The Dark Side of the Book Deal

Jack Torrance: Wendy, let me explain something to you. Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you're breaking my concentration. You're distracting me. And it will then take me time to get back to where I was. You understand?
Wendy Torrance: Yeah.
Jack Torrance: Now, we're going to make a new rule. When you come in here and you hear me typing

Jack Torrance: or whether you DON'T hear me typing, or whatever the FUCK you hear me doing; when I'm in here, it means that I am working, THAT means don't come in. Now, do you think you can handle that?
Wendy Torrance: Yeah.
Jack Torrance: Good. Now why don't you start right now and get the fuck out of here?

 

For me, it's this site and yahoo spades rather than xbox 360

I debated whether to point out the difference between fiction and non-fiction. Non-fiction work concerns itself with facts, and it would seem, as your post points out, Jeff, that non-fiction would take longer. If, as most of us are, you are accustomed to a 24-hour turnaround with much of the copy you produce, that would be a tough adjustment to make.

 

Sure, Wendy hit the bricks, but all Jack got done was that one sentence, over and over.

Too bad he didn't have SportsJournalists.com to dick around on while he was bored. He may not have become a dull boy, after all.

 

Sorry, but I have to give an alternative take on the pain and angst of book writing. Yes, it's hard, but not as hard as a hundred other things I've done in my life and you've done in yours. Cleaning a sludge pit was hard. Pouring concrete was hard. Shoveling gravel all day was hard. Taking care of an infant was hard. Writing isn't easy either, but here is my point - IT IS NOT unobtainable. From a lifetime of writing, most of it as a complete independent who writes books, who started out with zero connections, and who has published in a variety of genres, one of the biggest obstacles I ever had to overcome was the notion that writing is such a precious and mysterious activity that it could not be done unless I was a sleep-deprived, coffee driven, anxiety-ridden, weird, hard-drinking, hermit-like wretch horrible to everyone and entirely self-obsessed. Although I'll admit there are moments like that, there were when I was pouring concrete, too. When I speak to younger writers I tell them to abandon any notion of what writing is and what it does to you and your life and find out on your own, discover what works for you, both in terms of style and lifestyle, and realize that most books are not written by someone somewhere else but by people like you, who cut the grass, coach little league, buy groceries and live normal lives, as well as by those who don't.

For years I felt that writing for a living was an unobtainable goal because I had been so intimidated by stories about writers who sequester themselves away for 12 hours a day, and write, oh, 2,000 words a day, no matter what, or like Jack Kerouac, who somewhere said he had written a million words (or two million, I forget which), by age thirty, before he'd published anything. That scared the hell out of me until one day I added it up and figured out that, almost by accident, I had written just as much by the same age, all while working full-time and doing all the stuff everyone else I knew was doing who didn't write, and that I had never sequestered myself away. That was it, the water ran cold and I realized that writers can be people like me, a regular guy, the guy around the corner, and instead of writing I had wasted a lot of time trying to build my chops around what I thought a writer was.

Like anything else it doesn't happen instantaneously, and that's what frustrates me when I read stories like that in the Observer, or comments like Jeff Pearlman's, that add to the mystification of this process, which has enough built-in burdens anyway. Success or whatever you want to achieve from writing beyond your own satisfaction is not instantaneous and while writing is an art, it is not inherently mystical. The biggest difference between those who are writers, and those who want to be writers and are not is not talent, time, disposition or anything else. Writers keep writing - those who wanted to be writers and aren't STOPPED for some reason, it's that simple. And if you want to write there is no excuse for that, not illness, not work, not rejection, not kids, not divorce, not death, despair or poverty, not anything. Sometimes it will make you happy and sometimes it will make you sad.

So find what works for you. Write in the morning, or late at night, during lunch, in a coffee shop or a park bench, in your room, in the basement, in the car, it doesn't matter. Drink alot of booze, take pills and smoke, or meditate and eat macrobotic foods. Watch TV 24/7 or pull the shades and put in the ear plugs. But whatever you do at some point abandon all notions about what being a writer is that you have heard from anyone else and discover what works for you on the page.

You already own the language as much as anyone else, and when you sit before a blank page, or a blank screen, you will never be more powerful.

 

One more thing - you write your way into your life, not out of it.

 

Hey Jeff you showed you that anxiety firsthand here when you jumped ugly with the SJ membership when they pointed out flaws in your Mets book.

