How I Became a Famous Novelist (10 page)

• A CIA agent discovers the Chinese are secretly training an army of genetically engineered dragons.

• An American college guy on a Rhodes Scholarship discovers a code in Shakespeare’s plays. The code leads to a secret about the Bible.

• A yoga instructor/marine biologist discovers that dolphins have a code in their DNA. (
Put there by aliens? The Catholic Church? Oil companies?
)

• A hip modern Londoner discovers she’s under a zombie curse that’s followed her family since her sixteenth-century pirate ancestors. She’s helped by a reggae singer who also teaches her how to relax and let love happen.

• A New York City cop discovers that some Hasidic Jews have found a long-lost eleventh commandment that changes everything.

• Pharmaceutical companies are poisoning everyone’s brains.

The last thing, I realized, wasn’t my idea. It was something a homeless guy had shouted at me as he was stuffing newspapers into his shirt.

Let’s say each of my ideas was worth $500,000 in royalties, plus $1 million in movie rights, and an additional $1 mill in franchise fees and such. That meant the paper in my hand was worth $32.5 million. I decided to cut that in half, to be conservative, but still.

Maybe it was thinking about the stern faces and strange symbols on dollar bills that gave me one last idea as the baking timer went off.

• A newly elected idealistic president discovers that the history of the United States has been guided by a cabal of aliens and a secret society of their human collaborators.

This was the one, I knew it. People love reading about presidents, and I could pack in the Monsters of Best-Selling Nonfiction: Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt. A suitably epic title occurred to me:
Angels in the Whirlwind.

The image of mammoth stacks of copies of
Angels in the Whirlwind
at Costco, of movie posters and readers’ guides and tied-in
National Geographic
specials appeared so clearly that I couldn’t wait to make it a physical reality. I rushed to my computer and started typing.

What I discovered that afternoon dramatically shifted my understanding of entertainment’s economics.

Writing a thriller, a Hawaii beach-house personal-helicopter-level blockbuster, is damn near impossible. That’s why Tim Drew can give away his secrets for free.

It’s easy at first, describing your hero’s monumental chin and iron-core integrity and so forth. But slowly you discover it’s like a complicated math problem, or assembling a bookshelf. You have to keep track of dozens of tiny parts, which good guys will turn out to be bad guys, and which cars will get blown up by which helicopters. And you know your readers will have no patience. They’re demanding entertainment, so every page has to be interesting and full of guns and veiled threats and snappy retorts. It’s exhausting.

With literary fiction, on the other hand, you can just cover everything up with a coat of wordy spackle. Those readers are searching for wisdom, so they’re easier to trick.

I put
Angels in the Whirlwind
aside. I still think it’s a decent idea, and if anybody wants to pay me to finish it, call my agent.

But that afternoon I went back to
The Tornado Ashes Club
.

I Google’d
CALVADOS
and learned that “the region known as Calvados, home to the eponymous apple brandy, is bordered on the north by Baie de la Seine and on the east by the Seine River.”

I looked up at Preston Brooks, shoeing his horse. I knew I could beat him.

7

Luke gazed around the stout knotted walnut table at his new comrades: azure-eyed Marcel, Guillaume of the quizzical smile, Lavroche with his cheeks seared by knife wounds. But as he raised his glass, and felt the subtle, awakening wafts that filled his nostrils, Luke felt himself transported as if by a zephyr. He felt himself float away to the orderly orchards, flowering avenues of apple blossoms that threaded the dew-glazed western bank of the Seine.

He allowed himself that, a flight around the distant blossoms, and let his eyes linger half closed for one more moment before opening them again.

Guillaume spoke.

“Mis-tair Luke,” Guillaume said. “We are always in danger here. The Germans, they march about on our streets. They tramp through our fields. They have captured many of us. They have tortured many of us. And they have killed many of us.

“But for us,” he said, “the fear, the danger—it is nothing. Because we are in our home. And we fight for our home.”

He poured, let the amber run into Luke’s glass, playing the bottle against the candlelight.

