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Pieces of Mind:
Fictional Truths and Non-Fictional Lies
about Writing
and the Writing Life
Vincent Zandri
“Writing is its own reward.”
—Henry Miller
Introduction
Back when I was a kid, the last thing I ever thought I would be when I grew up was a writer—and a fairly successful one at that. That is, a writer who is successful enough not to have to drag his ass out of bed every Monday morning on account of a day job. That’s right; I don’t have to work for the man because I am the man. But then, despite the obvious perks like freedom, for instance, there is a downside to working entirely for yourself . . . Nah, on second thought, there really isn’t a downside at all.
So, back to when I was a kid.
I grew up in a household where my dad—a commercial construction business owner—made the money, and my mother stayed at home to raise the kids. He came home around four thirty, and we promptly ate dinner at five. By six, the kitchen had been cleaned and the day’s clothing was being traded in for pajamas. In bed at eight, where I devoured all sorts of comic books, novels, and even World War II history volumes. Lights were out by nine. My dad would be up at dark thirty, which is when I would wake up, and we’d do it all over again.
To say that my dad’s business and work ethic consumed all the oxygen in the household would be putting it lightly. Our lives revolved around it. Nothing was ever scheduled without the business in mind. The fact that it came first, before everything else, there was no doubt. Family meals, religious obligations, holidays, and family vacations all revolved around my dad’s construction business, and the time he needed to put into it.
So, naturally, when I was born, the first thing my father said to my mother while she lay exhausted and bleeding on the hospital bed, was this: “We can stop having children now. We have a boy, and he will carry on the business.”
It was a strange way for me to grow up, always knowing in the back and fore of my head that I would one day be running a construction company just like my dad. And I guess, looking back on it all these years later, I probably enjoyed the novelty of it all. The sense that I had one up on my friends who would have no choice but to look for jobs when they grew up. It probably provided me with a kind of arrogance and edge—something that accompanied me all through college.
But by then, some significant cracks had appeared in what, up until then, had been a solid-as-a-rock plan. By the time I turned twenty-one, I had spent five summers working in the field for Zandri Construction Corp. I even injured myself on several occasions, the major incident occurring when I stepped on a six-penny nail, the business end of which was sticking straight up out of demolished floorboard. It impaled itself through my foot entirely.
Did it hurt? You bet.
But the physical pain was nothing compared to the ribbing I endured from the other workers, most of whom at that time were Viet Nam vets who had seen some pretty bad things over “in the shit.” Curiously, and sadly, most if not all of those poor souls went to early graves due to alcoholism and despair. But my dad, himself a vet, maintained a soft spot in his heart for them, so he always made sure to employ vets whenever he could.
I digress.
Having a taste of the business from the point of view of a laborer didn’t do a whole lot for my love of the construction business. In fact, if anything, it made me dread it. My old man put me on the worst of the worst jobs. Cleaning concrete forms in the hot summer sun for eight hours at a time. Hefting wheel barrel loads of wet concrete from point A to point B until my back and shoulders were on fire (a good way to get in shape for high school football season it turns out). Shoveling ditches. Tearing out and disposing of asbestos with no masks (I have the scars on my lungs to prove it, or so a recent MRI proved).
One particular job that remains fresh in my memory is cleaning out the waste receiving pit located directly below a commercial paper making machine. A pit filled with so much watery filth and toxic discharge that we had to wear fishermen’s waders while we formed a kind of pale brigade, emptying the pit one pale load at a time. It was the only time I never made it through the day since I couldn’t prevent myself from gagging and eventually puking my guts out.
So, yes, I grew to hate the business . . . with a passion, in fact. You might ask: why would your dad put you in a position to hate a business he so badly wanted you to take over? The answer is this: there was a method to his madness.
Years later, when I’d already become a journalist and author, we took a long walk on a beach in Cape Cod. He explained to me that by making me work the same kind of crap jobs that he’d had to endure as a young man, he was instilling not only character but something much more practical. If I developed a hatred for the worst kind of physical labor possible, I would finish my education. Something he was unable to do since he had a young wife and even a child to support at only twenty-one years old.
He also told me that I would be much more interested in making the transition from the field to the office part of the business. Something that occurred immediately upon my graduation from Providence College in 1986.
If my first day working in the office of the construction company was any indicator, I wasn’t going to like that part of the business any better than I did the field. The shocking thing was, I hated it even more. At least working in the field provided physical stimulation. However, in the office going over bills and blueprints, finger tapping an adding machine, making calls about lengths of lumber and quantities of brick and concrete block, I wanted to hang myself from the rafters. From the outset, I knew the work was not for me.
