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The Creative Writer's Survival Guide
Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist
By John McNally
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS
Copyright © 2010 John McNally
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-1-58729-920-9
Chapter One
The Decision To Become a Writer
This Writer's Beginning
I started writing my first book when I was in the seventh grade and finished it shortly before I entered high school.
It was a nonfiction book about old- time film comedians, and I spent a great deal of time sending letters to anyone who had ever been in movies with, or who had personally known, Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Charlie Chaplin, or the Marx Brothers. I was stunned when people actually began to respond.
Margaret Hamilton, whose most famous role was the Wicked Witch in The Wizard of Oz but who also appeared in an Abbott and Costello movie, sent me a polite, handwritten note along with an autographed photo of herself. Charles Barton, who directed a number of Abbott and Costello movies, including Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, sent a letter with his phone number, asking me to call him. (Afraid my voice would reveal I was a child, I never called.) Lou Costello's daughter, who had recently written a book about her father, sent a letter wishing me luck on my project. Moe Howard's son-in-law wrote back warning me not to use the name "The Three Stooges" in my book's title. Moe Howard's son-in-law! Never mind the menacing threat of litigation. I was beside myself.
I also wrote to a number of authors to ask technical questions, and, amazingly, they wrote back, too, including Leonard Maltin, who had yet to gain fame on Entertainment Tonight. I wrote to movie studios to inquire about permissions fees to reproduce photographs for my book; envelopes stuffed full of contracts began appearing in my parents' mailbox, and although the studios were asking for too much money, I was excited nonetheless to be receiving daily mail from Universal Studios, MGM, and even the defunct Hal Roach Studios, which must have been nothing more than a rented office in L.A.
During breaks from pounding out manuscript pages on the cast-iron Royal typewriter I had bought at a flea market in the sixth grade, I wrote to every major publisher in New York and asked for their guidelines. I sent letters to publishers in Illinois, too, figuring that I had an in with them since, minus three miserable months in Houston, I had lived my entire life just outside of Chicago. In no time at all, envelopes bearing the names of famous publishing houses began appearing in our mailbox. It was as if editors had been doing nothing but waiting for a letter from me! Using their royalty rates as my guide, I calculated how many books I would need to sell before I could buy a house for my parents. I tried not to let anyone know what I was doing, but a few days before graduating from eighth grade, I couldn't help telling girls I'd had crushes on, and so in my autograph book they wrote, "I can't wait to read your book!" and "Don't forget me when you're famous!"
Oh, no, I thought, I won't forget you. Ever!
I finished the book during the summer of 1979 and promptly began writing query letters to publishers, asking if they would care to see my book. I imagined bidding wars; I imagined my photo on the cover of People with the headline, "Young Author Secures Enormous Advance"; I imagined all those girls in grade school who'd ignored me calling me up to apologize for dismissing me as a snide, fat kid instead of seeing me for what I really was-a sensitive, misunderstood intellectual with a love for words. (In truth, I was a snide, fat kid, but I was willing to play the sensitive misunderstood intellectual role, if necessary.) What I hadn't imagined were letters from publishers telling me that they did not accept unsolicited manuscripts, and yet this was what I received, day after day: form letters (not even personal responses) informing me of their companies' policies. Having no idea what "unsolicited" even meant, I looked it up in the glossary of one of my books on publishing: "A story, article, poem or book that an editor did not specifically ask to see."
Unsolicited? If publishers didn't want to see my book, why were they so damned eager to send me their guidelines?
Before full-blown despair crushed me, a letter arrived from an editor at Harmony Books, asking to see the manuscript. This is it, I thought. Solicited! All you needed was one person who wanted your book to negate all those rejections. Who cared what Warner Books, Random House, or William Morrow thought? Harmony Books understood what I was trying to do; they saw something in my query letter that had piqued their interest; they knew, in short, that they had a goldmine on their hands. And so I waited-one week, two weeks, three weeks. It wasn't until week six that a letter from Harmony finally arrived. The first sentence began, "While your book is a fine first effort ..."
