I woke up from a nap on my chaise lounge during an uneventful day off which included reading parts of books by such luminaries as Joan Didion, Steven Kotler, Allissa Wilkinson. I opened my eyes and looked out the plate glass window into the garden. Then I realized, with a strange reflective focus, that my whole life I’ve been surrounded by books. But more than that, by people who read books. And perhaps because of this book fixation, I’ve also been surrounded by people who want to write books. And I also am such a person.
Much of my activities even today after 40 years of wanting to write books still center around the idea that I was eventually going to be able to do this. That I was going to be able to write a book that would be appreciated and loved, that would help the world around me understand humans and how we live.
On Books vs. Articles
And after all these years of publishing articles, I still don’t think of myself as a real writer because I still haven’t published an actual book. Yet I know: every book-writing author was once someone who had yet to publish a book.
On social media I belong to a community called #writingcommunity. This is a group of people most of whom are trying to write books. Many of the books seem to be concerned with fantasy or vampires or murder but with most of them the general unifying theme of this Twitter thread is writing their first book. I don’t think anyone has ever written on this thread “if only I could get an article published.” People want to write books! I am different because I thought that writing articles would lead to writing books, in which so far I was mistaken. But overall we’re the same.
My Grandfather wanted to write books
Of the people who wanted to write books, the original in my family was my grandfather, who had the idea of writing books to support his family back in the late 1930s and he did not seem to know that it was not going to work. In fact, apparently he had enough promise that he even had an agent. My grandfather had been working in alumni magazines, in particular the magazine of Northwestern University, of which he was a graduate, and he believed it would be simple to go from writing articles for such a journal to publishing books.
Those books were apparently to contain assorted adventure stories based, perhaps, on the short stories of Hemingway, and I remember very clearly finding a copy of a pulp magazine to which he had sold one of his short stories. It was about a football player whose name was Bowser. Reading the story, and already well into my own writing ambition at the time, I was unsettled by the trite and predictable course of actions taken by Bowser. Also by dialogue spoken by Bowser as he sought to win the Big Game.
I thought to myself, I sure hope I haven’t inherited my grandfather’s writing talent because if so, I too will never publish a book. Of course I was young back then. Idealistic. Not to be daunted by the idea that because a progenitor had failed that I was doomed to do the same.
My Grandfather was a Great Guy, He Just Couldn’t Publish a Book!
My grandfather managed some noteworthy feats in his life including driving from Minnesota to the California coast in one swoop without stopping to go to sleep, and saving enough money so that when he died his relatives were provided for, in particular my grandmother but also my father and my uncle and my brother, who worked his entire life at the family law firm, but one thing I’ve always known about Grandfather is that he was not a person who could write books no matter whether he thought so or not, no matter whether he had an agent or not.
After a couple years of his writing books project, while still a relatively young man, he had to give up hope and go to work as a real estate appraiser. In his basement office you could see stacks of old pulp magazines and next to them copies of Omni, which in the old days was a slightly more lurid Scientific American. Aliens you know. But the sci-fi book that everyone remembers, 2001 A Space Odyssey, was to be written by someone else. As for me, I too have stacks of magazines, but I have not yet given up on wanting to publish a book.
A Friend from College Also Planned to Write a Book …
A friend in college, slightly older than me and certainly having read more literary fiction than either me or my grandfather, was working on something we aspiring book writers know well as The Great American novel. He had never published a book either, but he seemed to have great faith in his one great book project. His book was a sweeping thousand-page saga of a person who greatly resembled the writer himself, young and living in LA in the 70s.
It could not really be called, as the members of AA call such stories, a drunkalog, but it had some chapters going in that direction, and some other chapters focused on certain florid characters he’d known in his youth. There was a Christ figure, an iconic car, a drugged-out flop house and a pagan drug temple, a fiesta-bash like no bash ever held before, and some commentary on music. The writer’s plan was, he would explain California to everyone who hadn’t been there. And become famous. He was the quintessential person who wanted to write a book.