“You have come to us,” Guillaume said, “from far from your home. But because you fight with us, because you drink with us, because you are our comrade, this, too, Normandy, will be your home.”

Luke lifted his glass. Perched it just beneath his lips.

“Let us drink then, mon ami,” he said. “Let us drink to home.”

—excerpt from
Chapter 3
of
The Tornado Ashes Club
by Pete Tarslaw

Picture this preview—which by now I’d fully formed in my head—and tell me you wouldn’t go see this movie:

First, the logo for Miramax or Fox Searchlight.

Then the logo for my production company. Either: a turtle swims up and imprints his hand on the screen over no-capitals lettering that says turtlehand films. Or: thousands of CGI snowflakes fall, and then superfast zoom in on the intricate pattern. “Snowflake Films.”

Then sonorous piano chords. A woman’s voice, soft and distant like the sound of a dusty music box you open on your great-aunt’s dresser:
There are memories burned in the human heart.

The screen fills with a falling shape against a night sky, shot through one of those filters that make colors distinct. (Probably a young guy from a small stylish country like Iceland or Estonia would be directing. Or else some sharp-eyed kid who’d done a Regina Spektor video or something.) It would take a second to realize what the image was: a parachute. An American soldier (Luke, played by a slightly unshaven but all-American actor, the guy from
Prison Break
maybe. Or: Christian Bale) descending into an apple orchard along a French river.

There are secrets we hide from each other.
Now we’d see Silas (Paul Giamatti–type but handsomer) alone in his office, with the lights of Vegas glistening through a window. A gunshot.

He turns his head. The camera follows him as he walks down the hall and finds an artfully posed dead body.

There are people we turn to.
Luke, now an old man, lies in a hospital bed as Grandmother opens the window. Two larks flutter away in the streaming sunlight.

There are journeys we must take.
Close-up on Silas and Grandmother, in their beat-up Ford Maverick. A shot from a helicopter that shows a herd of mule deer running in between oil derricks along the highway, as scrubby Texas mountains rise in the distance.

There are promises we keep.
Luke walks up to the church door of a Slovenian hill town. Then we cut to Grandmother and Silas, holding an urn as a tornado (done with computers) surges along the prairie in front of them.

And loves we find, and make our own.
Genevieve (ideally Scarlett Johansson, but whatever, sort of a smarter-looking version of Gretchen Mol) walks off the stage in a Western bar lit by Budweiser signs. She sits down at the bar. Silas slides her a whiskey over ice.

The tempo picks up. One of the country singer’s songs plays (opportunity for licensing—maybe a sexed-up cover of an old Loretta Lynn tune). A quick montage: Luke fighting behind a crashed and burning airplane in the Tunisian desert; Vegas cops kicking in the door of Silas’s apartment; Luke playing smash-mouth football in a sweater and leather helmet. Silas and Genevieve dancing and laughing in the rain under an iron bridge that spans the Mississippi. Grandmother clutching Luke to her sweatered shoulder as he sobs. Luke sampling wine in a Peruvian vineyard as the workers celebrate and play their Andean panpipes.

Based on the acclaimed best-selling novel by Pete Tarslaw
would be Chyroned on the screen. Genevieve, Silas, and Grandmother stand on the hood of their Ford, grimacing in spiritual revelation as a tornado prepares to envelop them.

THE TORNADO ASHES CLUB
. I doubt I’d write the screenplay, but maybe I’d take an uncredited cameo as a French resistance fighter or tornado expert.

Picturing myself in the theater watching it, I almost teared up. Yet it was impossibly far away.

FOUR ANECDOTES ABOUT WRITERS TO ILLUSTRATE MY PROBLEM

1. The essayist Dalton Tierguard was once asked by an interviewer what he hated most about being a writer. Without a second’s hesitation he answered, “Writing.”

2. The nineteenth-century French writer Jean-Jacques Plachet so despaired of ever finishing his novel
Les Femmes Laides
that he loaded a hunting rifle and shot himself in the right foot. Thus immobilized at his desk, he was able to finish his masterpiece.

