’s armor or a more guileless emotional life. Fred rants at and insults his wife, then goes on to try to quickly replace what he’s lost in a sexual sense, with no hint that he has suffered any emotional damage. And my thumb went right to the off button on the remote.

Publishing Hell Career Choice: Agent or Editor?

I’m not sure why people are attracted to work as an agent or editor. I understand even less why they’d make fiction the focus of their work. The last few years a number of critique sites have popped up on the web, giving fiction writers a chance to read and comment on each others work. I’ve been to many of them and read hundreds of submissions. (Most sites require that you critique to get critiqued) I had the opportunity(?) to dig down through the endless layers of a slush-pile. After this experience, I have a great deal more sympathy for agents and editors. Fact is, almost all of what I read sucked.

And I don’t mean sucked in a way that needed work. I don’t mean sucked such that the work was salvageable with a good editing pass. I certainly don’t mean sucked because I didn’t like the style or theme. I mean sucked like I couldn’t get past the first paragraph, or often the first line. Sentences organized like a cat parade. Word choices so bad they rank right down there with my selection of girlfriends. Subject matter ranging from trite to cliché to pathetic cry for therapy.

One of the first bits of advice given to aspiring fiction writers is to read great fiction. Lots of it. Most of us writers were doing that long before the notion that we too could write occurred to us. The idea is that the craft can, in large part, be absorbed from other good writers. I accepted this premise without question. Then I read hundreds, perhaps thousands of attempts to emulate great writers by the much less talented. I now add a codicil to that well-worn advice: a new writer can lean a great deal from reading great writers, given that the new writer has talent to begin with.

I played high school football and I have watched a lot of professional football in my time. No amount of passionate observation or attention to the details of the game at a high level made me faster. And fast is a fact of pro football. You cannot learn speed. You can improve what nature gave you a little, but slow is slow and can’t be fixed. Similarly, if you possess no native facility for the use of language, and more important, a natural feel for story, no number of great books, no amount of instruction will make you a great fiction writer. I’m not even sure it can make you serviceable.

I now see how the slightest stumble in the first few lines of a manuscript can get it round-filed by an agent or editor. After reading so many painfully bad first pages, day after day after day, like marking off the days of a long stretch in Alcatraz, an agent’s or editor’s patience has not worn thin; patience is no longer a functioning part of their personality. Patience has been replaced by a very low tolerance for pain. They can see the pain coming on page one and it is too easy to avoid it with a simple flick of the wrist. No wonder there is such a high turnover in the business. I’m not sure I could ever read again after a year of slush-pile torture.

I have stumbled across a notable new talent once or twice. I bumped into Earl Carlson’s work on Author Nation. His voice is unique and cynically humorous, his “heroes” an uncommon slice of the most common around us. He is a joy to read and I feel certain that, if he perseveres, he will be noticed by one of those unfortunate, suffering wretches who parlayed an English degree and youthful passion for literature into an underpaid and unglamorous career as a literary agent or editor.

Selling Me

I had my first reading and book signing at a friend’s bookstore Saturday night. It reminded me of asking a woman far out of my league for a date. Though the audience was made up of friends and acquaintances, I still mingled nervously, not sure what to do with my hands, fearing the moment I must speak.

The proprietor had set up the reading like a book discussion group, participants in a circle of folding chairs. More people showed up than she anticipated. The intended circle instead became an amoeba, adapting its shape to the confines of the room. Though many had read the novel and liked it, I was still unsure of their approval, still unsteady as I sat to read. I wondered if I could get used to this kind of public exposure in the name of selling something. That’s why publishing houses have marketing departments. I think most writers are like me, in that they couldn’t sell shoes to a barefoot man walking a broken glass highway.

I have always resented the easy self-promoters our society breeds, scurrying like tweeking roaches from one all-about-me marketing opportunity to the next. They can talk about themselves and what they have accomplished without compunction or, in my experience, cessation. The personality they have likely manufactured in their promotional efforts, soaks in from the outside, eventually permeating their character and seeming to expunge any attractive human qualities they may have possessed. (This is why regular people are naturally repelled by the common sales personality) Truly disheartening for me is that this works for them. They are relentless and they succeed. They become the top executives who lean on smarter underlings, the homely jerks who date supermodels, the less talented actors who become stars, the authors who sell a persona more vibrant and compelling than the book they wrote. Some compensation for the rest of us is they may also join that sorry parade of human wreckage whose perp walks, public meltdowns, DUI mug shots and serial relationship disasters becoming fodder for celebrity obsessed media.

