Money was a little better, and Lisa and I rented a three-bedroom house with a yard for $375 a month. I continued typing 12th-Century Merovingian Latin manuscripts (hello out there, Dr. Geary!), correcting the grammar of Ph.D.s in English, and collecting wallpaper.
One day at the university I got a phone call from an editor named Sue Stone at Ace Books in New York City. They wanted to buy my first novel.
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One time I watched a writer named Kate Wilhelm get irritated at a bunch of beginning writers. They were all asking her the Question, the one professionals hear constantly from amateurs: How do I break in? How do I get published?
“You’re all so fixated on that first big sale,” she said. “But you know what you need to do, and either you’ll get published or you won’t. But let me tell you something: getting published is a thousand times easier than staying published.”
Those words haunt me to this day.
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II. Some Trivia
1. The manuscript originally submitted to Ace (Ariel’s first publisher) was a fairly long book—just shy of 200,000 words. I worked closely with my editor at the time, Sue Stone, to cut out around 45,000 words—180 manuscript pages. For art’s sake, you ask? Nope; it’s because at its submitted length Ariel would have cost X dollars to print, which meant they’d have to price the book at around $3.95 (ah, 1983) and sell Y number of copies, risking that a book by an unknown writer costing a little more than average (which was $2.95) would tank. But at 180 pages shorter they could sell the book for Z dollars and run less risk.
O, horrors! Poor stalwart Author, falling victim to those corporate Philistines who put commerce before Art. Right?
Well, guess what. Publishers ain’t charities. They can’t survive to offer you more books if they don’t make money. Guess what else. Ariel is a much better book for all the cutting.
I always have been a long-winded sumbitch (this is news to you, right?), and Ariel was a very talky book.7 Sue Stone acted in an editorial capacity now sadly rare in publishing: hands-on, page-by-page supervision, working closely with me.
I have only two regrets regarding the truncation of the manuscript. One is the loss of the chapter with George’s family.8 To be honest, its absence or presence hardly changes the face of literature, but I think the chapter, though a bit broad, is funny and adds to George’s character and the reasons Pete and Ariel go to such lengths to help him. I’m delighted to be able to restore it to this edition.
My other regret regarding truncation is the damage it did to the character of Shaughnessy Taylor. As Ariel now stands, Shaughnessy is the fall guy. People hate her. Originally she was more sympathetic—or so I like to think—but she arrived late in the novel and didn’t play all that active a role until the end. Shaughnessy is a time bomb I planted and hauled around until time for her to go off. Most of my characterization of her was through dialog—largely arguments and discussions with Pete. Ariel never did talk to her much; she could hear the ticking from the start.
But making Shaughnessy the heavy is too facile and convenient a dramatic device, and to this day I feel that I did not serve her well. I gave brief thought to using the opportunity of this edition to restore some of that deleted material and help her out, but ultimately I decided not to. Those deleted stretches of dialog really are irrelevant to the book’s engine and would bog it down.
I also would feel the need to revise them, if only because everything else in the book was revised a zillion times even after selling it. I’m uncomfortable with “special edition” books and movies wherein authors and directors revise earlier works. You could spend your whole career bettering a work. Once you’ve let it be released, in a certain sense it doesn’t belong to you anymore but to the world. Pour your heart into it, dress it up, walk it to school, and then let it go and let it take its knocks.9
My rule in this reprint was a modest restoration of omitted material and absolutely no repair beyond the aforementioned fixing of egregious errors. No sanding, staining, and sealing. Not even any dusting, unless you count proofreading it (again!). The novel stands, warts and all. It’s who I was and what I knew about writing at nineteen—well over half my life ago. Changing it to reflect what I’ve learned since (assuming I’ve learned anything, but let’s don’t go there) would do that nineteen-year-old a disservice. Besides, I’m not sure I could emulate Ariel’s narrative style now if I tried.10
So Shaughnessy remains a heavy. If I wrote Ariel now—well, I probably wouldn’t, but assuming I did—I would know how to characterize Shaughnessy more deftly and economically. I hope. And I’d probably figure out a way for Pete to end up with McGee anyhow. I dunno.
But I beg you go easy on Shaughnessy, Gentle Reader. We are flawed creations all, and her creator was still a child.
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2. Blowguns, I have since learned first-hand, have absolutely no stopping power. Oopsy.
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3. I had been a black belt in Tae Kwon Do for several years when I started Ariel. It was the only athletic activity I’d ever stuck with; I lived and breathed the stuff. My instructor for eight years was a man named Robert Marlin, and the character of Malachi Lee is partly based on him. He was a survivor of the first order, a good man and a great teacher, and he put me through the classic apprenticeship of someone who is talented but wild and needs breaking and control to realize his potential. He gave me a samurai sword as a going-away present for college. I still have a picture of us kicking the crap out of each other, here on my office wall. I’m looking at it as I type this.
Bob died of cancer some years back. He changed my life, and in a certain real sense he saves it nearly every day. I miss him terribly.