I stopped reading, not because of the rejection I knew was bound to follow. No, I stopped because of the editor's presumption. "First effort?" I yelled, enraged. "First effort?" I found a draft of my original cover letter. Nowhere-nowhere!-did it say that this was my first effort. Let us forget for a moment that I had typed the entire manuscript on erasable bond paper that smeared with the slightest touch, or that my signature at the bottom of the cover letter looked like a child's. Let's ignore that when I wanted to emphasize a phrase, I had flipped the lever that raised the ribbon so that I could type the words in red ink instead of black. The fact remained that I had not told Harmony Books that the book I had sent them was my first. So, where did they get off suggesting that it was?
That, at least, was what my thirteen-year-old self was thinking. The forty-four-year-old me is now amazed that someone actually asked to see the book in the first place and then took the time to write back. The rejection letter went on to say that they already had a film writer on their list-my old pen-pal Leonard Maltin-and that it wouldn't be fair to him to add yet another. It was a courteous letter, encouraging even, but they had dashed my hopes. I allowed myself to sulk for a day-but just for one day and no more. The next morning, I began thinking up new angles to pursue, new books to write, and I was determined to show all of them-everyone who had rejected me-that they were wrong to have done so. I was money in the bank! I was the next number one bestseller!
By the time I turned fourteen, I had been rejected by every major publisher in New York. I honestly can't think of a more valuable education for a writer-for this writer, at least-than what I put myself through. In this profession, failure isn't just a fact of life; it's a necessary part of the process. What I learned first-hand at fourteen was how hard it is to get your foot in the door; I learned how insurmountable it can be to get a book published. Instead of getting discouraged, I started to view myself in a new light-as a seasoned writer, as someone already on his way up.
It was Teddy Roosevelt who said, "It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
My childhood hero Evel Knievel often paraphrased the above quote at press conferences before jumping a few dozen school busses, crashing his Harley, and breaking half the bones in his body. Better to die, was Knievel's philosophy, than to live a quotidian existence. (Since Knievel could barely walk by the end of his life, you may want to take those inspirational words in stride.) As for me, I decided to keep daring greatly, all the while hoping for, in the words of Teddy Roosevelt, "the triumph of high achievement." It took a mere twenty-one years after the mass rejection of my film comedians opus and the writing of two unpublished novels before I saw the publication of my first book, a short story collection titled Troublemakers, in 2000. Ten years later, as I sit here typing this, I've written six more books, two of which remain unpublished as of today, but so far not a broken bone in my body, only stitches and bruises-and all of those, I'm happy to report, have pretty much healed.
Knowing Why
It's useful to know why you want to write so you can adjust your expectations accordingly. If you want to write short stories for your family and friends to read, that's great. If you want to write short stories with the hope of eventually publishing a book, that's great, too. If you want to write short stories so that you can become a millionaire ... okay, now we're running into some problems.
You get my point. Your expectations, your plans of action, even your daily writing habits: each of these will vary based on your ultimate goals for writing.
Between fourth grade and my sophomore year of college, I had entertained the idea of being a professional writer, but I grew up in a part of Chicago where no one I knew, except for my teachers, had gone to college, let alone become a writer. Although I knew as early as the fourth grade that I wanted to write, it wasn't until I took my first poetry-writing course in college that I realized that writing was something I wanted to dedicate my life to. But what did it mean to dedicate my life to writing?
For me, it meant doing everything I possibly could. I would go to grad school for writing; I would start sending my work out; I would spend my spare time reading when I wasn't writing. I was, in short, going to give myself a legitimate chance to make it as a writer.
I often joke that if I knew back then what I know now about how damned hard it would be or how many set- backs I would encounter along the way, I probably would have chosen a different occupation. I'm not serious, of course-I would still have pursued writing-but there's a nugget of truth in that I would have flinched at seeing how difficult it really was. The beauty of youth is ignorance. I wrote every short story as though it were going to appear in the Atlantic. I mapped out books as though Knopf and Viking were going to bid for them. In other words, my optimism sustained me. And when the story in question proved not to be destined for the Atlantic, I was already hard at work on another, certain that this one would be the one.