I wrote a good novel. Not great, but good. I want people to read it and I think they would like it, some very much so. That I must pimp myself on its behalf is so out of character for me that I feel ridiculous and self absorbed telling people about the book. Some of that is my ingrained low self esteem, part of it the training from working class parents and relatives of a generation ago, people who did without demanding credit, who accomplished fine things without boasting. To draw attention to yourself was a minor sin and the worst thing you could be was a braggart.

But unless I go out and tell people I wrote a book, and act as if I believe it is a good book, no one but a tiny publisher and my editor will know. So I will go out and sell me if that what it takes to sell the book. I’m not very good at selling me, but, at least for a while, that will be my job. I only hope I don’t get too good at it.

Too Many Heroes

I’ve ranted lately about the overuse of certain words to avoid directly stating the truth, obscure intentions or obfuscate agendas. Another pernicious form of word abuse is to use a word so often or out of context that it loses its meaning or renders ordinary an exalted concept.

Such abuse has been the fate of heroes. The word used to be reserved for those people who went so far beyond the normal expectations of courage and selfless action that no other appellation seemed adequate. Heroes were rare. But the hero bar has been lowered again and again over the decades, mostly by politicians eager to be solicitous of certain professions or groups, to the point where simply holding a particular job can qualify you for hero status.

Audie Murphy was probably the first Hero I remember my parents talking about. My father and uncles and other World War II vets told me about him anytime one of his movies came on Sunday afternoon TV. His combat exploits earned him a Medal of Honor, a Distinguished Service Cross, two Silver Stars and Purple Hearts by the basket. Here is a description of the fight that won him the Medal of Honor:

The next day, January 26 (the temperature was 14° F with 24 inches of snow on the ground), the battle at Holtzwihr, (France) began with Murphy's unit at an effective strength of 19 out of 128. Murphy sent all of his men to the rear while he took pot-shots at the Germans until out of ammunition. He then proceeded to use an abandoned, burning tank destroyer's .50 caliber machine gun to cut into the German infantry at a distance, including one full squad of German infantry that had crawled in a ditch to within 100 feet of his position. Wounded in the leg during heavy fire, he continued this nearly single-handed battle for almost an hour. His focus on the battle before him stopped only when his telephone line to the artillery fire direction center was cut by either U.S. or German artillery. As his remaining men came forward, he quickly organized them to conduct a counter attack, which ultimately drove the enemy away from Holtzwihr.

Now, all a soldier has to do is don the uniform and show up to be a hero. Not that soldiers don’t deserve credit for their service, but calling a soldier a hero because he’s in theater would have qualified millions of men in World War II for hero status. Nearly all of them would have rejected the notion outright, saying they were only doing their jobs. And they would be right.

Again and again I hear fire fighters and police officers called “American heroes” simply because that is their job. I agree that it is possible, given the situations in which their jobs can place them, that they have the opportunity to earn the accolade. But to call both the rookie who so far has done nothing but wash fire engines and a ten year veteran who has pulled a family out of a fiery house collapse heroes is to diminish the courage and dedication of the veteran. When everyone who slaps on a badge or drags out heavy fire hose is a hero, does the word say anything in particular about the person so described?

The speed of modern communications, social networking sites, 24/7 cable news and the monkey-see-monkey-do stenographers that have replaced real journalists, all contribute to the degradation of the language, diminishing the power and usefulness of words at a rapid pace. I suppose someday very soon a politician will need to flatter bloggers and news media in his own interest, glossing them as “heroes of the information age.” At that point, we can officially retire the word as having any meaning other than someone who does something.

Dark Days, Battle and Joy

I have started several posts in the last few days, too much time having gone by between posts, but ultimately, I trashed them all. My three readers are no doubt disappointed when I don’t get some new bit of “wisdom” up in a timely fashion. But all of those pieces came from a black place and had no business seeing the light.

