by Barry, Dave
FACT: William Shakespeare, who is responsible for some of the greatest works of Western literature including the original version of West Side Story, was raised in a rural village without any formal education and could neither read nor write nor speak English. Many historians now believe he may actually have been a horse.
FACT: When J. K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book, she was a single mother on welfare who was both blind and deaf and had been chained to a dungeon wall for eleven years upside down.
FACT: John Grisham is from Mississippi.
If these individuals were able to overcome such hardships and become successful authors, there is no reason why you can’t. So let’s get started!
The first step is to have a snack.
(Thirty-minute break.)
OK, time to get started!
HOW TO BREAK INTO THE WRITING FIELD
Let’s get one thing straight: There are no shortcuts to becoming a successful published author. It takes determination and a lot of plain old hard work. You cannot just sit around and wait for literary success to be dropped on you out of the sky by some magical success-pooping seagull. No, you must roll up your sleeves, plant yourself in front of your computer and perform the difficult—and lonely—task of writing a letter to a successful author asking for free advice. This is the only known way to succeed as a writer. We published authors receive such letters all the time. Mine generally sound like this:
Dear Mr. Berry,
I am a recent college graduate or stay-at-home mother of three or corporate attorney or eighty-seven-year-old retiree or prison inmate or vice president of the United States and I am a big fan of your writing, especially your book “Hoot,” which was hilarious! Anyway, the reason for this letter is that I am looking for some guidance and I am hoping you can provide it. While not a published author myself, I have done some writing in my spare time, and my friends or parents or college professors or cell mates or goldfish or alien abductors have told me that my “tongue in cheek” style of humor reminds them of you. Mr. Barrie, I know you are a very busy person so I will “cut to the chase.” I am hoping you will take a look at the enclosed selection of my humorous essays or the 873-page manuscript of my comic novel about a corporate attorney who becomes involved in a series of wacky depositions or my collection of family Christmas newsletters from 1987 or the Akron, Ohio, Yellow Pages or my handwritten account of the many humorous events that occurred during my forty-three-year career in the field of dental implants. I am specifically wondering if you think that I have “what it takes” to “make the grade” as a “pro” writer and, if so, what steps I should take next? Would you be interested in “polishing up” my work for publication? I would of course give you “full credit.” Also would it be possible for you to put in a “good word” for me with your publisher? I understand that in order to get published, it’s a good idea to have an agent and I am hoping you can recommend one. I would also be grateful for any “tricks of the trade” you can pass along to a “rookie,” such as the “do’s and don’ts” of putting words inside “quotation marks.” Also I have developed this weird lump on my right elbow and I’m wondering if you think I should have it looked at. Thank you so much, Mr. Berrie!
Sincerely,
(Name)
P.S. Please write back soon because the lump is changing color.
We professional authors receive many letters like this. Whenever one arrives, we immediately drop whatever we are doing so we can analyze the letter writer’s specific situation and develop a detailed plan of action for his or her writing career. Bear in mind that this takes time. If you write to one of the more popular authors—James Patterson, for example, or the late Jane Austen—you need to be patient, as they might be busy providing consultation services for other aspiring authors. Allow two weeks for your author to get back to you. After that, you should consider a follow-up letter or personal visit to your author’s residence to see how your career plan is coming along.
Your First Book Contract
Once your author has found you an agent and a publisher, you will need to sign a book contract, which is a lengthy legal document that says, “The Author warrants blah-blah-blah, etc.” Don’t worry about the exact contents of the contract. The only important thing in there is the size of your advance, which is a sum of money that the publisher pays you before you have actually written the book. That’s right: You get this money up front. I realize this sounds crazy. It’s like taking a college course where the professor gives you an “A” on a paper you haven’t even written yet. But there’s a sound logical reason for this system; namely, the book publishing industry has no idea what it’s doing.
The size of your first advance will depend on a great many factors. It should be around one million dollars.
Writing a Book
At some point during the decade after you sign the contract the publisher is going to start asking you whiny questions about when you expect to finish your book. “In your contract,” your publisher will say, “you specifically warranted that blah-blah-blah.” As if you, a busy professional author, are supposed to remember every single thing you sign!
But the point is, there may come a time when you have to physically write a book. This is the worst part of being a professional author because you have to sit around thinking up words for days on end, which is unbelievably boring. After you become more established, you can skip this pesky chore by doing what many top authors do; namely, think up book ideas but hire cheap foreign labor to write the actual books. If you go that route, make sure you read your book before you pass it along to the publisher because many foreign laborers don’t have a strong grasp of English and sometimes they will totally screw up your idea.
FACT: The Hunger Games, as originally conceived by the author, was supposed to be a three-book series on the historical impact of salad dressing.
