by Steve Hely
I needed to talk to somebody. I took out my phone and dialed Lucy in New York.
“Pete? What’s up?”
“Lucy, hey what’s up, it’s Pete.” (I was kinda drunk by now.)
“Did you hear about Polly’s wedding? Are you excited?” Lucy is one of those girls from the Midwest who think everything’s terrific.
“Yeah, super news. Listen let’s talk about some books.”
“Oh, did you start Peking?”
“Not yet. Listen what’s the deal with Preston Brooks?”
“The Kindness to Birds guy? You called me at eleven to ask about Preston Brooks?”
“Yeah you know, just talk to you.”
“Um, we don’t publish him or anything, but everybody’s—”
“Listen, how much money do you think a guy like that makes?”
“Well, I can’t really say; it sort of depends. There’s—you know—paperback rights, and—”
“What would be the ballpark?”
“Well, I actually saw just today that the movie rights sold. It said high six figures.”
I put down my phone. I could hear Lucy’s chirp come through. But I was busy picturing Polly’s wedding.
I would walk in wearing a suit I’d paid someone to pick out for me. At the bar I would order something writerly, perhaps naming a Scotch they didn’t have. My contemporaries, American men—who are philistines—might not recognize me, because my book’s publicity had not yet penetrated the CNN/SportsCenter loop in which they are trapped. But there would be no mistaking the reaction of the whispering women. The aunts and cousins would be braver, coming up to me, clutching my arm and telling me how they’d loved my novel, and wanting to know where I got my ideas, and how I’d gotten my start. The young women would crane their necks to hear me. Had I just mentioned “Elijah”? For surely by now they’d seen in the Entertainment Weekly profile that Elijah Wood was starring in the movie based on my book. Ron Howard was attached. James and his cloddish Australians would sulk and stare at their beers and punch each other in the arm. And Polly would be dragged away, again and again, by bridesmaids asking to be introduced to Peter Tarslaw. And as the evening wound down, I’d hold the prettiest one, the smart-cutest, enthralled as I issued quiet pronouncements about how “a writer makes it his duty to be midwife and doctor to an idea being birthed.” And then I’d lead her away, kind of discreetly, but she’d privately delight in knowing that eyes were cagily seeing her leave to be favored by the writer Peter Tarslaw. And Polly herself would slap her flowers to the table in rage, upstaged at her own wedding. Defeated.
I decided to become a famous novelist.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
Best Sellers
3
A writer’s job is to tell the truth.
—Ernest Hemingway
A writer strives to express a universal truth.
—William Faulkner
If you want to write, and have your writing mean something to someone, above all it must be true.
—Preston Brooks
What a crock of horseshit. Since when has anybody wanted to hear the truth? People hate the truth. It’s literally their least favorite thing in the entire universe. People will believe thousands of different lies in succession rather than confront a single scintilla of truth. People like love that crosses the years, funny workplaces, goofy dads who save Christmas, laser battles, whiny hags who marry charming Italians, and stylish detectives. But try telling somebody a single true thing about human experience and they’ll turn on the TV or adjust their Netflix queue while you starve to death in the rain. People don’t trot down to Barnes & Noble to pay $24.95 for the truth.
I’m willing to give Faulkner and Hemingway a pass. But when Preston “My Writing Is a Cudgel” Brooks declaims about truth, he’s lying.
Rule 1: Abandon truth.
That was my first rule for my novel. By six o’clock on Saturday evening, I’d outlined The Tornado Ashes Club. Here’s how I did it.
The morning after I decided to be a famous novelist, my head was throbbing more than is ideal. But the image of Preston Brooks and his college harem hung before me like a torchlight guiding a mountain climber. And the image of Polly Pawson and her degenerate Australian wedding party prodded me from behind, like Sherpas with pointy sticks.
A first step was itemizing my goals.
GOALS AS A NOVELIST:
1. FAME—Realistic amount. Enough to open new avenues of sexual opportunity. Personal assistant to read my mail, grocery shop, and so on.
2. FINANCIAL COMFORT—Never have a job again. Retire. Spend rest of life lying around, pursuing hobbies (boating? skeet shooting?).
3. STATELY HOME BY OCEAN (OR SCENIC LAKE)—Spacious library, bay windows, wet bar. HD TV, discreetly placed. Comfortable couch.
4. HUMILIATE POLLY AT HER WEDDING.
Next, rules. A Googling of “rules for writing” unveiled the truth fallacy. Another Brooks quote, frequently cited online: “As a rule, a writer would be better off hauling tar or stunning calves in a slaughterhouse. Real writing, honest writing, will tear your guts out.”
By this point, I was just in awe of the guy. He’d use any wild deceit to hide his fraud. Writers couldn’t be trusted. I’d have to discover the real rules for successful novel crafting on my own.
I had novelists I admired, but they don’t offer much inspiration.
Consider Whit Kerner. He wrote The Forbidden Chronicle of the World, a terrific, funny book about a conspiracy of harridans who secretly run the universe. Current rumor among the few who cared was that Whit Kerner had done so much heroin his hands had fallen off and he was trapped in a cabin, unable to dial a phone, somewhere in British Columbia. So he had achieved none of my three goals.
The summer before college, Cockroaches Convene blew my mind. I read along as Proudfoot tramped through the cemeteries, and then I went back and read it all again. But Jim Dinwiddle, the man who invented all that, was found dead by Memphis police in a Dumpster in 1978, with a plastic bag taped around his head. Likewise, 0 for 3.
After the impossibly good Well Bred, Helen Eisenstadt morphed into a gnomish far-left scold, whose essays about “oilocracy” appeared in the shrillest of alternative newspapers. I don’t know what became of Kim Szydlowski (Quiet, You Bastard) or T. T. Hauser (Storm Drain), but they were never on TV, so doubtless grim fates had met them, too.
The financial success of an author is inversely proportional to the literary worth of the book. Take the authors of the Bible. Those garment-rending saps ate cockroach dung in caves in the Gaza desert and scrawled tortured epiphanies on papyrus before being stoned to death or dying in plagues. Or Herman Melville, who barely staved off debts by assessing tariffs on crates of imported wool in New York Harbor for twenty years. Meanwhile Pamela McLaughlin, whose books can be read and forgotten in the time it takes for ordered Chinese food to arrive, flies in a private helicopter to the Caribbean island she owns. She named it—and this is not a joke, I read it in Vanity Fair—“Bellissima Haven.”
Rule 2: Write a popular book. Do not waste energy making it a good book.
I decided to head to the big bookstores in downtown Boston. There the behavior of book buyers could best be studied. Grabbing Hobart’s two-week-old New York Times Book Review from my room, I headed downstairs.
While waiting for the subway, I saw a woman with cat’seye glasses reading Dexter Eagan’s Cracked Like Teeth, which is what cat’s-eye-glasses-wearing women were reading back then. Sadly a memoir wasn’t an option for me, because my youth had been tragically happy. Mom never had the foresight to hit me or set me to petty thieving or to enlist us in a survivalist cult. I wasn’t even from the South, which would’ve bought a few dozen pages. Lying wouldn’t work; these days memoir police seem to emerge and make sure you truly had it bad. And the bar for bad is high—reviewers have no patience for standard-issue alcoholics and battered wives anymore.
I spent the train ride scouring my memory for an angl
e. Once a wasp had flown up my pants and stung me several times. Sometimes when I was a kid “Funny Mom” would appear, singing Patsy Cline and wanting hugs, and I later learned this was drunk Mom. One February vacation I’d spent at a vegan farm in Vermont, cross-country skiing with my lesbian Aunt Evelyn and her friends. They’d made me write a prayer to the Earth on degradable sorghum paper and leave it in a crevice in a boulder. Still, pretty thin cheese.
Rule 3: Include nothing from my own life.
My experiences were dull. If I’d led an interesting life, I’d be a smuggler or a ranch hand or an investigative reporter penetrating deep within the sinister world of Tokyo’s yakuza.
Emerging from the T at Downtown Crossing, I strode down Washington Street and into Borders Books & Music.
Placed like an altar for entering customers to pass was a table arranged with neat stacks: BESTSELLING AUTHORS. Preston was there, and Pamela, and Nick Boyle. Most fascinating was Gerry Banion’s Sageknights of Darkhorn. The cover art was like the geometry-class doodle of an unsocialized ten-year-old: a square-bodied king wielding a crude sword with his stumpy arms from the back of a horse that appeared palsied. Both man and beast were lumpier than is natural—the king’s left leg had a bonus knee.
I ran my finger along the smooth covers. These weren’t novels you creased with rereading, and pressed into the hands of trusted friends, and carried around in beaten backpacks. These were tidy candy-package novels you wrapped up and gave as presents, which moved from store shelves to home shelves to used-book sales unread, as money flowed authorward. That was the cash pie of which I wanted a slice.
In the second-floor café I ordered a coffee served in a cup as big as a dog’s head, opened the Book Review to the Best Sellers list, and got to work. By the time I was done shoveling in sugar, I had another rule.
Rule 4: Must include a murder.
Sixty percent of that week’s bestselling novels involved killings. Glancing around the bookstore, I estimated that fifty thousand fictional characters are murdered every year. Not including a murder in your book is like insisting on playing tennis with a wooden racket. Noble perhaps in some stubborn way, but why handicap yourself?
Many types of best sellers had to be eliminated from contention. Thrillers, mysteries, fantasy, and sci-fi all require intricate construction and research. I had no intention of spending my nights on ride-alongs with homicide cops, or mapping magical empires and populating them with orcs.
Writing an updated version of some public domain story seemed like a worry-free route to literary success. A ready-made plot would keep my mental effort to a minimum. It would just be gussying up the SparkNotes, really. In my notebook I wrote down a few ideas: Oliver Twist in exclusive San Diego gated community? Huckleberry Finn with a hovercraft? Hamlet but he loves sudoku? Iliad among Hawaiian surfer chicks? But these all seemed tough to maintain past the first hundred pages.
Most of my scattered impressions gleaned from the bestseller list gelled all at once, in a flash, when I gazed up and saw the Crazy Muffin Ripper.
Rule 5: Must include a club, secrets / mysterious missions, shy characters, characters whose lives are changed suddenly, surprising love affairs, women who’ve given up on love but turn out to be beautiful (MUFFIN RIPPER RULE).
The only other customer at the coffee bar was an electric-haired woman of about fifty. If I had to guess I’d say that she maybe worked in an art supply store? Probably in the back. She was tearing apart a cranberry-raisin muffin with frantic violence. Crumbs were strewn across her open copy of The Jane Austen Women’s Investigators Club.
And this woman, I decided, who sits at a bookstore and assaults muffins and reads, was my target audience.
Of course such a woman would be enthralled by the idea of a club. All lonely people wish they were in a cool club. I certainly do—we’d have neat jackets and nicknames. That’s why readers are the top club-formers of America.
Of course she’d like secrets and mysterious missions. For loners, the next best thing to belonging to a club is guarding a dark secret or a mission, which makes shyness a heroic necessity. Perhaps she had a dark secret of her own—a house full of cat bodies stacked like firewood.
Of course she’d like sudden love stories. The Muffin Ripper wasn’t spending Thursdays fending off dudes at José McIntyre’s Margarita Night. For a love story to be plausible to her, it had to arrive suddenly, and the man needed to be bundled with another dose of dark secrets, to explain what took him so long. The bestseller list is always peopled with divorcées and wounded women who, on storm-tossed islands or the hills of Italy, find to their surprise that olive-toned men want to make careful Cambrian love to them.
If that’s what she wanted, I’d give it to her.
Tipping my cup to the woman who’d set my mind ablaze, twitching with creativity and caffeine, I folded up my book review and headed for the aisles.
I wasn’t so arrogant as to think my own first effort would stay on the bestseller list. Not for more than a week or two. I had a more realistic objective: getting hired as the writing professor at a prestigious college. Williams, or Princeton, someplace kinda away from it all seemed nice. I’d read enough campus novels to expect sexual frolicking and light work.
But becoming a professor called for a particular kind of book, a “literary” book. These books can be identified in two ways. One: at the end of a work of literary fiction, you’re supposed to feel weirdly sad, and perhaps cry, but not for any clear reason.
Rule 6: Evoke confusing sadness at the end.
Two: the word “lyrical” appears on the back cover of literary fiction.
Rule 7: Prose should be lyrical.
Since the definition of “lyrical” is “resembling bad poetry,” I could crank it out. Just for practice, in my head I tried describing what the Muffin Ripper was doing, right then. “Back arching like a perched swallowtail, her hand hovered with quivering gentility as she picked up a dropped raisin off the sheet-white floor. She raised it to her lips slowly, like a sacrament, as the dust of wheat flour drifted down her chin.” Good enough.
Now that I’d started cracking the Code of the Novel, insights seemed to burst out at me off the shelves like firecrackers. Walking through the audiobooks, I realized that here was an entire market ordinary novelists didn’t plan for. There was a whole bunch of people who listened to books in their cars.
Rule 8: Novel must have scenes on highways, making driving seem poetic and magical.
Next, I bumped into the cookbooks, an overwhelming wall where in one eyeful were pictures of pastas and steaming meat stews and mac and cheese next to piles of gravy-smothered biscuits. I decided to get some lunch. The human brain is easily lured by food. And people are fat these days and think about food all the time.
Rule 9: At dull points include descriptions of delicious meals.
Rounding the corner, I knocked some oversized volumes on The Art of Pork to the floor. Nearby a bookstore employee looked up from his reshelving with a flat expression. Bookstores are filled, customers and employees alike, with people who hate their jobs.
Rule 10: Main character is miraculously liberated from a lousy job.
I walked away as he picked up the books.
Rule 11: Include scenes in as many reader-filled towns as possible.
On my way out I passed “Local Interest,” right by the register. Here were books of old photographs of Boston, a collection of poetry by and about the Red Sox, a history of Newbury Street, and a few Boston-related novels, like Murdah by Chowdah and Bud Light, Freckles and Hair Gel: A Southie Love Story.
I realized this was shelf space rife for exploiting. My novel should be “Local Interest” across the nation. I’d inject the names of popular bars in Ann Arbor and Austin and Portland and have our hero stop in for a beer or some chili fries. Impressed by my authenticity, locals would write up my novel for their local independent press. And I’d get free meals from grateful owners while on my book tour.
Time for a C
hacarero! These tasty Chilean sandwiches are served from a stand near Filene’s, and at lunchtime the line stretches around a corner, following the track of the wafting smoke from the grilled steak and spiced chicken. It was one of those creepily warm winter days, and though this was a Saturday, the line was still full of discharged office dwellers with crossed arms and dangling ID badges.
I gave my protagonist a job. He should be like these harried types who eat lunch on the fly. Corporate, but in some vague capacity since I don’t know how real businesses work. “Human Relations” seemed safe. But he should also be totally awesome. A dexterous athlete and a soulful lover, with the wisdom of a mystic and the abs of a rock climber. He should have a set of unusual skills, like underwater caving. The schoolchildren who made J. K. Rowling a billionaire were the ultimate proof of.
Rule 12: Give readers versions of themselves, infused with extra awesomeness.
Awesome heroes stuck in mediocre lives are compelling, because they suggest that having a mediocre life may not be your fault.
In a way this was all just a subset of a rule all authors should memorize.
Rule 13: Target key demographics.
Ideally my protagonist would be somehow “multicultural.” Unusual racial backgrounds garner at least pretend interest from all readers. But as a standard-issue white male, I didn’t have much to offer. There was one black guy I knew well—my college roommate, Derek. But no one wants to read about a black guy who went to Exeter and wore a bathing suit and a Star Wars T-shirt and spent all his time playing World of Warcraft. There’s only one interesting story about Derek.
The One Interesting Story About Derek
In junior year, he resolved to lose his virginity. He took a bus to Mount Holyoke, vowing not to return until he had achieved his goal. After a week spent sleeping in trees and dodging the campus police, he acquired a kind of folk-legend status, and a “not unpretty” woman in his words took pity on him to the approval and acclaim of all.
The point being, my protagonist would have to be a white guy.