The long and hard work of writing a novel has few moments of happiness. There are lonely days of work piled one upon another. Add to those the short, gray days of winter passing at a gloomy trudge, the ceaseless toil of farm life and a void my love life used to fill, and you have a prescription for melancholy. If allowed to bleed into my writing, the product is self-absorbed, depressing and unreadable.

The antidote for me is to find joy in the battle. You cannot know at the outset whether you will succeed or fail, so you must enjoy the fight. When I was an athlete, it was the competition that drove me. I would sometimes win, sometimes lose, but I always loved the struggle. I reveled in being pushed by my competition and in pushing back. We drove each other to improve, to perform at our best, win or lose. I do not remember individual wins and losses from decades of athletic competition, I remember moments of extending myself to my limit, one play, one movement at a time. It is the battle that stands out in my memory, not the outcome.

So I sit at the keyboard today prepared to engage my most feared opponent, a blank page. The contest will last an hour, perhaps two. Even at the end, I will not know if I have succeeded or failed. But I will know I have been in a fight. I will come out bloodied, but I will be able to stand up straight and say I fought with all I had. Win or lose, I will have that, always. And I will be better for it.

Happy Endings

I just finished reading Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural. I saw the film adaptation starring Robert Redford some time ago and loved it, but I had never read the novel. The movie ends nothing at all like Malamud’s novel and the protagonist, Roy Hobbs, was changed dramatically for the movie. I liked the movie better.

Don’t get me wrong, Malamud’s writing is every bit as good as his reputation would suggest. He was worthy of all the accolades he received. And novels like The Natural have their place. The novel version of Roy Hobbs is obsessed with fulfilling later in life the destiny he believes was his due, that in his youth he was cheated out of by forces he didn’t understand. In the end the hero is felled by his own unquenchable ambition, bad choices, hard luck and harder acquaintances. By the end of the book he is broken, bitter and despised as a failure.

I don’t need stories like that. Some people do. I’m not one of them. The movie version allows Roy Hobbs to make up for his past arrogance and bad decisions. He gets one last chance to remake his life with a single swing of the bat. And he does. He still has to quit baseball, but he gets the winning homer, the adoration of the fans and, this time, the right girl. He gets redemption and a happy ending.

Malamud’s novel gives Roy Hobbs a fate much closer to what such a character would suffer in real life. Think Barry Bonds without the long career. But I get enough real life every day that I don’t need a great writer to emphasize the bad for me. Yes, in the real world, in almost all cases, once an asshole, always an asshole. (Again, see Barry Bonds) But there are those rare cases where people do change for the better. Against all odds and base human selfishness, someone does the right thing. We cling to stories like these for a reason. We need to be reminded that it can happen, that people can be good. We need to be reminded that we can change for the better.

One of my favorite movies is an adaptation of a Richard Russo novel, Nobody’s Fool. The protagonist is Donald “Sully” Sullivan, a ne’er-do-well, self-defeating carpenter who seems never to learn from his mistakes. In Russo’s novel, the character has under his crusty and cynical exterior a deep humanity that is finally allowed to surface. He renews a relationship with his estranged son and grandson. He is allowed to change just a little, enough to have hope. The novel’s end drags out far too long. After Sully’s story-long flirtations with a younger employer’s wife, his naïve notions of romance are revealed when he is shocked to find that his son has been sleeping with the woman. He is once again the fool, but now a fool with a family. An altogether mixed bag of an ending. And not all that happy.

Once more I like the movie better. The screenwriter crafts a dramatic ending that allows Sully a rough dignity, honor and one more chance to choose his better angels. He does. He chooses love without possessing, chooses friendship and loyalty over his own needs long unfulfilled. Sully gets to be a hero, albeit with a small ‘h.’ And I get to believe a little longer that I have that kind of small ‘h’ hero inside me. In the movie, Sully gets the happy ending he deserves.

Yeah, they are Hollywood endings. Perhaps it is naïve to believe that people can change, that redemption is possible. Maybe it’s even corny to want stories that perpetuate what are arguably myths. But I need these stories. I need to know, somewhere deep inside, that it is possible for me to change, that I can learn from my mistakes and someday overcome them. I need to think I can redeem myself. I need a happy ending.

