Scribblers Page 14

“I think if you take a good writing course, you can cut your learning curve. As I try to tell everyone I work with, writing really is a craft, and you can teach craft. You can’t teach talent, and you can’t teach drive. But you can teach the craft of writing—protagonists, plot, dialogue, and all that sort of thing.

  “What I find holds most of them back, if they have any sort of talent, is they lack drive. I would take somebody with a little less talent and a lot of drive and give them a better opportunity of getting published than somebody with a lot of talent and no drive.

  “And what I quite often find in teaching adult students is a lot of them are working jobs, or they’re married and living sort of moderately comfortable lives, and I think that just doesn’t bode well for drive. I think you have to be hungry.

  “So I’ve taught a lot of writers that I thought had wonderful talent, but I could just tell that they didn’t work at it every day. They’d work only on inspiration, and whenever they got around to it. And I just knew that some of them weren’t going to make it. I’d tell them, ‘You can’t make it on talent alone. You have to be driven and do this just like a job.’ ”

  “Do you have any insights into what compels so many people to give it a try, even against a very poor likelihood of success?” I ask.

  “It’s not like when you see a beautiful painting and you decide, ‘Well, I’m just going to go home and be another Raphael’ Because you’d have to learn all the skills—which brushes to use and colors to mix. But you’re taught technically how to write at a very young age. You can find someone that has a strong interest in reading, and at some point they think, ‘Aha! I could write a book better than this.’

  “And everyone has an interesting life they want to write about. I think it was Samuel Goldwyn who once said, ‘The only people that should write their memoirs are the dead.’ And I think they feel they can make that leap from being an avid reader and having an interesting life story to writing creatively.

  “And then they fall into the chasm, of course, or the abyss of hell.”

  Jill Jones raises the same point when I ask her about the writer’s urge.

  “You know, a lot of people want to write their grandmother’s memoirs, or a story based on what Granny did,” she tells me. “And I think those people are the ones that aren’t going to make it, because they can’t divorce fiction from fact. Fiction has its rules—especially genre fiction—and facts usually don’t fit the rules.

  “I think if people want to write, if that’s their passion, it’s not my job to talk them out of it. I do tell them the truth about the industry, and that’s very discouraging. I just tell them, ‘When you get this book finished, if they turn you down again and again and again and again and again—and it happens to everybody that ever writes—you’ve got to be able to handle it.’

  “And then you get published, and you think you’re hot potatoes and you’re on your way, and they buy one book and they don’t buy two. This has happened to friends of mine. They think they’ve stepped over that line and they’re in, but that’s not the way it is either. Once you’re in the business, it’s hard to stay in the business.

  “But why do people want to write?” she says. “Beats me. It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done.”

  A complication enters Essence of My Desire.

  Through an old diary, Nick Rutledge learns a family secret. Back in the 1840s, his ancestor John Rutledge fell in love with Mary Rose Hatcher, an English witch. To prevent their union, John was exiled to India, where he was introduced to the mysterious mahja plant in a monastery at the foot of the Himalayas. He sent mahja seeds back to Mary Rose, who planted them, nurtured the flowers that grew, made a perfume from them, and dispatched a batch to John. That perfume permitted them to meet as lovers in their dreams. Unfortunately, repeated use transported them to such an exalted spiritual realm that they ceased to exist in a physical sense. They simply vanished, never to be heard from again.

  Thus, when Nick Rutledge and Simone Lefèvre partake of the perfume in the present day, they do so at peril of annihilation.

  Their dream meetings are just a tease anyway. What I’m really anticipating is the scene when Nick and Simone get together in the flesh.

  Randy Russell’s mysteries and Bill Brooks’s Westerns have love scenes, too, but they’re nothing like Jill Jones’s. Rooster Franklin’s path is littered with naked women. In Blind Spot, he steals the limousine in which President Kennedy was shot, opens the trunk, and finds a beautiful, comatose woman wearing only a pair of panties. The female inhabitants of Quint McCannon’s frontier towns are lonely widows and gold-hearted bar girls. There’s no lovemaking in these books; it’s quick, old-fashioned, pants-around-the-ankles banging. Whether or not the characters are spiritually fulfilled is beside the point.

