Magic Hours (13 page)

But can one
learn
how to keep readers turning pages? Can one learn some magical method of “Building a Cast” of supporting characters, as one of Maass's subchapters is headed? “Needless
to say” Maass writes, “the more complex you make your secondary characters, the more lifelike and involving your story will be.” One can almost hear the scribbly note-taking accompanying that insight. Maass is not wrong; it is needless to say. But seeking to provide writers with some surefire method of injecting complexity into secondary characters seems rather difficult. How would one do this, if not intuitively—if not
naturally
? Well, let us try. Say I have just created a secondary character named Jake. Jake works at a zoo. He is overweight, conscious of his body and has no girlfriend. Okay. Complexity now. He was once kicked in the face. By a zebra. That Jake, he hates zebras. This is pointless, of course. Characters, along with their hang-ups and complexities, appear in the mind of a writer and are honed or dispatched accordingly. It is as simple and dreadfully complicated as that. Writers who are able to summon up a lot of interesting secondary characters have one of two things going for them: they have had a lot of life experience and met many interesting people, or they are imaginative swamis.

Maass's book is at its best while destroying certain tightly held notions of why writers do not succeed. Writers whose books have not broken through, Maass notes, “would rather put their faith in formulas, gossip, connections, contract language—
anything
but their own novels.” This is certainly true, but who can blame them? The powerful counter-argument is that dozens and dozens of writers (Joanna Scott, Brian Hall, Donald Harington, Gary Sernovitz, Wilton Barnhardt) have written brilliant, exciting, innovative
breakthrough
—style books and not yet bathed in the fountain of universal acclaim. I once asked a writer friend, whose first book had won an important literary prize, what that was like. He answered, “Like running around on a football field with a hundred other people and being the only one struck by lightning.”
Getting Struck by Lightning
is an ungainly title, and its
premise is rather cracked. Ultimately, though, its premise is no more cracked than that of
Writing the Breakout Novel.

Writing the Breakout Novel
is published by Cincinnati's own Writer's Digest Books, possibly the most sinister malefactor of Panglossian expectations in the literary world today. Some of its books, like Maass's, are useful. Most are pandects of stupidity. From
The Insider's Guide to Getting an Agent
to
The Writer's Book of Character Traits
to
Fiction Writer's Brainstormer,
Writer's Digest Books preys on hopefuls' dreams.
How to Write & Sell Your First Novel,
by the literary agent Oscar Collier and the freelance writer Frances Spatz Leighton, is no doubt something of a landmark book for these aspirants, as it sells them a vision not of publishing but publi$hing: “Publishing has become a $32 billion industry in the United States, and authors are beginning to appear on annual lists of America's biggest earners.” So quit your job and buy a boat, why don't you? “Writers,” we are told, “are continuing to move away from the typewriter toward computers.” And Model-Ts are beginning to roll down the cobbled streets of old Manhattantown. “A less promising development,” Oscar and Frances tell us, “has been the appearance of novels devoted almost entirely to extreme violence.” But first novels without such nasty bits still get published all the time. And what a feeling for the agent! “If I,” Oscar confides, suddenly ditching poor Frances, “can get such a charge from merely
discovering
a new novelist, think how much more you can benefit from
becoming
one.” Holy shit!