My friend told me he had “entre’” into the literary world, which I believe meant he had a friend, a poet, who had once published a book with St. Martin’s Press and my friend believed that he could borrow her agent. He would ride to literary stardom on that route. Over the years we lost touch and I used to check occasionally whether he had completed and published his great book, and I knew the name of the book so it was easy to check, but it wasn’t until after he retired that I found the book on Amazon. It had been published at last!
But the book was self published.
I read the book and it was far better than my grandfather’s magazine story about Bowser but there were narrative gaps of a gaping variety. Despite the literary quality of its prose and the depth of its characterization, the average reader could never have followed it sufficiently to enjoy the magic carpet ride experience of reading a novel, that immersion in another world that we all know and love. There was just too much background and even inside information required to understand this book, information of which I myself had, at best, only about half, so that no readers from the mainstream would understand it. I could see why it had come to vanity press.
What I could not see was why he had decided to do this, publish this work in a print on demand format, which to me seems to admit defeat, but perhaps after spending his whole life writing one superlative book he couldn’t let himself die without showing it to somebody and that somebody turned out to be me, who of course bought it.
The character based on me myself in that book was a spoiled brat and came to a somewhat unfortunate ending, and thus I knew that he did not forget me.
I too want to write books …
As for myself, of course I’m a person who wants to write books! And it is also true that I *wrote* books, if you consider books that were never published. If you count only those that had full manuscripts requested by agents, I wrote two. None of these however obtained representation and none of them were published.
In the end, looking back, I worry that my books had horrible flaws that I would have noticed had I not been swept up in that trance-like state of novel composition which all we bookwriters know, that sweeping swishing dreamlike state in which you become all the characters of your book and the reality you’ve created inside your book becomes a second world, fully realized, a scintillating reflection of the actual world, with all the working parts and functions of the actual world except more real somehow than the real world, and you control it, and you forget about everything else and are there at the edge of the ocean with the waves sounding and the smell of salt, talking to that person you created for this moment.
Then someone who is actually real, and lives in your house, comes in and asks you what you want for dinner. Spell broken. Reality rushes in like the Bay of Fundy. The next morning you look at what you wrote and it’s garbage.
That Advice from Stephen King Makes Me Nervous
You know what I am talking about, if you are a person who wants to write books. You have read that horrible quote, I believe it is from Stephen King, but maybe not, maybe some other famous book writer, where it says, and I paraphrase, enjoy the process of writing because that may be the only joy you will ever get out of your manuscript. This man too knew the truth about people who wanted to write books, that most of us will never see anyone read our book who actually understands and appreciates, who can find in it the joy that only a good book can bring, with the possible exception of our mother or best friend. And that only if they’re unusually loyal.
That said, this map of near futility adopted, nevertheless, there are books published every year which change lives and enter the modern parlance, which affect the future. People who want to write books are trying to create those works, and there is no actual way of knowing which author’s voice will ring true in any given age. Predictable successes, celebrity biographies and political diatribes sell big but are quickly forgotten, but once in a while, someone writes a book which speaks to a generation, and very rarely, someone writes one which can speak over decades.
The books of tomorrow must come from us, the people who want to write books! When I woke up from my nap this afternoon I saw us as clearly as I saw myself in the mirror, ghosts of the book writer past, present, and future. Book writers who are all around us, but as yet they say nothing, because their books have not been published. Yet.
But still the future is ours to make.
So I call out to the people who write books, and say to write and make it all yours and take credit for all the little things that happen on the way. We are people who want to write books. We revel in the creative space that we cultivate on the page, in our minds, and that we live in every day of our life. Go forward, people who want to write books, go forward #writing community, find your bliss!
For despite the grinding dudas of the curmudgeonly advice by the Steve King his ilk, they are correct: the joy is in the journey,