  Still on the outs, Nick and Simone fail in their separate attempts to duplicate the mysterious perfume synthetically. Meanwhile, vile Frenchman Antoine Dupuis gets hold of a sample and becomes addicted to it. The quarry in his dream-world love chase is, of course, Simone. Repeated mentions of the Frenchman’s small stature hammer home his unattractiveness. Nick Rutledge’s oft-lauded broad shoulders are the leading indicator of his desirability.

  Finally, Nick and Simone resolve to try to heal their old wounds. They meet for dinner at a fancy place called, incredibly, the In and Out Club. They dance; they kiss; she cries. Nick invites her home. Simone declines but then follows him in a taxi to his London suburb for a night of passion.

  A metaphorical sword is drawn.

  Petals are parted.

  On her departure the next morning, Simone steals Nick’s vial of perfume. Later, racked by guilt, she barricades herself in an apartment and douses herself in the dangerous mixture, figuring the only way she can have Nick now is by crossing into the dream world permanently.

  But Nick finds her, takes a splash of perfume himself, and journeys to the other realm to convince Simone of his love and bring her back.

  Indeed, it is the love-addled Dupuis who overdoses and is dematerialized!

  My glasses are fogged and my face a bit flushed as I turn the final page.

  CHAPTER 9

  Son of Bullitt

  I drive like Mr. Magoo. I don’t have an old-timey open-air car with a squeeze-ball horn, but I do share his nearsightedness, poor judgment, and easy confusion. I’m therefore a danger when I’m anxious and in a hurry, as now.

  Going to my car one morning, I discover that its left rear tire is flat. I can’t get a good look at the offending object, which protrudes a quarter-inch from the tire and splays like some jagged metal flower. On my knees in the driveway, I touch it gingerly.

  These days, I drive an aged white Olds, a model that was discontinued from production some years ago. I jack the back end but find that my tire wrench doesn’t have a great-enough breadth to give me leverage to loosen the thoroughly rusted bolts—just the kind of irregularity that sounded the car model’s death knell, a wrench meant for a little red wagon.

  I keep an aerosol tire inflater in the trunk. The way the white foam sputters from the puncture confirms my opinion that the wound is mortal.

  I don’t have time for this. I’m nervous and want to get to the office early.

  My wife is on the phone in the kitchen, a vantage point from which she’s witnessed my exertions over the tire—and no doubt narrated them to whoever it is she’s talking to. I motion for her attention and explain how I’ll have to stop at a service station to get the tire changed on the way to work.

  “Don’t be silly,” she says. “Anyone can change a tire. I’ve done it myself.”

  I cup my hand to my ear, point to the telephone, plead for discretion.

  The tires on the car when I bought it were a size that has since been eliminated from manufacturers’ lines. The car has front-wheel drive, and the rear tires have worn so well that I continue to use my original set, though I’ve replaced the front pair. The car rides on tires of two different heights, then, but it’s th
e larger size that I keep as a mounted spare. I’ve retained a smaller spare in case I blow a rear tire, but I don’t have a rim for it.

  I explain all of this to the mechanic with the aid of a couple of hand gestures—one that mimes the turning of a spigot and the other the plucking of grapes from a vine. I don’t want the mounted spare on the back of the car. I want my backup, smaller-sized spare mounted on the damaged tire’s rim.

  The mechanic is an old, bearded cowboy who listens with his arms folded across his chest, moving his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with every few taps of his boot. He stoops over the tire, produces a pair of pliers from an unknown location on his person, and extracts the object, which proves to be a common nail with its head bent and split.

  He turns on me accusatorially, with the terse contempt such men reserve for people who carry two spare tires. “Nothing wrong with this tire,” he says.

