Magic Hours

by Tom Bissell

  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.

  NUTS & BOLTS, TEA & ANGELS

  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:We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived.

  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 y
ou” 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:Write down all the stuff you swore you’d never tell another soul. What you can recall about your birthday parties?... Scratch around for details.... Write about the women’s curlers and with the bristles inside, the garters your father and uncles used to hold up their dress socks, your grandfathers’ hats, your cousins’ perfect Brownie uniforms.

  There is such a thing as too-specific guidance, and I fear it will take some time for anyone who has read Bird by Bird to write about a birthday party without mentioning all the hair curlers and garter socks and Brownie uniforms. Lamott simply beats one to the writing. Also, for a writer of such shrewdness, Lamott allows herself to get lost among some awfully simple terrain. A longish section intended to inspire beginners who do not know what to write about sees Lamott throwing out suggestions as unpromising as school lunches and carrot sticks. Yes, an ode to the carrot stick will get one writing, but Bird by Bird is not, I don’t think, intended for children but reasonably intelligent adults interested in writing. The whole question is beneath Lamott, and her suggestion is beneath her readers. Norman Mailer once said that, if a writer does not know how to get a character across the room, he is dead. I would append that: If a writer does not know what to write about, has no idea where even to begin, he was never alive to begin with.

  OLYMPUS

  “I do not think novelists—good novelists, that is—are altogether like other people.” This insight comes fifteen lines into Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art, which was published on Mailer’s eightieth birthday in January 2003. This sentence places us high upon the mountainside of a different sort of how-to-write book, the Olympus, which only rarely deigns to address the actual processes of solid fiction-making. Instead, it focuses on the philosophy of writing—again, how to live—enjoying frequent, rather stark expeditions into the joys and terrors of literature. Reading such books is not always easy; the mountain analogy is apt. One’s pack is too heavy the snow is thick, the guide is unforgiving, self-involved, but far too knowledgeable to ignore. One constantly feels as though one has to prove oneself worthy of his or her company.

  The Olympus is always the work of a highly esteemed writer who has elected—perhaps for money, perhaps because the writer believes he or she has something interesting to say—to set aside the scepter for a short while and share with fans and hopefuls how and why he or she writes and what a beginning writer can do to improve him- or herself. With their mandarin tone and necessary overstatements, such books routinely annoy and worry beginners. Beginners are probably right to be worried and annoyed, and it is no coincidence that the typical Olympus is not usually read by aspiring writers but rather by their authors’ fans and foes. The particles of their allure have altogether different electricity: the insights are less global and more personal, more spiritual and less emotional. Not surprisingly, the Olympus also tends to have a much longer shelf life than other how-to books, from E.M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel to Flannery O’ Connor’s Mystery and Manners to Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead. Joyce Carol Oates’s recent (and excellent) The Faith of a Writer will, I suspect, outlast a good deal of her other work.

  Mailer’s The Spooky Art was greeted by notably hostile reviews. Many critics charged that it was simply one big microwaved potluck
of Maileriana that contained only the stray spice of anything new. This charge was indisputably true, but some of us card-carrying Mailer fanatics are willing to read the man on topics as bleak as Madonna. (Indeed, some of us have read the man on Madonna.) Yes, Mailer devotees will be familiar with most of what appears in The Spooky Art. I will go perilously far out onto a limb, here, to say that, if only for its arrangement and augmentations, it is still very much worth perusal. Here is something:A man lays his character on the line when he writes a novel. Anything in him which is lazy, or meretricious, or unthought-out, complacent, fearful, overambitious, or terrified... will be revealed in his book.... [N]o novelist can escape his or her own character altogether. That is, perhaps, the worst news any young writer can hear.

  This is a reversal of the mysticism one encounters in a book such as Writing Down the Bones, which promises that unlocking the inner writer will release only lemon-scented elation. Mailer suggests that the inner life of a writer is a vast, terrible ocean of doubt and despair. The former view will make for happier workshops and pleasanter emotional weather, certainly, but it is not likely to encourage a writer to “settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” as Mailer summarized his own goals in 1958. (“And I certainly failed,” Mailer adds now, “didn’t I?”) There is much in The Spooky Art that few writers would be willing to say. “You can write a very bad book,” Mailer tells us (and as anyone who has read Marilyn or Ancient Evenings or Of Women and Their Elegance or An American Dream can tell you, he would know), “but if the style is first-rate, then you’ve got something that will live—not forever, but for a decent time.... Style is half of a novel.” Of writing in the first person, Mailer says, with his characteristic mixture of wisdom and buffoonery “It is not easy to write in the first person about a man who’s stronger or braver than yourself. It’s too close to self—serving. All the same, you have to be able to do it.” As for novel writing (I will hopefully assume he really means writing, as Mailer’s chief accomplishment lies in nonfiction, which is no small thing, whatever he may believe or wish to believe), “It may be that [writing] is not an experience. It may be more like a continuing relationship between a man and his wife. You can’t necessarily speak of that as an experience, since it may consist of several experiences braided together; or of many experiences braided together; or indeed it may consist of two kinds of experiences that are antagonistic to one another.” If this sounds confused, one suspects it is supposed to, and it is inversely stirring to see a writer of Mailer’s stature recklessly unable to come to terms with what, exactly, writing is.