It was at that time I started my real education. I was devouring novels and books by writers I’d never had the chance to read while working on my “formal education.” I read Tolstoy, Max Frisch
, Jim Harrison, Raymond Carver, Tim O’Brien, Martha Gelhorn, Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolf (and Tom Wolf), Norman Mailer, and of course, Ernest Hemingway.
I loved Hemingway’s work, especially the short stories from In Our Time. I felt that his prose spoke to me and me alone. It was the first time I had ever been exposed to real magic happening on the page. Yes, I had read Hemingway in high school, but this was different. I was reading him for the first time again, with a new set of eyes—eyes that belonged to a young man with his entire future ahead of him.
The future.
There it was again. The F word. And there I was working in a field that not only rejected creativity, but was dependent on the accuracy and efficiency of engineering equations. It was a business of numbers and calculations, and I was terrible at math. I was then barely twenty-two years old and rapidly falling in love not only with words and books but authors and their lives. I wanted to know what it took for someone like Hemingway to become a famous writer. How did he do it? Did he just wake up one day and start hammering out a story on his Remington portable typewriter? Did he go to writing school? Did he ever want to do anything else with his life?
I began to devour as many biographies of the great writers as I could. Hemingway once again led the effort. I read everything I could about his life, from his birth in 1899 to his tragic suicide in 1961. The stuff I encountered was so wonderful, so adventurous, so romantic, so 180-degrees apart from the life I was leading that I could barely wait to get off work so I could continue reading about the life I would eventually attempt to emulate, in my own particular way.
I read about Papa Hemingway fly fishing in the Fox River, handing out chocolates to soldiers in the Italian trenches during WWI, suffering a terrible injury after a mortar shell exploded beside him, and recovering in a hospital not far from Milan where he fell in love with a nurse years older than him.
Then I read about his early days in Paris as a struggling writer and foreign correspondent. There were the bullfights in Spain, big game fishing in Key West and Cuba, big game hunting in East Africa, the Spanish Civil War, D-Day and World War II, back to Paris and Venice and China, and wine, women, and song. It was a life lived so prodigiously and so fully that it took my breath away, and still does to this day.
Would Hemingway waste his time in a four-walled office punching an adding machine?
You know the answer to that one.
By the end of that first summer working for Zandri Construction Corp., I had made a decision. I was going to do whatever it took to become a writer. I was going to give up the business opportunity of a lifetime and invest my life in pursuit not only of letters but also living life as well as I could live it. I would waste no opportunity to experience everything I could in order to write about it later.
I would taste it, feel it, smell it, hear it, laugh with it, cry with it, sleep with it, live with it. I would break free of the bonds of my life and travel the world, sail the seas, fly the skies, ride the wave of freedom that only the writing life could offer.
I would break free of convention and familial expectations.
In the end, I said goodbye to my dad’s business, but it was only the start of something incredibly new and exciting. I not only loved writing, but I was also a fan of writers and writing. Hell, I even started collecting old manual typewriters—something I still do to this day.
I’d go on to write for the local newspaper, the local magazines, then graduate to the literary journals, and small presses. I’d enroll in prestigious writing programs like Bread Loaf Writer’s Colony and the New York State Writer’s Institute. Later on, I’d earn an MFA in Writing from Vermont College. Soon after that, I wrote my first big novel, nailed the hotshot New York agent who scored the mega first novel deal with Delacorte Press for my novel, The Innocent (As Catch Can). That two book hard and soft contract was worth a quarter of a million bucks. I’d made it.
I was not yet thirty-three years old.
What followed were some serious rollercoaster-like up and down years, but also years that were more Hemingwayesque than I might have originally bargained for. There were the marriages and divorces, the kids, the houses, and cars. There were the travels, which took me to exotic locales like Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Peru, China, India, Nepal, and months at a time in Florence, Italy, the city that has become my second home.
I’ve written in Paris, Rome, Innsbruck, Istanbul, Athens, London, Bilbao, Jerusalem, Cotonou West Africa, Moscow, Hong Kong, Guatemala City, Lima, and that’s what comes immediately to mind. I’ve nearly drowned in the Ganges, was almost crushed to death when our truck was purposely run off the road in post-revolutionary Egypt, have been bitten by piranhas in the Amazon Jungle, stared down angry soldiers in the West African bush country, and traveled by elephant in Nepal’s Chitwan National Forest.
