WHAT CALLS US TO THIS SPECIAL FORM OF
WRITING? AND SHOULD WE RESIST ITS CALL?
February 1990
I’d like to tell you about a friend of mine. I’ll call him Jack. (And why not? That’s what his parents called him, that’s what his friends call him, so why should I be different?)
As far back as he can remember, Jack has wanted to write fiction. He has worked on various novels over the years, and has brought a couple of them to completion, which is to say that he reached a point when he ceased working on them. Since none of his work was published, it sometimes struck him that his novels weren’t completed so much as they were abandoned.
Still, he got along, and there was usually a novel that he was at least thinking about, if not actually working on. And he taught writing with some success, even though he himself was not a published writer.
(And that seems worth a digression. Many of us who do publish regularly are frequently amused by the great number of people in this country who teach creative writing in schools and universities despite having had precious little success with it themselves. Where do people get off teaching what they can scarcely do? As unassailable as this argument seems on the face of it, it strikes me as every bit as illogical to assume that the ability to write publishable material in and of itself qualifies one to teach others to do the same. I could carry this further but I won’t. It is, after all, but a digression.)
Back to Jack. Somewhere in the course of his fifth decade, a need to be published made itself known to him. He realized that he’d reached a point in life where getting work into print was of more importance than the nature of the work involved. He wanted to see his byline in some sort of publication, and he wanted there to be words under that byline. Furthermore, he wanted to get money for it. Not to get rich, but to get paid for his efforts.
So he started doing travel pieces. He found a magazine that would take brief travel articles from him, and he began writing regularly for it. He got very little money for his work, fifteen or twenty dollars for each brief article, but it was money he’d earned at his typewriter and he got a kick out of it. Furthermore, he was amassing credits as a travel writer, and in very little time he began getting invited on press trips. He got to travel to some of the more interesting parts of the globe, and to do so free of charge, with his comfort seen to by people who had every reason to hope he was having an excellent time. The trips led to opportunities to publish more ambitious travel articles with more prestigious and lucrative markets, and this opened new vistas to him for future travel.
It was a cinch for him to write the articles. When he was facing a deadline he just sat down and turned out acceptable copy. And he loved to travel, he’d always loved to travel, and here he was traveling for free and making money from it. And he was seeing his name in print all over the place.
I’ll tell you, I envied him. I travel all the time, but I generally wind up staying at some equivalent of the Bates Motel and damn well pay for it myself, too. I’d thought about doing travel pieces in order to get on the list for press trips, but I knew I’d have a horrible time writing the articles, that I’d agonize over each one and not do a very good job with them.
Last time I ran into Jack, I asked him where he was going next. He told me about a trip he had lined up for the following month, an excursion to South America that sounded sensational. “But I’m cutting way back on travel,” he said. “I’ve been turning down press trips left and right. They’re fun, but, well, I never set out with the goal of making my mark as a travel writer. This was a means to an end. I wanted to get published so that I could validate myself as a published writer. Because what I really want to do, what I’ve always wanted to do, is write fiction. And the damn press trips are taking so much time I can’t get a novel written.”
In an early cartoon of Jules Feiffer’s, a man explains that from early childhood on he always knew he was destined to be a shoe salesman, that he felt this powerful longing to be a shoe salesman, but that he’d felt he had no choice but to bow to the wishes of his parents and the realities of the job market and make a living as an abstract expressionist painter. He hated it, it ate away at his soul, but he had a family to support so that was what he did. “The world,” he says in the last frame, “should make a place for shoe salesmen.”
The cartoon resonates for us because it is a switch on the way the world works. We long to be artists, and various pressures make shoe salesmen of us. Merely switching things around is enough to make us smile.
I wonder, though. Maybe we’re so prepared to believe that our longing ought to be for the artist’s life that we’re loath to recognize it when we’re geared the other way.
Let’s get away from painters and shoe salesmen and bring it back to writing, shall we? Why is it, I wonder, that such a high proportion of us have our hearts set on writing fiction? Why is that always the hope, the dream, the goal?
My friend Arno Karlen, who has had some deserved success with both fiction and nonfiction, likes to confound audiences by maintaining that nonfiction is harder to write. Since his listeners generally include a good number of writers who have published nonfiction with some regularity while having the devil’s own time getting their fiction accepted, his argument would seem to fly in the face of their experience. But Arno generally qualifies his thesis. Really good nonfiction, he explains, is more difficult to produce than really good fiction.
My own sense of things is that genuinely first-rate work of any sort is in short supply; one’s individual degree of difficulty in various pursuits probably varies with one’s aptitude for each. It is surely more difficult, on balance, to publish fiction than nonfiction. The market for nonfiction is vast, that for fiction virtually microscopic. There are ways to apprentice oneself in nonfiction, starting out in local journalism, writing for church bulletins, whatever. In fiction, those areas we might characterize as entry-level positions—ghosting series westerns, say—are by no means abundant, and are generally available only to the genuinely talented.
