The grooming costs each aspiring student several thousand dollars, payable weeks in advance. The Editor to the Stars swans into the host city for a three-day weekend, staying in a luxury hotel and teaching in a hotel conference room. Needless to say, the only people who can afford his rates are wealthy. Mostly they’re the wives of wealthy men, with a couple of tenured college professors thrown into the mix—and me. At each of our three sessions students assembled, read their work, and waited. Everyone looked to the Editor to the Stars, who would sigh deeply and ask us to comment on the work in question.
This strategy allowed the other students to feel smart while it ran out the clock. Opinions flew, but not much practical advice. Usually no practical advice. Opinions collided, and the cross talk ate up more time. During this heated gabfest, the Editor to the Stars was updating his own mailing lists, glancing at messages on his phone, nodding sagely.
In the final moments of debate, the Editor would weigh in with some variation of, “This amusing piece shows a great deal of sensitivity, you should expand it into a novel.” Or, “Your work is as promising as [insert some dead writer the Editor claims to have discovered and nurtured to greatness: Hemingway, Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe]. Please keep at it.”
Lots of hand-holding. Loads of flattery. By Sunday afternoon each of his twenty-five students had gotten a nice pat on the head but no useful information. And the Editor to the Stars left town forty thousand dollars richer.
After witnessing that racket I’d resolved to write a book. Someday. A tough-love manual with more practical information than a dozen price-gouging writing gurus would typically provide. Still, I’m conflicted.
Holding me back are the dead people. As I take stock of the people who’ve helped me, the booksellers and fellow writers, I find so many have died. I love knowing a lot of people, but the downside is that means going to a lot of funerals. To write this book would be to pay a debt to those people. But it would be a sad task.
Another reason not to move forward is my best teacher. At this writing, Tom Spanbauer has given up teaching. He tells me that he feels like a fraud. For three decades he’s held out the idea that regular people, people with daytime jobs, people from blue-collar families, could write stories that would reach the world. Many of his students have succeeded, including Monica Drake, Stevan Allred, Joanna Rose, Jennifer Lauck, and myself. But Tom’s own career has languished, and to him the fiction-teaching routine has begun to look like a scam.
There’s more to it. Tom’s health isn’t the best. But that’s too personal to tackle here.
Tom teaches students practical, effective techniques that instantly make their work better. Many of these he learned from the famous editor and writer Gordon Lish. Tom steers readers toward the best writers to emulate. He helps connect his students with agents and editors. And he did this in his own condemned home, every week, since 1990, when he charged each of his students twenty dollars each session. Yet he’s honest enough to worry about their chances for success in the bookselling world.
Contrast that with the Editor to the Stars who charges thousands. Ignores his students’ work. Knows them for three days. Tells them they’re brilliant and that the publishing world is their oyster, then skips town, never to be seen again.
If I’m going to write this book, I want to err on the side of pessimism.
If you’re dedicated to becoming an author, nothing I can say here will stop you. But if you’re not, nothing I can say will make you one.
That said, if you came to me and asked me to teach you everything I’m able, I’d tell you that the publishing industry is on life support. Bret Easton Ellis tells me the novel is no longer even a blip in the culture. You’re too late. Piracy has destroyed the profits. Readers have all moved on to watching films and playing computer games. I’d say, “Kid, go home!”
No one is born to do this job. Storytelling, yes. But when you become an author you seek out other authors the way an Anne Rice vampire seeks vampires as mentors. I was lucky. My first book was endorsed by four great writers: Robert Stone, Katherine Dunn, Thom Jones, and Barry Hannah. Under the pretense of thanking them, I stalked them. Stone came to Portland as part of a panel discussion about Zelda Fitzgerald. When I met him at the Heathman Hotel he told me, “For anything to endure it must be made of either granite or words.”
Robert Stone
This book is, in a way, a scrapbook of my writing life. From shopping the cathedral flea market in Barcelona with David Sedaris to having drinks at Cognac with Nora Ephron just months before she died. To the years of sporadic correspondence I had with Thom Jones and Ira Levin. I’ve stalked my share of mentors, asking for advice.
Therefore, if you came back another day and asked me to teach you, I’d tell you that becoming an author involves more than talent and skill. I’ve known fantastic writers who never finished a project. And writers who launched incredible ideas, then never fully executed them. And I’ve seen writers who sold a single book and became so disillusioned by the process that they never wrote another. I’d paraphrase the writer Joy Williams, who says that writers must be smart enough to hatch a brilliant idea—but dull enough to research it, keyboard it, edit and re-edit it, market the manuscript, revise it, revise it, re-revise it, review the copy edit, proofread the typeset galleys, slog through the interviews and write the essays to promote it, and finally to show