But, as a rule, your publisher will expect you to write your first book all by yourself. This means you will have to choose a genre. For your first effort, I recommend that you write a children’s book. This genre has a couple of advantages. For one thing, you’re writing for children and children are, let’s face it, not the sharpest quills on the porcupine. You can write pretty much any idiot thing you want and they’ll be fine with it. Also, children’s books are typically just twenty-four pages long and consist almost entirely of large illustrations, so the total number of words you have to write is about the same as a standard grocery list.
FACT: The average children’s book author works two hours per year.
The one important rule of children’s books is that they have to teach an Important Lesson. Here’s the basic format:
Merle Moth Does a Big Thing
Page 1: Merle Moth loved to eat.
Page 2: Eat! Eat! Eat!
Page 3: Merle ate socks.
Page 4: Merle ate coats.
Page 5: Merle even ate hats!
Page 6: One day, Merle saw a blue shirt.
Page 7: “I will eat this shirt!” he said.
Page 8: But Merle could not eat the shirt.
Page 9: “This shirt tastes bad!” Merle told his friends.
Page 10: “Because it is made from oil,” said Tyrone Toad.
Page 11: “What is oil?” said Merle.
Page 12: “It is a nonrenewable resource,” said Earlene the Endangered Fruit Bat.
Page 13: “Oh no!” said Merle.
Page 14: “Oil hurts the Earth,” said Carlos Cicada, who was transgendered.
Page 15: “Oh no!” said Merle again, for he knew the book needed to reach twenty-four pages.
Page 16: “Yes,” said Reggie the Lactose-Intolerant Raccoon. “We must save the Earth from oil!”
Page 17: “But I am so small!” said Merle. “How can I save the Earth from oil?”
Page 18: “I know!” said Farook the Differently Abled Muslim Sea Urchin.
“You can fly deep into the ear canal of a petrochemical executive and tell him to stop hurting the Earth with oil!”
Page 19: And that is what Merle did.
Page 20: Soon the Earth was saved!
Page 21: Merle was happy.
Page 22: “I learned an Important Lesson,” he said. “Even if you are small, you can make a big difference!”
Page 23: “You can say that again!” said Antoine, a vegan amoeba of color.
Page 24: Everyone laughed and laughed. But not at anyone else.
The End
The downside to the children’s book genre is that—this is well known inside the publishing industry—it’s impossible to keep cranking out this kind of crap without turning to hard drugs.
FACT: The Very Hungry Caterpillar is actually about the author’s long, desperate struggle with crystal meth.
For this reason you might want to consider another low-workload, high-pay genre: poetry. There is BIG money to be made here because poetry is extremely popular with the American consumer. Bookstores literally cannot keep poetry books on the shelves. (This is why, when you go to a bookstore, you never see poetry books on the shelves.)
“Wait a minute,” I hear you saying. “Isn’t it hard to write a poem?”
It used to be. In the old days, there were strict rules requiring that poems had to rhyme and contain a certain number of syllables per line and be at least vaguely comprehensible to humans. Writing these old-style poems was backbreaking work, which is why the men who did it are virtually all dead today from various causes.
But then in the early nineteenth or twentieth century a group of brilliant young research poets working late at the National Poetry Laboratory accidentally mainlined some heroin and invented “free verse,” which is a kind of poetry that has no rules at all. Now any random clot of unpunctuated words could be a poem:
Suddenly
In the morning
always in the morning
the moment comes
when you are shuffling, sleep-slowed
down the dawn-dim hallway
shuffling in your nightdress
it comes
so sudden
so cold
so suddenly cold when it comes
the dog nose in your butt.
—T. S. ELIOT
Free verse totally revolutionized the poetry industry. It meant that the entire lifetime output of an old-style poet such as Milton Wordsworth Longfellow could be equaled in a single afternoon by a bored homemaker with a bottle of zinfandel. The point is: You can definitely do it. And because of the high consumer demand for poetry, the money is great.
FACT: Eighty-six percent of all private jets are owned by poets.
Also it goes without saying that, as a poet, you will be a major international celebrity. You will have front-row seats for every concert and be whisked past the line of loser normal people into any exclusive restaurant or nightclub you want. Not to mention having casual sex with as many as four Kardashians per day.
If that sounds too unhygienic, you might want to consider becoming a novelist. This is a little harder than writing poetry or children’s books, but not much. The two big decisions you have to make are:
Will it be a women’s novel or a men’s novel?
Will there be vampires?
Once you have answered these questions, all you have to do is come up with characters and a plot that contains a Beginning, a Middle and a Surprise Ending. Use this table for reference:
ELEMENTS OF A NOVEL*
Women’s Novel
Men’s Novel
MAIN CHARACTER
Female. Strikingly beautiful. Highly intelligent. Sensitive. Has many feelings. Millions and millions of feelings. Very attractive to men. Also very attractive to women. Also very attractive to vampires if there are any in the plot. Just generally an extremely attractive person.
