How I Became a Famous Novelist (7 page)

IDEAS

• Grandmother should talk like one of those wise old ladies who’s amused by everything. She should have
lots of stories of hardship. Made her own soap? Had to slaughter favorite chicken?

• Use words to describe old ladies that make them sound beautiful (graceful, regal, etc.).

• Silas should be the kind of guy who notices the beauty of light filtering through a beer bottle.

• Silas and Grandmother should come across Genevieve when she’s playing to a rowdy pool-hall audience that doesn’t appreciate her subtle lyricism.

• To get thirties and World War II details right, add old movies to Netflix queue.

• Luke in World War II: he hides in a haystack. He sleeps with a farmer’s daughter in Holland. He sees something that takes his mind off the war (nuns? children playing?). He has a chance to kill a German, but he doesn’t because the guy looks homesick. Luke throws his gun in the ocean (symbolic).

• Luke was a high school football star, but he also read poetry to Grandmother under the stadium.

• It turns out that Grandmother promised Luke that, when he died, she’d throw his ashes into a tornado. So they chase tornadoes.

POSSIBLE METAPHORS / MOVING SCENES

• Woman who says stuff that turns out to have extra meaning when it’s revealed she’s in a wheelchair.

• They pull over by a prison and see the prisoners working on the farm. One of the prisoners tips his hat.

• Gambling / taking a chance (on love? ironically named horse? “he’s scared, like us, but that’s the kind of horse that runs his heart out, like he’s got nothing to lose”).

• Overheard conversations at truck stops (blue collar earnestness).

• Everybody singing along to the same song (Patsy Cline?) on the radio. It reminds them all of different stuff (first kiss, night before he shipped out, etc.).

• They pass some kids going to the prom. Genevieve says she never had a prom, so Silas dances with her in a cornfield.

This was all terrific, but I didn’t know how to get started. Do you just start writing sentences? That seemed a bit rash.

By now the whiskey was making me sleepy. I got up to order some boneless buffalo tenders.

At one end of the bar was a rough stack of old newspapers. There was a week-old sports section with two cigarette burns over Tom Brady’s eyes and a
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folded open to guitar amps. But beneath that I found a catalog for the Metro Boston Learning Center. I flipped through and there it was, between “Winning the Airfare Game” and “You and Your Wok”: “Writing Your Novel: From Idea to Publishing.”

Everybody has a book in them—even you! Gain insight from a published author into how to get your idea out of your head and onto the page. Learn techniques, styles, and tips on everything from creating characters, building suspense, and making your work marketable to how to beat writer’s block. Meets Mondays at 8
P.M
.

The next day at work I was in a better mood than usual. I lingered with the koi just long enough to watch my favorite, Lumpy, eat a piece of a Maple Frosted Donut I’d picked up at
Dunkin’. Lisa looked busy with files as I approached, but when I passed she said potatoes were going to grow behind my ears if I didn’t get a good scrubbing soon.

Alice’s sweater that day was emblazoned with an outline of Rudolph made out of rabbit hair or something, with a red bead for the nose. This despite that it was well after Christmas. She held out her hands like a scale.

“Okay. On one hand, we’ve got a very dumb young man from Manhattan. His essay is about how he learned about other cultures when the doorman at his building took him to a cockfight.

“On the other hand, we have a Russian girl. Her essay is about how she wants to attend Brown. She’s under the mistaken impression Madonna went there. Jon Sturges says this is a priority assignment, because her dad is some kind of oil guy or something.”

We flipped a coin, Alice went off to fix cockfights and I ended up with the oil baron’s daughter. Not trusting her English, she’d written her essay in Russian and then used a computer translator:

Madonna, by her is convincing feminitaj, has inspired her the artistic individuality, and her courageous states on the political problems, the women all over the dirt. Because of her example I wanted to visit university Brown.

It was simple enough to redo. I Wikipedia’d Brown and found that Kathryn S. Fuller, former president of the World Wildlife Fund, went there. I whipped up some froth about how “this inspiring woman offers a clear example of the kind of dynamic
leadership I myself hope to provide someday, as my own nation, Russia, continues its uneasy transition to democracy and faces its own environmental challenges.”