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4. I really did go hang gliding to research the attack sequence. It was just some runs down bunny hills on huge dunes in Nag’s Head, North Carolina (where the Wright brothers flew), but it was enough for me to get the feel. (One girl panicked, stiff-armed, stalled, and augered on in, as Tom Wolfe would say. She shattered her wrist under the trapeze bar. Owee.) I’m big on verisimilitude; I love little details that convince me a writer really has done what he’s writing about. You should have seen me running around the Empire State Building drawing maps and battle plans.
I also believe that “a writer who has been in a canoe in the rain,” as someone once said, “should know what it felt like to be on the Titanic.“11
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5. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. I attended two SCA meetings in college by way of research, much the way I attended a meeting of the Florida Speleological Society to research caving for my second novel, The Architect of Sleep. 12 That verisimilitude thing again. Years of martial-arts training was a big help in writing Ariel too.
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6. “The clock on the wall had frozen at exactly four-thirty” is a nod to one of my favorite post-apocalypse novels, Richard Matheson’s wonderful I Am Legend.
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III. Some Observations
1. It’s hard for me to reread Ariel.
My general habit is to write the day’s batch—sometimes straight into the computer, sometimes in longhand (always on yellow legal pad when I write longhand) and revising as I type it in. Next day I read what I wrote and make revisions on the printed page, then keep on writing, often in longhand. (I like to revise at coffee shops while I ply my brain with caffeine. There’s a reason for clichés, ain’t there?) I enter the revisions into the computer, usually making more changes as I do, then enter the new stuff, revising as I go. I print the new batch, and next day I repeat the process.13
When something affects a previous section—or a subsequent one; I don’t always write sequentially—I go to that section and change it to suit. When the manuscript is done, I revise it in toto, sometimes several times. Then I do a continuity edit, checking to be sure details are consistent and seeds are planted in the appropriate early places and germinate when they’re supposed to so that I can feel smug whe
n it all appears to have been born fully formed from my Zeus-like head. Sometimes that clever foreshadowing is put in after the fact.
Then I send it to my agent, and he says, Jesus, Steve, you are a long-winded sumbitch. Cut some of this, willya? I get pissed off and argue about the unassailibility of my esthetic sensibility, and then I go cut some of it because of course he is right. I send the revised version back to him, he sends it out to publishers. Assuming it sells (and you know what they say about them what assumes), my editor will want changes. I revise again, probably a couple of times. The manuscript is copy-edited, and because I used to make a living correcting the grammar of English professors, I read those changes and correct those corrections.14 The copy-edited and corrected manuscript is set in galleys, and I have to read those to find the things I missed, the corrections that were ignored, and the new errors introduced when the galleys were set.
So by the time the novel comes out I am sick unto my grave of reading it. Even if I am crazy in love with the damned thing, I’m so familiar with it that I have absolutely no idea what it says anymore. In an odd way, my effort to get my work into your life is also an effort to banish it from mine, because if you’re reading it, it means my work is done done done.
I’m sure I’ve read Ariel fifty times.
That said, I haven’t read it in a long time, and what strikes me most is how simple it is. It’s told in a very straightforward manner; Pete’s syntax is pretty declarative and uncomplicated. He’s quite visual. I remain strongly visual, but I can’t imagine writing that simply again. Maybe that’s not good; I dunno. Nowadays I write with the ear as well as the eye, for the rhythm of English is heard and not seen. Sometimes meaning is lost in the music, I know, but I can’t seem to help it. I have gone perhaps beyond the pale.
But even Ariel’s subject matter is no longer something I would really deal with.
All this may sound as if I am denying my first novel. In fact I’m really proud of it. In the first place, and somewhat perversely, I’m proud that I did Ariel the hard way: I taught myself to write a novel, learned how to submit the manuscript, didn’t network, didn’t schmooze, didn’t have an agent, didn’t have an uncle in the biz, sold the thing right out of the slushpile. Is it wrong to avoid the anonymity of the slushpile by networking and schmoozing? Hell, no! The deck is so stacked against publication, especially first-time publication, that writers should use every trick and connection and pull every string they can. But the fact that I did none of it and sold my first novel anyhow, especially at that young age, still feels good.
I was also lucky.
In the second place, how many half-decent novels by nineteen-year-olds are there? (It’s a rhetorical question; I can name a few and I don’t want you to name any more.)
Ariel is a first love, now encountered many years after our involvement ended. Hi, how are you, who are you now, I hope you’re happy, I hope things are good. I see why I was in love with it, but I would not fall for it now. I think it would be even sadder than the distance I feel from the novel if I still were the same writer—much less the same person. So I have to be honest here and say that I am proud of it as a representation of where I was, that I am not there now, and that I am proud of that too.
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2. If there were an award for Novel Most Hurled Against a Wall When Finished, Ariel would surely have garnered one.15 My mail on Ariel is mostly positive, but a definite thread of “How could you?” runs through it.
Let’s get this out of the way right now: Ariel can have no other satisfying dramatic ending without pulling a cheat, making it all better now, making it all didn’t happen really. Despite its trappings Ariel is square in the tradition of coming-of-age novels, and what happens to Pete is set up from the get-go. Pete’s dreams, and Ariel’s own “bell jar” dream, prefigure it rather obviously. I’ve always felt that the high points in any drama should be a surprise when they happen, but in retrospect they should seem inevitable.
