On Becoming a Novelist (17 page)
While one is learning one’s craft, then practicing it and hunting for an agent, then waiting for mail with the agent’s return address, one must somehow make a living. Every writer hopes, like a medieval Christian, that after his period of honorable suffering, bliss will follow as a reward. So the writer takes some miserable part-time job, or lives off his parents or spouse, and writes and prays and waits. One day, the writer tells himself, the big break will come, and his money troubles will be over.
It’s not true. At any rate, it’s not true for the serious writer. Maybe one in a thousand serious novelists ever become self-supporting by means of their art. The writer, for all his childishness, needs to face this fact and deal with it.
Through the centuries writers have found various tricks for survival. Ancient poets begged or attached themselves to kings. There are still, here and there in the world, decent rich people who will give financial help to the promising writer, knowing they will probably never get paid back. The usual means by which the rich give help to the noble poor is through foundations—the Guggenheim, for instance. Or the writer may seek public support, from the National Endowment for the Arts or the arts councils in the various states. The extremely good writer has a chance with such organizations, especially if he knows well-known writers who can testify to his worth. But there is inevitably a certain amount of crookedness in foundations and grant programs. Somebody has to judge the writer’s merit, and judges have friends whose work friendship causes to shine more brightly than it otherwise might. The writer without friends may be at a disadvantage. Or the judges on foundation boards may have some particular kind of fiction they like, so that even if they recognize an applicant as outstanding, they give their money to someone else. If the young writer can get some rich individual to back him, he should swallow his pride and do it. For organizations that can help the young novelist, locate good teachers, get advice on fellowships, and so on, write or phone Poets & Writers, 201 West 54th Street, New York, N.Y. 10019 (phone [212] 757-1766). The magazine published by Poets & Writers,
Coda
(annual subscription rate, $10), has complete, up-to-date information on contests, fellowships, and money available to writers through arts councils and foundations.
More likely, the writer will have to find a job. Almost all full-time jobs are hard on writing, even office work where one has practically nothing to do. I myself cannot write with people around me—I need solitude both for concentration and for the freedom to go through without embarrassment the kind of gesturing, wincing, and mumbling I often need to get a scene right. Also, I cannot work on a novel if I do not have long time blocks for writing—fifteen hours straight is for me ideal. Trying to nickel and dime your way through a five-hundred-page novel can drive you crazy. Some writers, in hopes of solving such problems, take work as fire watchers and sit alone in high lookout posts, occasionally glancing at the horizon. Theoretically that ought to be an ideal situation, but in practice it’s a pain, mainly because the CB never quits. Jobs as night watchman or night hotel clerk are not much better, and trying to earn a living by teaching high school is much worse—nothing is more draining, even for a teacher not overburdened by a sense of responsibility. Journalism may be a better option, but it may undermine the writer’s prose and sensibility.
One of the favorite jobs of writers in recent years has been college teaching. College teachers get the summer off and even in winter are likely to find more time for writing than almost anybody else except the full-time hobo. One teaches, say, three classes, each three hours a week, sees students for several hours each week (with luck, one can bunch up appointments so they all come on Tuesday or Wednesday), spends a few hours preparing classes (if one is unusually conscientious), and the rest of the time is his own. For the writer of suitable temperament, university teaching may be an excellent solution. The trouble is that there are fewer and fewer jobs. MFA and PhD programs turn out far more writers looking to teach than the market can absorb. That fact perhaps need not be utterly discouraging. The extraordinary student is still employable. His strong recommendations from professors and his fine record of publications, whether in fiction or in his chosen academic field, may pry open doors that to others seem rusted shut. And for another, a PhD in any respectable field—English literature, for instance, or even philosophy—helps to crack doors elsewhere, for instance in government, advertising, or business.
The writer who survives by teaching writing may discover, however, that his teaching hurts his art. Dealing day in and day out with beginning writers, he finds himself forced continually to think in analytical fashion about problems he would normally solve in other ways. To make his student see clearly what is wrong in his or her fiction, the writer-teacher has no choice but to work in a fully conscious, intellectual way. Every writer at some point must go through an analytical period, but in time he must get his own characteristic solutions into his blood, so that when confronted by a problem in a novel he’s writing he does not consult his literary background. He
feels
his way to the solution; rather than drawing back from the fictional dream to look at what he’s doing, he solves the problem by plunging deeper into the dream. For the writing teacher, the habit of intellectual analysis may become crippling.
He may encounter other problems. As the teacher sees more and more talented students, he may consciously or unconsciously begin to set himself increasingly difficult tasks, distancing himself from his best students’ work by tour-deforce showmanship, pyrotechnics, and subtlety beyond his students’ means. He becomes precious, arty, academic. And because it is necessary for a teacher to awaken his students to the various possibilities of contemporary fiction, so they don’t all write alike, as if Donald Barthelme were the only writer who ever lived (or Hemingway or Salinger or whoever is most influential in a given class), the teacher may become unduly influenced by other writers of his time, or unduly concerned with theory. No doubt, for some teachers of writing this never happens; but one hears it as a common complaint.
However he goes about it, what the writer must do, assuming he’s not independently wealthy, is to find some kind of congenial work that will not eat up all his energy and time. For example, delivering rural route mail is terrific (one can get off by noon). And for the sake of his art he must learn to live within the limits his odd existence sets. If the writer wants everything he sees on TV, he’d better quit writing and get serious about money or else give away his TV to the poor in spirit.