The climactic scene in Second Hand Lions is one I will never forget. It inspires me to know that writers can create scenes like this one. A boy confronts his uncle, demanding to know if his uncle’s stories of high adventure are true. The uncle tells him it doesn’t matter. “Just because something isn’t true, that’s no reason a man can’t believe in it,” the uncle says. “Sometimes the things that may or may not be true are the things a man needs to believe in the most. That people are basically good. That honor, courage and virtue mean everything. That power and money, money and power mean nothing. That good always triumphs over evil. And I want you to remember this, that love, true love, never dies. . . . Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. A man should believe in those things because those are the things worth believing in.”

And I believe in happy endings. Doesn’t matter if they happen in real life or not. It is a thing worth believing in.

Challenge Me

Of the many words over-used, misused and abused by public officials and celebrities, the use of the word challenge as a euphemism for less delicate, more honest words and phrases has become pervasive. That this habit has filtered down through the upper echelons of business all the way to the redneck-working-class level has me, to avoid any euphemisms, really pissed off.

Politicians no longer await imminent defeat in an election, they face “a stiff political challenge.” The governor of Illinois doesn’t face impeachment, conviction and incarceration, he faces “significant legal challenges.” The leading man of the moment, the one with the perfectly sculpted public image, doesn’t have to give half his shit to his wife in an ugly divorce when she discovers his habitual infidelity. He can enter therapy with her, where they will “try to overcome relationship challenges.” The contractor didn’t fuck up the construction of the new city library, he “struggled with a challenging design.”

Challenge is a great weasel word. It carries no connotation of blame or fault. It implies an obstacle for which the person so challenged will require valor, fortitude, perseverance and hard work to prevail. The unexpressed idea behind the word is that a challenge bestows a great mission on the challenged. No more is he a scumbag philanderer cheating on his wife, but a victim of a heretofore unrecognized psychological stumbling block that he has the candor and guts to confront. The change of a word or two transforms a run-of-the-mil political corruption trial, turning a legal scramble to stay out of jail into a higher purpose bestowed with a nobility that the defenders of the Alamo would envy.

Challenge is sufficiently fuzzy that one can avoid more accurate but inconvenient words and phrases like indictment, divorce, bankruptcy, failure, addiction, tax evasion, alcoholism or statutory rape, and give a patina of courage to an otherwise messy and embarrassing situation. A challenge is far more respectable than slanderous precision.

So, today I will not go to the barn and clear a foot of cow shit away from obstructed gates, I will face the daunting logistical challenge of significant material relocation. Why worry if I’m too old and poor to be decent dating material again when I can have relationship challenges? And an extensive rewrite of a 300 page novel manuscript? No drudge work that. I am an artist facing a creative challenge.

I have to stop here. My barn boots and material relocation challenge awaits. If I don’t slip, I can avoid the challenge of our dog trying to lick my barn coat clean before I get it off.

Same Old Story

I watched another romantic comedy tonight. By myself, as I often do. I am a connoisseur of the form. Not so much a connoisseur, I guess, as a sucker. I give just about all of them a chance. I see some good in even the worst film efforts in the genre, a form older, actually, than cinema. Boy meets girl (Or girl meets boy. Works the same), boy loses girl, boy overcomes seemingly insurmountable obstacles to find love. Despite Hollywood’s effort to find new twists on the idea, the same basic approach dominates the genre because people keep coming back for more of the same.

Given that my real life has rarely resembled a romantic comedy, that the situations and outcomes that so satisfy me in a film are never realized in real life, why do I keep coming back? Not to learn how to make my romantic life work. It has never worked in the last forty years. If I had learned any useful lessons from seeing all those films in the genre, you’d think it would have resulted in at least some success. Nada.

So why do I fall for the next romantic comedy that rolls of the Hollywood assembly line? They fill a need in me. That’s what stories do. That’s why we like them. We need something from them and when they deliver, we come back again and again. We so need them that when someone is good at giving them to us, we throw money at them we don’t have, shower fame and adoration on them they don’t deserve. What do I need from romantic comedies? I need my hope that I can find love replenished. A life long lived is fertile ground for cynicism, and cynicism chokes out hope and belief in romantic love. Romantic comedies are like Roundup to the cynical weeds in my garden. They don’t keep the weeds down for long, though. I need regular applications.

