Don’t worry, I’m not turning philosophical. (If I were, my title would be Why Bother?) I mean, specifically, why clutter this blog space with so much old work, rather than fresh mutterings?
Thirty, twenty, even ten years ago—in a publishing economy far, far away—a nonentity like myself would’ve still managed to get out a book of selected essays. Sales would’ve been modest, and the upfront advance against royalties barely enough to buy myself a cappuccino machine, but I’d have been able to preserve between hardcovers, for a pre-digital posterity, those magazine articles that hadn’t aged pathetically.
Those years are long gone, of course, so I’m doing it via this grab-bag blog. Not as selectively as either of us would prefer, no doubt, but it’s my way to “self-publish” a collection which otherwise would never exist. I’m combing my computer’s files, which go back to the mid-nineties; yet because I started writing for magazines in 1982, at some point I’ll have to resort to scanning typescripts.
I’m not including everything. (Shame cannot be suppressed entirely.) Nor am I using the versions of the articles as finally published—I found that editors’ hands got progressively heavier and clammier as magazines became more threatened by the Internet.
These days it’s hard not to feel nostalgia for the magazine world in which I flourished (loose sense of the word) for two decades. The economic model of readers and advertisers which created that culture has cracked, and when I remember how the business used to work it seems almost unbelievable. In 1984 GEO magazine sent me and a photographer to unknown Oman, in the Arabian Gulf, for a month; it probably cost them, all told, $20,000—I shudder to think what that would be in today’s currency. Yet it was perfectly feasible, and in the larger scheme of things (theoretically) profitable for them.
If you could stand the pressures both financial and professional, there were few pleasanter ways for someone single to eke out a living in the 1980s than writing travel articles for American magazines. I’d always imagined that I would see the world as a touring musician; it never occurred to me that grown-up editors in tall Manhattan office buildings would not only front my entire freight to flee fast and far for a couple of weeks but, after I returned, even pay me well—well, well enough—for writing a dozen coherent pages of my impressions of some place overseas where I’d dreamed of going.
I began to get work at just about the time I began to feel stifled by living in New York. I wasn’t making enough of a living doing what I liked—as a jazz and classical guitarist. All I could count on was playing solo a few nights a week in a fancy restaurant that paid me with free dinners, and let me bring a date on off-nights of my choosing. My reliable income, such as it was, came from “temp” work as a secretary, a day or a week at a time; I could type efficiently and answer the phone, I was presentable and agreeable, I kept my hands and face washed.
While trying to get traction with The Garden of the Peacocks I’d worked as a real estate broker in a high-end firm and been miserable, though for a time I knew by memory most buildings on the Upper East Side between Lexington and Fifth. After nearly a year I quit. I thought I was taking no risks whatsoever; I felt sure I’d written a great novel; it never occurred to me it might be an untenable mess. A publisher’s contract and popular acclaim must surely follow. Imagine my surprise!
This morbid revelation was still months away, after I began traveling for GEO and a few other magazines. I never considered that there was a sensible way to go about planning a career, and it was a couple of years of happy accidents before I began to think of myself as someone with a profession. I clung to my self-image as a novelist, a man of literature, and this protected me as much as it hindered me. My mind was on concocting the next magazine assignment only if it might offer something besides money that I could use in my fiction—landscapes or portraits—not just a proposal I could sell to an editor.
This sounds focussed and idealistic, but it was only the blind pragmatism of someone with fixed goals but no long view. A sizeable poetry grant soon allowed me to give up temp work entirely.
For the next fifteen years, traveling the world for magazines was how I made most of my limited income. I never stopped being thrilled by the sensation of freedom that an assignment gave me. Often it meant travel to another season. After growing up in Georgia heat I most looked forward to heading somewhere sweltering; when you’re under forty there’s a sensual pleasure at being physically uncomfortable.
The best moment was not the anticipation that came with being told that a proposal had been approved by editors, nor the electric nervousness of passing through customs in some new country and being made viscerally aware that I had to produce a certain number of first-rate words per day, no matter how unprepared I felt, or I would never get to do this again.
No, the supreme moment was always those extended few hours of escaping Manhattan by airport bus; the sudden relief of time to kill at the airport and the reprieve of being at last not on my own money but on an expense account; the adventure, almost like finding myself in a thriller, of being able to tell anyone who asked that I was going overseas on assignment for a magazine they’d heard of—it gave me a professional identity, an importance, that otherwise I never had—to be followed by the ecstasy, in my airplane seat, of watching the lights of New York dwindle as all my problems, the unpaid bills and the unsolved technical issues of a novel, were left far behind and would grow more distant every day till I returned, when they did too.
My strategy, which editors made clear to me was unusual, was to write as much of the article as possible in place. I never carried a typewriter (and felt an unshakeable allegiance to writing by hand whenever possible anyway). I traveled with plenty of legal pads. I used the small ones to take my daily notes “in the field” and the larger to rewrite those notes into polished prose every evening at my hotel, after dinner.
I’d write the article in discrete blocks—descriptions, history, conversation—that could be assembled, when my time in a place was done, into an organic order which was (I hoped) compelling. As the days went by I always found that the place itself told me, gradually, the structure of its own article; I rarely felt I was guiding it as much as letting the piece decide what it wanted to say.
Naturally, the first page—the first half-page—proved the most important, and could determine the rest. Once my beginning asserted itself (the more tactile, diverse, and suggestive, the better), this meant I was beginning to know what I thought.
I never understood how other travel writers could take page after page of random notes, a line or two here and there, then try to assemble it all back in New York. Their method seemed to deliberately exclude the invaluable, vaporous sense of a place’s “reality” which, willy-nilly, you lose the second you get onto the plane to leave. Why try so hard to recall it from the other side of the world when you could save yourself so much time, and do such a better job, by writing most of the article while eating, sleeping, waking, listening, breathing in the place itself?
Part of the motivation was financial. After all, the sooner I turned in my article, the sooner I’d get paid. Oddly enough, even many successful magazines failed to realize that the easiest way to buy a freelancer’s loyalty was not through taking him out to lunch, or praising his work, but by paying him quickly. Such magazines got offered proposals first, even if sometimes they paid a little less.
My first two assignments, for GEO, came in the late spring of 1982. I was twenty-four. My parents were inexpressibly relieved that I was making definable progress, since clearly I was not going to turn out a real estate magnate and had let that job drop a few months before. My father—who praised, helpfully criticized, and encouraged all my fiction—must’ve breathed an enormous sigh while secretly wondering how I’d conned such a high-profile magazine, with French and German editions too, into taking a chance on a beginner with not one but two Caribbean assignments in a single fell swoop.
The world was different now. I was a working writer, a paid magazine correspondent. I was actually earning a living, too, since GEO paid $2500 for a full-length article. My rent was $348 a month, my total expenses a thousand, so for a few weeks of pleasant work I’d already made enough to live on for half a year. Best of all, I saw no reason for this extravagant success, which was funding another draft of my novel, to ever stop.
The following spring (1983) they sent me to Bahrain—I was savvy enough to give myself a couple of weeks in Rome on the way. I stayed in a soon-to-be-familiar little hotel on the Aventino, got to know the tawny city, and borrowed from my father a pile of books on the Middle East. The prospect of writing about that region had me petrified; the task seemed to call for a maturity of insight and a deep knowledge that I knew I couldn’t possibly fake through research, or acquire overnight; whatever skills I had as a writer didn’t strike me as useful for what was about to come. The more I read, the worse I felt.
He also loaned me a battered manual typewriter, on which I wrote my first published short story, perching the machine on a chair while I sat on the hotel bed. That story, the naturalness with which it offered itself, was a revelation, no less than a phone call to the young woman I’d just broken up with brutally back in New York. An expensive overseas line for a conversation lasting less than a minute.
Still, no reason not to be excited: the world was ripe with newness and energy.
Today few of my magazine colleagues are working, at least not as we used to. We’ve been replaced by a vast amateurism that costs almost nothing for an audience who can’t tell the difference, or don’t much care. And certainly don’t want to pay for whatever difference they do perceive.
I’m not blind to how dull some of our material was, and the magazine biz was always an elephants’ graveyard of lesser talents; but even if our work wasn’t lustrous, or audacious, or insightful, it was still professional. There’s no pressing need any more for readers or advertisers to cough up much money. All we veterans can do is wave goodbye, and pull down the blinds.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
The Professional Life
Most of us discover by our twenties that others’ professions are not remotely as we imagine. Film actors, no matter how successful, spend a lot of time waiting around. Musicians need to practice constantly. Lawyers learn to look fascinated while hearing about other people’s problems.
And writers? Civilians have absolutely no idea what it’s like. If they did, they’d never wish they were writers, even for a day. (Anyway, the urge is usually to be a published author, not to spend all day writing. Big difference.)
I remember interviewing Paul Theroux when I was twenty-five. He was the first superb professional writer I’d ever met who wasn’t in my immediate family. Because I asked, he showed me the first and second drafts of The Mosquito Coast, handwritten in ink, filling two enormous ledgers. He said lightly, “If you showed this to most people, they’d shit.”
He was right, of course, but it wasn’t just the quantity of hard manual labor involved, but the commitment behind it, the scraping away of self for every inch of material. This excoriation is the aspect that’s hardest to describe; it’s as if you were determined to build a road with the gunk you sponge out of the kitchen sink at the end of every day. And the road has to look beautiful, too, or you won’t get paid.
It would be crude to mention money. As Stevenson wrote, extolling the pleasures of our profession to a young would-be writer, the wonder is not that it pays so little, but that it pays at all.
There are also the problems of living with us. Even in a digital age it’s a profession that produces a messy profusion of pesky paper. Writers tend to be distracted, too, in a most selfish way; their minds are literally (or literarily) elsewhere. This is often portrayed as romantic, but it’s annoying for everybody.
It may simply be a question of spelling. Change one letter, and “writer” becomes “waiter.” That’s much closer to the truth, since you spend so much of your time waiting—waiting for a solution to be revealed for some problem that will be irrelevant come the next draft, waiting for your agent to get back to you, waiting for some career-changing review that makes no difference. Waiting to become a successful writer. Whatever that means.
When I told one colleague what I was planning to write about this week, he said, “Be sure to explain that we get to drink all day. And don’t forget the parade of willing women.”
I almost forgot.
And writers? Civilians have absolutely no idea what it’s like. If they did, they’d never wish they were writers, even for a day. (Anyway, the urge is usually to be a published author, not to spend all day writing. Big difference.)
I remember interviewing Paul Theroux when I was twenty-five. He was the first superb professional writer I’d ever met who wasn’t in my immediate family. Because I asked, he showed me the first and second drafts of The Mosquito Coast, handwritten in ink, filling two enormous ledgers. He said lightly, “If you showed this to most people, they’d shit.”
He was right, of course, but it wasn’t just the quantity of hard manual labor involved, but the commitment behind it, the scraping away of self for every inch of material. This excoriation is the aspect that’s hardest to describe; it’s as if you were determined to build a road with the gunk you sponge out of the kitchen sink at the end of every day. And the road has to look beautiful, too, or you won’t get paid.
