At one of our first pitch sessions, Conn warned me, “No redemptions.” Very sternly, she explained that a new chief editor had been hired, and his edict was that no story in the magazine could offer a redemptive ending. I assumed the chief editor to be a cynical curmudgeon. Now my guess is that he was just a savvy judge of what so many Americans want to read.
Take The Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family loses their farm. They struggle to migrate west. The oldest generation dies on the journey and are buried ignominiously. They starve and find abuse at the hands of lawmen and deceptive labor brokers. The family falls apart and the next generation is born dead and dropped into a river, not even buried but cast adrift to shame the world.
It’s the case made by Horace McCoy in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? People are comforted by the misery of other people. And in the late 1960s and the 1970s, with the Vietnam War and Watergate and stagflation and the oil embargo, Americans leaned toward quest stories with a loser ending. I’ve heard it called “Romantic Fatalism.” In movies like Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, Midnight Cowboy and The Bad News Bears, people set out confidently toward a goal. They work hard, do their best. And they still lose.
People love to see others suffer and lose. Perhaps this trend toward losers explains the horror vogue in the same period. From Rosemary’s Baby to The Omen, The Sentinel, Burnt Offerings, and The Stepford Wives, we watched innocent people abused and destroyed by sinister forces beyond their awareness.
The formula varies in small ways, but it remains a pornography of someone else’s suffering.
Compare 1976’s film Carrie with 2009’s Precious. In both an overweight girl (Carrie is fat in the book) in high school lives with an abusive mother. Both girls suffer torment from their classmates. Both have been abandoned by their fathers. Both are bullied into eating—Carrie White’s mother telling her to eat and that the pimples caused by cake are God’s way of chastising her—Precious’s mother just telling her to eat, period.
The biggest difference between the two stories is that Carrie White practices a special power that allows her to eventually slaughter her tormenters. Including her mother. And the stress of doing so causes Carrie’s heart to fail.
As for Precious…She’s impregnated by her father, twice, gives birth to a Down syndrome daughter, is beaten by her mother, taunted, infected with HIV, she’s humiliated and vomits fried chicken in a trash can, but her special power? She learns to read.
Important Note: To sell an extra hundred thousand books, depict a white person teaching a black person how to read. White people who love to read think everyone should love to read. Plus it flatters readers to show them a character who can’t read. It’s the ultimate way to make your reader feel superior and thus to sympathize with a character. Best of all, it validates reading as a pastime. Whether it’s the movie Fame or Driving Miss Daisy or The Color Purple, teaching a black person to read is a plot device that never, ever gets old.
So if you were my student I’d tell you to make a sympathetic character suffer, then suffer more, then suffer worse, never make the reader feel complicit with the tormenters, then—the end. No redemption. People love those books.
Then I’d tell you the opposite. Don’t perpetuate the status quo. Let Nick Carraway shout “You’re a bag of dicks!” at Tom and Daisy, and “Daisy slaughtered Myrtle!” Let Jay Gatsby leap from his pool and grab the gun. What is our preoccupation with defeat? Why do high-art narratives end poorly? Is it the destruction of the Greek comedies and the Christian church’s obsession with tragedy? If more writers strove for paradigm-busting resolutions, would there be less suicide and addiction among writers? And readers?
Above all, I’d tell you, do not use death to resolve your story. Your reader must get out of bed tomorrow and go to work. Killing your main character—we’re not talking about a second-act sacrifice—is the cheapest form of resolution.
A Postcard from the Tour
Margaret Buschmann was my first. We did it on a Saturday when no one would be around. In a tiny first-floor office at the Freightliner Corporation where we both worked. There was a roll-down screen we could use as a backdrop, and Margaret brought her own camera. It was hot, a hot August afternoon. We’d always joked that if I ever sold a book we’d do it. So we snuck in when the building would be otherwise empty, and we did it.
Margaret took my first author photo.
The pushback was immediate. The year 1995 was still the ’80s as far as I was concerned so I wore a striped cotton turtleneck sweater. Picture Mort on the old Bazooka Bubble Gum comics. A thick, ribbed sweater that rolled up to my chin. And I wore it over a black hoodie sweatshirt so that the hood spilled out of the collar of the turtleneck. Did I mention the temperature? Once Margaret had arranged the lights I was sweating buckets. She kept looking at me and asking, “Are you sure you want to wear that?”
My haircut, some version of the eighties infamous claw bangs, the sweat stuck the hair flat to my forehead so it needed regular fluffing. I told her I was fine. She said I didn’t look very relaxed. We argued.
That rite of passage, the author photo, something I’d anticipated for so long, became an unhappy ordeal. On the book tour