  I start to justify myself, but the mechanic swaggers into the other bay before I have a chance to formulate a clear position. I notice he doesn’t even think enough of my nail to dispose of it properly, casually flicking it out the open door and into the lot, presumably to stick in someone else’s tire. He returns with a tire-plugging kit, effects his repair, and inflates the tire. He then wipes his hands on a loathsome rag and runs the blade of his pocketknife under his fingernails while I fumble for my wallet.

  I lay rubber as I exit the station.

  I’ve set myself a firm goal. I can’t continue investing time, travel, and money in my manuscript indefinitely. When I reach a certain page count—considerably less than the entire projected length—I’ll quit work on it until I can find whether it might be worthy of publication. If the answer is yes, I’ll continue to completion. If it is no, I’ll scrap it for good. Of course, I’d be in a better position if I had a completed manuscript to offer, but I believe I’ve written enough for a fair judgment.

  It is time, as my father used to say, to shit or get off the pot.

  First, I show it to my boss at work and ask her advice on how I ought to proceed. She is aware of my general subject matter and has provided me some Asheville leads, but I’ve been tight-lipped about the personal nature of what I’m doing; she probably thinks I’m attempting a history of mountain writers. She’s not fond of delivering hard news but doesn’t shy from it either, so I’m confident her evaluation will be no kinder than what I deserve.

  I give it to her on a Thursday or Friday and get it back first thing Monday morning.

  “I started reading your manuscript and couldn’t put it down,” she says in her written evaluation. “Your self-deprecation made me laugh out loud at points.” And later, “I know I’d be proud to publish this manuscript, but I think you might be doing yourself a disservice if you don’t try to get a house that is better known for its literary publishing.”

  She goes on to discuss in some detail one chapter in which the narrative voice isn’t of a kind with the rest of the manuscript. This last point notwithstanding, her words are balm. Her offer to publish is deeply appreciated, but it is my dream to land with a major house, as she understands.

  Fixing the problem she identified requires me to switch the order of two chapters and completely rework one of them, cutting six to eight pages of material and writing four of five pages of new. But I don’t lack for incentive. A week’s worth of late nights finish the job. I then show the manuscript to another coworker, who makes no mention of any inconsistency of narrative voice and who is, to my delight, even more complimentary in his evaluation than our boss.

  I am thus ready to brave the wider waters.

  One of our company’s best recent successes was a risky first novel that bounced around New York before making its way to us. It sold modestly in hardcover for us but garnered superior reviews. Soon, our author had himself a major paperback contract and deals for translations into several languages. When the paperback came out, it got glowing notice in the New York Times Book Review, a nearly unheard-of coup for a reprint edition. By then, the author had a second manuscript, to which we held the right of first refusal. Of course, he’d priced himself out of our market by then, but we made a token offer so as to give him and his agent a floor from which to proceed. The author shortly won a two-book deal with a mega-house. It was an amicable parting. We were pleased to bask in his success, and he was grateful for the path we’d provided him.

  I don’t claim credit for any of this. The manuscript required some cleaning up, but by and large, it had come to us much as we published it. Before it was ever accepted, however, I recognized its merits and argued its case when not everyone on our staff was in agreement.

  The upshot for me is that I have an easy entrée to a young agent on the rise. It is partly thanks to me that he now boasts a talented, ambitious author ripe for big things. Perhaps my name has been mentioned during the behind-the-scenes doings. If not, the agent still might be kindly disposed when I come forward with a manuscript of my own.

  I ask my boss to run interference for me.

  I don’t know exactly what she writes the agent, beyond telling him of my years with the company and praising my manuscript and my writing and editing generally. But I am privy to the agent’s reply to her. In three dashed-off but nonetheless memorable lines, he declares himself both “thrilled” and “delighted” at the prospect of seeing my work, refers to me familiarly as “Steve K.,” and vows to read my stuff as quickly as he can upon its arrival.