It would be crude to mention money. As Stevenson wrote, extolling the pleasures of our profession to a young would-be writer, the wonder is not that it pays so little, but that it pays at all.
There are also the problems of living with us. Even in a digital age it’s a profession that produces a messy profusion of pesky paper. Writers tend to be distracted, too, in a most selfish way; their minds are literally (or literarily) elsewhere. This is often portrayed as romantic, but it’s annoying for everybody.
It may simply be a question of spelling. Change one letter, and “writer” becomes “waiter.” That’s much closer to the truth, since you spend so much of your time waiting—waiting for a solution to be revealed for some problem that will be irrelevant come the next draft, waiting for your agent to get back to you, waiting for some career-changing review that makes no difference. Waiting to become a successful writer. Whatever that means.
When I told one colleague what I was planning to write about this week, he said, “Be sure to explain that we get to drink all day. And don’t forget the parade of willing women.”
I almost forgot.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Tell It Slant
One question nobody ever answers truthfully is, “How are you?” This is among humankind’s great achievements—our ability to fine-tune an answer. And if you happen to be cursed with a serious neurological disease, you get used to lying, because if you told the truth, even part of the truth, nobody would ask again.
I got the idea for my fourth and most recent novel, The Land of Later On, back in the 1980s, long before my first novel was published. In those innocent days I travelled extensively as a freelance writer, so “one man’s odyssey through the afterlife” (whatever that meant, it sounded cool) seemed no more outlandish than other distant journeys I was describing.
My afterlife idea was that sole cryptic phrase in a notebook, and over the decades other novels intervened. But I never forgot it.
Gradually my magazine work was replaced by a career performing and recording as a jazz and classical guitarist. Then, six years ago, I realized something was terribly wrong. Diagnosed with so-called “progressive” multiple sclerosis, I quickly sank from running a few miles a day and playing an instrument on a professional level to living in a wheelchair, unable to play at all. I couldn’t type or even scribble anymore; I could write only by dictating into my computer.
Once you’re hit by an incurable illness that doesn’t kill you, but ruins your life and (especially, cruelly, brutally) your mate’s, you learn that relativity’s at the heart of who we are. What had seemed unbearable a few years earlier now struck me as a picnic—was there no way to wind the time back?—and I daily found myself contemplating suicide as an understandable escape route. Not for me: the core of my life is that I’m happily married. But suppose my wife had somehow died, shortly before my own illness took hold? Would I bother to stick around?
Suddenly that scant idea for a novel, buried for twenty-five years in my notebook, came calling. I began dictating it almost as a lark, to see if there was really anything there. The only blessing of my disease was that plot questions were unexpectedly settled, and I could write of a suicide-inspiring disease with authority. As Emily Dickinson said: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant. I wasn’t writing confessionally (I’m not that sort of novelist), but autobiographical elements inevitably offered themselves.
Here’s the plot of my novel: Kip—a New York jazz pianist whose career was cut short by a neurological disease—returns from a failed suicide attempt with a vivid memory of his journey through the afterlife. Resembling the world as he knows it, but unlimited in space and time, its residents are those who choose not to reincarnate, which would erase all memory of who they once were. Kip has a quest: to find his beloved Lucy, a yoga teacher who shared his apartment for years but died of leukemia before he took his life. Is she still here? Has she waited for him, or “gone back” to become someone else? In his odyssey to find her across centuries and locales (Istanbul to the Marquesas Islands, India to Oklahoma and New Guinea), Kip is guided by the poet Walt Whitman, who urges him to write a memoir on his return.
I know this doesn’t sound funny, but believe me—along with everything else, it’s a very funny book. It’s not a novel about having a neurological disease; that’s simply the excuse to push my narrator to commit suicide and venture the very surprising afterlife. But suicide is the rarely-discussed elephant in the multiple sclerosis waiting room. It’s on everyone’s mind at some point, despite all those nauseating community photos they throw at you of cheerful, healthy-looking folks bowling along in wheelchairs, playful as puppies.
I can’t imagine I’m the first writer with a severe form of MS, though mine may be the first novel whose narrator has it. My subject isn’t suicide or suffering, but a liberating, life-affirming afterlife. I’m not religious; it’s not a religious book. It is a humane one.
I got the idea for my fourth and most recent novel, The Land of Later On, back in the 1980s, long before my first novel was published. In those innocent days I travelled extensively as a freelance writer, so “one man’s odyssey through the afterlife” (whatever that meant, it sounded cool) seemed no more outlandish than other distant journeys I was describing.
My afterlife idea was that sole cryptic phrase in a notebook, and over the decades other novels intervened. But I never forgot it.
Gradually my magazine work was replaced by a career performing and recording as a jazz and classical guitarist. Then, six years ago, I realized something was terribly wrong. Diagnosed with so-called “progressive” multiple sclerosis, I quickly sank from running a few miles a day and playing an instrument on a professional level to living in a wheelchair, unable to play at all. I couldn’t type or even scribble anymore; I could write only by dictating into my computer.
Once you’re hit by an incurable illness that doesn’t kill you, but ruins your life and (especially, cruelly, brutally) your mate’s, you learn that relativity’s at the heart of who we are. What had seemed unbearable a few years earlier now struck me as a picnic—was there no way to wind the time back?—and I daily found myself contemplating suicide as an understandable escape route. Not for me: the core of my life is that I’m happily married. But suppose my wife had somehow died, shortly before my own illness took hold? Would I bother to stick around?
Suddenly that scant idea for a novel, buried for twenty-five years in my notebook, came calling. I began dictating it almost as a lark, to see if there was really anything there. The only blessing of my disease was that plot questions were unexpectedly settled, and I could write of a suicide-inspiring disease with authority. As Emily Dickinson said: Tell all the Truth but tell it slant. I wasn’t writing confessionally (I’m not that sort of novelist), but autobiographical elements inevitably offered themselves.
Here’s the plot of my novel: Kip—a New York jazz pianist whose career was cut short by a neurological disease—returns from a failed suicide attempt with a vivid memory of his journey through the afterlife. Resembling the world as he knows it, but unlimited in space and time, its residents are those who choose not to reincarnate, which would erase all memory of who they once were. Kip has a quest: to find his beloved Lucy, a yoga teacher who shared his apartment for years but died of leukemia before he took his life. Is she still here? Has she waited for him, or “gone back” to become someone else? In his odyssey to find her across centuries and locales (Istanbul to the Marquesas Islands, India to Oklahoma and New Guinea), Kip is guided by the poet Walt Whitman, who urges him to write a memoir on his return.
I know this doesn’t sound funny, but believe me—along with everything else, it’s a very funny book. It’s not a novel about having a neurological disease; that’s simply the excuse to push my narrator to commit suicide and venture the very surprising afterlife. But suicide is the rarely-discussed elephant in the multiple sclerosis waiting room. It’s on everyone’s mind at some point, despite all those nauseating community photos they throw at you of cheerful, healthy-looking folks bowling along in wheelchairs, playful as puppies.
I can’t imagine I’m the first writer with a severe form of MS, though mine may be the first novel whose narrator has it. My subject isn’t suicide or suffering, but a liberating, life-affirming afterlife. I’m not religious; it’s not a religious book. It is a humane one.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Becoming A Writer
Adapted from a March 1998 speech to the Macon, Georgia Writers’ Club
I thought I’d talk today about several aspects of the writing life, some of them practical, some mystical. I hope that I can do justice to the tradition you have long established here. To stand in a spot once occupied by Flannery O'Connor, no matter how briefly, must give any writer pleasure.
I can only speak about what I’ve found to be true for myself, because much of becoming a writer is finding what works for you. This is why the standard writer’s interview often seems absurd. We know how it goes: if the author scribbles or types his first drafts, works in the morning or late at night, reads his work aloud to his wife or husband or cat or mongoose, etcetera. I don’t think that stuff matters any more than whether we wash our knees first or our elbows.
One of the best things a writer can learn early on is that how I pull the rabbit out of the hat might not be the way you should do it, and neither of us may be able to change the docile bunny to a rainbow of silk handkerchiefs no matter how hard we try. Most writers are only given a limited range of illusions which come naturally, and it’s important to learn which sleight of hand you must practice to make your art appear complete, and which conjuring tricks you must graciously leave to others. Paul Theroux put it succinctly. He said, “We don’t write as we want to, we write as we can.”
So our duty to our writing selves, to our talents, to the part of us that wants to give life to something in language that’s our very own, is to find what we should be writing at any given moment, and abandon any idea of writing like some luminary we admire. The problem is that the answers may surprise us. What your imagination announces you should be writing this year may not be within your grasp at this stage (though the imagination is usually right), and it may not be what the rest of you thinks you should be writing ever.
The question of how one becomes a writer is about as full of hidden dangers as someone asking where you were last night. I don’t think I’ve ever been shy about giving writing advice to anyone who would sit still and take it, but I found that when you invited me here and I began considering how I became a writer, I was surprised at how quickly my memory pulled down the blinds in the window.
Let’s frankly admit that what we’re really asking is how one becomes a good writer, or at least a better writer. I know one point that the greats up in heaven, our former colleagues, would agree on: some days, some years, and even some decades, you don’t make progress; you stay in place or get turned around and go backward. This is why we should judge a writer by his strengths, by his best work.
To me a writer is simply someone who writes a lot, in the sense that a pianist is someone who plays the piano a lot—and play is a word I’ll return to. I have always found unbearable those people who sit across from you and sip their coffee like a writer, and dress as they think a real writer should, and carry the shoulder bag they think a writer should, and keep up with the books they guess a writer should. They talk like writers and make love like writers and use their forks and knives like writers; they wear their writer-ness like an elaborate cape. In a line of work where quality depends on uniqueness, they’re trying hard to follow a pattern and inhabit a role.
In my experience of meeting first-rate writers, craftsmanship and genius rarely come in the human form you expect. I love this, and I love what it suggests about people—that their essence is rarely what we first imagine. This sense of constant human surprise is, to me, pure joy.
You become a writer by writing, and you become better by writing more than you ever thought possible. It might not be what you do most of the time—but even though a Swiss Army knife has fifty-three other functions, it still has the right to call itself a knife.
The hard part for many people early in their writing lives is believing through and through that they’re able to do it. To get anywhere you must take it for granted you can, that with dedication you’ll get somewhere—then thrust the pesky question aside and carry on with the job. Every writer is beset by fears, especially early in a project, but you have to keep going and slip through them, no matter how many drafts it takes. The vast question of whether you’ll ever prove a good writer must be answered yes—yes, that is, if you really do love to write, love it despite difficulties and setbacks, perhaps love it more because of them. And once answered yes, the question must be banished, because it’s never a fruitful line of inquiry.
It can also become, especially in writers starting out, an excuse for not getting on with the work at hand, which deserves all the concentration you can give. If the problem is that to write seems to demand a bigger sense of ego than can be easily summoned up, I would answer that first, in any work, confidence comes and goes to a writer like bouts of good and bad weather, and some days you just have to stay out there in the fields when the weather’s awful.
