Agents and editors perform similar functions in that they employ their own talents to elevate both the book and its author. If they choose their acquisitions wisely, they also elevate readers and, in the best of scenarios, the culture as a whole. As literary gatekeepers, they can either pander to and perpetuate the lowest common denominator of taste, or they can exercise a delicate manipulation by challenging both the writer and society as a whole to be better than they are.
I could spend another page or so here accentuating my indebtedness to both Sandy and Anna by comparing them to other agents and editors I’ve been acquainted with over the past thirty years. But there is no comparison. I feel blessed to have these two young women on my side. I’ve always known that if I am ever to be saved, it will be by a woman. Little did I know it would take two of them, working together, to do the job.
And to the entire team at Landmark, I am humbled and deeply grateful not only for what each of you does, but that you have chosen to do it, to care so deeply about books and the fools who write them that you willingly spend your days (and, I imagine, many nights) copyediting, fact-checking, packaging and promoting, formatting and illustrating, and adorning and otherwise beautifying those books. Without unseen toilers like you, there would be no books, and therefore little dissemination of information and wisdom, little chance to explore distant places and cultures, little chance to be stirred by another’s courage or despair or joy or triumph, little balm for the aching soul. Without you, we fools might still be wandering the land to tell our stories from campfire to campfire. Without you, we would leave small trace of ourselves when the wind of time blows our dust far and wide.
And what can I say of those individuals who, without pay or other pocketable recompense, will consent to read a raw manuscript so as to intercept its flaws and infirmities before a reader can? Their time and expertise is present in this novel too. I owe much to writer/editor Michael Dell for pointing out at least two dozen typos and misspellings my forty readings of the manuscript missed, and for his keen editorial insights illuminating textual moments when the clarity I thought existed did not exist. My thanks also go out to Trooper Jason Urbani of the Pennsylvania State Police, who patiently and generously responded to all of my questions regarding behavior and protocol among those guardians in gray and black.
Gentlemen, I thank you. I hope that your contributions to this novel will win each of you a few extra credits in the karma column, though I doubt you have need for them.
And no acknowledgment page would be complete if it ignores those who make the rest of us possible. Without Readers, those essential and beloved Readers, we would all be six shades of bereft.
A writer without readers is like a man adrift on the ocean in a very small boat. In that small boat, he might float from island to island, from one strange and exciting place to the next. He might make wondrous observations and discoveries, might be thrilled to the marrow by the revelations that come to him out there in the vastness of a star-speckled night when the seam disappears between earth and sky, God and sailor.
But because he is alone in that boat, he will have no one to share his discoveries with, no way to test the soundness of his insights. Is he an explorer or just a madman? The wonders he carries will lie rotting in the bottom of his boat until he gets tired of the way they smell in solitude and tosses them overboard, himself along with them.
The irony of this business is that most writers are solitary and misanthropic, but to be of any value, they must also be the garrulous captains who stand at the bows of their ships and cry out, “Iceberg over there! Whale sounding there! Sea serpent dead ahead!” The writer’s cargo is a human one, and he must pilot his passengers up and down the swells of human emotion, through the sargasso of grief and over the jagged reefs of despair.
His job is to lead his passengers, not by the mind, but by the heart and the gut, to chaperone them into a white-knuckling storm or down through an ear-popping dive or into a cove of sweet relief. A writer’s job is to love his readers and to want nothing more than to pilot them from experience to experience, emotion to emotion. The best fiction is a voyage of feeling, and the writer’s job is to generate sentipensante for his readers, those feelings that give rise not to an intellectual kind of knowledge but an emotional knowledge, a deeper connection with what Faulkner called “the old verities and truths of the heart.”
Another way of looking at this relationship between writer and readers is through its intimacy: the reader comes to a story wanting to be wooed, desirous of seduction. If the writer’s inducements are successful, the voice sufficiently tempting, the promises sufficiently alluring, the reader gives herself over to the story not for minutes but hours and, for days at a time, melding her own imagination with the writer’s while falling into step with the characters, hoping for the best, giving them her heart. What greater gift can a writer receive than this?
At its best, the making of a novel, from the original thought to the reader’s bookshelf, is a long and tenuous journey of unselfish love. Each of us gives to the story what we have to give. Maybe that’s a romantic notion that seldom holds true today, but it’s the notion I cling to.
Writers survive and endure only because of all of you, collaborators one and all. To misquote the Beatles, we get by with a lot of help from our friends. And so, to each and every one of you, I can say only this:
Thank you, my collaborator. Thank you, my friend.
About the Author
Randall Silvis’s fifteen books of fiction and nonfiction have appeared on Best of the Year lists from the New York Times, the Toronto Globe & Mail, SfSite.com, and the International Association of Crime Writers, as well as on several editors’ and booksellers’ pick lists. His multigenre work has been hailed as masterful, not only by the New York Times Book Review, but also by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Mystery Scene magazine.
The author’s short fiction has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has been included in the Best of the Net anthology and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s Best American Mystery Stories series.
As a former contributing writer for the Discovery Channel magazines, Silvis authored numerous cover and feature stories on subjects of history, natural history, biography, and science and technology. His nonfiction narrative about the exploration of Labrador, Heart So Hungry, was a Best of the Year pick by the Toronto Globe & Mail. His many articles and essays have appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Christian Science Monitor, The Writer, Writer’s Digest, Pittsburgh Magazine, and elsewhere.
Also a prize-winning playwright and produced screenwriter, Randall Silvis’s literary awards include the Drue Heinz Literature Prize; two literature fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Award; six writing fellowship awards from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts for his fiction, drama, and screenwriting; and a doctor of letters degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania for “distinguished literary achievement.”
Cohost of the popular podcast series The Writer’s Hangout (www.thewritershangout.com), Silvis lives in western Pennsylvania, the setting for much of his work.
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Two Days Gone Page 33
