Why We Write (7 page)

I still do movies. I had a movie come out in 2011, a big, corny, DreamWorks teenage action movie called
I Am Number Four
that I did under a fake name.

Persona of interest

It’s funny to me to use fake names. Being a writer is about creating public mythology, creating a writerly persona, as much as it’s about what you write.

There’s James Frey who goes home to his family, and there’s the public James Frey. Look at guys like Hemingway or Kerouac or Bukowski or Norman Mailer or Hunter Thompson. I’m willing to bet the person who was home with his family wasn’t the guy the public thought of as that person. These people had big public personas, and their public personas almost destroyed them. They got lost. They forgot that there’s a line between who you are at home and who you are in public.

At this point in my career there’s the public James Frey: bad
James Frey, notorious James Frey, egomaniac, arrogant James Frey. Who I am at home is different. I don’t need to swagger into my apartment and say I’m the best and the baddest. When I go home I’m just Daddy. I’m James, my wife’s husband.

In my personal life there are plenty of things I’m insecure about. I’m scared I’ll wake up someday and not have money to pay my bills. I get nervous at parties; I don’t like being around forty people at once. Pretty standard human bullshit.

I’ve had shitty things happen to me in my career—like getting eviscerated by Oprah on national TV, and having sixteen class-action lawsuits filed against me, and having a lawyer tell me, “You’re facing permanent financial Armageddon. You should think about moving to Florida or Switzerland or Monaco.”

But what scares me most is that something might happen to my kids. My wife and I had a second child who passed away. A son. That’s the most brutal experience ever.

Compared to losing a kid, losing a friend, having your heart broken—those horrific experiences as a writer are just bad days at work. Two thousand six was a bad year at work for me, but that’s all it was.

When I’m at the machine, when I’m James Frey the writer, all that evaporates. I have no doubt. I have no fear. Nobody can hurt me, nobody can say shit that means anything to me. When I’m in the act of writing it’s not ego, it’s just work, just struggle and challenge. I keep a pretty strict wall between those things. People get into trouble when that wall falls down.

My writing, me, all of it, is a big, long-running piece of performance art. The die has been cast. The mythology exists. Whether it lasts or not will be determined by how good the
books I write are. That’s the beauty of it: all the bullshit in the world, and all that really matters to me, to readers, to history, is, Are the books good enough? What I want is to do to other people what Henry Miller did to me.

Radical

As I was trying to teach myself to write the way I wanted to, I looked a lot at literary history. I tried to figure out what different writers I admired had in common with one another.

I looked at people like Baudelaire, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, Kerouac, Mailer, Thompson, Ginsberg, Bret Easton Ellis. When their writing first appeared nobody had seen anything like it. Take
On the Road.
How many road books existed before that? Billions.
Don Quixote
is a road book, two guys going on a trip. You have to radically reinvent not just how writing can be done, but how subject matter can be treated. You have to write great books, singular books that are absolutely unique and almost revolutionary and immediately identifiable as yours.

We think of Hemingway now and it’s just Hemingway. But when his books first came out—short, declarative sentences, tight, lean, easy to read, plot-intensive writing—it was radical. If you think about Kerouac, radical. Henry Miller, radical. Ginsberg, radical.

The best best of all

I’ve had some spectacular moments as a writer. It’s awesome the first time you see your book in a bookstore; the first time
somebody says, “Damn, dude, I love your books.” I love starting a book and finishing a book. There’s pure pleasure when you feel like you wrote a sentence that’s perfect for whatever it needs to be. I’ve had readings with thousands of people at them, I’ve sold ten or fifteen million books, I get to go on book tours around the world. At one point I was number one on both the hardcover and paperback
New York Times
bestseller lists.

You would think that would be the greatest moment. But it wasn’t.

The greatest moment—I might even start crying when I talk about it—was when I typed the last word of
A Million Little Pieces
. I looked at it and burst out into tears. I don’t know if there will ever be a moment in my writing career better than that.

I have a deal with myself. If I’m ever more concerned with what people are saying or with what my sales are or how many people show up at my readings than I am with writing shit that rocks people’s worlds, I’ll quit and find something else to do. I’m not going to be some seventy-five-year-old man who’s just cranking shit out because my ego won’t let it go.

Marvin Hagler just walked away from boxing one day. Everyone was asking, “When’s he coming back?” He’s never coming back. I have huge respect for the way he did that.

At some point I’ll just leave, and nobody will ever hear from me again.

I
dare you: read a page one like the one above and put the book down. Go ahead and try.

“Bet you can’t read just one” could be Sue Grafton’s brand identity. And—in addition to being a gifted writer who rightly prides herself on her rare dual achievements, rave reviews
and
blockbuster sales—Grafton
is
a brand. Fortunately for her millions of readers in twenty-eight countries and twenty-six languages, she’s a brand with twenty-five built-in sequels.

Published in 1982, when Grafton was a forty-two-year-old successful but unhappy screenwriter,
A Is for Alibi
was the first in her mystery series featuring female private investigator Kinsey Millhone.
A
wasn’t, in fact, Grafton’s first novel. She wrote
her first at age eighteen, and six more in quick succession, only two of which,
Keziah Dane
(1967) and
The Lolly-Madonna War
(1969), were published. After years at author boot camp, a.k.a. screenwriting, an irresistible mystery plot presented itself. Enmeshed in bitter divorce proceedings, Grafton found herself fantasizing about murdering or, at least, maiming, her soon-to-be ex-husband. Luckily for all of us, she turned those fantasies into a novel. Grafton has already completed
A
through
V
in the series. Never have so many wished so fervently to add a few more letters to the alphabet.

Sue Grafton

Why I write

I write because in 1962 I put in my application for a job working in the children’s department at Sears, and they never called me back.

Seriously: I write because it’s all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I’m stuck in the hell of writer’s block, which I’m happy to report only occurs about once a day.

My best time as a writer is any day, or any moment, when the work’s going well and I’m completely absorbed in the task at hand. The hardest time is when it’s not, and I’m not. The latter tend to outnumber the former. But I’m a persistent little cuss. And I soldier on.

I’m a persistent writer. And also a terrified one.

Most days when I sit down at my computer, I’m scared half out of my mind. I’m always convinced that my last book was my last book, that my career is at an end, that I’ll never be able to pull off another novel, that my success was a fleeting illusion, and my hopes for the future are already dead. Dang! All this drama and it’s not even nine a.m.

Writer’s block is a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to, since I come up against it so often. I used to try to power through, overriding the block by sheer force of will. Now I look at it differently. I see writer’s block as a message from Shadow, informing me that I’m off track. The “block” is the by-product of a faulty choice I’ve made. My job is to back up and see if I can pinpoint the fork in the road where I headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes I’ve misunderstood a character or his or her motivation. Sometimes I’ve laid out events in a sequence that muddies the story line. Usually I don’t have to retrace my steps more than a chapter or two, and the error is easily corrected.

I write largely by trial and error, which means I often run into dead ends. I pursue possibilities that peter out. I devise and abandon whole story lines because they turn out to be unusable.

To steady myself, I keep a series of journals for every novel I write. That’s where I allow myself to whine, wring my hands, fret, scheme, experiment, and occasionally pat myself on the back. Writing is tense and stressful work. My theory is that if I don’t own my dark side—my frustration, my fears, and the bumbling about I seem destined to do on any given day—my negative emotions will sabotage my ability to write.