The answer is not to make your ego as large as it can be but rather as small, so you can slip through the difficulties like a needle through a wall of rock. If you do that, I promise, the work will still look and sound unmistakably like you. Keep your focus on the work at hand, not on you. As the poet Peyton Houston, one of my personal saints, wrote: “Everything was in shadow until I got out of the way.”
So how did I become a writer? Good question.
It’s hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t know I was going to be a writer. Soon I set about becoming a musician as well; this is still an enormous part of my life. There were a few months at age seventeen, the dire old age of childhood, when I thought I was done with writing, the well had run dry. The following year I wrote my first novel, which shows just how wrong you can be.
I had learned to read at age four and soon read very well, and began writing little stories by age six. I don’t think an early start matters in the least, it’s simply what happened to me. I have a solid memory of lying on my stomach, scrawling away at a half-page saga, and of the satisfaction it gave me to put quotation marks around dialogue, because then it looked like the real thing.
At the heart of this memory, though, is the love of books. If I could devour books now with the healthful gluttony and remorseless speed as I did then, I might be well-read. I used to wake through some internal pressure at four in the morning and read in bed until it was time to get up for school; and because most schoolwork came easily to me my main memory of grammar school is lugging piles of books home from the library every couple of days.
That library was an Eden to me. There is, of course, a serpent in Eden, and the cruel temptation was that I wasn’t allowed to check out books from the adult floor, where they obviously kept the more interesting volumes. Like, say, The Count of Monte Cristo, unabridged and as heavy as a strongbox. For a while I attempted to check out books on my mother’s card. Whether they cared that I was not Gladys Lasky Weller, or realized that (despite all my shameless lies) my mother couldn’t possibly be asking me to take out books on Genghis Khan, the battle of the Little Big Horn, and space travel to Neptune, either way, my hopes were thwarted.
So I used to spend a few idyllic afternoons every week at the library after walking there from school. They could stop me taking those books home, but they couldn’t stop me reading in a corner. Eventually the rule-makers relented, and on the strength of my mother’s card I was given the keys to this adult paradise.
In a grove across the street, where I waited for the bus, was a marble bench honoring the poet Sidney Lanier, whose bust gleamed upstairs in the library. Every day I’d ponder that it must be a fine thing to be a writer; they sculpted your likeness, they remembered your words, they even planted flowers in your honor. I thankfully didn’t consider the weed in the flowerbed—so many writers, so few memorials. In European cities they used to name streets after even minor authors, so they’re not forgotten though they might remain unread. I wouldn’t bet on this trend returning.
My reading, outside of what my English mother fed me with unerring taste, was scattershot. There was a good deal of poetry, whose music cast a lasting spell; for much of my life I’ve written nearly as much poetry as prose. Earlier I mentioned a love of books—I mean by that a love of the object itself. Part of wanting to write is the desire for a binding with your name on it. Most writers have an affection for the printed word; an eye for dust jackets and the merits of alternative editions; an appreciation of typefaces and the look of lines on a page, the way paper feels, the heft and shape of a book. I can still remember arranging titles I wanted to read on my desk at school—those desks on the wrong side for a left-hander.
My social experience growing up here, in what was then a smallish city in central Georgia, doubtless contributed to my becoming a writer. I rode a city bus to and from grammar school, because my mother didn’t drive, and as a result ended up not participating in the usual activities, with a lot of time to myself for reading. Before, when I was too small to go home alone, I’d walk downtown to my mother’s ballet studio and read away the afternoons while she taught and rehearsed. And though we had many friends, partly because my father (a Bostonian) was always abroad covering some war or other as a reporter, and because my mother remained a Londoner with much of her mind in Europe, I never felt myself entirely an American or truly a Southerner. I say this although I feel great love for Macon, for Georgia, and for the South; this part of the country holds greater magic for me than New England, where I now live. Still, to this day I feel more general affinity for European writers than American ones, and undoubtedly my writing reflects this.
In any event, this social situation was a childhood laboratory preparing me for my profession. V. S. Pritchett has likened the writer to a man living on a frontier. This means having one foot planted in the familiar country that everyone inhabits, and the other foot in the private country he spends page after page exploring—with the internal country really a dream-version of the other, like a hand-shadow thrown on a wall whose ultimate shape may bear little resemblance to what produced it. So from an early age I got used to being simultaneously an outsider and an insider: to feeling part of a community, and safe within it, while also feeling utterly removed from it. I’ve never really felt anything different no matter where I was.
Of course we all feel this way. There’s us, and everybody else—which is why other people are fundamentally unknowable. I think of James Joyce, writing, “A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?” But the writer is different to the degree that the country on the other side of the frontier is for him generated with more detail and energy than for most people, precisely because it’s constantly being visited and mapped and farmed and populated and explored. This double life allows a writer to move in and out of the world he’s creating on the page, and the room he happens to be working in, with the blithe ease of someone waving a diplomatic passport at agreeable border officials. I should add that whenever the work goes badly the border officials turn very surly. For me one test of whether a work’s going well is whether what I’m writing about remains more vivid than what’s going on around me when I stop for lunch.
These countries on either side of the frontier also represent the subjective and objective sides of the writer. By "subjective" I mean the ability to immerse yourself in what your imagination offers you, with no more second-guessing than you’d give to a dream when you’re asleep. But this must be followed by a ruthless scrutiny, over and over, by the objective, rewriting mind. Yet that scrutiny is valuable only if it is able to wholeheartedly reenter the spirit of the initial dream almost instantaneously, and be reminded of what the imagination was striving for, then dart back to the terrain of the written page and make the necessary adjustments.
This back-and-forthing is often very tricky, especially in the early stages of a work, but as you press on and acquire a deeper sense of what the work will be, that open border becomes casual—the way a smuggler finds a convenient frontier crossing-point, a hidden pass through the mountains, where he can slip from country to country alongside his pack-mules loaded with contraband, and no rifle-toting guards anywhere in sight. Thus the act of writing is first imagining what a work will be, then discovering as you write what it is—and successfully reconciling the two (we hope) with what it ought to be.
My mother, one of the most widely cultured and open-minded people I’ve known, gave me a great deal besides teaching me to read and providing me with unending books and enthusiasm for my writing. We traveled overseas on the cheap every summer, and this interest in other ways of life has been crucial to me. The sooner a writer understands that everybody thinks differently and we all of us believe we’re justified in everything we say and do, the better. Travel exposed me to other languages, which meant a lot to my inner ear. Young, I saw many of the best art museums in Europe; I think my visual sense is one of my strengths as a writer and probably comes from this. Through my mother I was exposed to the rigors of the ballet world at its highest levels, and this also is good for someone determined to do creative work—to get an idea early on of the costs as well as the possible rewards, and to shake hands with greatness.
Around age eight I began to read a good deal of science fiction and fantasy. This lasted five years, until I went off to boarding school. I haven’t read anything of the genre since, but it was a healthy obsession for a writer-to-be. Because much of the apparatus of science fiction doesn’t depend on an adult experience of the world, I could feel capable of writing it myself in a way that “regular” books denied me. I wrote a number of science fiction or fantasy stories in 7th and 8th grade, and a kindly editor in New York sent me a helpful book on shaping stories in the setup-climax-resolution way. Inadvertently I became the youngest published science fiction author in history—I still hear from the genre statisticians—unless some upstart has eclipsed my record. A paperback anthology called Infinity Three turned down a story I sent them, but accepted a poem. I wrote it at age twelve; it came out when I was thirteen.
The virtue of the way my boarding school taught English was that you were required to write a story every week. Obviously some people were better at it than others, but if you’re hoping to become a writer, one short story a week from ninth through twelfth grades is not a bad place to start. Senior year I took a special writing course that was wonderful partly because the teacher kept us reading modern fiction, and at an exhausting rate. We had three nights to handle Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and we were expected to deal with Borges or Barth or Cary in a night or two. To someone accustomed to standard high school fare, these books were like a sequence of detonations, of well-timed depth charges, and made anything seem permissible in our own stories. Bravery and experimentation were encouraged, and the result was that instead of trying to imitate Hemingway we tried to write like ourselves. Out of a dozen-odd classmates at least four write professionally.
In college I found that the Yale approach to reading was not of much use to me. To hear their pretentious literary analyses executed on a hapless text was like watching a live butterfly get its wings pinned back, or hearing people who haven’t the slightest idea how to build a table talking with authority about the ludic cross-pollination between a table’s semiotics and its hermeneutic sense-memory. All those syllables left me—who wanted mainly to learn how the bits of wood fit together—literally over in the Music Building. The academic approach struck me as irrelevant, and I noticed that the only books they deigned to discuss were those that suited their souped-up, techno-syllabic, hot-rod crypto-lingo. So I stopped taking English classes and wrote novels and poetry on my own.
At this point I got very lucky. I was taken under the wing of a superb older poet, Peyton Houston, who for decades gave me the kind of word-by-word, line-by-line tutelage that a young poet can only dream about. All this time I’ve kept writing poems; perhaps they’re my best work. In any case, I believe poetry is the highest, most flexible state that language can achieve, and to practice it even occasionally is of immeasurable value for anybody who aspires to write well.
I also fortunately came under the influence of a Spanish composer, Julián Orbón, with whom I studied musical composition for years. These two men, who died early in the ’90s, influenced my approach more than anybody else has.
From them I got a powerful conviction that art, no matter how it may surprise or shock us, must still always be logical and never arbitrary in its construction and development. They gave me a sense of how compelling a force structure can be in a work, and how organic that structure must be—that the tiniest detail, no matter how ornamental it might seem, must abet the entirety, and give a sense of resonating and flowering across the total architecture. That every word, every beat, must be gone over again and again, questioned and prodded and thrown back into the smelting furnace. That you must be on guard against the banal, the tired, the done-before. That you must know our predecessors’ work very well, and not be afraid to use the tradition, while renewing it radically in making something fresh and yours.
They also impressed upon me an ability to severely cut what I’d done, to leave only what was alive and really essential: an ideal work contains a minimum of words, the truthful minimum. They taught me not to be afraid of simplicity while seeking a pressure of ideas, and to be on guard against striking a pose or shouting for effect. And that the whole should have the appearance, after all that rewriting, of being spontaneous, of inventing itself right before your eyes.
Finally, they taught me how hard it is to get anywhere in the arts, that quality has little to do with it and this doesn’t matter—that you created something beautiful was enough and must remain enough. We are measured by what we can perceive and what we do with those perceptions, not by the zeros on a publisher’s contract.
So I wrote a novel freshman year, which came naturally, and got a literary agent, who tried but failed to sell that book. I wrote a second novel with enormous difficulty; the more I worked the more labored it became, because the rule is that the second novel is allowed to whack you as much as it wants to see if you’re serious. Thankfully, after two years of this punishment my agent—Dorothy Olding, who represented Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Agatha Christie, Anthony Powell, and Muriel Spark—called at seven one morning and woke me by advising I give up and go on to the next book. Great advice, abrupt freedom: sometimes the gods are kind.
I finished my third novel the summer after graduating from college. My agent couldn’t sell that one either, though we came close. I moved to New York and wrote The Garden of the Peacocks from 1980-82, but soon took it back from her because I realized, in a flash of revelation, that the family saga of a wilful Cuban sculptor was beyond my reach, and nothing was gained by circulating a catastrophe to publishers.
I then spent three years on another novel which, again, came very close with a couple of publishing houses but, after initial excitement from individual editors, got sent back by their evil committees. All this time I supported myself with odd jobs: as a guitarist, and as a freelance magazine journalist, sent abroad a great deal.
I returned to The Garden of the Peacocks for another four years. I was barely staying afloat in Amsterdam, Paris, Turkish Cyprus, and finally Massachusetts. By 1990 I got the Peacocks pretty close to how it was eventually published. I now had a different agent, Henry Dunow, my first having been incapacitated by a stroke. My new agent did his damnedest—the novel was turned down by thirty-five publishers. A roulette wheel has no memory; the odds are bad but unchanging, each time.
Meanwhile I wrote another novel, The Polish Lover. Three more years on the tightrope, before a helpful colleague suggested that the answer to structuring a compressed novel about a love affair gone wrong was to leap among several time-streams and leave out a lot. It’d been turned down by two dozen houses when the head of Marlowe, a mid-size New York publisher, read it, loved it, and bought it and the Peacocks, plus a half-finished travel memoir of a road journey across India and Pakistan, from Calcutta to the Khyber Pass, that originated as an article I did for Smithsonian magazine.
Suddenly in early 1996 I went from being on the verge of giving up to having three book contracts. This may sound like sour grapes, but the feeling was not one of triumph but rather of sheer relief. The triumph came not when I held the finished book—partly because color xeroxes skew your notion of what the cover’s going to look like—but when the initial set of proofs came in, and for the first time I saw my words arrayed on paper that resembled not my typescript but the pages of a book.
Having written so much from a young age, I’d had every reason to think my career would get off to an early start. I hadn’t reckoned how very hard it is and how slim the chances are, because there are so many more writers who deserve to be published than ever will be. To be good enough simply doesn’t get you very far: you have to be lucky also. It was twenty years after I finished my first novel before I got a publisher, twenty years of working ceaselessly on little sleep while buying time to do my own writing. My breakthrough came at a moment when I’d vowed to give up novels and write only poetry. A novel-in-progress takes up a colossal space in one’s life, and I was sick of getting nowhere. I doubted I could write significantly better books, and to pretend I might coincide with what they were buying next season seemed naive.
It is all too easy for me to bring back that sensation of being nullified by the publishing world, and though I now have seven books out, the muscle I developed of keeping that sensation at bay still gets exercised all the time. It taught me that no matter what your goals are—whether you’re writing a poem, an article, a memoir, a novel, a screenplay, a journal, a comic book, or something none of us have thought of—you must not blink or give up. Sometimes I feel I got rewarded by not going away; if you hang around long enough, perhaps attention gets paid. When I try to analyze how my writing improved over the years—how different, truly, is the last draft of The Garden of the Peacocks, which a publisher bought, from the rejected draft before?—I’m left utterly befuddled.
Still, I have a theory that editors everywhere, especially at publishers but also at magazines, have a weird sixth sense. Most are second- or third-rate minds, many are frustrated writers (sometimes surprisingly bad or good ones), and they’re filled with plenty of wrong answers but few of the right questions. Yet after being daily pummeled by manuscript after manuscript, they do acquire an animal instinct for when a work has not been fully imagined, not been taken all the way; and I believe the reason my earlier work was not accepted was because it was only 80% or 90% of the way there. Editors, alas, just cannot lavish their time on a risky first novel to haul the manuscript that last 10% of the distance—and it’s artistically perhaps the most important 10%. (Professionally, it certainly is.)
Thus you should be very, very careful about sending out work; many writers submit it too hastily. Keeping it in a drawer for one month or six will not hurt, and you’ll be surprised at what you see when you go back to it. My mistake was that because I’m a tireless reviser, I felt sure that after countless drafts, when I saw nothing more to change, this meant the book was ready. Had I been willing to wait and look at it again after an enforced absence, I’d have vastly improved my chances. You have to tell yourself: There is no hurry. There is no hurry. And whenever you feel the urge to speed up your final editorial process, slow it down instead.
Today the difficulties that writers eternally face are wildly magnified by a market changing under the pressure of many other media yelling for the attention of a bored audience in need of higher and higher dosages of excitement. Each season from every nook of the electronic jungle more possibilities arise than ever, and it’s hard for an original talent to make itself heard. We’re living through a time when the role of fiction has changed fundamentally from forty years ago. Ever since movies came along there has been a gradual shift, and the last decades have amplified and sped up this sea-change. Nowadays when an audience wants a good story it turns to film, a much more natural medium for simple narrative—delivering a plot with relevant details. People’s basic notions of what a story is have become more defined by what films can provide than by what prose can.
This isn’t the place to go into the differences between the two, but just as people once read epic poems for the story, and gave up on them in favor of novels, now they watch movies. DVD rentals are our equivalent of the 19th century lending library. Thus the adequately-written “story” novel of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s scarcely exists anymore, except in particular genres like mysteries. Likewise, the Grishams, Clancys, Browns, and Crichtons (plus ever-multiplying acolytes) do not rely on language for their effects but are instead anti-language. Their books read like film synopses and depend heavily on an audience’s familiarity with movies and borrowed images to convey a scene.
This is usually spoken of as a bad thing, but I’m not sure it is. Books have always been a minority interest, and it’s better if writers stop trying to wage a war they can’t win and instead concentrate on the special things language can do.
Let me close by offering a few bits of writing advice that should be taken with plenty of salt. They are merely what I’ve found to be true, for me.
The first is that you must write pretty nearly every day if you want to sink deep into your own work and improve it. The imagination is the laziest muscle in the body, and unless it’s relied on constantly it will atrophy. I leave out, of course, the vacations that are needed to recharge the batteries after hard labor—but these should be earned vacations, not excuses.
In any case, follow a routine. Even if you can only write two days a week for an hour each, stick to that schedule no matter what, and choose a time that you know is safe, when no one will disturb you and you won’t be called away. You’ll be surprised at all the pages you produce even under such time constraints.
A test I always subject my writing to, draft after draft, is how much can be cut and thrown away without damaging the effect I’m striving for.
The advice you usually hear is to write about what you know. I’d emend this to say: Write while standing on the shoulders of what you know. A lot of people try to get started by keeping a journal. This always strikes me amiss because I’ve never been able to keep one; whatever I write sounds phony. There’s nothing harder than writing currently about oneself. Maybe a place to start is with a memory of childhood or of a family member or, better still, a glimpse of someone you know peripherally—the fellow who sells you coffee every day. The more you can free yourself from worry over what you’re saying about someone close to you, the better; the only way to write well is to not care in the slightest what people will think. What’s crucial is to find something you can write about that makes you sound like you. And it might be a subject you don’t feel attached to.
You must also learn to be kind to yourself, to understand that there are times when you can’t get the words to wrap around their intended meanings and a story just won’t budge on the page. This doesn’t mean you should give it up, but might mean you should put it aside for a while or try a radically different approach. I got familiar with this in writing the Peacocks, juggling four characters’ points of view. I often found myself stubbornly rewriting a scene many times until I realized that no amount of work was going to inject light into a chapter where I’d chosen the wrong point of view. So I’d start over. In the end those blind alleys were all necessary.
The problem of point of view is fundamental. There is the narrow view of the first-person narrator, who makes up for a limited horizon with an intense gaze and a personal voice; the trade-off is versus the all-seeing, all-knowing vista of the third person, which seemingly gives us the entire world of the story. In my first novel I tried to combine them, to write looking over a particular character’s shoulder in each chapter. My third novel, The Siege of Salt Cove, is told by thirty-nine different narrators, who pass the ball of the plot among them. The quandary, always, is to gently find out what form the story wants: you cannot tell it, it must tell you.
Another error that rarely occurs to people is that sometimes a paragraph or a sentence may be very good, but not in the right location to do its job. It may belong on page three, not page eight.
At the beginning I mentioned a question every writer faces, of what you should be writing at this point in your writing life. A natural corollary is that it’s you who have to figure out your own solutions to the problems that crop up on the page. (Some difficulties recur constantly; every writer faces the awkwardness of moving a character from one room to another.) I’m talking here about the larger problems in a work. It’s great if you can learn from Maugham, Flaubert, or even Mickey Spillane, but be wary of the solution that comes ready-made from an outside literary source.
Writing is self-discovery, and in most works there comes a time—even if you’re writing what is natural and apt for you now—when you must write scenes or characters that terrify you, that you’re sure you cannot possibly pull off. I now understand these tests are in the work from the very beginning, built by our imaginations into the site plan. And that the aspect of a work which we fear to write most is probably the part we absolutely must write. When I look back at my books I see that many parts I was terrified of in fact wrote themselves smoothly and turned out well once I stopped playing games and avoiding them. It’s necessary to paint yourself into a corner: that’s when you find out how far you can leap.
Earlier I spoke of a writer as being like a smuggler working two frontiers. The smuggling image may seem a romantic one for someone who sits at a table for hours turning sentences back and forth. But good writing always carries an element of danger, if only by showing us the world as we haven’t seen it before. The hardest, most important part of the process, where many talented and determined writers fail, is that they don’t keep in mind how a successful smuggler is always searching for previously unavailable goods. Not enough writers ask themselves if there’s anything really fresh, or downright new, in what they’ve written, if it isn’t ground that’s been gone over thoroughly by many who came before. If so, you must be courageous enough to discard the parts that are familiar and find some way, even in a short story about a couple who break up, to bring us something we’ve never read, whether it’s in the characters or the situation or your approach. Most people aren’t brutally self-critical enough in this regard, but it’s what makes a work timeless and energetic, and why the best writing of the past still looks vibrant.
Lastly, the question we all face, at the heart of becoming a writer, is why? Why do it? It does set you free—no matter how frustrating the writing is, or what your external circumstances are, no matter how profound your financial defeat, it turns you into a free man. I know that I’ve never gotten over the enchantment of language, the intoxication of those rare moments when earth and sky upend and it all suddenly appears on the page, at least for a sentence or two.
I’ve had other rewards. My journalism let me see the world and forced me to be gregarious in ways that even a vast income never would have, and this plurality of human experience deepened my writing. Had I never done that, never been able to publish novels, I’d have gone on writing poetry and probably stories anyway, and not just from habit. Ultimately, to write forces you to understand what you did not understand before, to confront yourself and find out who you are and what you know of the world outside you and the world in you. It liberates you from the ghastly prison of self and enables you to see the hills and the sea and the light on the buildings and the people around you as you never have, by writing them down. And if you work hard enough, and trust your imagination enough, you can remake those myriad ever-multiplying worlds in a language that’s your own and no one else’s.
