Horseman, Pass By , written in 1958, was published in 1961, a rapid progress really. I had expected to be thrilled when I received my first copy of my first book, but when I opened the package and held the first copy in my hand, I found that I just felt sort of flat. There it was. I had made it into the ranks of the published, as I was to do about forty more times. But I felt no great surge of satisfaction. I learned then and have relearned many times since, that the best part of a writer’s life is actually doing it, making up characters, filling the blank page, creating scenes that readers in distant places might connect to. The thrill lies in the rush of sentences, the gradual arrival of characters who at once seem to have their own life. Faulkner said that he just listens to his own characters and writes down what they say. I watch mine, and try, like Conrad, to make the reader see what’s going on. You soon lose the sense, in writing fiction, that you yourself are making things happen. I wrote about Emma Horton, in the four Terms of Endearment books, and never once thought that I was commanding her to do this or that. When she died I felt the loss most keenly, just as, right now, I feel the loss of Duane Moore, the main character in the five Last Picture Show books. My final visit with Duane occurs in a novel called Rhino Ranch . I have now followed Duane Moore from adolescence to old age and it would be strange if I didn’t miss him. He was not my alter ego in the first books, but he was certainly my alter ego in the last books.
I should repeat once more how lucky I was to have begun the struggle for publication at just the right time. If I had sought publication even three years later I would have walked a harder road, as, for example, did the brilliant Texas writer Max Crawford, who took seven years to get his own first novel into print. The book was called The Backslider —perhaps in part the delay was caused by Max’s first title for this excellent novel about the hard-bitten wheat farmers of the caprock region: The Penis of Jesus , a title that would undoubtedly make it a hard sell in Floydada, where Max grew up.
Max Crawford had, I believe, to produce his second, no less Hobbesian, novel, Waltz Across Texas , before the dark but accurate Backslider could be published. (The fact that LBJ was president then had a braking effect on the publication of Texas fiction for several years.)
I often, at my lectures, remind would-be writers that many of the novelists and short story writers, that most of the writers they now admire most had to write two or three unpublished efforts before they finally broke through. A look back at literary history suggests that this has long been the case. Ken Kesey, for example, wrote two novels prior to Cuckoo’s Nest . I remember reading a chapter of one called (I think) Zoo , about a fire in a chicken house, with flaming chickens flying all around. I believe the manuscripts of these two pre–Cuckoo’s Nest books were destroyed by a fire in Ken’s writing shack, in, I think, La Honda, California.
To this day it is not easy to get started in fiction, but the speed with which self-publishing has been established is making getting started a good deal easier. In my own hometown, where, for so long, I was the only published writer (excepting one poet and the county historian, my neighbor Jack Loftin); now there are at least three, and one of the three, Jim Black, wrote and self-published a novel called There’s a River Down in Texas which was later picked up by Penguin, a very respectable house. Jim Black’s approach to breaking in has now been repeated many times; self-publishing is obviously going to become easier and easier—and more and more common. Much trash will get published, but then much trash is published even by the most reputable publishers.