Growing up is (one hopes) inevitable, and one of the things Ariel is about is the necessary price we pay to grow up. You want happy-wappy endings, watch a Disney flick—but an ant farm will teach you more about coping with life than those evil bastards will.
That said, I completely agree with those who feel the ending seems abrupt. (Oh, shit, I’ve only got twelve sheets of typing paper left! Whuddumeye gonna do?) It is a flaw, and if I were to do it over again I would ease more gracefully into the emotional climax and denouement. But I didn’t and you’re stuck with it. If it makes you feel any better, I’m stuck with it too. We learn as we go.
I will point out, however, that Ariel does cue the reader about even this abruptness. Don Quixote is the novel’s admittedly self-conscious parallel (The Lord of the Rings being its self-conscious contrast), and at one point Shaughnessy herself complains, “It feels like Cervantes just got tired of writing it. The ending’s too abrupt. I know I’m supposed to feel terrible that he dies, but all I feel is shortchanged.” So nyah-nyah.
Be grateful the book doesn’t have the denouement I originally submitted, which was basically Pete saying, yeah, this is the story of the best thing I know will ever happen to me, but that’s over now, thanks for reading, gotta go lead my miserable anticlimactic life now, see ya. Eeeeww. Sue Stone steadfastly refused to accept that ending. Thank you, Sue.
For my part, I have a bigger problem with the first act of Ariel than with the ending. I think it opens a bit too cute and searches around for a direction until about Chapter 10. When Pete and Ariel set out from Atlanta, that book is on rails. Before that there’s some essential setup and some world-building, but I think there’s a lot of awkward writing and clumsy staging. The scene in Chapter 1 where the feral kid tries to kill Pete, the scene in the trading bar in Chapter 2, and the confrontation on the overpass in that same chapter—these feel so sophomoric to me that I wince.
When I compare the pacing and the quality of prose of the novel’s end to its beginning, it’s obvious to me that I had learned to write a novel by the end of the novel but was groping around and trying to figure that out at its beginning. Possibly the relative innocence of the prose at the book’s opening helps make Pete and Ariel’s meeting more believable, but it’s too stuffed-animal cute for my current taste. But did I ever get any fan mail lambasting me for being too cute at the beginning? Noooooo … .
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3. I was never gonna write a novel. Now I love the damned things. There’s room to swing a cat in a novel.
I never wanted to be married. Now it sounds like a nifty idea. There’s room to swing a cat in a marriage.
I never wanted kids. I still don’t, but given my previous obstinacy about novels and marriage, I’m willing to concede the possibility, to acknowledge change. There’s room to swing a kid in a marriage.16
I’ve learned to never say never.
Taking the aforementioned as a bit of a qualifier, listen up—especially you people who write me demanding an answer to this very question:
I Will Never Write a Sequel to Ariel.
It ends, get it? Finis. Show’s over, nothing more to see here, folks, move along, move along. A sequel would be a gimmick to part you from your lunch money and contribute to the Steven R. Boyett Retirement Fund. To continue that story would be a cheat, a smug literary trick that cheapens what has gone before. The notion feels dishonest and exploitative.
I once gave brief thought to dealing with the “lost year” in Pete and Ariel’s early friendship, and even started something that was gonna take them through Disney World, but I didn’t write it because the truth is I have nothing more to say about Pete and Ariel, and neither do they. Their story is told. Save your forty-four cents. Stop knocking on my door. You kids get off my lawn. Feh.17
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4. I remember staring agape at the movie screen the first time I saw The Road Warrior. It was 1983; Ariel had been sold to Ace but wasn’t out yet, and there on the screen was not only a look and feel I had tried for, but archetypally the identi
cal story (though with Max a combination of Pete and Malachi Lee). Interestingly enough, Ariel and The Road Warrior are also dead ringers, structurally, iconographically, and archetypically, for Star Wars. (What, you never noticed that? Jeez, ya want me to draw you a map?)
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5. A brief word on writing action. I think good action sequences are harder to write than a lot of people realize. I’ve read great writers who couldn’t write good action to save their lives. Does it mean you’re a better or worse writer if you can or can’t write action? No. But it’s a particular talent, one that often doesn’t get its due; I used to devote a segment to it when I taught fiction. Action requires a highly visual imagination, excellent timing, and judicious use of verbs. It’s as easy to overdescribe what’s happening as to be vague; the effect of both is to leave the reader confused about who is doing what to whom.
Sex scenes are action scenes.
I’m surprised how often I’ve read an action sequence, particularly a fight scene, and watched it all fall apart because there was no way in hell the described action could work. It was ludicrous for the character to go from position A to position B and whack the bad guy, or whatever. I try to act out such sequences, enlisting the aid of my beleaguered friends.
Ariel’s violence is pretty over-the-top (nineteen-year-old guys being inordinately fond of eviscerating video aliens and such), but it was always important to me that violence be as realistically depicted as possible, and as painful and unpleasant as it really would be. I’m no longer quite so preoccupied with people whopping on people, but describing a car chase or a rock concert requires the same skills as writing about people whaling on each other. Something to think about, anyhow.
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