- No firsthand interviews with Dwight Gooden or Darryl Strawberry
- Tom Seaver was traded in 1977 not '78 as you wrote
- Davey Johnson could not have done WFAN in '86 becasue station did not exist
till 1987
- Billy Hatcher game tying HR in NLCS went down left field line - not right.

Maybe sitting in "The Bread Company" to write poses too much of a distraction.

 

Boom, you're 100% right. As you clearly know, I'm very thin-skinned, which makes the critical, post-book process difficult.

More important, as to what In Exile says: You're correct. The trash collections just drove by my house 10 minutes ago, and that job—along with 10 trillion others—is probably much, much harder than writing a book. Writing is a great, great gig. But in the midst of it all, burried and blocked, it can feel like a run through the Sahara. But, again, you're 100% right. It's still a gift of a career.

 

Great quotes--the second one should be made into a sticker and sent to every author with the signed book contract. "Please remove backing and affix to laptop screen."

Over many years of working with authors, I know this for sure: The degree of angst and panic is directly related to the degree of natural talent. The craziness increases with ability. A gifted musician hears every note that isn't perfectly in tune; same with a gifted writer. A less talented artist misses a lot of that. Ignorance is bliss, and I mean that in a good way.

But I'm still amazed when successful, popular, gifted writers completely fall apart when making the transition from newspapers or magazines to books. It's still just words. You string 'em together, you tell a story. It's longer and bigger, but it's still just words telling a story. Get over the drama, Hemingway is dead, you aren't. Just write the damn thing.

 

or simply

Don't stop believing.... in yourself.

 

When I wrote my first book way back when, I got stuck one day and asked my editor what the secret to effective writing was.

His answer was as brilliant as it was concise: "Tell the fucking story."

It removed all manner of artsy, fartsy literally fantasies from my head and reminded me it was just a job to be done.

It didn't make me a great writer by any stretch, but it permanently cured writer's block and for that, I'm forever thankful.

 

I think every writer starts out with visions of ashtrays full of cigarettes and angst, because there's something stupid and romantic about it.

But when it comes right down to it, writing is more like manual labor than most of us would like to think. It's grunt work, and you just have to sit down and get it done. There's a romance to that, too, of course -- like we're salt miners. Or typefitters, as I used to call myself here. That's when I decided writing was like laying pipe, miles of it -- or laying cable, if I'd just eaten Moons over my Hammy at Denny's.

I don't think, though, that you can underestimate the head time (and unfortunately, I mean the time spent inside your own head) you'll endure when you're writing something like a book. Man, I've played some games with myself, especially when it comes to word counts.

For me, it goes something like this:

10,000 words: Do that nine more times, and I'm done. Easy!

20,000 words: One-fifth! I need a Tab.

30,000 words: One-third! Now where's my Tab?

40,000 words: Fuck, I fucking hate fucking fractions.

50,000 words: Halfway! Wait. That means I have to do what I just did, all over again. I give up.

60,000 words: Maybe I should become a teacher. Or a cop. Or a mailman. Yeah, a mailman.

70,000 words: I really thought, on that class trip in Grade 11, that Stacy Langman was going to blow me. That would have been something.

70,001-79,999 words: Reward myself with a good stroke after every 1,000 words. Make that 100 words. Make that every noun. Make that every vowel.

80,000 words: Gotta get out of these doldrums... Need some wind... Must reach the Tropic of Capricorn... Sargasso Sea... Gulf Stream... Damn dirty seagulls... Need water... Drinking my own pee... What? Holy Christ, eighty percent! I can do this...

90,000 words: Who am I kidding? I can't do this.

97,000 words: I've had a boner for four hours. Should I call my doctor?

100,000 words: [Out open attic window] OH MY GOD! I LOVE EVERYBODY! THE WORLD IS GOOD! GOD IS GREAT! ALLAH, BUDDHA, SAM BEAM -- I LOVE YOU, TOO! YE SHALL BE SAVED!

Later that same night: What do you mean, edit?



The lesson, kids? Don't drink your own pee. It makes dada go ruh-roh!

 

And somewhere between the 50 and 60k mark, you get the moment that can only be compared to a hundred flaming diseased anacondas burrowing up your ass as you swallow a. five inch hairball covered in monkey pus:

'Fatal Error. Cannot open file. File aborted. This program will now terminate. You are so fucked.'

That was a special day.