I knew why I wrote. I wrote because my life depended upon it. Not literally, of course. I wouldn't die if I didn't write. But I most definitely would be miserable. Unfulfilled. For lack of a better, more tangible way of putting it, writing is what nourishes my soul. There were lean times when I took other jobs, sometimes menial, sometimes merely mind- numbing, that didn't allow for much if any actual writing time, but even when I wasn't writing, I was writing in my head: imagining scenes, committing interesting details to memory, dreaming up plots for entire novels. During one particularly dark period, I was juggling three jobs at once and not writing a word. Then I joined a gym, forced myself to wake up at 4:30 in the morning so that I could exercise for at least an hour, and then return home to write before heading off to my day job. The schedule was grueling, and I didn't write much of anything worthwhile during that period, but I knew that I needed to provide an escape hatch from these jobs that had no meaningful connection to what I wanted to do with my life. The important thing was that I was writing. For me, writing was its own reward.
Where would-be writers run into problems is when their reasons for writing don't match their expectations. Years ago, I taught a proposal writing workshop for nonfiction book projects. One student had been commissioned by the community college that employed him to write a narrative of the school's history. Somewhere along the way he got it into his head that Random House or Scribner might be interested in such a book, and that, if he could only convince one of the big New York publishing houses to accept it, Hollywood was bound to come knocking. Clearly, the man was enthusiastic about his project, but his expectations were completely unrealistic. There wasn't anything particularly unique or distinctive about his school. He couldn't understand why I didn't think the book wasn't a bestseller in the making. I honestly don't believe that this fellow-a decent and nice man, I should add-had ever entertained the idea of being a writer before he was commissioned to document his school's history. The bug had bitten him, but which bug? The bug to become a writer, or the bug for fame? I doubt he ever asked himself why he wanted to pursue this project. Did it mean anything more to him other than fulfilling a latent desire to become a celebrity? At some point, his expectations derailed from the project's purpose, resulting in runaway delusions. By the end of the workshop, with his dreams of offers from Random House and Hollywood shot, his disappointment was palpable, yet if he hadn't lost sight of the project's original purpose and had dedicated himself to doing a good job on it, he might actually have gained a measure of satisfaction from it.
Do yourself a favor. Ask yourself why you want to write. Once you know the answer to that question, it'll be a lot easier to determine what your goals should be.
What Have You Ever Done That's Worth Writing About?
One night in a bar named Gabe's, while I was working toward my MFA, the drunk guy standing next to me wanted to know what my deal was. When I told him, he smirked and said, "What the hell have you ever done that you can write about? I used to jump out of airplanes. Have you ever jumped out of an airplane? How old are you, anyway?" On and on he went, until I walked away.
I have heard this same litany of questions, or a version of them, most of my writing life, the implication being that I've spent my life in school, so what could I possibly have to write about?
Few arguments get me as riled up as this particular one. I don't discount experience-experience is good, experience is useful-but what is experience, precisely, and what role does it play in the life of a fiction writer? The person who discounted my life experience is guilty of a fallacy in thinking that only big experiences, like jumping out of airplanes, constitute worthwhile experiences for a fiction writer. What about all those years of my life that preceded that moment in the bar? My mother grew up a sharecropper in the South and told me dozens of fascinating, bizarre, and gripping stories about her life. Granted, I wasn't there with her, but being raised by someone who'd gone through the things my mother had gone through certainly helped shape my sensibilities. And what of my own experiences? I lived through a trailer fire when I was four; our family stayed with relatives for over a year after the fire; I attended five different grade schools, because we moved a lot, so I experienced an almost constant fear as the "new kid"; my mother worked in a factory, and I went with her on more than one occasion to meet her coworkers; my father was a roofer, and I helped him put down fresh tar on apartment roofs more times than I'd care to remember; one of my aunts committed suicide; family members divorced and remarried; for ten years, and as early as the second grade, I spent most of my weekends helping my father sell a variety of junk at flea markets; in 1976, when I was in the sixth grade, I bought scalped tickets for an Elton John concert; I had crushes on girls in my classes; I was the second fattest kid in the seventh grade (I wouldn't allow myself to become the fattest); I fell in love in high school and subsequently had my heart broken; for a number of years, I sold bootleg concert T-shirts and (briefly) made more money than I knew what to do with; I was in fist-fights; our apartments were broken into; I was in the hospital with my mother when she died of cancer. Are these not experiences? Are these not worthy subjects to write about? Why do I need to jump out of a plane in order to qualify as a fiction writer?
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Creative Writer's Survival Guide by John McNally Copyright © 2010 by John McNally . Excerpted by permission.
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