What does it take to write a saleable novel? Let us see: “a feeling for characterization,” “a passable plot,” and an “interesting and well-detailed setting.” What are the writer's chances at publishing his or her first novel? Oscar does some casual arithmetic and comes up with the following: “[Y]ou have a once in ten chance of getting published, unless you do it yourself.” I would say that this is off the mark by a factor of, oh, two million or so.
Oscar/Frances then give us the success stories: “You couldn't get more obscure than John Wessel who worked in a bookstore.” But Wessel sold his book to Simon and Schuster for $900,000. And since then Wessel has written... uh, let us move on. Tom Clancy! The admittedly interesting publishing history of
The Hunt for Red October
is addressed at length, and then: “Novels continued to explode out of Clancy.” Alack, yes. But what is a novel, Oscar? “A novel is a story. It's just a story. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. That's all there is and you can handle it.” This seems about as convincing and heartfelt as a Sigma Chi preparing a drunken coed for her first anal adventure. “Writing about what you know is fine, and writing what you only dream about in your mind is fine, too.” Everything is fine, in fact. How do you make characters sympathetic? “In many ways.” How do you make people sound natural in a novel? “How do real people talk? They talk like you. They talk like me.” But what about finding the time to write a novel? “Steven Linakis worked full time as a book-keeper, commuted long hours on the Long Island Railroad and still managed to write a first novel that earned him more than $200,000.” You know, Steven Linakis. He wrote... that book. That book that sold for $200,000.

Probably the most well known (and well bought) species of how-to-write book is authored by someone who has published a few successful works of fiction or nonfiction and decided to share with the world his or her incunabulum of literary secrets. Such books are often aridly titled, highly theoretical, exercise-driven, and contain generous tissue samples of other writers' prose to be peeled and vivisected until the student-reader knows why the passage “works.” Madison Smartt Bell's
Narrative Design
and Josip
Novakovich's
Fiction Writer's Workshop
are both fine and helpful examples, as is John Gardner's
The Art of Fiction,
an oak-solid Nuts & Boltser that is an interesting companion to his more philosophical
On Becoming a Novelist
.All of these books should be read, and not only by beginners. But this category breaks down into more Linnaean classification. Alongside the Nuts & Bolts how-to books of solidly accomplished writers, one finds what I will call the Tea & Angels how-to book. These are often deeply mystical affairs.

There is a place for mysticism when discussing writing, as much of the process is bloodcurdlingly strange. So many things happen in any given piece of writing that cannot be explained: hauntingly unintentional thematic echoes, unplanned characters who arrive as though by seance, moments all but impossible to describe to the nonwriter when one does not feel as though one is writing but
transcribing
.Amazing, all of it. But the majority of writing is not like this, and should not be discussed as though it is, or can be.

Natalie Goldberg's
Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
is more mystical than ten Sufis. Get the right pen, Goldberg advises, and the right notebook (“Garfield, the Muppets, Mickey Mouse, Star Wars. I use notebooks with funny covers”) and just go. Keep your hand moving, she coaches. There is another activity that requires you keep your hand moving. The important things are not to cross out, think, or get logical. And keep a big wad of Kleenex nearby. “Lose control,” she commands. Goldberg is St. Paul on the topic of the First Thought: “First thoughts have tremendous energy.... You must be a great warrior when you contact first thoughts and write from them.”

Goldberg tells us, “I teach the same methods over and over again.” Unfortunately, she also makes the same points over and over again. “What is said here about writing can be applied to running, painting, anything you love.” Indeed, writing is like cooking, she says at one point. Writing is like singing, she says at
another. Writing is like running, she says (again). Actually, writing is like writing. Where did Goldberg pick up this breathtakingly inclusive view of writing? “In 1974 I began to do sitting meditation.” Uh oh.

It is not merely that Goldberg is certifiable on the topic of writing; she is also a very cunning egomaniac, as when she describes with dewy wonder how a friend of hers once spent the afternoon reading over her (Goldberg's) old notebooks. “If you could write the junk you did then and write the stuff you do now,” this friend tells Goldberg, “I realize I can do anything.” Later on, she shares that she always brings a “date” to her readings: “I told the friend that as soon as I was finished reading, ‘Come right up to me, hug me, tell me how beautiful I looked and how wonderful I am.”' Of course, nearly all writers are needy monsters, but that is no reason for Goldberg to unwisely encourage this lamentable condition. And yet some of what Goldberg says is beautiful:

A lovely few lines of sentiment, and Goldberg is to be honored for sharing them. Equally salutary is her realistic appraisal of money and writing, so unlike Golden Parachutes and the troughs of lucre they promise: “I feel very rich when I have time to write and very poor when I get a regular paycheck and no time to work at my real work.” One begins to like Goldberg—with qualifications, absolutely—but, all the same, one really begins to admire her spirit and goofiness but then she says something like “If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you” and you bow your head.

