A Once and Future Novelist: Dreams and Swords

“A Once and Future Novelist” series concludes.

“Literature is fun, but it is also business.”

                                                            —Vladimir Nabokov

                                                            —Amy Lowell

Nothing would have pleased me more than finishing a new novel, namely Phoenix, and sending it off to a willing agent who would secure me a deal, bring me back into the auctorial fold, help me pick up things where life had forced me to leave them off, etc.

      But that didn’t happen.

      I make a living, and I make most of it through writing. Not the kind of writing, of course, that I would prefer to do, had I my druthers. But I have no complaints these days. If I was twenty years younger, I’m sure I would complain vociferously, but age teaches us the emptiness and futility of such activities and the shame of histrionics. The fact is, you make ends meet. Or, at least, you should. You live up to your responsibilities. You do what you gotta do.

      I did not intend “The Once and Future Novelist” series to be a cautionary tale or a self-pitying tract, and I desperately hope it hasn’t read that way. Life can take us in myriad directions. Fortune is a fickle and ungainly companion. Time and Fate, Life’s respective ruthless and mercurial henchmen, perform alternately unpredictable kindnesses and brutalities. You lose your way on a vocational path, perhaps, but you find love and companionable beauty that you hadn’t experienced before. Are there things more important than writing? Of course. Does writing then lose its fascination, its allure, or its ability to deliver a particular sense well-being notably distinct from most other activities? Of course not.

      Even through the fallow years, the desire to write fiction has never left me. Having spent so much time doing it at one time in my life, the urge for it is always spectrally present, just like the ex-smoker’s eternal desire to smoke even decades after snuffing out that last one. Doing creative work of any kind, with any degree of facility, delivers an intellectual charge that is unlike just about any other satisfaction we experience in all other activities of daily life. One’s relationship with reality is forever changed. One looks incessantly at the world with a transformative eye, as if in the constant throes of a low-grade fever.

      Because of this, even through the deplorable span of years when I wrote very little and with no particular intent or goal for what little I did write, my sense of myself as a writer did not lessen. I knew, of course, that I was a writer who didn’t write, and because of that, I took care not to call myself a writer. And I certainly didn’t talk about what I might be pecking away at or thinking about pecking away at.

      Don’t get me wrong: life certainly hadn’t become some great vale of misery and regret. On the contrary, over the course of those years, everything else in my life had steadily improved until I found myself, in my mid-forties, happier than I had ever been, more content, secure, productive, and still with all my original teeth and hair. I still read as much as I always did, still felt that same abiding love of books and literature. The only thing absent now was the writing. I missed it.

      I wish that I could bring this brief series to some kind of triumphal end. Report some coup, some serendipitous, fateful stroke. But life doesn’t work like that for most of us, and I’m no different than anyone else. I haven’t even a decent epiphany, some bright burst of recognition that I can point to. No gentle, purling accumulation of understanding. No deus ex machina with a multi-book contract and a cell phone with Oprah’s number on it descended upon my writer’s garret.

      But I did recently come across a Bulgarian proverb that seems to characterize what more or less occurred to me a couple years ago. “If you’re going to drown yourself, don’t do it in shallow water.”

      Not that I was necessarily drowning myself. Though I felt the potential for such an occurrence. In other words, if I was going to “fail” at being a novelist, I wasn’t going to “fail” for lack of trying. I wasn’t going to “fail” through abdication to more convenient, conventional manners of livelihood. Literature is fun, but it is also business, sure. I might “fail” from a commercial perspective, from a publishing perspective. But I wasn’t going to lay any blame on the capricious and fickle world of book publishing for my private inability to continue on what I always considered “the true path.”

      To my mind, writing and publishing are really two entirely different things. Each represents objectives that are alloyed while at the same time antithetical. It’s a dysfunctional pairing. To write is to speak to a particular audience; to publish is to serve a consuming constituency who may or may not include that audience. Don’t get me wrong, this is not some screed about the state or the objectives of the book publishing business. They have their work. We, as writers, have ours. Sometimes we dovetail. Many times we don’t.

      We see the debate, or rather the friction, manifesting itself here on Gather more frequently than we can really track. The publishing world is routinely excoriated or upbraided for doing what they’re organized to do: publishing books that appeal and are purchased by the greatest common denominator. As appalling as that may sometimes be to those of us who consider ourselves “serious” writers who write serious and challenging fiction, we’re at least spared the indignity of publishers castigating us, in turn, for not writing more books that are more easily accessible to the average reader. Truth is, they don’t need to castigate us. Rejecting us is adequate enough response.

      Two years ago, older, wiser, but no less idealistic, I made another few rounds of attempts to find an agent who would represent me and help me sell my finished novel, Desire. Much had changed during my several years hiatus. Fiction has always been a hard sell, and of the twenty or so agents I contacted, all but one brushed off any interest in reading my manuscript because they already had all the writers they could reasonably represent. Or so they said. Predictably, that one agent who was willing to read the book, passed. Who could blame them? It was a big book, challenging for the casual reader, and written by someone completely unknown. So, what to do?

