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You Just Gotta Look Back Thomas Wolfe may have been right: You can't go home again. But that doesn't mean you can't stop and take a look back, to scour your past accomplishments as a writer, to take stock of where you are now compared to where you were back "then." I know whereof I speak. I began writing when I was fifteen. To me, it was the most unnatural thing I could possibly do. So why did I do it? To answer that, I have only to turn to another literary quote, this one from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who once said, "Writers write for fame, money, and the love of beautiful women." Yep, that was me. |
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It didn't matter that I was too young to deal with any of the fame I might have achieved as a successful teenage scribe. And I never once stopped to think that, even if I had managed to grow wealthy at a young age, I still couldn't have opened a checking account. It was that last part, that thing about the love of beautiful women (to me, even a 15-year-old with freckles and braces qualified), that clinched it. Unfortunately, knowing as much about writing as I did about life, I began my literary journey by cranking out my very first "novel," which wasn't a novel at all by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it was an assemblage of only marginally humorous incidents culled from my father's only marginally successful career as a tradesman. I called it God Bless the Construction Workers, and it was just awful. When, after receiving a suitable number of rejection slips, I realized that I was not going to pin my success to that corkboard, I switched genres and began writing beat poetry, which I assembled into book-length collections and promptly began sending to every publisher in the civilized world. All with predictable results. As Dame Fortune would have it, I finally stumbled upon a winning combination for a nonfiction book entitled Growing Trees Indoors. The book was published, never earned me back my $800 advance, but got me in the door to the club. After that, I stumbled into the rapidly expanding world of nonfiction kids' books--again, only marginally profitable, but I earned enough to help keep me poor. Finally, after a dozen years or more of freelancing full-time (with time outs for bad behavior in the form of various newspaper and magazine editing gigs), I sold my first novel, only to have the publisher go belly up just as the book was being released. I mention all of this for two reasons. First, I am a masochist. Like all good masochists everywhere, I enjoy revisiting my failures. It keeps me humble. Second, I am an opportunist. Although I would love to be in the cat bird's seat, writing blockbuster New York Times' bestseller fiction, I know that, in between my novel sales, I always have nonfiction to fall back upon. The market, although less glamorous than that of fiction, is predictably strong, and someone somewhere is always in the running for some nonfiction idea or another, especially if it's gimmicky. And that's enough, at least, to pay the rent. Meanwhile, I keep plugging away at that fiction, keep improving as a writer and expanding as a human being and hoping for that mega-score. It's easier to do when you have a string of nonfiction titles behind you and you realize you can always fall back upon that when you get into trouble. It ain't exactly J. K. Rowling or Stephen King, but it's good, sold, dishonest work, and it's something you should consider doing while waiting for that big fish of yours to land. After all, writing nonfiction beats shoveling cat shit in a pet shop, and that's good enough for me. Smoke if you got ‘em.
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