In
Bones's
epilogue, she describes the day she finished writing the selfsame book and going to a local cafe: “I looked at everyone, spoke to no one, and kept smiling: ‘I've finished a book. Soon maybe I can be a human being again.' I walked home relieved and happy. The next morning I cried. By the afternoon I felt wonderful.” Reading this book feels a little like being in a long, doomed relationship with a manic-depressive. One also feels ruthlessly certain that, despite the fact that it has sold well over 150,000 copies, no one who ever read
Writing Down the Bones
became a writer by anything but sheer accident.

Of well-known how-to-write books by established authors, Anne Lamott's
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
is, despite her healingly mild approach, the most fun to read. The title comes from a story out of Lamott's childhood. Her brother, overwhelmed by a grade-school writing project on birds, despaired of his ability to finish it. Lamott's father put his arm around the boy and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” Perhaps one feels a small temptation to snigger at this advice—how easy it is to imagine these words stitched on a throw pillow—but this temptation should be fought, for a simple reason: like much of what is found on throw pillows, it is memorable and quietly true.

Bird by Bird
's introduction offers a portrait of Lamott's father, himself a writer, who died early, of a stroke, at fifty-five. Lamott's first novel, published when she was twenty-six, concerned a family coming to terms with its patriarch slowly dying. Intended as a gift to the man, it was written as he succumbed. Not having read the book, I have no idea if it is any good. Having read Lamott's introduction, with its description of a dying father weakly raising his fist to his daughter as new pages are delivered, I can say I never want to: it could not be as good as that image, or as beautiful.

Like Natalie Goldberg, Lamott has a marked fondness for magical mystery tours (“December is traditionally a bad month
for writing”) but she is tougher, funnier, and more honest. Her admission of why she writes (“I am completely unemployable”) may not be helpful, exactly, but it moved at least one reader to put down the book and laugh with warm recognition. Evidently, Lamott teaches quite a lot, and I was on guard for the moistly encouraging tone that I would imagine many career creative writing teachers are, for their humanity's sake, forced to adopt. But getting published, Lamott writes, “will not open the doors that most of [her students] hope for. It will not make them well.” (To indulge, briefly, in further autobiography my first published book has just appeared in stores. The last year of my life—the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes—ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up living with new diseases.)

One learns many things about Anne Lamott in
Bird by Bird
. Quite likely, one learns far too much. We meet her friends Carpenter and the gay Jesuit priest Tom and Ethan Canin and a friend who died—far too young—of breast cancer. Lamott's son, Sam, keeps popping up, too, often to say something enchantedly cute, such as when he decides that night air “smells like moon.” One or two instances of this would have been tolerable, but being held at parental gunpoint by Lamott so many times grows irritating.

However, a good deal of what Lamott says is terrific; she rewards you for hanging in there. Much of the beauty of writing is, she writes, “the beauty of sheer effort.” A whole chapter titled “Shitty First Drafts” argues, hilariously so, for the necessity of such drafts. Another chapter, about her multiple failures to “fix”
a novel that seemed obdurately resistant to fixing (meanwhile her money was running out) is not only useful and heartening but undeniably wrenching. “To be a good writer,” she says, “you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care.” Elsewhere she notes that writing “is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.” In recounting a workshop that saw a good writer suddenly, viciously assault a bad writer after the class had offered the bad writer some patronizing praise, Lamott refuses any pat conclusions. Admirably refusing to criticize the good writer for her attack, she judges only that “you don't always have to chop with the sword of truth. You can point with it, too.” She brilliantly and, I believe, accurately diagnoses the sort of student writer who routinely rips the spinal column from his classmates as a heathen seeking “pleasure that is almost sexual in nature.” Less terrific is some of her advice: