How I Became a Famous Novelist (5 page)

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 angle. 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:
BEST-SELLING 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 best-selling 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.