Stories like these emphasize beginnings. They usually ignore that relationships, as all things, have middles and ends as well. A romantic comedy dabbles in endings, often mixing in fights and breakups, but at last, only the loneliness ends and a couple begins, a flat-out denial of living reality. Romantic comedies defy endings, resist all endings, because their beating heart is the struggle against decay and death. Each of us comes out swinging with our first breath every morning and we throw down with those demons until we slip into the black every night. Low morale is very bad for our fighting spirit, and we need all the fighting spirit we can get with an opponent like Our Inevitable End. Romantic comedies are the propaganda films my soul needs to keep up the battle. They help me believe that someday, someone will have my back. Always.

It’s probably not true, but without romantic comedies, I’d be saying it’s definitely not true. That little hedge, that probably, keeps me waking up each morning. That probably is there in good measure because of Say Anything and When Harry Met Sally and Sweet Home Alabama and High Fidelity and Gross Point Blank and others. That probably keeps me looking for a glance, a giggle, a bit of easy, flirting banter with a woman that lets me know I might not be alone after all. There might not be an end. Only a wait for the next beginning. For boy meets girl.

Literary Rorschach Test

Every fiction writer I know has been asked some version of the following: “Am I (fill in fictional character name here)? I have to be. I am so (fill in virtue/flaw/tragic flaw here) just like (previously named fictional character).”

There is really no way to avoid the question, especially for novice writers who haven’t found a decent writers group or workshop yet. They often turn to friends or family as first readers hoping for reassurance and encouragement. They may get that, but the reader will almost certainly see some aspect of themselves in a character, no matter how outlandish the comparison. And what they see tells you more about the reader than the writer. Your suburban-soccer-mom sister corners you in the kitchen at Christmas and says, “Is that Vietnam-vet-sniper-turned-vampire me? Because, like, who would think of a vampire who hates the site of blood? And I hate the site of blood!” Or your boyfriend’s bodybuilding-narcissist-who-listens-to-Iggy Pop-on-yard-sale-eight-track-tapes roommate catches you on the way out to dinner—“I know you modeled the Moldovan-double-agent-concert-pianist-gigolo after me. It’s so obvious. We’re both gay!”

If someone who knows you reads your book or story, they will see themselves in it somewhere. Sometimes that makes them happy, sometimes not so happy . . . “That nympho-lesbo-killer-hippie-whore is me, isn’t it? Isn’t it?! You were writing that scene right after our big fight about me being friends with Jeremy. What’s wrong with me having a guy for a friend?! You are such a jerk!” Worse than that? “How could you give a character in your book a twisted dick? How did you know I had a twisted dick? Are you staring . . . you know . . . THERE in the locker room? What is your problem, Pal?” I know some writer has suffered this: “You don’t love me. I knew it. When Kristen asks Ben on the bus, on the way home from the Vegan pot luck with the mobsters, he looks out the window and doesn’t answer her. You looked out the window of the bus when we were riding home tonight.” You protest that she didn’t ask if you loved her and you told her you loved her ten times already today. “But not on the bus. You just looked out the window like that emotionally repressed idiot Ben. And you both have curly hair.”

To be fair, perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit. No I’m not. This shit happens to writers every day. And after a while, if it won’t break up a relationship or cost you any money, you just agree that, yes, I did model Sergeant Bonecrusher after you, a 93 pound female lead singer in a punk band, because you are both “tough.” It’s easier than the long-winded truth, that everything a writer has seen or heard or smelled or felt or tasted, every breakup and orgasm and stubbed toe and gunshot wound and death of a friend, each book you read or movie or play you’ve seen or hero you’ve met or lie you’ve told or theft you’ve committed or day you spent in jail or joint you smoked and sometimes things you just dreamed while you lay half asleep on a raft in a farm pond while bluegills nibbled at your leg hairs, it all goes into a mental hopper and is mixed in and tumbled for years with genetic memory and reptilian fears and nostalgic longing for your eight grade piano teacher. And one day it comes out on the page as a character made up of so many things from so many places that you have no idea where it came from. And sometimes you just need a stock character for a minor role and you don’t want to work that hard, so you use some hackneyed filler. And that’s how it happens.

Though sometimes, that self-centered boor with one breast bigger than the other who can’t smell that she wears way too much perfume because of a head injury as a child, the one who picks her nose during sex? It is you.

