The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life (Kindle Single) (6 page)

When the fellowship was over on the first of May, I packed up my manuscript and drove away. I cried all the way to the Sagamore Bridge. I knew I was leaving behind one of the greatest experiences of my life. I will forever miss what I had there: the endless quiet days, the joy of living a hundred feet from my new best friend, the privilege of getting to stay inside the fog of my own imagination for as long as I could stand it without anyone asking me to come out. It might not have been a realistic life, but dear God, it was a beautiful one.

* * *

WHEN I WAS TWENTY,
I published my first short story in
The Paris Review
. An agent called me soon after and asked to take me on as a client and I said yes, though I didn’t have another story that was any good at all. Now, seven years later, I arrived from Provincetown at her office in New York with my novel in a box. I had borrowed money to make the drive home to Nashville, but I wasn’t in any hurry to get there. My agent had told me that the market for first fiction wasn’t what it used to be. (Note: This is what agents say. It’s probably what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s agent said when he brought in
This Side of Paradise
.) “But I’m young!” I said cheerfully. (Note: Young is always in fashion for debuting novelists. I was twenty-seven.) “You weren’t exactly packing up your college textbooks yesterday,” my agent said. (Fitzgerald was twenty-three.)

When I arrived home four days later, my mother came out to the driveway to meet me. An editor at Houghton Mifflin had bought
The Patron Saint of Liars
for $45,000. 

For the first time in my life, I was going to have money (paid out over three years in four installments), and the only thing I could think of to buy was a new air conditioner for my car. It had been out for two years. Now that I had a book contract and an advance on the way, I went to a mechanic. He said the air conditioner was low on coolant, a problem that was resolved for fifteen bucks. Somehow, that’s the detail of selling my first book that I always remember.

The question that people are likely to ask me (after I’ve politely declined to write their book for them) is how to get an agent. Obviously, I’m not the best person to address this question, since my agent found me just moments after the end of my childhood and we have been together happily ever since. Still, there are a few things I’ve learned along the way: My best piece of advice is to finish the book you’re writing, especially if it’s your first book, before looking for an agent. Most agents will tell you the same thing, unless you’ve already published half of said unfinished book in
The New Yorker
. Writers need agents these days. Not only are rights getting more and more complicated in this electronic age, but for the most part publishing houses no longer have slush pile readers. Agents now do the work of sifting and sorting the unsolicited manuscripts themselves. I was recently doing a book signing when someone came up in the line and asked me how to get an agent. You’d think I’d have a pat answer down for this one, but it always stumps me. Fortunately, my friend Niki Castle was standing close by and I turned the question over to her. Niki had worked at International Creative Management in New York for four years, and I thought her advice was excellent. She told the woman to go to one of the online agent sites that list agents who are looking for new clients, and then follow their submission guidelines
to the letter
. If they ask for a twenty-page writing sample, do not send in twenty-two pages. “The most basic infractions of the guidelines can mean your work may never get read,” Niki said.

Do not assume that finding an agent or getting published is something that automatically happens to well-connected insiders. I have sent my agent countless potential clients over the years, ones I believed were worthy, and I think she’s signed three of them. Publishing is still a market-driven enterprise, so an agent wants to find a great writer as much as the writer wants to find a great agent. But no agent takes on a client as a favor to someone if they really don’t like the book and don’t think they can sell it. Therefore, I suggest focusing your energy on the part of the equation you control: the quality of your work. You can also try to publish your work in general-interest or literary magazines in the hope that an agent will find you. (It worked for me.) If you try that route, I have two pieces of advice: First, read the magazine you’re submitting to. If you aren’t willing to read several back issues of
Granta
or
Tin House
,
then you have no business sending them a story. Magazines really do have personalities, and you should be able to figure out if your story might fit in. Second, if you have one really good, perfectly polished story—wait until you have three or four. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a letter from the editor saying she liked this one but it wasn’t quite right and now she’d like to see something else. That’s a very depressing letter to receive if you don’t have anything else to send.

At every stage of writing a book, there is a sense of
If only
… If only I could find the time to write and if only I could figure out the third chapter and if only I could get my book finished. If only I could find an agent. It only some editor would buy my book. If only I could get a good publicist. If only the book would get reviewed. If only they would do more promotion. If only it would sell. It goes on like this forever, until you’re ready to start another book and kick off the cycle all over again.

After my book sold, I went to Boston and got dressed up to meet the people at Houghton Mifflin. My editor took me to lunch at the Ritz and we ate crab cakes and drank martinis. This was twenty years ago, and at the time it felt like something that must have happened twenty years before. I’ve always thought that book publishing was an old-fashioned business, and Houghton Mifflin, back in their long-gone warren of interconnected houses, seemed one step removed from Leonard Woolf’s Bloomsbury.