This is, I believe, as close as the human can ever come to the divine—not in the sense of wisdom or power, but in the sense of play. And if your words are at all original, the truths released by them will be original too, and there on the written page you will find the world new again.
Which seems, to me, reason enough to be here.
I thought I’d talk today about several aspects of the writing life, some of them practical, some mystical. I hope that I can do justice to the tradition you have long established here. To stand in a spot once occupied by Flannery O'Connor, no matter how briefly, must give any writer pleasure.
I can only speak about what I’ve found to be true for myself, because much of becoming a writer is finding what works for you. This is why the standard writer’s interview often seems absurd. We know how it goes: if the author scribbles or types his first drafts, works in the morning or late at night, reads his work aloud to his wife or husband or cat or mongoose, etcetera. I don’t think that stuff matters any more than whether we wash our knees first or our elbows.
One of the best things a writer can learn early on is that how I pull the rabbit out of the hat might not be the way you should do it, and neither of us may be able to change the docile bunny to a rainbow of silk handkerchiefs no matter how hard we try. Most writers are only given a limited range of illusions which come naturally, and it’s important to learn which sleight of hand you must practice to make your art appear complete, and which conjuring tricks you must graciously leave to others. Paul Theroux put it succinctly. He said, “We don’t write as we want to, we write as we can.”
So our duty to our writing selves, to our talents, to the part of us that wants to give life to something in language that’s our very own, is to find what we should be writing at any given moment, and abandon any idea of writing like some luminary we admire. The problem is that the answers may surprise us. What your imagination announces you should be writing this year may not be within your grasp at this stage (though the imagination is usually right), and it may not be what the rest of you thinks you should be writing ever.
The question of how one becomes a writer is about as full of hidden dangers as someone asking where you were last night. I don’t think I’ve ever been shy about giving writing advice to anyone who would sit still and take it, but I found that when you invited me here and I began considering how I became a writer, I was surprised at how quickly my memory pulled down the blinds in the window.
Let’s frankly admit that what we’re really asking is how one becomes a good writer, or at least a better writer. I know one point that the greats up in heaven, our former colleagues, would agree on: some days, some years, and even some decades, you don’t make progress; you stay in place or get turned around and go backward. This is why we should judge a writer by his strengths, by his best work.
To me a writer is simply someone who writes a lot, in the sense that a pianist is someone who plays the piano a lot—and play is a word I’ll return to. I have always found unbearable those people who sit across from you and sip their coffee like a writer, and dress as they think a real writer should, and carry the shoulder bag they think a writer should, and keep up with the books they guess a writer should. They talk like writers and make love like writers and use their forks and knives like writers; they wear their writer-ness like an elaborate cape. In a line of work where quality depends on uniqueness, they’re trying hard to follow a pattern and inhabit a role.
In my experience of meeting first-rate writers, craftsmanship and genius rarely come in the human form you expect. I love this, and I love what it suggests about people—that their essence is rarely what we first imagine. This sense of constant human surprise is, to me, pure joy.
You become a writer by writing, and you become better by writing more than you ever thought possible. It might not be what you do most of the time—but even though a Swiss Army knife has fifty-three other functions, it still has the right to call itself a knife.
The hard part for many people early in their writing lives is believing through and through that they’re able to do it. To get anywhere you must take it for granted you can, that with dedication you’ll get somewhere—then thrust the pesky question aside and carry on with the job. Every writer is beset by fears, especially early in a project, but you have to keep going and slip through them, no matter how many drafts it takes. The vast question of whether you’ll ever prove a good writer must be answered yes—yes, that is, if you really do love to write, love it despite difficulties and setbacks, perhaps love it more because of them. And once answered yes, the question must be banished, because it’s never a fruitful line of inquiry.
It can also become, especially in writers starting out, an excuse for not getting on with the work at hand, which deserves all the concentration you can give. If the problem is that to write seems to demand a bigger sense of ego than can be easily summoned up, I would answer that first, in any work, confidence comes and goes to a writer like bouts of good and bad weather, and some days you just have to stay out there in the fields when the weather’s awful.
The answer is not to make your ego as large as it can be but rather as small, so you can slip through the difficulties like a needle through a wall of rock. If you do that, I promise, the work will still look and sound unmistakably like you. Keep your focus on the work at hand, not on you. As the poet Peyton Houston, one of my personal saints, wrote: “Everything was in shadow until I got out of the way.”
So how did I become a writer? Good question.
It’s hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t know I was going to be a writer. Soon I set about becoming a musician as well; this is still an enormous part of my life. There were a few months at age seventeen, the dire old age of childhood, when I thought I was done with writing, the well had run dry. The following year I wrote my first novel, which shows just how wrong you can be.
I had learned to read at age four and soon read very well, and began writing little stories by age six. I don’t think an early start matters in the least, it’s simply what happened to me. I have a solid memory of lying on my stomach, scrawling away at a half-page saga, and of the satisfaction it gave me to put quotation marks around dialogue, because then it looked like the real thing.
At the heart of this memory, though, is the love of books. If I could devour books now with the healthful gluttony and remorseless speed as I did then, I might be well-read. I used to wake through some internal pressure at four in the morning and read in bed until it was time to get up for school; and because most schoolwork came easily to me my main memory of grammar school is lugging piles of books home from the library every couple of days.
That library was an Eden to me. There is, of course, a serpent in Eden, and the cruel temptation was that I wasn’t allowed to check out books from the adult floor, where they obviously kept the more interesting volumes. Like, say, The Count of Monte Cristo, unabridged and as heavy as a strongbox. For a while I attempted to check out books on my mother’s card. Whether they cared that I was not Gladys Lasky Weller, or realized that (despite all my shameless lies) my mother couldn’t possibly be asking me to take out books on Genghis Khan, the battle of the Little Big Horn, and space travel to Neptune, either way, my hopes were thwarted.
So I used to spend a few idyllic afternoons every week at the library after walking there from school. They could stop me taking those books home, but they couldn’t stop me reading in a corner. Eventually the rule-makers relented, and on the strength of my mother’s card I was given the keys to this adult paradise.
In a grove across the street, where I waited for the bus, was a marble bench honoring the poet Sidney Lanier, whose bust gleamed upstairs in the library. Every day I’d ponder that it must be a fine thing to be a writer; they sculpted your likeness, they remembered your words, they even planted flowers in your honor. I thankfully didn’t consider the weed in the flowerbed—so many writers, so few memorials. In European cities they used to name streets after even minor authors, so they’re not forgotten though they might remain unread. I wouldn’t bet on this trend returning.
My reading, outside of what my English mother fed me with unerring taste, was scattershot. There was a good deal of poetry, whose music cast a lasting spell; for much of my life I’ve written nearly as much poetry as prose. Earlier I mentioned a love of books—I mean by that a love of the object itself. Part of wanting to write is the desire for a binding with your name on it. Most writers have an affection for the printed word; an eye for dust jackets and the merits of alternative editions; an appreciation of typefaces and the look of lines on a page, the way paper feels, the heft and shape of a book. I can still remember arranging titles I wanted to read on my desk at school—those desks on the wrong side for a left-hander.
My social experience growing up here, in what was then a smallish city in central Georgia, doubtless contributed to my becoming a writer. I rode a city bus to and from grammar school, because my mother didn’t drive, and as a result ended up not participating in the usual activities, with a lot of time to myself for reading. Before, when I was too small to go home alone, I’d walk downtown to my mother’s ballet studio and read away the afternoons while she taught and rehearsed. And though we had many friends, partly because my father (a Bostonian) was always abroad covering some war or other as a reporter, and because my mother remained a Londoner with much of her mind in Europe, I never felt myself entirely an American or truly a Southerner. I say this although I feel great love for Macon, for Georgia, and for the South; this part of the country holds greater magic for me than New England, where I now live. Still, to this day I feel more general affinity for European writers than American ones, and undoubtedly my writing reflects this.
In any event, this social situation was a childhood laboratory preparing me for my profession. V. S. Pritchett has likened the writer to a man living on a frontier. This means having one foot planted in the familiar country that everyone inhabits, and the other foot in the private country he spends page after page exploring—with the internal country really a dream-version of the other, like a hand-shadow thrown on a wall whose ultimate shape may bear little resemblance to what produced it. So from an early age I got used to being simultaneously an outsider and an insider: to feeling part of a community, and safe within it, while also feeling utterly removed from it. I’ve never really felt anything different no matter where I was.
Of course we all feel this way. There’s us, and everybody else—which is why other people are fundamentally unknowable. I think of James Joyce, writing, “A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me?” But the writer is different to the degree that the country on the other side of the frontier is for him generated with more detail and energy than for most people, precisely because it’s constantly being visited and mapped and farmed and populated and explored. This double life allows a writer to move in and out of the world he’s creating on the page, and the room he happens to be working in, with the blithe ease of someone waving a diplomatic passport at agreeable border officials. I should add that whenever the work goes badly the border officials turn very surly. For me one test of whether a work’s going well is whether what I’m writing about remains more vivid than what’s going on around me when I stop for lunch.
These countries on either side of the frontier also represent the subjective and objective sides of the writer. By "subjective" I mean the ability to immerse yourself in what your imagination offers you, with no more second-guessing than you’d give to a dream when you’re asleep. But this must be followed by a ruthless scrutiny, over and over, by the objective, rewriting mind. Yet that scrutiny is valuable only if it is able to wholeheartedly reenter the spirit of the initial dream almost instantaneously, and be reminded of what the imagination was striving for, then dart back to the terrain of the written page and make the necessary adjustments.
This back-and-forthing is often very tricky, especially in the early stages of a work, but as you press on and acquire a deeper sense of what the work will be, that open border becomes casual—the way a smuggler finds a convenient frontier crossing-point, a hidden pass through the mountains, where he can slip from country to country alongside his pack-mules loaded with contraband, and no rifle-toting guards anywhere in sight. Thus the act of writing is first imagining what a work will be, then discovering as you write what it is—and successfully reconciling the two (we hope) with what it ought to be.
My mother, one of the most widely cultured and open-minded people I’ve known, gave me a great deal besides teaching me to read and providing me with unending books and enthusiasm for my writing. We traveled overseas on the cheap every summer, and this interest in other ways of life has been crucial to me. The sooner a writer understands that everybody thinks differently and we all of us believe we’re justified in everything we say and do, the better. Travel exposed me to other languages, which meant a lot to my inner ear. Young, I saw many of the best art museums in Europe; I think my visual sense is one of my strengths as a writer and probably comes from this. Through my mother I was exposed to the rigors of the ballet world at its highest levels, and this also is good for someone determined to do creative work—to get an idea early on of the costs as well as the possible rewards, and to shake hands with greatness.