Thanks, Bill

Mutts that most of us are, every writer still has a pedigree. Someone put the idea in our heads that we could be writers. Someone encouraged us. Someone planted that seed and nurtured it. We were guided by teachers who had teachers. If we had the time and inclination, we might trace our lineage back centuries. I’d rather spend the time writing, but I would like to go back a couple generations, anyway.

I trace my own lineage through William Allen, former director of the Ohio State University Creative Writing Program, best selling author, and my novelist-boot-camp drill sergeant. I took the last workshop he taught at OSU. I finished a draft of the novel I began shortly after his workshop and took him up on an invitation to his house in West Texas to re-write. The three months I spent there were, for me, a graduate program in fiction writing. A veteran editor and teacher, he tore the book apart. He watched over my shoulder as I rebuilt it into something finer. I would give him pages and he’d hand them back with more pencil marks than type. Sometimes he’d just ball up a page and toss it, insisting I should try again. I learned to trust that he meant it when he told me I’d written something good, because he had no qualms at all telling me when I’d written crap. He found everything from the smallest error in grammar to the largest story or structure problem.

Sometimes we’d bump into each other in the kitchen in the middle of the night, the seventy mile per hour winds that sometimes shook his Davis Mountains home making it hard to sleep. We had some of our best conversations then, about politics, mule deer, the ignominious fate of human kind and literature. He’d talk about his mentor, William Price Fox, who taught him at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early seventies. Bill’s tone of admiration and gratitude towards William Fox mirrored my own for him.

I’ve had other teachers. I took my first undergrad fiction class with graduate assistant Christine “Telene” Guerra at Ohio State. I don’t think she liked me much, but I don’t hold it against her. It’s not like that makes her part of a tiny group. Nor do I think she appreciated my subject matter. But she made no judgments in that regard. She gave honest criticism of my writing without criticizing me as a person. When you are a fragile new writer, it is easy to find reasons to quit. In eschewing the chance to be a roadblock, she did more for me than she realized.

My writers groups have included published poets Psyche North Torok, Diane Ferri and short story writer Amy Simonson. Diane has also published a novel. I have learned something from all of them and I hope they have learned from me.

Beyond my ambition of writing novels that people want to read, I’d like one day to be the kind of mentor I have in Bill Allen and he had in Bill Fox. I want to keep this lineage alive out of my love of fiction and my respect for people like Bill Allen and Bill Fox. They have modeled a generosity of spirit I hope to emulate.

Help! My narrative structure is smothering my leitmotif!

I would love to watch a New York Times literary critic write a novel. After years of vivisecting the novels of others, they know every possible part and piece that goes into a great book and how they should fit together. Their attempt would probably be akin to a biology student trying to reassemble a dissected cat into a purring, meowing animal. They know how to take it apart, but they have no idea how to give it life.

I know the function of writers. It is to give us the stories we need. I don’t know where to locate that need on Maslow’s hierarchy, but I know it’s there. From the first cave paintings, events were put into an order that told not just what happened, but why it mattered. I know the function of writing teachers. They help give us the writers who give us the stories. I know the function of editors. They clarify a writers vision and hold back writers who aren’t ready to articulate one.

What is the function of literary critics? To interpret complex literature for us? Like ministers placing themselves between God and his ignorant flock, they deign to tell us what a book means. Authors don’t need the help any more than God does. Is it to teach writers? I have learned from a literary critic here and there, but the reward is far too little to wade through the smug, obtuse and condescending crap that often passes for literary critique these days. Is their function to warn us away from unworthy books and guide us to those with merit? They assume that their taste, temperament, education and experience are so far superior to our own that we should substitute their critical thinking for our own.

Certainly critics such Michiko Kakutani, Motoko Rich and others at the NY Times aren’t talking to Midwest, blue collar, hard-ass me. These modern Pharisees use a lexicon of jargon to separate themselves from us Philistines. Words and phrases like leitmotif and euphony and overarching narrative keep us confused rabble at bay. Empty and abstract clichés like intricate, deeply felt, reverberate, incandescent, fecund language, and echoes tell us nothing concrete, nothing useful about a book. What mainstream literary critics do is taste the dish and try to describe the flavor to us—usually in prose not half as evocative as the authors they critique—while simultaneously telling us whether or not we should try it. Of what use is that compared to tasting for ourselves? They get an ego bolstering position as arbiter of literary worth and a platform from which to shout. And a check, of course. What do we get? Talked down to, mostly. And we are spared the effort of thinking and deciding for ourselves.

