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Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Unsolicited Advice from Jackson Connor to Jackson Connor

Interviewer: Leslie McGrath. Interviewee: Sabina Murray. From The Writer's Chronicle February 2012:

McGrath: Your first novel, Slow Burn, was published when you were twenty-one. How did that come to pass? Are the [sic] any similarities between being a young author and a child star?

Murray: Well, I didn't become a drug addict or a prostitute, but I'm not exactly Liz Taylor. When you publish that early, your peers are not rooting for you. That's one thing. And there are two treacherous holes one can fall into: first, there's the flash-in-the-pan, where you buy everyone drinks until the money dries up (let's say two weeks) and never publish again, and, second, there's the stuck-in-a-hole, where, although your first book was published when you were twenty years old, your subject matter and writing style remain remarkably unchanged deep into middle age. Or there's me, where your book is sent out, reviewed in a few places, you get your picture in Vanity Fair, but are still selling balloons on the sidewalk in order to make ends meet. Then ten years later, when your next book comes out, you find yourself telling people over the rims of pints that it's actually your second book. And this gets met with a "Really?" so frequently that you wonder if you're not making it up.
     I was a young college senior, I graduated at twenty, and the book was my senior thesis. I had the shocking good luck to have Valerie martin as my teacher and she sent the book on to her agent, who sold it. Nothing has ever been quite so easy since. What might have been an auspicious beginning turned out to be character building. But a I said before, no drugs and no prostitution, so I count myself rather blessed.
In On Writing, Stephen King discusses his early writing career, beginning, I believe, in his case, in the womb. After college, he taught writing, and he wrote like hell, and he published a couple things here and there, then he sold a manuscript for $200,000, and, well, you know the rest of the story. Or if you don't, this is it: he still writes like hell and publishes the hell out of his writing, and, if the story I made up is true, paid more than $200,000 for dinner with friends one time.

Anne Lammott in the chapter "False Starts" in Bird by Bird receives a letter from her editor beginning, "This is perhaps the hardest letter I've ever had to write" (86). Now, if she's anything like me, she's immediately thinking the letter is hard to write, because her editor doesn't know how to spell Pulitzer Prize. Come to find out, this book she'd been struggling with for two years just doesn't quite do it for the editor. So she struggles with it for another eight or nine months amid feelings of grief, fear, and humiliation. She fell in love with the book and this new draft and resubmitted it to her editor and flew out to talk to him about it. "But my editor said, 'I'm sorry.' I looked at him quizzically. 'I am so so sorry," he said. 'But it still doesn't work.'" That evening, as she describes it, sounds rough. But she immersed herself in the novel for a month, wrote, and wrote like hell, set a brand-new treatment off to her editor . . . "The book came out the following autumn and has been the most successful of my novels.

(I am not doing either of these authors justice. Lammott discusses this process in a lovely, hilarious, and brutal eight-page essay. The first 94 pages of King's memoir cover this epic and honest writer's early writing life.)

Norman Mailer high-fived himself when he got drafted and published The Naked and the Dead at age 25 -- I think it's his best work and one of the best war novels of all time.

Gertrude Stein got a famous rejection early in her career, suggesting, if I recall, that she learn the rules of our language before she attempt any further fictions in it.

Nick Flynn's dad failed at his attempts at the Great American novel, and this failure, in part, is at the heart of Nick Flynn's Another Bullshit Night in Suck City -- which creates, for me, complicated notions of the contemporary American novel.

How old was Henry Miller when he published Tropic of Cancer?

Some craft books, some collections of essays, some anthologies of writerly advice, offer writers eight, ten, thirty-three, fifty, or a hundred and one varying perspectives on how to get into the writing world, how and when to write, how to publish, how to respond to publication, how to keep one's head up despite set backs, but not so far up that one might think oneself above oneself. In short, it's a clusterfuck of advice.

And it's all good. Every ounce of it: from Hunter S. Thompson's job applications to Natalie Goldberg's Writing down the Bones to They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein.

There is no template for the writerly life, I believe. In fact, when we've read these books by writers about how to write, my spouse and I have often reflected that these writers are not telling us how to write, so much as telling themselves; more to the point, they're telling us How I Wrote -- whether it's how I wrote this story or this novel or this sentence or my complete oeuvre, the only thing they're telling us is: this worked for me . . . good luck. There is no one way to advance in this field. There is no way to know when you've made it. There is no end game, except to write. The only thing to do, the only thing that's real for a writer, is to write. And if that means losing your first novel because Borders shuts down, sit down and write. And write like hell.

2 comments:

  1. I do believe I will use this blog in my grad workshop. An anti-writing guide, writers guide. How to write, write well, still get screwed by the writing life, then to write some more. And write the more so well.

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  2. Wow! That's very kind of you, Nik. I've been trying to do all those things -- the "write well" part is still up in the air, and I've been doubting myself in new and interesting ways after this most recent chapter of King's _On Writing_, but maybe I'll address that another day.

    If your grad students do have a glance, let me know how they feel about it, or have them let me know -- I've been thinking a lot about different stages of "learning" to write.

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