Around age eight I began to read a good deal of science fiction and fantasy. This lasted five years, until I went off to boarding school. I haven’t read anything of the genre since, but it was a healthy obsession for a writer-to-be. Because much of the apparatus of science fiction doesn’t depend on an adult experience of the world, I could feel capable of writing it myself in a way that “regular” books denied me. I wrote a number of science fiction or fantasy stories in 7th and 8th grade, and a kindly editor in New York sent me a helpful book on shaping stories in the setup-climax-resolution way. Inadvertently I became the youngest published science fiction author in history—I still hear from the genre statisticians—unless some upstart has eclipsed my record. A paperback anthology called Infinity Three turned down a story I sent them, but accepted a poem. I wrote it at age twelve; it came out when I was thirteen.
The virtue of the way my boarding school taught English was that you were required to write a story every week. Obviously some people were better at it than others, but if you’re hoping to become a writer, one short story a week from ninth through twelfth grades is not a bad place to start. Senior year I took a special writing course that was wonderful partly because the teacher kept us reading modern fiction, and at an exhausting rate. We had three nights to handle Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and we were expected to deal with Borges or Barth or Cary in a night or two. To someone accustomed to standard high school fare, these books were like a sequence of detonations, of well-timed depth charges, and made anything seem permissible in our own stories. Bravery and experimentation were encouraged, and the result was that instead of trying to imitate Hemingway we tried to write like ourselves. Out of a dozen-odd classmates at least four write professionally.
In college I found that the Yale approach to reading was not of much use to me. To hear their pretentious literary analyses executed on a hapless text was like watching a live butterfly get its wings pinned back, or hearing people who haven’t the slightest idea how to build a table talking with authority about the ludic cross-pollination between a table’s semiotics and its hermeneutic sense-memory. All those syllables left me—who wanted mainly to learn how the bits of wood fit together—literally over in the Music Building. The academic approach struck me as irrelevant, and I noticed that the only books they deigned to discuss were those that suited their souped-up, techno-syllabic, hot-rod crypto-lingo. So I stopped taking English classes and wrote novels and poetry on my own.
At this point I got very lucky. I was taken under the wing of a superb older poet, Peyton Houston, who for decades gave me the kind of word-by-word, line-by-line tutelage that a young poet can only dream about. All this time I’ve kept writing poems; perhaps they’re my best work. In any case, I believe poetry is the highest, most flexible state that language can achieve, and to practice it even occasionally is of immeasurable value for anybody who aspires to write well.
I also fortunately came under the influence of a Spanish composer, Julián Orbón, with whom I studied musical composition for years. These two men, who died early in the ’90s, influenced my approach more than anybody else has.
From them I got a powerful conviction that art, no matter how it may surprise or shock us, must still always be logical and never arbitrary in its construction and development. They gave me a sense of how compelling a force structure can be in a work, and how organic that structure must be—that the tiniest detail, no matter how ornamental it might seem, must abet the entirety, and give a sense of resonating and flowering across the total architecture. That every word, every beat, must be gone over again and again, questioned and prodded and thrown back into the smelting furnace. That you must be on guard against the banal, the tired, the done-before. That you must know our predecessors’ work very well, and not be afraid to use the tradition, while renewing it radically in making something fresh and yours.
They also impressed upon me an ability to severely cut what I’d done, to leave only what was alive and really essential: an ideal work contains a minimum of words, the truthful minimum. They taught me not to be afraid of simplicity while seeking a pressure of ideas, and to be on guard against striking a pose or shouting for effect. And that the whole should have the appearance, after all that rewriting, of being spontaneous, of inventing itself right before your eyes.
Finally, they taught me how hard it is to get anywhere in the arts, that quality has little to do with it and this doesn’t matter—that you created something beautiful was enough and must remain enough. We are measured by what we can perceive and what we do with those perceptions, not by the zeros on a publisher’s contract.
So I wrote a novel freshman year, which came naturally, and got a literary agent, who tried but failed to sell that book. I wrote a second novel with enormous difficulty; the more I worked the more labored it became, because the rule is that the second novel is allowed to whack you as much as it wants to see if you’re serious. Thankfully, after two years of this punishment my agent—Dorothy Olding, who represented Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Salinger, Agatha Christie, Anthony Powell, and Muriel Spark—called at seven one morning and woke me by advising I give up and go on to the next book. Great advice, abrupt freedom: sometimes the gods are kind.
I finished my third novel the summer after graduating from college. My agent couldn’t sell that one either, though we came close. I moved to New York and wrote The Garden of the Peacocks from 1980-82, but soon took it back from her because I realized, in a flash of revelation, that the family saga of a wilful Cuban sculptor was beyond my reach, and nothing was gained by circulating a catastrophe to publishers.
I then spent three years on another novel which, again, came very close with a couple of publishing houses but, after initial excitement from individual editors, got sent back by their evil committees. All this time I supported myself with odd jobs: as a guitarist, and as a freelance magazine journalist, sent abroad a great deal.
I returned to The Garden of the Peacocks for another four years. I was barely staying afloat in Amsterdam, Paris, Turkish Cyprus, and finally Massachusetts. By 1990 I got the Peacocks pretty close to how it was eventually published. I now had a different agent, Henry Dunow, my first having been incapacitated by a stroke. My new agent did his damnedest—the novel was turned down by thirty-five publishers. A roulette wheel has no memory; the odds are bad but unchanging, each time.
Meanwhile I wrote another novel, The Polish Lover. Three more years on the tightrope, before a helpful colleague suggested that the answer to structuring a compressed novel about a love affair gone wrong was to leap among several time-streams and leave out a lot. It’d been turned down by two dozen houses when the head of Marlowe, a mid-size New York publisher, read it, loved it, and bought it and the Peacocks, plus a half-finished travel memoir of a road journey across India and Pakistan, from Calcutta to the Khyber Pass, that originated as an article I did for Smithsonian magazine.
Suddenly in early 1996 I went from being on the verge of giving up to having three book contracts. This may sound like sour grapes, but the feeling was not one of triumph but rather of sheer relief. The triumph came not when I held the finished book—partly because color xeroxes skew your notion of what the cover’s going to look like—but when the initial set of proofs came in, and for the first time I saw my words arrayed on paper that resembled not my typescript but the pages of a book.
Having written so much from a young age, I’d had every reason to think my career would get off to an early start. I hadn’t reckoned how very hard it is and how slim the chances are, because there are so many more writers who deserve to be published than ever will be. To be good enough simply doesn’t get you very far: you have to be lucky also. It was twenty years after I finished my first novel before I got a publisher, twenty years of working ceaselessly on little sleep while buying time to do my own writing. My breakthrough came at a moment when I’d vowed to give up novels and write only poetry. A novel-in-progress takes up a colossal space in one’s life, and I was sick of getting nowhere. I doubted I could write significantly better books, and to pretend I might coincide with what they were buying next season seemed naive.
It is all too easy for me to bring back that sensation of being nullified by the publishing world, and though I now have seven books out, the muscle I developed of keeping that sensation at bay still gets exercised all the time. It taught me that no matter what your goals are—whether you’re writing a poem, an article, a memoir, a novel, a screenplay, a journal, a comic book, or something none of us have thought of—you must not blink or give up. Sometimes I feel I got rewarded by not going away; if you hang around long enough, perhaps attention gets paid. When I try to analyze how my writing improved over the years—how different, truly, is the last draft of The Garden of the Peacocks, which a publisher bought, from the rejected draft before?—I’m left utterly befuddled.
Still, I have a theory that editors everywhere, especially at publishers but also at magazines, have a weird sixth sense. Most are second- or third-rate minds, many are frustrated writers (sometimes surprisingly bad or good ones), and they’re filled with plenty of wrong answers but few of the right questions. Yet after being daily pummeled by manuscript after manuscript, they do acquire an animal instinct for when a work has not been fully imagined, not been taken all the way; and I believe the reason my earlier work was not accepted was because it was only 80% or 90% of the way there. Editors, alas, just cannot lavish their time on a risky first novel to haul the manuscript that last 10% of the distance—and it’s artistically perhaps the most important 10%. (Professionally, it certainly is.)
Thus you should be very, very careful about sending out work; many writers submit it too hastily. Keeping it in a drawer for one month or six will not hurt, and you’ll be surprised at what you see when you go back to it. My mistake was that because I’m a tireless reviser, I felt sure that after countless drafts, when I saw nothing more to change, this meant the book was ready. Had I been willing to wait and look at it again after an enforced absence, I’d have vastly improved my chances. You have to tell yourself: There is no hurry. There is no hurry. And whenever you feel the urge to speed up your final editorial process, slow it down instead.
Today the difficulties that writers eternally face are wildly magnified by a market changing under the pressure of many other media yelling for the attention of a bored audience in need of higher and higher dosages of excitement. Each season from every nook of the electronic jungle more possibilities arise than ever, and it’s hard for an original talent to make itself heard. We’re living through a time when the role of fiction has changed fundamentally from forty years ago. Ever since movies came along there has been a gradual shift, and the last decades have amplified and sped up this sea-change. Nowadays when an audience wants a good story it turns to film, a much more natural medium for simple narrative—delivering a plot with relevant details. People’s basic notions of what a story is have become more defined by what films can provide than by what prose can.
This isn’t the place to go into the differences between the two, but just as people once read epic poems for the story, and gave up on them in favor of novels, now they watch movies. DVD rentals are our equivalent of the 19th century lending library. Thus the adequately-written “story” novel of the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s scarcely exists anymore, except in particular genres like mysteries. Likewise, the Grishams, Clancys, Browns, and Crichtons (plus ever-multiplying acolytes) do not rely on language for their effects but are instead anti-language. Their books read like film synopses and depend heavily on an audience’s familiarity with movies and borrowed images to convey a scene.
This is usually spoken of as a bad thing, but I’m not sure it is. Books have always been a minority interest, and it’s better if writers stop trying to wage a war they can’t win and instead concentrate on the special things language can do.
Let me close by offering a few bits of writing advice that should be taken with plenty of salt. They are merely what I’ve found to be true, for me.
The first is that you must write pretty nearly every day if you want to sink deep into your own work and improve it. The imagination is the laziest muscle in the body, and unless it’s relied on constantly it will atrophy. I leave out, of course, the vacations that are needed to recharge the batteries after hard labor—but these should be earned vacations, not excuses.
In any case, follow a routine. Even if you can only write two days a week for an hour each, stick to that schedule no matter what, and choose a time that you know is safe, when no one will disturb you and you won’t be called away. You’ll be surprised at all the pages you produce even under such time constraints.
A test I always subject my writing to, draft after draft, is how much can be cut and thrown away without damaging the effect I’m striving for.
The advice you usually hear is to write about what you know. I’d emend this to say: Write while standing on the shoulders of what you know. A lot of people try to get started by keeping a journal. This always strikes me amiss because I’ve never been able to keep one; whatever I write sounds phony. There’s nothing harder than writing currently about oneself. Maybe a place to start is with a memory of childhood or of a family member or, better still, a glimpse of someone you know peripherally—the fellow who sells you coffee every day. The more you can free yourself from worry over what you’re saying about someone close to you, the better; the only way to write well is to not care in the slightest what people will think. What’s crucial is to find something you can write about that makes you sound like you. And it might be a subject you don’t feel attached to.
You must also learn to be kind to yourself, to understand that there are times when you can’t get the words to wrap around their intended meanings and a story just won’t budge on the page. This doesn’t mean you should give it up, but might mean you should put it aside for a while or try a radically different approach. I got familiar with this in writing the Peacocks, juggling four characters’ points of view. I often found myself stubbornly rewriting a scene many times until I realized that no amount of work was going to inject light into a chapter where I’d chosen the wrong point of view. So I’d start over. In the end those blind alleys were all necessary.
The problem of point of view is fundamental. There is the narrow view of the first-person narrator, who makes up for a limited horizon with an intense gaze and a personal voice; the trade-off is versus the all-seeing, all-knowing vista of the third person, which seemingly gives us the entire world of the story. In my first novel I tried to combine them, to write looking over a particular character’s shoulder in each chapter. My third novel, The Siege of Salt Cove, is told by thirty-nine different narrators, who pass the ball of the plot among them. The quandary, always, is to gently find out what form the story wants: you cannot tell it, it must tell you.
Another error that rarely occurs to people is that sometimes a paragraph or a sentence may be very good, but not in the right location to do its job. It may belong on page three, not page eight.
At the beginning I mentioned a question every writer faces, of what you should be writing at this point in your writing life. A natural corollary is that it’s you who have to figure out your own solutions to the problems that crop up on the page. (Some difficulties recur constantly; every writer faces the awkwardness of moving a character from one room to another.) I’m talking here about the larger problems in a work. It’s great if you can learn from Maugham, Flaubert, or even Mickey Spillane, but be wary of the solution that comes ready-made from an outside literary source.
Writing is self-discovery, and in most works there comes a time—even if you’re writing what is natural and apt for you now—when you must write scenes or characters that terrify you, that you’re sure you cannot possibly pull off. I now understand these tests are in the work from the very beginning, built by our imaginations into the site plan. And that the aspect of a work which we fear to write most is probably the part we absolutely must write. When I look back at my books I see that many parts I was terrified of in fact wrote themselves smoothly and turned out well once I stopped playing games and avoiding them. It’s necessary to paint yourself into a corner: that’s when you find out how far you can leap.
Earlier I spoke of a writer as being like a smuggler working two frontiers. The smuggling image may seem a romantic one for someone who sits at a table for hours turning sentences back and forth. But good writing always carries an element of danger, if only by showing us the world as we haven’t seen it before. The hardest, most important part of the process, where many talented and determined writers fail, is that they don’t keep in mind how a successful smuggler is always searching for previously unavailable goods. Not enough writers ask themselves if there’s anything really fresh, or downright new, in what they’ve written, if it isn’t ground that’s been gone over thoroughly by many who came before. If so, you must be courageous enough to discard the parts that are familiar and find some way, even in a short story about a couple who break up, to bring us something we’ve never read, whether it’s in the characters or the situation or your approach. Most people aren’t brutally self-critical enough in this regard, but it’s what makes a work timeless and energetic, and why the best writing of the past still looks vibrant.
Lastly, the question we all face, at the heart of becoming a writer, is why? Why do it? It does set you free—no matter how frustrating the writing is, or what your external circumstances are, no matter how profound your financial defeat, it turns you into a free man. I know that I’ve never gotten over the enchantment of language, the intoxication of those rare moments when earth and sky upend and it all suddenly appears on the page, at least for a sentence or two.
I’ve had other rewards. My journalism let me see the world and forced me to be gregarious in ways that even a vast income never would have, and this plurality of human experience deepened my writing. Had I never done that, never been able to publish novels, I’d have gone on writing poetry and probably stories anyway, and not just from habit. Ultimately, to write forces you to understand what you did not understand before, to confront yourself and find out who you are and what you know of the world outside you and the world in you. It liberates you from the ghastly prison of self and enables you to see the hills and the sea and the light on the buildings and the people around you as you never have, by writing them down. And if you work hard enough, and trust your imagination enough, you can remake those myriad ever-multiplying worlds in a language that’s your own and no one else’s.
This is, I believe, as close as the human can ever come to the divine—not in the sense of wisdom or power, but in the sense of play. And if your words are at all original, the truths released by them will be original too, and there on the written page you will find the world new again.
Which seems, to me, reason enough to be here.
Monday, December 19, 2011
Old Guidebooks
Any connoisseur of travel eventually becomes a connoisseur of guidebooks. To be in a new place is to face one's ignorance, and a great guidebook can not only educate you but actually change your life. Yet few books age more quickly—who would ever pay cover price for a guide to Paris from five years ago?
But early in travel I learned that the truly out-of-date guide, obsolete for thirty or even a hundred and thirty years, can be invaluable. They are the most detailed time capsules we possess about the world as it actually was. I can page through a 1962 guide to the Bahamas and there my childhood lingers, isle by happy isle. Or I can open a 1929 Baedeker to Egypt, the decades peel away, and a vanished Cairo is revealed—right where it always was, hiding under the present.
Mass tourism began (1841) with Mr. Thomas Cook in England organizing a long day's excursion; but guidebooks for the bold voyager came before. By the mid-19th century, these guides had enlarged the Grand Tour to include the farthest reaches of Empire—for touristic and imperial motives always follow each other like pickpockets.
The three best series of guides can still be bought for a few dollars per volume at used bookshops. Delved into over and over through the years, in the field they for me proved wiser and just as useful as their up-to-date colleagues. They also remind me how travel is always as much an experience of time as space.
Les Guides Bleus (The Blue Guides) originated in France and, naturally, concentrate in most detail on its pleasures, mile by mile; they soon appeared in English for the benefit of the more savage traveler. Their format, even between the world wars, remained pure 19th century—miraculous mini-encyclopedias of small print, dense maps, and compression—but their mood was a weird mix of the concerned local who doesn't want you to wander astray and the urbane intellectual who hopes to elevate your sensibilities. Their rich blue covers are still lovely.
Favorite moments? A 1923 guide to the Rhone Valley kindly reminds the traveler doing suggested routes "in an opposed direction" to make all necessary changes, "notably those in respect to right and left, or going up and coming down." The 1919 guide to Loire chateaus contains photos of every village, with arrows telling you which turn to take for where, determined to make sure you won't get lost.
The John Murray Handbooks, from London, began in 1820 when that publisher adventurously hired an experienced lady traveler to produce a handbook of "the Continent." It was such a success that Murray followed with a series that embraced all Europe and also included Egypt, Russia, Hong Kong, Australia, and dozens of countries in-between. Bound in a soft, gold-lettered red with dozens of foldout maps of stunning accuracy and usability, the Murray's guides set a standard never surpassed. They were written by experts, updated every few years, and extremely thorough. (The 1912 Ireland guide is over six hundred pages of tiny print; thirty are devoted to angling.) Editorial policy was to answer any question that might arise. The "Handbook for India, Burma, and Ceylon" began as four huge volumes written by a Captain Eastwick over thirty years; in the end it became one book nearly a thousand pages long, and is still the best guide to the subcontinent.
Though they followed Murray (the bindings even look alike), the original Baedekers—which began in 1832 and ended in 1944 when the Leipzig factory got bombed—have become a synonym for the detailed, exhaustive guide. A family business, Baedeker grew to include 78 titles in English, French, and German. They provide a handy vista of travel habits. The French Riviera had its own enormous volume; the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Alaska all got lumped together. Baedeker followed Murray's practice of assuming (until WWII) that people journeyed to experience and to learn, not to buy and consume. They are written in a formal, dry, witty prose that has aged well (on Naples: "The traveller is often tempted to doubt whether such a thing as honesty is known here.") even if the inch-by-inch approach can tire. Like Murray, they have a lordly, impartial incorruptibility which is now sadly obsolete.
But early in travel I learned that the truly out-of-date guide, obsolete for thirty or even a hundred and thirty years, can be invaluable. They are the most detailed time capsules we possess about the world as it actually was. I can page through a 1962 guide to the Bahamas and there my childhood lingers, isle by happy isle. Or I can open a 1929 Baedeker to Egypt, the decades peel away, and a vanished Cairo is revealed—right where it always was, hiding under the present.
Mass tourism began (1841) with Mr. Thomas Cook in England organizing a long day's excursion; but guidebooks for the bold voyager came before. By the mid-19th century, these guides had enlarged the Grand Tour to include the farthest reaches of Empire—for touristic and imperial motives always follow each other like pickpockets.
The three best series of guides can still be bought for a few dollars per volume at used bookshops. Delved into over and over through the years, in the field they for me proved wiser and just as useful as their up-to-date colleagues. They also remind me how travel is always as much an experience of time as space.
Les Guides Bleus (The Blue Guides) originated in France and, naturally, concentrate in most detail on its pleasures, mile by mile; they soon appeared in English for the benefit of the more savage traveler. Their format, even between the world wars, remained pure 19th century—miraculous mini-encyclopedias of small print, dense maps, and compression—but their mood was a weird mix of the concerned local who doesn't want you to wander astray and the urbane intellectual who hopes to elevate your sensibilities. Their rich blue covers are still lovely.
Favorite moments? A 1923 guide to the Rhone Valley kindly reminds the traveler doing suggested routes "in an opposed direction" to make all necessary changes, "notably those in respect to right and left, or going up and coming down." The 1919 guide to Loire chateaus contains photos of every village, with arrows telling you which turn to take for where, determined to make sure you won't get lost.
The John Murray Handbooks, from London, began in 1820 when that publisher adventurously hired an experienced lady traveler to produce a handbook of "the Continent." It was such a success that Murray followed with a series that embraced all Europe and also included Egypt, Russia, Hong Kong, Australia, and dozens of countries in-between. Bound in a soft, gold-lettered red with dozens of foldout maps of stunning accuracy and usability, the Murray's guides set a standard never surpassed. They were written by experts, updated every few years, and extremely thorough. (The 1912 Ireland guide is over six hundred pages of tiny print; thirty are devoted to angling.) Editorial policy was to answer any question that might arise. The "Handbook for India, Burma, and Ceylon" began as four huge volumes written by a Captain Eastwick over thirty years; in the end it became one book nearly a thousand pages long, and is still the best guide to the subcontinent.
Though they followed Murray (the bindings even look alike), the original Baedekers—which began in 1832 and ended in 1944 when the Leipzig factory got bombed—have become a synonym for the detailed, exhaustive guide. A family business, Baedeker grew to include 78 titles in English, French, and German. They provide a handy vista of travel habits. The French Riviera had its own enormous volume; the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico and Alaska all got lumped together. Baedeker followed Murray's practice of assuming (until WWII) that people journeyed to experience and to learn, not to buy and consume. They are written in a formal, dry, witty prose that has aged well (on Naples: "The traveller is often tempted to doubt whether such a thing as honesty is known here.") even if the inch-by-inch approach can tire. Like Murray, they have a lordly, impartial incorruptibility which is now sadly obsolete.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Where'd You Get That Afterlife?