Literary critics don’t help writers, in fact have ended careers that might have borne sweet fruit some day. They do more to obstruct than to aid readers, and they are but poor imitations of editors. While I would not go so far as to line them up right behind Shakespeare’s lawyers, it might not be a bad idea to ignore them until they are forced to find more useful work.

Talent or Training?

The question is here framed in the context of writing fiction. It’s the old Nature-vs-Nurture conundrum that keeps so many biologists and psychologists busy researching and disparaging each other’s ancestry. At some point, every writer asks a form of the question, “Do I have talent?” Sometimes they muster the courage to ask in a whisper, as if to ask aloud would ensure an answer in the negative. More often, they don’t ask, their reluctance rooted in a secret certainty they do not want to have confirmed. But the question is there. Always there. Nearly everyone who becomes serious about writing fiction has doubts. And all who doubt ache for an answer that does not destroy their dreams.

For some few, the answer is immediately obvious. There are those rare people who have such a clear voice, have so much to say, or are such natural story tellers that their lack of formal education is a detail that can be filled in later. My mentor, Bill, found a girl so gifted that he arranged to get her into his graduate writing program though she hadn’t much more than half finished an undergrad degree. That she and others may not even know the difference between farther and further, your and you’re or there, they’re and their, is irrelevant. Those are things that can be easily learned once the passion for writing has been discovered.

For others the answer is equally clear. Unless they wrote a check, a treasure map, or directions to a strip joint bachelor party, no one, including their mothers, will read past the first couple sentences. Despite extensive education, they will never write palatable fiction. Included in this group are those writers who harbor an unshakeable conviction that annoying persistence is all that lies between their present anonymous poverty and the wealth and recognition of their genius that is the inevitable result of their being discovered. They are, invariably, hacks. My personal observation is that most are men of high IQ and low EQ—that is, Emotional Quotient, or the ability to effectively and genuinely interact with other humans, most especially women. These men often live in an emotionally stunted world of power fantasy, waking wet dreams and cold technology. They usually write science fiction or fantasy that reinforces their delusions and gives them a chance to show off extensive vocabularies and techie jargon that they think sets them apart in a good way. It doesn’t. Given that the best fiction illuminates the human condition in its many variations and seeks to evoke in its readers deeply felt human emotions, they are ill prepared to write it and rarely do.

At this point, you are probably thinking that I’m arguing in favor of writing talent being innate. While there are people who seem to go from freshman English to Oprah’s couch in one book, and those who struggle to write a coherent shopping list, the mass of people attracted to writing fiction lie somewhere between these extremes. They have some combination of emotional insight, life experience, education, intelligence, curiosity and facility with language necessary to become a good fiction writer. Their initial attempts at writing a story may vary in quality, but most may have what it takes to turn out good fiction. However, like all worthwhile endeavors, whatever initial ability one possesses must be enhanced by learning and—this is the tough part that most people don’t want to hear—years and years of practice.

An observation made by many and confirmed by a few actual studies is that it takes 10,000 hours of practice at nearly anything to master it. If you break that down to a little less than three hours per day, that's about 20 hours each week, or a bit more than a thousand hours every year. So baseball, music, acting, math, fly-fishing, sculpting, dance and, yes, writing all take about a decade of practice to master. Many may take up writing and succeed if they are willing to learn and put in the time. That in no way guarantees success, but for most of us, there really is no way to know if we have the talent until we’ve worked that long and that hard to find out. It is perfectly understandable that most who consider becoming a writer decide not to risk so large a chunk of their life on the chance that they’d become a pretty good writer who can earn a little money. That’s a valid choice, as valid as deciding not to try base jumping. At least in base jumping, you’d only have to deal with one failure. Becoming a fiction writer offers no such comfort.

So I guess my answer to the writing talent question is this: If you just have to know before you start or before you get too far into it, quit. You’re really too timid or too lazy to succeed as a writer even if you have talent.