Dirty Work (20 page)

The proposition of writing came on me slowly. I had been wondering how this process evolved, how these books and stories came to be written. I knew that people sat down and wrote them, but it seemed almost impossible that people could actually do something like that. I wondered what it took to be a writer, and I wondered if just anybody could do it. I wondered if it might be like learning how to build houses, or lay brick, or even fight fires, for that matter. I knew that some writers made a lot of money. I was a big fan of Stephen King, and I knew that his books sold well. The main question was, could a person teach himself how to do it by doing it? It seemed a logical question to me. I had absolutely no idea of the odds against me when I decided to try it.

My wife had an old portable Smith-Corona electric, and I went out and bought a box of typing paper and sat down in our bedroom one night and started writing a novel. It was about a man-eating bear in Yellowstone National Park, a place I’d never been to, and it had a lot of sex in it. I thought sex sold, because of the Harold Robbins novels I’d read. I was wrong. Nobody in New York wanted it. I know because I almost wore that novel out sending it around. It took me five months to write it and I couldn’t understand why nobody wanted it. The main reason they didn’t want it, I know now, is because it was horrible. You would not believe how horrible. Just imagine. It was 327 single-spaced pages of sex and man-eating.

That was my first acquaintance with a thing called the Apprenticeship Period, but it got me hooked on writing, on telling a story, putting down words on paper. After that I decided I’d try my hand at short fiction, so I wrote a few horrible short stories. Nobody wanted them either. Nobody would even write anything on a rejection slip.
I decided pretty quick that nobody in New York knew his ass from a hole in the ground about fiction, but I decided that I would forge gamely on, in spite of them. I was working at a place called Comanche Pottery on my days off then. We poured liquid plaster into rubber molds shaped like pottery, Indian heads, leopards, and elephants, let them harden, then stripped the molds off. One night the whole place burned down and I was out of a part-time job for a while, but that was okay. It gave me more time to write.

Also during this time I tried to sell some stuff to
Outdoor Life,
some nonfiction pieces about things I’d seen and done while I was hunting. The first person who ever showed me any kindness was a girl who worked there named Jeannie Jagels. She wrote me a letter back about one of my early efforts, telling me why they couldn’t publish it, telling me, gently and kindly, why it wasn’t good enough. She was the first saint I met in the publishing business, and the publishing business is full of saints. A lot of the guys I work with at OFD have nicknames, and mine is “Bush,” or sometimes, “Brush” with a silent
r.
It goes back to the way my hair was one time. Out in my writing room I have a piece of paper tacked up with a heading that says,
THE ALL-BUSH SAINTS REVIEW
. And on it I have all the people listed who have helped me with my work starting with the earliest and going all the way up to Shannon Ravenel. There are a lot of names on that list, but Jeannie Jagels is the first. Later on she turned another story of mine over to a guy named Rich LaRocco, who was a field editor for
Outdoor Life.
He read my piece, which was pretty horrible and illogical, and used a lot of words in a lot of ways they didn’t need to be used, and he wrote me a cryptic note: “Write the way you’d write a letter to a friend.” Mr. LaRocco will probably never know how much good that little piece of advice did me. What it did was cause me to look at my own work and actually try to evaluate it with an objective eye, which was something I’d never done before. I’d always thought I’d just send it off and they’d buy it and publish it. Up to that point it had never occurred to me that I still had a lot to learn.

* * *

I decided that it might be a good idea to go to the library and find some books on writing and start learning more about my craft. So that’s what I did. I checked out books on writing by the armload and read them from cover to cover. I also started reading work by better writers. I had been reading Faulkner since I was about sixteen, but not with any regularity or sense of purpose. I started rereading him and other novelists, and I started reading the collections of short stories that appear every year, books like the
O. Henry Awards
and the
Pushcart Prize
and the
Best American Short Stories.
I began to see how weak and pitiful my own work was, and it was a depressing thing to see. I saw that there was a great gulf between what I was writing and what I wanted to write. But I still had the belief that if I hung in there long enough and wrote enough, I would eventually learn how. So I started another novel. This one was about a couple of old boys in Tennessee who were going to plant a big patch of marijuana and make a lot of money. It had a lot of sex in it, too, but I’m a slow learner. I think that one took about seven months, and when I finished it I knew it was a lot better than the first one, and I sent it off knowing it would be a hit. The same thing happened, nobody wanted it. I sent it out enough times to realize that it wasn’t going to be taken, and after a while I shelved it, and chalked it up to experience, and apprenticeship. I did that for years, and I kept writing, and reading.

In those years most interesting to me were essays on writing by fiction writers. The things they had to say about their own early careers could be tremendously heartening. I knew that I was a late starter and I figured the answer to this was to write even more, as much as possible, every chance I had, and compress the years of learning into a shorter period of years. That’s what I did. My children were small then, and whenever I was home I could usually lock myself away in a room, sometimes for ten or twelve hours, sometimes for as much as five or six thousand words.

By that time I had realized there wasn’t going to be any money made any time soon off writing, but I decided to go on anyway, for as long as it took. Two other things had happened to me. One was that I was enjoying what I was doing enormously, and the other was that I was teaching myself, without knowing it, to become a better reader. I had started reading the best writing by the best writers, and I began to find out it was what they called literature. I couldn’t write it yet, but at least I knew what it was. I finally knew what I was aiming for. And that was Mr. Faulkner’s advice all along: read all you can by the best writers. What he meant was read literature, and maybe that’s still the best advice young writers can get.

It took a long time for me to understand what literature was, and why it was so hard to write, and what it could do to you once you understood it. For me, very simply it meant that I could meet people on the page who were as real as the people I knew in my own life. They
were
real people, as far as I was concerned, not just characters. Even though they were only words on paper, they were as real to me as my wife and my children. And when I saw that, it was like a curtain fell away from my eyes. I saw that the greatest rewards that could be had from the printed page came from literature, and that to be able to write it was the highest form of the art of writing.

From that time on that’s what I’ve tried to write, and in the past few years I’ve been lucky enough to see some of my stories published in literary magazines. I’ve seen that distant dream come true, a book with my name on it. It hasn’t been easy and I doubt if it ever will be. I don’t think it was meant to be easy. I think that from the first it was meant to be hard for the few people who came along and wanted to write it, because the standards are so high and the rewards so great. A conference like this is one of the best of
them, to be able to stand before a group of people who love it like I do and want to hear more about it, and to be able to offer some of my own work out to them in the hope of making them see into the hearts of the people I’ve chosen to write about.

Thank you.

PHOTO CREDIT: TOM RANKIN

Larry Brown was born in Lafayette County, Mississippi, where he lived all his life before his untimely death in 2004. The critically acclaimed author of eight books of fiction, including the posthumously published
A Miracle of Catfish,
as well as two works of nonfiction, Brown received the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1992 and 1997, the Lila Wallace-Readers Digest Award, and the University of North Carolina’s second Thomas Wolfe Prize and Lectureship.