As of this writing, I spend upwards of four months per year away from home. Travel is a passion that has not abated with age, but in fact, grown stronger. Not bad for a man who, thirty years ago, faced a lifetime of four walls for ten hours per day and two weeks of vacation per year whether I liked it or not.
In this volume, you’ll find essays not only on writing, but also the writing life which can take many forms be it an observation of the world as I see it at that particular time or a travel piece on Italy. I wrestled with making this a sort of chronological omnibus of my non-fiction writing, starting with some of my most sophomoric pieces. These include, but are not limited to, reports on high school football games, fly fishing essays, bird hunting features, book reviews and the like for publications such as The Times Union Newspaper (Albany), New York Newsday, Hudson Valley Magazine, Game and Fish Magazine, RT, and others. I also considered including some early literary fiction published in private and academic journals like Negative Capability, Fugue, Old Hickory Review, The Maryland Review, Rosebud, Buffalo Spree, and Orange Coast Magazine.
But in the end, I decided to go with pieces that appeared in The Vincent Zandri Vox for two simple reasons. Firstly, these essays are more recent and, therefore, more accomplished; and second, they are a reflection of the new era of publishing which arguably began in late 2007 with the introduction of the Kindle eReader and soon after, the Amazon KDP independent author platform.
The pieces are edgy, at times funny, other times sad, often angry, entirely anti-politically correct, but above all informative. Read them for what they might teach you, or read them for fun. Hopefully, you will do a little of both.
Today, I have twenty-six novels and novellas in print both traditionally and independently, plus numerous short stories, boxed sets, translations, and anthologies. This is my first non-fiction collection, and I’m choosing to publish it under my own indie label, Bear Media, simply because it will be delivered to market much faster. I’ve hit the New York Times, USA Today, and Amazon No. 1 Overall Bestseller lists, sold close to a million copies of my novels and stories, won the ITW Thriller and PWA Shamus Awards for Best Paperback Novel, and been featured in The New York Times, on Fox News, Bloomberg TV, and nearly made it to CBS’s Sixty Minutes, but that fell through. I’m considered an outlier by some—or an outlaw—in that I don’t stick to any one publisher or publishing method, but instead do things my way, on my terms. A theme you will see repeated again and again throughout this volume that predominantly includes essays from 2009 all the way through 2011. This was a golden period for indie authors in that it was still possible to make a ton of money on a good novel simply by lowering the price to $0.99. Those days are gone now, but I still see the enormous potential of indie publishing for writers like me who are work-horse prolific.
You’ll read the essays as I wrote them, warts and all. I felt that rewriting them would be disingenuous in some mildly profound way, like colorizing Casablanca just because technology has made it possible. But in all disclosure, I have, in specific instances, deleted names of certain publishers and other publishing associates for both legal and personal purposes. But this small edit in no way affects the spirit
and tone of the piece.
I’ve come a long way since I first entered into business with my dad. There are days I still can’t believe how things turned out. It took a gargantuan effort to break the bonds of family and what had been expected of me as my dad’s only son. For a while, it was hard, and our relationship suffered because of my decisions to leave the family fold for what became my true calling. But in the end, I know he was proud of me and my accomplishments. He also saw in me something he wished he had seen in himself—the ability to throw caution to the wind and go for it.
Not long before his death, he pulled me aside and said, “You know, I envy you. You’re like your grandfather. You don’t let anything bother you for too long. You let it slide off your back while you keep on going. Me, I’m not like that. I can’t be like that. I sweat the small stuff. Always have, always will.”
Six months later my dad died of a massive coronary while tying his work boots. He was 76 years old and still working a sixty-hour week trying to keep his construction business afloat and his family happy.
Whether that’s one of my fictional truths or truthful fictions doesn’t matter, because the point is this: Life is short, spend it wisely. Chase after your passion, whatever it is. For death, in all its bleak finality, is indeed on your heels every minute of every day.
Vincent Zandri
May 30, 2017
Antigua, Guatemala
Biting the Nail: The Discipline of Writing
“Where do you get your discipline?”
That’s the question I’m asked most frequently about my solitary writing life. Most people who work according the programmed schedule of job and career find it inconceivable that a person can actually roll out of bed, face a blank page, and begin to make words. Yet, as writers, that’s what we do. We create and in order to create we have to have discipline. Discipline to work alone, according to our own rules, according to our own high standards, according to our own priorities and curiosities.
Pieces of Mind Page 1