When I decided (or discovered) that I wanted to be a writer, I assumed almost automatically that I would be a writer of fiction, a novelist. I can think of two sources for this assumption. First, my chief interest as a reader was in realistic American fiction. Since that was what I enjoyed reading, since that was the sort of writing I greatly admired, it seemed reasonable that I would seek to emulate those writers who appeared so heroic to me.
Second, it seemed to me that a novelist was right up there at the top of the writing heap. Being a novelist was clearly worth the effort.
I don’t know that this explains why I wound up a novelist, however. I think a large part of the credit (or blame) for that lies in the fact that my talents lay in that direction. I was cut out to be a writer of fiction. It was relatively easy for me to come up with ideas and turn out acceptable stories and books.
I’ll tell you something. If this hadn’t been the case, I don’t know that I would have stayed with it.
I’d be hard put to prove this. But I have a hunch it’s true. When I read about someone like Jack Kerouac, who is said to have completed 15 novels before one was accepted for publication, I am awestruck. What on earth made him keep at it? I can’t make myself believe for a moment that I’d have had the grit. I’m damn lucky my early efforts met with some measure of success or I might very well have said the hell with it.
I have trouble admitting this, because I’ve always tried to tell other people of the importance of keeping at it, and especially of having realistic expectations for early work. I’ve said in this space more than once that we should not consider ourselves to have failed if a first novel turns out to be unpublishable, that a singer would hardly expect to be paid for a first song or a painter to sell a first painting.
But the first novel I wrote did get published, and I’d say it’s a good thing it did. I won’t argue that I wouldn’t have written a second book otherwise, because I did in fact write a second book before that first one sold, but I don’t know how long I’d have kept at it. And I might not have been able to write that novel, either, if I hadn’t been encouraged by the sale of a dozen or more short stories first.
If my fiction had kept meeting with rejection, and if I’d had an easy and successful time with nonfiction pieces, I don’t think it would have taken me too long to rethink a career decision I’d made in the 11th grade. But it worked the other way around, and it has continued to work the other way around for me ever since. I have a hard time writing nonfiction. With the exception of writing about writing, of the sort you are reading at this very moment, nonfiction is difficult for me and I am not terribly good at it. I’m a rotten interviewer and a poor fact-gatherer. When it comes to the actual writing, I can hammer out an acceptable sentence or paragraph, but even there the dozens of small decisions that I make easily and intuitively in my fiction are arduous in my nonfiction. I agonize over things that someone with rudimentary journalistic ability could toss off in his sleep.
Having discovered this limitation in my ability, I’ve made it a point not to do much nonfiction, and to limit myself to the sort of occasional piece that is within my grasp. Remember that Dr. Kronkheit vaudeville routine?
“Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”
“So don’t do that!”
And what about Jack?
Well, really, who am I to say? Perhaps he really does want to write fiction, and perhaps his experience as a travel writer will give him the confidence he needs to turn out a solid novel and see it through to publication. And, even if he never does publish a book, maybe fiction will hold enough internal rewards, will be sufficiently worth doing for its own sake to justify whatever he puts into it.
And maybe not.
Maybe my friend is stuck with a decision he made in the 11th grade, for about as much reason as most decisions most of us made way back then. Maybe Jack believes he has a longing to write fiction simply because that belief has been an article of faith for so long. Maybe, if that longing were genuine, he would have written more books and put more into them in the past 30 years. Maybe, if his talent pointed in the same direction as his desire, he would have gotten someplace by now.
Maybe the fact that travel writing comes so easily to him suggests that his talents lie in that area, or one allied to it. I’ll tell you a secret. Talent means it’s easy. It’s never a cinch, it always demands something from you to work at the top of your form, but the possessor of a talent is able to do with relative ease what someone else must labor very hard at, and often cannot do at all. And it’s very easy to overlook talent in oneself, because when something comes easy we think there’s nothing to it, and that what we’ve done was probably not worth doing in the first place.
Why do so many of us want so desperately to write fiction? I don’t know, and it may not be important to know. If it’s important to you, God bless you, and go for it. Even if you don’t start out abundantly talented, you may be able to get somewhere, and you may get very far indeed.
But if it’s not important to you, if you think it’s important only because it ought to be important, if you’re locked into an ill-informed decision you made back in the 11th grade, you might want to take a moment to rethink things. Perhaps the world ought to make a place for shoe salesmen. Perhaps you owe it to yourself to find out what you really and truly want to do.