      Well, I could finish the uncompleted novel that I’d been pecking away at for years, or I could write another novel altogether. I was, am, more than happy to do both of those things. In fact, I will do both of those things. But in the meantime, I still wanted to publish Desire. I still felt great affection for it. I still felt, despite its youthful excesses, that the novel had merit, and spending several months combing and cleaning and rewriting parts of the manuscript, I still found it to contain instances of writing that startled me for their focus and clarity. It held hard, crisp, bright pieces of writing that represented what I had always felt good fiction should possess. In its way, it conveyed what I had always believed or hoped good fiction should convey: a moral universe contextualized by human frailty. The complex notions and conditions of what it means to be alive, and the preciousness of that, and the implications of that, God or no God, meaning or no meaning. I couldn’t let it fade into a box in my basement, or languish as a couple megabytes on my laptop until changing formats, operating systems, or storage media made it inaccessible forever. I wanted to share it and let the chips fall where they may. They may fall, irrelevantly, into the recycling bin of history. But I wasn’t going to make that pre-emptive judgment on my own work. I had to bring this bit of personal and vocational history to what seemed to me its logical conclusion. It wasn’t a roadblock to continuing with other things or with new things. It was just unfinished business.

      Publishing it myself, then, was the last refuge.

      Or engaging in, as I came to discover (which brings us all the way back around to the beginning of our first installment), independent authorship.

      Independent authorship. The term still has a dubious-sounding quality to my ear, like “self-medicating,” or when the out-of-work claim they are “job transitioning” rather than unemployed.

      But it’s the path I’ve chosen. In addition to giving me the sense that this business is finally finished, I also harbor the perhaps naïve or overly ambitious notion that, in its independently published form, Desire is far more apt to experience the one-in-a-million event, the wildly unlikely lightening strike: a grassroots groundswell, a word-of-mouth chain reaction, a Schwab’s Drugstore moment. However remote a possibility, it is still a possibility nonetheless that it could, just could, fall into the hands or under the eye of someone who is in the business of books and authors; someone who, like the kind agent at John Hawkins & Associates so many years ago, suddenly, joltingly becomes one of my “biggest fans.” Someone who knows precisely what to do and how to do it with a novel like this, a novelist like me, a career in odd stasis, a dream or a sword.

      You make your own luck. Self publishing is me at the forge, trying to smith this pig iron dream of a novel into a sword that will help me cut a path through the remainder of my writing days on this earth.

      Originally I considered making this series of articles a chronicle of my journey through the self-publishing process with my print-on-demand publisher. But, curiously enough, the process of self-publishing has proven to be spectacularly similar to the plain old process of publishing, or trying to publish. By that I mean, my publisher performs services as part of their process that mostly consist of reminding me, advising me, imploring me to keep in mind “what sells books.” Their “editorial evaluation” of Desire was uniform and predictable:

      “The author should consider using more dialogue throughout the novel. The author possesses a talent for dialogue, and he should take advantage of those skills. More dialogue also would break up the long stretches of narrative.” (Because we all know how bothersome long stretches of narrative can be.)

      “The author possesses an impressive vocabulary that will send many readers running for the dictionary. [Now wouldn’t that be a perfect world?!] Stretching a reader is fine, but constantly reading obscure words will quickly become tedious for many readers.” (If the long stretches of narrative haven’t already sent them running for the hills.)

      And so on.

      It doesn’t matter. The book is what it is, for better or for worse, and I wrote it the way I wrote it because, well, that was the way I wanted to write it. I’m not claiming that I’m right and they’re wrong, or that my idea of the novel is good and theirs is bad. We writers do what we do, and try to do it as best we can, and ditto for publishers. As I said before: a dysfunctional pairing. And yet, we’re all each of us has got.

      I’ve finished designing my book jacket (a perk for the independent author who moonlights in the world of freelance graphic design) and now wait for the electronic galleys to arrive for my final proof. I’ll spend two or three weeks reading Desire for the 439th and probably last time (late in Desire, my main character points out that one of the benefits of publishing one’s book is that one never has to read it again). Upon completing that, I expect the process will pick up deliberate speed with perhaps a mid- to late-summer pub date. Of course, I’ll have to hunker down soon and begin fomenting plans for local marketing efforts. That might provide material for an amusing story all its own, since such activity fills me with dread.

      Securing an agent, finding a publisher, realizing commercial success, reaping material reward. Book signings and movie sales and appearing next to Oprah. These would all be welcome occurrences. But their principal benefit, as far as I can see, would be the means they afforded me to continue doing this: writing, writing novels and stories, spending my working life reading and writing about literature, and continuing this lifelong process of learning this craft.

      All books are either dreams or swords. We look up from the concluding page, and the earnest imaginary world of the novel either drifts benignly away as we readjust our eyes to daylight reality, or we find our world cleaved in two, scored, or newly carved, different from how we left it, changed in how we look at what we thought we already knew how to see. Like those illustrations from our childhood “Highlights Magazine” where we find the hidden objects: the flamingo in the grainy bark of the tree; the toy boat in the train station—as Nabokov wrote in Speak, Memory, things that, “once seen, can’t be unseen.” Forever.

      This transformation—a modified perspective, a newly configured world, an augmented reality—occasioned purely through language, a re-ordering of our perception thanks to mere words and sentences and their particular arrangement on a page…

      In the end, this is what sustains us.