Male. Masculine. Ruggedly handsome. Brave. Manly. Highly intelligent. Fearless. A renegade and a loner; dislikes authority. Courageous. Strong and very good at fighting, but reluctant to use violence. Understood to possess—although this is never explicitly stated—a huge penis.
OTHER PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
The main character’s mother or sister or daughter or childhood friend from whom she has become estranged or has an ambivalent relationship.
Other females whose function is to have long conversations with the main character about her numerous feelings and relationship complexities.
Several strikingly handsome males and/or vampires who are, it goes without saying, powerfully attracted to the main character.
A serial killer or sex pervert basement torturer or powerful politician or businessperson or criminal with numerous henchpersons.
High-ranking yet idiotic police, military or government officials who detest renegade loners.
A highly professional yet beautiful female police or military officer or lawyer with a tough outer shell yet at the same time a certain emotional vulnerability yet at the same time a nice pair of gazombas.
BEGINNING
We are gradually introduced to the world of the main character. We slowly begin to understand, through her innermost thoughts and her conversations with other female characters, that, because of some mysterious traumatic incident that occurred in the past, she has deeply conflicted feelings about her complex relationships with her mother, sister, daughter and/or estranged childhood friend. We also are introduced to one or more males to whom the main character is attracted but about whom she has many deeply ambivalent feelings that result in much conflicted thinking going on for pages and pages.
The main character is thrust into a situation where he encounters some wrongdoing being done and, through no fault of his own, must reluctantly beat the living shit out of some henchpersons. This results in a string of mysterious clues that cause the main character to realize that there is an evil plot afoot involving worldwide nuclear destruction or serial killing or sex pervert basement torturing with soldering irons or the president of the United States being a Communist robot or some other hideous evil plot that the main character must courageously try to uncover single-handedly against impossible odds.
MIDDLE
Through continued conversations with other female characters, as well as additional lengthy passages of innermost thoughts, we gradually learn more about the complex feelings and relationships of the main character, getting glimpses—but only glimpses—of the mysterious traumatic past incident that is causing her to have so much emotional complexity in her life. At the same time she gradually becomes involved in a deeper and more complex relationship with one or more of the male characters, yet she is unable to commit herself fully to him or them because of so many sensitive innermost ambivalent feelings swarming around inside her like minnows in a bait bucket.
The main character, bravely pursuing the truth, finds his path blocked time and again by henchpersons out of whom he has no choice but to reluctantly beat the living shit. This draws the attention of high-ranking police, military or government officials who naturally get everything completely wrong and focus their suspicions on the main character. They assign, to investigate him, the tough yet beautiful gazomba woman. She and the main character take an instant dislike to each other and soon have amazing sex lasting several days thanks to the awesome power of the unstated but clearly understood Yule log in his undershorts.
SURPRISE ENDING
As the main character’s feelings reach a raging fever pitch of ambivalence, she has a climactic emotional conversation or
encounter involving her mother, sister, daughter or estranged childhood friend, and we finally, after many hundreds of pages, discover the mysterious traumatic past event has caused so much internal conflict and relationship complexity. It turns out to be: a shocking surprise. By finally getting it out into the open, the main character is able to confront it and have many additional pages of conversations and thoughts and feelings about it. In the end she is able, at last, to accept herself as the highly attractive woman she is and to admit the love she feels for one or more of the male characters and possibly allow him to suck out her blood. The book ends here because of the danger that some actual action is about to occur.
The main character and the woman (who has of course fallen in love with him) become ensnared in a hopeless plot predicament from which escape is absolutely, completely one hundred percent impossible, so they are definitely going to die. They respond by having sex of a caliber that would kill a rhinoceros. Then they escape in a very clever and brave way and proceed to an action-packed climax in which the main character, against impossible odds, reluctantly kills a minimum of 135 people en route to discovering the incredible shocking truth, which is: something totally unexpected. With the plot now resolved, the main character and the woman again engage in lovemaking so powerful that it alters worldwide bird migration patterns, although she knows in her heart that he will never settle down with one woman because of his renegade loner lifestyle and massive unstated pelvic salami.
Promoting Your Book
The surest way to make your book a bestseller is to get my wife to read it. If she likes it, she will make it a bestseller. She has done this repeatedly. Remember a book called The Kite Runner? That was my wife. Of the ten million copies of that book sold, at least 9.8 million were purchased by people who were directly ordered to do so by my wife. Not only did she make everybody in her vast international network of book-reading women friends buy it, she also would walk up to complete strangers in bookstores and say: “Have you read The Kite Runner? It’s a great book!” Then she would basically hover around them until they had no choice but to buy The Kite Runner, even if they already owned it or, for that matter, even if they owned the bookstore.