For years I had an instinct I might write a novel about the afterlife. Before beginning The Land of Later On I felt, dutifully, that I ought to do a bit of research. You see the problem.
My favorite research involves identifying stuff I don’t have to read. I could immediately dismiss Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; I’d encountered them in college, and I figured those two masterpieces of the hereafter would now only get in my own pedestrian way.
More serious a threat were several superb cultural histories of Heaven or Eternity or whatever you feel comfortable calling the Great Perhaps. Yet the closer I got to my blank opening page, the more I realized I didn’t want to coagulate my novel with anybody else’s ideas of what happens after we die. My guess was surely just as good as theirs, wasn't it?
I also hoped to write a novel that might prove as funny as it was (with luck) poetic.
What clinched my aversion to homework was an accidental find at a flea market. For a quarter I splurged on a pamphlet from the 1930s, with a title like Is There Life After Death? Finally, I thought, we’re getting somewhere.
In fact, I’d just thrown away twenty-five cents. It took a while for the author to get to his point: there isn’t any afterlife, because there’ve been so many gazillion people since the dawn of time, there wouldn’t be room for them all. He did the math to prove it, too. This argument had so many holes I didn’t know where to start. Anyway, when it came to imagining the afterlife, I soon realized I was better off without somebody else’s site plan or map or ideology.
So I wrote The Land of Later On. Here’s how my narrator, Kip, first explains the setup:
“Infinite in space and time, its denizens are those who choose to stay. You can occupy any place and era you like, for as long as you like. You can set up headquarters in an idyllic Mediterranean port and stroll out across the cobblestones of 14th century Mecca, or 19th century San Francisco, or the airborne walkways of next century’s Singapore. You can have breakfast on one continent in one century and lunch on another in another. For some people this is heaven; others never go anywhere. Why risk an unpredictable journey? A lot can go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Kip (a New York jazz pianist whose career ended a while ago) isn’t in search of any of this. He’s on an improvised quest to find the love of his life, Lucy, who died four years before he committed suicide. And he doesn’t care how many centuries and continents it takes—if she’s still waiting for him, somewhere in the afterlife.
My favorite research involves identifying stuff I don’t have to read. I could immediately dismiss Dante’s The Divine Comedy and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress; I’d encountered them in college, and I figured those two masterpieces of the hereafter would now only get in my own pedestrian way.
More serious a threat were several superb cultural histories of Heaven or Eternity or whatever you feel comfortable calling the Great Perhaps. Yet the closer I got to my blank opening page, the more I realized I didn’t want to coagulate my novel with anybody else’s ideas of what happens after we die. My guess was surely just as good as theirs, wasn't it?
I also hoped to write a novel that might prove as funny as it was (with luck) poetic.
What clinched my aversion to homework was an accidental find at a flea market. For a quarter I splurged on a pamphlet from the 1930s, with a title like Is There Life After Death? Finally, I thought, we’re getting somewhere.
In fact, I’d just thrown away twenty-five cents. It took a while for the author to get to his point: there isn’t any afterlife, because there’ve been so many gazillion people since the dawn of time, there wouldn’t be room for them all. He did the math to prove it, too. This argument had so many holes I didn’t know where to start. Anyway, when it came to imagining the afterlife, I soon realized I was better off without somebody else’s site plan or map or ideology.
So I wrote The Land of Later On. Here’s how my narrator, Kip, first explains the setup:
“Infinite in space and time, its denizens are those who choose to stay. You can occupy any place and era you like, for as long as you like. You can set up headquarters in an idyllic Mediterranean port and stroll out across the cobblestones of 14th century Mecca, or 19th century San Francisco, or the airborne walkways of next century’s Singapore. You can have breakfast on one continent in one century and lunch on another in another. For some people this is heaven; others never go anywhere. Why risk an unpredictable journey? A lot can go wrong if you don’t know what you’re doing.”
Kip (a New York jazz pianist whose career ended a while ago) isn’t in search of any of this. He’s on an improvised quest to find the love of his life, Lucy, who died four years before he committed suicide. And he doesn’t care how many centuries and continents it takes—if she’s still waiting for him, somewhere in the afterlife.
Monday, December 5, 2011
Talking to Myself
Like many writers, I always depended on routine. Discipline is too high-minded a word for the unvarying schedule that kept me going, kept me producing—three decades, seven books, hundreds of magazine articles, innumerable poems. I’d rise early and get to my desk early; I’d stay there, happily, until the day’s requisite pages were done.
Each writer finds his own approach, and I don’t think it matters more than whether we wash our knees first or our elbows. My method was always the same: initial two drafts handwritten in ink, later drafts typed. I avoided doing early stages on a computer because electronics make it too easy to revise midstream, to second-guess the imagination.
That all changed a few years back. Otherwise very healthy, in my late forties I got hit with progressive (so-called) multiple sclerosis. This is not the version of the disease you read about, with drug therapies that often work. Mine, relatively scarce, eats away at you as insistently as a bulldozer; there’s no off switch. I’m now utterly wheelchair-bound, tire very quickly, and can no longer scribble legibly by hand. I can type with only one finger.
As a result I’ve had to transform entirely the way I write. Superficially, the solution seems a 21st-century privilege of technology. In fact, it’s rather old-fashioned.
Three years ago, while trying to figure out my future, I was faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem: to assemble a 700-page compilation of the finest World War II reporting by my father, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent. Beyond the difficulty of selecting the right articles, they needed to be fed into my laptop, and I had only six months. My finger was going to wear out rapidly; scanning smudged photocopies of old newspapers just got me gobbledygook; and I couldn’t afford a typist.
I described my quandary to a friend, along with the hope that in some glowing, rosy tomorrow I’d be able to talk to my screen and watch words appear. He waited for me to finish basking in my dream, then said, “Wake up.” (His phrase was more vivid.) “You can buy the program this afternoon, cheap. At any computer shop. Even a dummy can work it.”
He was right, of course, and pouring someone else’s words into a machine was a foolproof way to learn the tricks and teach the software the vagaries of my voice. But could I compose a new novel? My sole experience with trying to speak creative thoughts aloud, twenty-five years earlier, had been disastrous. On assignment in Oman, I’d dictated several cassettes’ worth of immortal travel impressions then returned to Manhattan to find them full of useless malarkey. A verbal altitude sickness, embarrassingly brought on at sea level.
By sheer luck my novel (The Land of Later On, about a jazz pianist improvising his way through the afterlife) was narrated in the first person, so it was natural to talk my way through. The chapters were short, also, which seemed right for the story—though now that it’s done and published, I can’t help wondering if this may have been due to my slightly hindered breathing.
I’m still troubled by how, because my voice changes throughout the day, the dictation accuracy level veers wildly. Because I haven’t formally established myself to the software as separate blabbermouths depending on the time, it can’t know which me is talking. (This is doubtless specific to my situation.)
The result is that usually I have to repeat at least part of each sentence, sometimes a whole clause, to get it right. At first I tried to storm on ahead, to preserve momentum; but when I’d go back to a paragraph, even moments later, I found I couldn’t remember what I meant nor reconstruct it. It’s normal to be unable to decipher bits of your own handwriting days later, but the frustration is far more profound when you can’t make sense of what you just said. It took me a while to get used to the annoyance of having to speak the same line over and over and over again, for almost anything becomes ludicrous when repeated so many times verbatim. The temptation is to change a few words, simply to preserve sanity.
My great advance was to switch from using a headset (I’ve wrestled with numerous models, and always lost) to a futuristic black microphone on a silver pedestal. As a few helpful colleagues have reminded me, I’m now in august company. John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, and Alfred Hitchcock all dictated masterpieces—though the age of the private secretary has given way to the age of the personal computer.
I have no excuse.
Each writer finds his own approach, and I don’t think it matters more than whether we wash our knees first or our elbows. My method was always the same: initial two drafts handwritten in ink, later drafts typed. I avoided doing early stages on a computer because electronics make it too easy to revise midstream, to second-guess the imagination.
That all changed a few years back. Otherwise very healthy, in my late forties I got hit with progressive (so-called) multiple sclerosis. This is not the version of the disease you read about, with drug therapies that often work. Mine, relatively scarce, eats away at you as insistently as a bulldozer; there’s no off switch. I’m now utterly wheelchair-bound, tire very quickly, and can no longer scribble legibly by hand. I can type with only one finger.
As a result I’ve had to transform entirely the way I write. Superficially, the solution seems a 21st-century privilege of technology. In fact, it’s rather old-fashioned.
Three years ago, while trying to figure out my future, I was faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem: to assemble a 700-page compilation of the finest World War II reporting by my father, George Weller, a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent. Beyond the difficulty of selecting the right articles, they needed to be fed into my laptop, and I had only six months. My finger was going to wear out rapidly; scanning smudged photocopies of old newspapers just got me gobbledygook; and I couldn’t afford a typist.
I described my quandary to a friend, along with the hope that in some glowing, rosy tomorrow I’d be able to talk to my screen and watch words appear. He waited for me to finish basking in my dream, then said, “Wake up.” (His phrase was more vivid.) “You can buy the program this afternoon, cheap. At any computer shop. Even a dummy can work it.”
He was right, of course, and pouring someone else’s words into a machine was a foolproof way to learn the tricks and teach the software the vagaries of my voice. But could I compose a new novel? My sole experience with trying to speak creative thoughts aloud, twenty-five years earlier, had been disastrous. On assignment in Oman, I’d dictated several cassettes’ worth of immortal travel impressions then returned to Manhattan to find them full of useless malarkey. A verbal altitude sickness, embarrassingly brought on at sea level.
By sheer luck my novel (The Land of Later On, about a jazz pianist improvising his way through the afterlife) was narrated in the first person, so it was natural to talk my way through. The chapters were short, also, which seemed right for the story—though now that it’s done and published, I can’t help wondering if this may have been due to my slightly hindered breathing.
I’m still troubled by how, because my voice changes throughout the day, the dictation accuracy level veers wildly. Because I haven’t formally established myself to the software as separate blabbermouths depending on the time, it can’t know which me is talking. (This is doubtless specific to my situation.)
The result is that usually I have to repeat at least part of each sentence, sometimes a whole clause, to get it right. At first I tried to storm on ahead, to preserve momentum; but when I’d go back to a paragraph, even moments later, I found I couldn’t remember what I meant nor reconstruct it. It’s normal to be unable to decipher bits of your own handwriting days later, but the frustration is far more profound when you can’t make sense of what you just said. It took me a while to get used to the annoyance of having to speak the same line over and over and over again, for almost anything becomes ludicrous when repeated so many times verbatim. The temptation is to change a few words, simply to preserve sanity.
My great advance was to switch from using a headset (I’ve wrestled with numerous models, and always lost) to a futuristic black microphone on a silver pedestal. As a few helpful colleagues have reminded me, I’m now in august company. John Milton, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Henry James, and Alfred Hitchcock all dictated masterpieces—though the age of the private secretary has given way to the age of the personal computer.
I have no excuse.
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