The most obvious escape from the debilitating effects of one’s competitive, ware-hawking culture is to move out of it—go to Mexico or Portugal or Crete. This is exactly what many writers do, but the cost of living cheaply may be greater than one at first imagined. Also, by leaving one’s culture one may lose one’s material. Expatriation may be all right for the fabulist, the nonrealistic writer. But again and again through history, writers have found that in leaving the people they know best—the specific kind of culture they come from—they leave the wellspring of their art. So the English novelist Arnold Bennett, when he left his country origins for London’s brighter lights, found himself a weakened writer. Such examples might be multiplied. Some writers thrive on transplanting, of course. Leslie Fiedler claims that Missoula, Montana, was the very best place for him to live for twenty years because all the differences between Missoula and New York stimulated his imagination; also, the nights were long and there wasn’t much for him to do except write. The shock of an unfamiliar culture was equally beneficial to Malcolm Lowry, Graham Greene, and Henry James, not to mention Dante. But the risk is there; one should be ready for it. Many writers feel they suffer from being set down in a region—usually because of a teaching job—so different from their appropriate milieu (New Englanders in Southern California, Texans in Cleveland) that they feel diminished, unreal to themselves. A special case of this general problem is the transplanting of the lower-class writer to some setting, especially the university, where gentrification undermines his language and values or otherwise denatures his experience of the world.
The best way a writer can find to keep himself going is to live off his (or her) spouse. The trouble is that, psychologically at least, it’s hard. Even if one’s spouse is rich, it’s hard. Our culture teaches none of its false lessons more carefully than it teaches that one should never be dependent. Hence the novice or still unsuccessful writer, who has enough trouble believing in himself, has the added burden of shame. That’s one reason writers, like other artists, have so often chosen to live off people that, at some conscious or unconscious level, they need not respect—generous prostitutes, say. It’s hard to be a good writer and a guilty person; a lack of self-respect creeps into one’s prose. Yet for all that may be said against it, living off one’s spouse or lover is an excellent survival tactic. For some businessmen, nothing gives more satisfaction than a wife or lover’s artistic achievement; and some women, in a way that only a cynic would call morbid, derive pride and satisfaction from enabling an artist husband or lover to do his work. I do not mean that the writer should seek out someone on whom he can feed like a vampire. But if a writer finds himself living, for honest reasons, with someone glad to support his art, he or she should make every effort to shake off the conventional morality and accept God’s bounty, doing everything in his power to make the lover’s generosity worthwhile.
With luck, the writer may eventually make money. A novel may be taken by the movies, or by the Book-of-the-Month Club, or may for some reason win the hearts of the young. But one ought not to count on it. Most novelists, including very good ones, never make a living from their art. The average income of professional writers is, I think, something like five or six thousand dollars a year. A young novelist can hardly help hoping that someday he will be published and will find himself free of guilt and debt, but—statistically, at least—shattered expectations are part of the game. One study showed that about seventy percent of those who published a first novel in a given year never went on to publish another. If one is unwilling to write like a true artist, mainly because one needs to, one might do well to put one’s energies somewhere else.
In my experience, the single question most often asked during question-and-answer periods in university auditoriums and classrooms is: “Do you write with a pen, a typewriter, or what?” I suspect the question is more important than it seems on the surface. It brings up magical considerations—the kinds of things compulsive gamblers are said to worry about: When one plays roulette, should one wear a hat or not, and if one should, should one cock it to the left or to the right? What color hat is luckiest? The question about writing equipment also implies questions about that ancient daemon Writer’s Block, about vision and revision, and, at its deepest level, asks whether or not there is really, for the young writer, any hope.
As every writer knows—both the experienced and the inexperienced—there is something mysterious about the writer’s ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is “hot,” an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality into another. In his noninspired state, the writer feels all the world to be mechanical, made up of numbered separate parts: he does not see wholes but particulars, not spirit but matter; or to put it another way, in this state the writer keeps looking at the words he’s written on the page and seeing only words on a page, not the living dream they’re meant to trigger. In the writing state—the state of inspiration—the Active dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols. The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the Active dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again.
This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer’s process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things—sees them clearly—and in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or vision becoming more and more lucid, until reality, by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead.
This is the process he must learn to set off at will and to guard against hostile mental forces.
Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer wrote from “inspiration,” or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect. One can write whole novels without once tapping the mysterious center of things, the secret room where dreams prowl. One can easily make up characters, plot, setting, and then fill in the book like a paint-by-numbers picture. But most stories and novels have at least moments of the real thing, some exactly right gesture or startlingly apt metaphor, some brief passage describing wallpaper or the movement of a cat, a passage that somehow shines or throbs as nothing around it does, some fictional moment that, as we say, “comes alive.” It is this experience of seeing something one has written come alive—literally, not metaphorically, a character or scene daemonically entering the world by its own strange power, so that the writer feels not the creator but only the instrument, or conjurer, the priest who stumbled onto the magic spell—it is this experience of tapping some magic source that makes the writer an addict, willing to give up almost anything for his art, and makes him, if he fails, such a miserable human being.