I was done by eleven. With the rest of my day I tried to draw a sketch of myself in the style that
The New Yorker
would print next to its gushing review. I imagined middle-aged women, drinking coffee, arguing passionately about Silas and Genevieve and the scene where Luke is given a ceremonial knife by his host in a hut on the coastal hills of Tunisia. I imagined myself giving an interview to Tinsley Honig as the Atlantic crashed beneath the deck of my tasteful mansion. Her blue eyes would drink it in. Then later, with the camera crew gone, I would make tender love to Tinsley in my bedroom with cathedral ceilings that overlooked the back of my estate, where one pool flowed into another pool in a miniwaterfall. The point was, while all this was going on, Polly would be in some D.C. apartment with her hair in curlers, nagging her unfortunate shrivel-testicled husband to put the kettle on.

But all this was roughly 300 pages away.

So that night I went to St. Joseph’s School, where the stairs down to the basement reminded me of the taste of square pizza slices and cups of applesauce. I found the right room, 12B. A wave of nostalgia hit my nostrils as I smelled the industrial cleaning solvent janitors splash on linoleum floors.

The only other student present was a fat man in a T-shirt that read “Something’s Cookin’ In . . . Tennessee.” He had gamely wedged himself into one of the twisted desk-chair combinations that were arranged in a circle beneath a battered
map of “The United States In The Civil War.” He sat there playing games on his cell phone.

The instructor was at the teacher’s desk, fussing about with papers. For ease and accuracy I’ll call her SpaghettiHair HamsterFace. She whisked around when she saw me. From two yards away she stank of cigarettes.

“I’m sorry—are you in this class?”

I was prepared for this. “Oh, I thought Janine talked to you.”

“Janine? No.” Then she waved her hands around like two hummingbirds. “Okay.” And I took a seat.

Janine Figero was a name I’d gotten out of the back of the Metro Boston Learning Center catalog, where she was listed as “Head of Programs.” I gambled on adult education classes being appallingly disorganized, I figured if I threw Janine’s name around, no one would give me any trouble about joining midway without paying.

My classmates trickled in, until there were seven of us. A small and bespectacled lady, who looked like the kind of grandmother who writes long letters, sat down next to me and poured herself a cup of coffee from a thermos.

Then SpaghettiHair HamsterFace picked up a worn paperback off her desk. It was decorated in streaks of hideous blue and orange pastels, and the title read
Sun Tokens.
It looked cheaply bound.

“Okay, let’s get started,” she said angrily. She opened a Diet Coke and took an unladylike swig. “So we’ve been talking about creating that sense of vividness, scenes that really seem alive. Also, the internal, getting at the character’s feelings and thoughts and putting that in words. Those of you who
have been here before have heard me read from my stories drawn from my experience in New Mexico—here’s a passage I think gets at some of the things we’ve been talking about.”

Just as she was about to get started, Alice walked in.

This was a delightful surprise. My coworker had a Mead composition book pressed to the Rudolph poof on her ancient sweater. She didn’t see me at first. HamsterFace gave her a dark look for lateness, and Alice scurried to a desk opposite mine. As she sat down she saw me and I smiled at her—the only thing to do, really. Alice’s eyes bulged like a comedian of the silent film era as HamsterFace opened
Sun Tokens
and started declaiming:

“
Lovemaking for me, on the porch of the bungalow,”
she read,
“was frenzy, teeth and biting and hair meshed against teeth, blind clenches against skin, mashing jammed knees and elbows, scratching and pulls, fingers stretching in mouths and crunching against the sandalwood boards, stickyhot tangles of toes entwined in flesh. Urges ancient and animal bubbled out like tar through the cracks in our humanity. We rammed at each other like bison bursting forth in a dawnspring
. . . .”

One of many amazing things about all this was how many students were taking notes.

Alice was staring at me with an investigative look, as though I were a word search.