* * *

I’VE BEEN AT THIS
writing job for a long time now, and yet for the most part I still solve my problems in the same ways I first learned to solve them as a college student, a graduate student, a waitress. There are certain indispensable things I came to early, like discipline. But other things, like serious research, I came to later on in my career. I have never subscribed to the notion of writing what you know, at least not for myself. I don’t know enough interesting things. I began to see research as both a means of writing more interesting novels and a way to improve my own education. Case in point: I didn’t know a thing about opera, and so I figured that writing about an opera singer would force me to learn. Conducting research, which had never even occurred to me might be part of writing when I was young, has turned out to be the greatest perk of the job. I’ve read Darwin and Mayr and Gosse to get a toehold on evolutionary biology. I’ve floated down the Amazon in an open boat just to see the leaves and listen to the birds. I’ve called up the head of malaria research at the Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland and asked if I could spend the day following him around. He said yes.

As much as I love doing research, I also know that it provides a spectacular place to hide. It’s easy to convince myself that I can’t start to write my book until I’ve read ten other books, or gone ten other places, and the next thing I know a year has gone by. To combat this, I try to conduct my research after I’ve started writing, or sometimes even after I’ve finished, using it to go back and correct my mistakes. I try to shovel everything I learn onto the compost heap instead of straight into the book, so that the facts just become a part of my general knowledge. I hate to see a novel in which the author has clearly researched every last detail to death and, to prove it, forces the reader to slog through two pages describing the candlesticks that were made in Salem in 1792. 

No matter how far I venture outside my own experience, I also know that I am who I am, and that my work will always reflect my character regardless of whether or not I want it to. Dorothy Allison once told me that she was worried she had only one story to tell, and at that moment I realized that I had only one story as well (see:
The Magic Mountain
—a group of strangers are thrown together …) and that really just about any decent writer you can think of can be boiled down to one story. The trick, then, is to learn not to fight it, and to thrive within that thing you know deeply and care about most of all. I think that’s why Grace Paley was pushing us to be better people when we were still young and capable of change.

As much as I love what I do, I forever feel like a dog on the wrong side of the door. If I’m writing a book, I’m racing to be finished; if I’m finished, I feel aimless and wish that I were writing a book. I am diligent in my avoidance of all talismans, rituals, and superstitions. I don’t burn a certain candle or drink a certain cup of tea (not a certain cup nor a certain kind of tea). I do not allow myself to believe that I can write only at home, or that I write better when I’m away from home. I was once at a writers’ colony in Wyoming and the girl in the studio next to mine dragged her desk away from the window the minute we arrived. “My teacher says a real writer never has her desk in front of a window,” she told me, and so I dragged my desk in front of the window. Desk positioning does not a real writer make. I had a terrible computer solitaire problem once. I decided that my writing day could not begin until I won a game, and soon after that I had to win another game every time I left my desk and came back again. By the time I had the game removed from my computer I was a crazy person, staking my creativity on my ability to lay a black ten on a red jack. I missed computer solitaire every day for two years after it was gone. Habits stick, both the good ones and the bad. 

While I’ve had long periods of time when I’ve written every day, it’s nothing that I’m slavish about. In keeping with the theory that there are times to write and times to think and times to just live your life, I’ve gone for months without writing and never missed it. One December, my husband and I were having dinner with our friends Connie Heard and Edgar Meyer. I was complaining that I’d been traveling too much, giving too many talks, and that I wasn’t getting any writing done. Edgar, who is a double bass player, was singing a similar tune. He’d been on the road constantly and he was nowhere near finishing all the compositions he had due. But then he told me a trick: He had put a sign-in sheet at the door of his studio, and when he went in to compose, he wrote down the time, and when he stopped composing he wrote down that time, too. He told me he had found that the more hours he spent composing, the more compositions he finished.

Time applied equaled work completed. I was gobsmacked, and if you think I’m kidding, I’m not. It’s possible to let the thinking-about process become so complicated that the obvious answer gets lost. I made a vow on the spot that for the month of January, I would dedicate a minimum of one hour a day to my chosen profession. One hour a day for thirty-one days wasn’t asking so much, and I usually did more. The result was a stretch of some of the best writing I’d done in a long time, and so I stuck with the plan past the month of January and into the rest of the year. I’m sure it worked partly because I had the story in my head and I was ready to start writing, but it also worked because my life had gotten so complicated and I was in need of a simple set of rules. Now when people tell me they’re desperate to write a book, I tell them about Edgar’s sign-in sheet. I tell them to give this great dream that is burning them down like a house on fire one lousy hour a day for one measly month, and when they’ve done that—one month, every single day—to call me back and we’ll talk. They almost never call back. Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.

Ann Patchett
is the author of eight books, including
Bel Canto
, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, England’s Orange Prize, and the Book Sense Book of the Year and has been translated into more than thirty languages. Her most recent novel,
State of Wonder
,
is a
New York Times
bestseller. She is working on a collection of essays.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MELISSA ANN PINNEY (
www.melissaannpinney.com
)

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