3. The stories for which Scottish writer Hamish Baird is known were all written during a six-year period, after which Baird took a job cleaning the sewers of Glasgow. He said his second career was a welcome relief from the misery of writing.

4. American novelist Amy Abbott McNicholas found writing so difficult that each morning she had her servant lock up all the chamber pots in the house, and keep them locked up until she was presented by her mistress with ten pages of prose. McNicholas died at forty-eight of a bladder infection.

When you think of the great writers, penning a novel seems terribly romantic. You think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Riviera breeze billowing his curtains and the sounds of the Cap d’Antibes street cut by the tapping of his typewriter, as he lacerates the rich and dreams of the past. Or Hemingway, in a hotel in Pamplona in the heat of the afternoon, as bullfighters take their siesta and drops of water bead on a bottle of kirsch. Or Joyce, squinting his Irish bead-eyes as he blends his classical training and his Gaelic imagination to summon up allusive rhythms and language dense and enfolding.

Even lesser novelists seem glamorous. Some scribbler burning twigs in a boardinghouse in the second arrondissement as he dips his quill pen into the ink. Or a slim and shoeless thirty-something, taking a year off from his job as an alternative-marketing consultant to sit in a park in Vancouver or Park Slope and type into his PowerBook a wry yet soulful take on the paradoxes of hypermodernity.

That is all delusion. Writing a novel is pathetic and boring. Anyone sensible hates it. It’s all you can do to not play Snood all afternoon.

Understand that in my account here, I’ve cut a lot of the boring stuff out. It wasn’t like writing essays, where I could bang one out and go to Sree’s. This was three
hundred
pages. It’s not that it was hard, exactly. It was more like shoveling snow or cleaning out the attic, tedious labor toward a very distant end.

Intractable literary problems kept presenting themselves. Example: one night Derek called me from The Colonial Boy, so I went to meet him, we drank Salt Lick bourbon with ginger ale, and the next morning my brain was in a vice and my poop was viscous. I wrote nothing.

A few days later there was a John Hughes marathon on WE, and to skip that would be downright un-American. Again, wrote nothing.

Another day while napping I had a dream about an old Nintendo game called
Kid Bubble
where you float around in Soap Land and bop monsters with your bubble while avoiding cactus spikes and sharp birds, so I spent most of the day finding and playing a downloadable version. Wrote nothing. Each morning I’d wake up and see Preston Brooks, shoeing his horse, staring down at me. Taunting me.

At the end of all this I had 112 pages of
The Tornado Ashes Club
groaning like a wounded deer in the road. The sooner I had a sharp rock in my hand to finish her off, the better.

But out of desperation came an ingenious solution.

First step: On a Friday about four weeks after I’d gotten fired, I waited for Hobart to come in. He arrived at about 11
P.M
., haggard and pale.

“Hey, Hobart. You know, I went on eBay, and I got us something.”

There, on the coffee table, next to
Peking,
was an unopened DVD set of the original version of
Summer Camp,
made for Danish television.

“It’s supposed to be extra screwed up.”

It was. Instead of the comforting warmth of the Asian-American hostess on the American version, this thick-necked Danish guy with salami fingers barked out orders. The translations on the subtitles weren’t quite right either, so an eight-year old girl shrieking and crying at an adult in her cabin was translated as “You are far irritating!”

And in the American network version, they go out of their way to assure you there’s no pedophile stuff going on. They’re much more cavalier about this in the Danish edition.

Every night that week we watched an episode when Hobart got home. We did not speak.

Once I ordered a pizza without telling Hobart. When it arrived I paid but said it was for both of us. Hobart stared at it like a refugee child being offered chocolate. Non-instant-mashed-potato food was foreign to him, but he pounced on it until grease and cheese dribbled down his stubble.

The next week, I started making parries and thrusts of conversation. I asked him about his work at Lascar and his med school studies and what it was like to carve up a cadaver.

“You stop seeing it as a person,” he said.

“That’s interesting. I totally can see that.” I paused while the Danish campers lustily sang competing campfire songs. “Man, I could never make it in med school. I’ve always had trouble concentrating. Probably has something to do with never knowing my dad.”