Hamsterface continued for a few minutes, reading as though she were almost bored with her own brilliance.

“Our couplings were a lie, but they were an honest lie. And that was enough.
”

She closed the book and set it down behind her.

“Thoughts?”

Nobody said anything. Then the grandmother next to me slurped some coffee and declared, “Very vivid. I did have a question. When the speaker, the narrator, refers to her lover as”—she glanced down at her notes—“‘baboon-thighed.’ What does she mean by that? Is that a compliment?”

Hamsterface pulled on the Diet Coke. “Yes, but it’s
nuanced
. That nuance is a good thing to work on in your dialogue.”

Some people noted this.

“All right, so, reading. The assignment was
epiphanies
. Did people find that difficult?”

The grandmother gave emphatic nods. Alice stared down at her pencil and avoided my gaze.

“So let’s go around the room, and everybody can read a passage from their epiphany scene.”

First at bat was a put-together woman in a pantsuit who’d been discreetly checking her BlackBerry all night. She read from her financial thriller:
Amelia, stunned, swiveled in her chair and faced Tom. ‘Confitrade may manage online investment portfolios in the convertible bond market, but they’re not making their money from growth assessment, Tom. They’re making it from cocaine!’

A young man with a complexion like wet plaster who weighed maybe eighty pounds read from his first-person account of a lovelorn dolphin:
Eniok stayed in the corner of the pool as he heard the Man make man-noise at Ongtak. He could do nothing. He thought only of being free in the Deep Place, where the fish didn’t smell of man-stink. And he decided to escape.

As we kept going around, through confusing mysteries and adverb-choked accounts of love, I could see Alice growing nervous. I saw her look around, as though she might make a break for it. Finally we came to the guy in the “Something’s Cookin’
in . . . Tennessee” T-shirt. He explained that he’d been working on something that “wasn’t sci-fi, precisely, but a sort of sci-historical fiction, alterna-fiction version of the Pocahontas legend.” His reading concluded with this sentence:
His moans from the pain delivered by the energy tendrils were muted by the plastic sheathing on his biosuit.

Then we were at Alice.

God bless her, she went for it.

Like a struggling woman sailor trying to keep her head afloat in a wildly raging tide, Xenia tried to keep mind and body apart, tried to keep her senses keen and aware, feeling the delights of each new touch from the Captain’s hands, now two staves of lustfire. And though she was a novice in the arts of sea-bound lovemaking, she didn’t shy away, no trembling virgin her. Indeed, she felt herself moved as if by an unseen hand, into him, with a vigor and animal wildness that would have stunned a Mongolian tiger. His thrusting member rumpled her petticoats around her yearning thighs.

No one seemed fazed by this. With a neutral expression I stared at the ground as Hamsterface mentioned something about “good imagery.”

And then we were done. Alice tore out through the door without looking at me, and everyone else filed out.

As I walked home, I assessed what I’d learned—about writing, not about Alice.

The main thing was confidence. My classmates didn’t get it. They all had some rich personal vision they were struggling to get into words. They were trying to work out all sorts of issues
and ideas and personal traumas. They were strangling themselves trying to fit it all in.

But that wasn’t the game. That wasn’t the Preston Brooks con. The key was just to
seem
significant. To distract the eye. If you tried to fit in actual emotion, or stuff you cared about, you’d just bog your novel down. Writing was like a magic trick. But instead of focusing on the illusion, the showmanship, the people in the class were wasting their time trying to work actual magic. Except for Alice, who seemed to have a genuine gift for soft-core pornography.

These people were all working too hard.

5

• Against the crisp canopy of the desert air, the sound of a gunshot travels for miles.

• In the desert air, you can hear the sound of a gunshot for miles.

• When Silas heard the sound, his first thought was,
I’ve never heard a gunshot before.

• A gunshot doesn’t pop or bang, it vibrates through you, setting everything off its track.

• That low hum, electricity throbbing slowly through a deserted office hall, was like a womb to Silas, but like every womb, it had to be shattered.