  Of course, I want to get the manuscript into his hands before his enthusiasm has a chance to wane. I spend a couple of fretful days in writing, rewriting, and re-rewriting a cover letter. The letter has to provide my contact information, establish my connection to the agent via our mutual author, describe my industry experience and editing credits, highlight my previous publications, and, most importantly, summarize, capture the essence of, and make irresistible the material I am presenting to him. And it has to do all this without a bragging tone in one artful single-spaced page.

  Since I am providing him only half the manuscript I project, I synopsize the remainder of the book, promising insight, historical perspective, more than a little poignancy, and much hilarity.

  When I’m ready to send my package, I don’t leave it with the outgoing office mail but take it straight to the post office, where I don’t drop it in an outside box or even slip it through the slot inside the building but deliver it directly to the care of the overfed man behind the counter.

  I don’t maneuver through traffic as much as I avoid objects hurtling toward my stationary position, as in an arcade game. My vision narrows to the hundred yards of pavement directly in front of me. My mind is drawn to irrelevancies. People riding with me make frequent use of their imaginary brake pedal. Other motorists give me room.

  My route lies along the heavily trafficked interstate that bisects town. I settle in behind a pickup pulling a trailer loaded with lawn equipment. The driver stretches to fumble in the glove compartment, and I remark something familiar in my glimpse of his profile. Mr. Epps? I nudge the gas pedal and move closer. One of my daughters took science from Epps—a man with sour breath and a pocketful of mechanical pencils, as I recall from open-house night. Things aren’t so dire that teachers have to spend the summer mowing grass, are they?

  I’m getting too close. He taps his brakes to back me off.

  Suddenly, Epps—or whoever he is—exits right. The traffic in the left lane disperses. I hear the whoosh of air brakes behind me and take a glance in the mirror to discover a big truck shockingly tight on my bumper. It seems to be angry about something.

  Going uphill now, the truck fades until it’s a blister on the mirror and the sounds of its downshifting are as subtle as pangs of conscience. Downhill, it swings into the passing lane and closes the distance with frightening speed. It draws abreast at the bottom of the hill. For one brief moment, I look up into the face of the copilot—scornful, sunglassed, street-smart. The truck gains ground at a decreased rate. My car is
opposite the middle of the trailer as the next hill steepens. Then the truck again falls behind me and moves back into the right-hand lane.

  Downhill this time, the passing lane is repopulated by motorists comfortable in their knowledge that the beast has singled out its prey. The truck can’t swing wide. It stays tight on my bumper, its air brakes whooshing every few seconds. Unaccountably, I back off the throttle. The speedometer dips from fifty-three to fifty to forty-five and levels out at forty-two. The trucker lays into his air horn so long and loud that my head sinks protectively between my shoulders and the hair on my neck stands smartly. The truck has fallen back enough now that I can see they’re flipping me the bird—both of them, with both hands each.

  An exit ramp miraculously presents itself, and I throttle up and swing hard right. The truck hurtles past, its horn still blaring but mellowing like that of a train entering a tunnel.

  For time immemorial, the central moment of the day for writers has been the arrival of the postman.

  My wife gets home from work earlier than I do, so my habit is to call every afternoon beginning a week after I posted my manuscript. I understand that this is premature, as my package could hardly have gone to New York and been routed directly back in that length of time. Still, I have to inquire. In fact, I have my wife’s homecomings so well timed that I usually catch her coming in the door, so she has to run for the phone to keep the answering machine from picking up. She’s slightly breathless when she answers—irked, too.

  “Anything come today?”

  “Just bills and junk.”

  Or “Did you get the mail on the way in?”

  “I just dropped it on the kitchen table.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t see what you’re looking for.”

  Of course, I’m not looking for my return envelope back, as that would indicate a bad outcome. What I’m really expecting is a phone call at work. Even if the agent doesn’t want to handle my manuscript, I suspect my writing is good enough and that I’ve banked sufficient industry coin to merit at least a courtesy conversation.