The two most difficult parts of an author event are prompting questions from the audience, and, finally, when too many questions are coming too fast, stemming the tide. My solution was to offer a tiara for each question. The barrage started instantly. Clearly I had only so many prizes so with the last crown, the questions ended. Best of all, I had a great time. I could not hate and resent people at the same time that I gave them lovely tiaras and whatnot. The act of giving something rewired my thoughts.
You see, the secret is to trick yourself into having a great time. Whether you’re on a twenty-city book tour or washing dishes, find some way to love the task. In fact there’s a Buddhist saying told to me by Nora Ephron, the one-and-only time I met her after reading her work since college. At a noisy Random House party in the restaurant Cognac, she said, “If you can’t be happy while washing dishes, you can’t be happy.”
Nora Ephron
People wrote to me about how they wore their tiaras to school. So I expanded to the autographed severed limbs. Then the glowing beach balls. In Pittsburgh on the tour for Damned, the writer Stewart O’Nan gave me ten full-size candy bars that I threw into the auditorium that evening. It was such a good contrast to just talking. It felt great to throw things as hard as I could so I began to buy huge sacks of candy bars and to heave them at people. Few things mirror the delivery of a good joke or story better than watching the arc of a thrown bag of Snickers bars as it flies over the heads of a thousand people and lands in the arms of just one.
That did the trick. I loved doing events again. I’d spend all winter staging and shipping the props. The blow-up sex dolls. The penguins and giant inflatable brains. To be honest, it cost me a fortune. Each big event set me back roughly ten thousand dollars in props, prizes, and shipping. But I’d ask, by a show of hands, how many people had never been to an author’s book tour event. And always, it would be most of the auditorium, so it felt worth all the fuss to make these people’s first book event something special.
I’m not sure if I’ll ever stage such big events again, but I’ll always be glad I did.
Also, if you were my student, I’d tell you to make the reader/author photos a story. For Pygmy, Todd Doughty, beloved Todd, the best publicist alive, he and I carted around a towering trophy. It broke down into many sections, and before each event I’d be in my hotel room screwing it together like a sniper assembling an assault rifle. All so that I could ask readers to hold it in photos. Forever after, when anyone saw the pictures that resulted they’d ask, “What did you win?”
Again, the photos would generate a story. The events would generate a story. If I did my main job well, the book would generate a story. And people will come together to tell their stories about the story. And that’s the reason why I’d tell you to find a way to have fun at work, and to give your audience something they can’t stop talking about. Process: Learning by Imitation
A common joke in Tom’s workshop was that students followed his rules so well that eventually they all sounded like bad imitations of his best work. It’s a joke, but it’s true. And it must’ve been disheartening to hear this stream of unintended parody. His own narrative voice being used to tell stories to which he had no attachment, exaggerating his storytelling devices to the point of burlesque: it had to be soul crushing.
It was only natural. Most of us had started writing by trying to mimic Fitzgerald or Hemingway. I read and reread The Portable Dorothy Parker until her snark became second nature to me. Now we were aping Tom, and the best of us would ultimately merge elements of his style with the best of what we’d cribbed from other writers. We’d add a few tricks we discovered on our own, and we’d create a unique voice. Unique enough. A hybrid.
What’s important is that imitation is a natural way to learn. In the golden years of Gordon Lish, when he taught at Columbia, edited for Knopf, and ran the literary magazine The Quarterly, he was known as Captain Fiction. His best students were the most promising young writers in America. And those writers wrote according to his demands and dedicated their work, publically, “To Q,” meaning to Lish, and it was a juggernaut. Lish’s unstoppable army.
Unstoppable until it was stopped. The critic Sven Birkerts, writing for The New Republic, called attention to how similar all the great, young Minimalists sounded. They wrote in the first person, in the constantly unspooling present moment, in “byte-sized” perceptions. And Birkerts was correct, and the shining edifice of Minimalism no longer looked like the future.
Just as Chick Lit fell out of fashion…Once a style or genre becomes too copied, reader fatigue kills it.
So no, the idea isn’t to follow every rule of Gordon’s and Tom’s and mine, not forever. But it’s better to start with some rules. Learn some compulsory skills. After that you can free-style, and if you’re lucky and if you’re successful a new generation of aspiring writers will copy your style and drive your hard-won, well-crafted voice right into the ground. Process: Build Your Infrastructure
Even when you’re written out, you