| Two
questions people are always asking me... |
The
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People
are always asking me two questions:
1.
How and why did I become a writer?
2. How did I get my first novel published?
Although these questions appear, at first, to be simple and straightforward they are far more complex than they appear. Writers and readers are forewarned, my answers will satisfy few and probably lead to more and more questions. Nevertheless, after a lifetime in the writing game, I guess I should give the answers a college try.
1.How and why did I become a writer?
The term writer is enormously imprecise. I define myself primarily as a writer of the imagination, a story teller, a fantasizer. Some describe such work as "creative writing." My principal medium is the novel and the short story and, occasionally, the stage play, poetry and lyrics. Although I have been a journalist, reporter and essayist, these pursuits are peripheral to my main occupation.
One doesn't "become" my kind of writer.
It is a calling, just as painters, sculptors, composers and others have been compelled to create in their mediums, my kind of writer knows in his gut early on that there is no way to thwart such a calling. Screenwriters call such obsessive scribblers, "real writers". I think they're on to something. Nor am I unique.
 |
| "Yes, teachers do inspire. It is, indeed, a noble calling and a great teacher and mentor is a lifetime gift." |
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There are thousands, perhaps millions of us out there, all "called" to create our works of the imagination, invent characters, tell stories, construct parallel worlds in our minds, describe other lives and other places, perhaps offer our deepest personal and cherished insights, advice and ideas through this miraculous one-on-one human communication system.
At this moment these millions are hard at work plying their "creative" calling. You'll find them in thousands of College Creative Writing Classes, alone in kitchens, basements, attics, coffee shops, on park benches, wherever writing tools can be placed, all grinding away in their various languages, finding words to tell their "made-up" stories, fashion their parallel universes out of the rich soil of their imaginations.
They know who they are.
Above all, they want others to read their works, many others. They long to have their creative material distributed by publishers, validated by so-called critics, enjoy the applause of their peers, be lionized, saluted, admired and rewarded by fame and fortune. Believe me, I know the urges.
This said, I must confess that I haven't got a clue as to how fate conspired to provide me with such a calling. My mother was a great reader of novels. My father rarely read a book. I confess I was a hungry reader of fiction from the fairy tales of Grimm and
Anderson to the myriad boy's adventure series of the day. I vividly recall my treks to the
Stone Avenue library in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The journey took me through streets crowded with pushcarts and people, a lost world. At the library I went through shelves of adventure series such as
The Boy Allies, Bomba the Jungle Boy,
The Hardy Boys and on an on to children's classics and beyond.
But an avid reader does not a writer make. If I had the writer's bug, I didn't know it until I came face to face with my freshman English teacher at NYU,
Dr. Don Wolfe. Yes, teachers do inspire.
It is, indeed, a noble calling and a great teacher and mentor is a lifetime gift.
Dr. Wolfe would assign subjects for "compositions", essays and stories and would diligently read them and scratch pithy comments in the margins. He was a great proponent of "vivid imagery" and "strong language". Occasionally his comments used the magic word "excellent", balm to the soul of a seventeen year old.
He did not advise me to pursue a career in writing. I was certainly not a "star" student and I doubt that even Dr. Wolfe knew at the time how much he had changed my life. At the end of that first year in his class in Freshman English, I suspected that I had chosen a career. I did not know at the time that the career had me in its sights.
Another course I was pursuing at the time
was "The European Novel" given by a Professor Ranney. We were assigned certain works of
Flaubert, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenieff, Anatole France, Thackeray and many others. I was a subway student riding the rails from my parents' apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, to the Bronx campus of NYU.
The ride took about an hour and a half.
It turned out to be the most glorious journeys of my youth. I wasn't on a subway train. My world was in London, Paris, Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere. Perhaps this is where I discovered the true power of the novel to transport the mind to other places and other times, to meet other people and involve oneself in their
insights, suffering, joys, victories and defeats.
All the filmed images ever contrived, however spectacular, cannot, in my opinion, ever supplant the power of words to move, expand, penetrate and enrich the reality of the imagination.
It was after graduation at NYU that I discovered that
Dr. Wolfe was teaching a creative writing class at The New School in Manhattan. I enrolled eagerly. At the time I was pursuing a career as Copy Boy at the
New York Daily News, mostly night side, but that is another story.
My fellow students were a polyglot assembly of all ages, genders and colors, all burning with the desire to write fiction, tell their stories.
Each weekly session was devoted to reading our works. Dr. Wolfe would offer his critique and fellow students would offer theirs. It was a time of great ferment and uncertainty. World War 2 had ended just four years before and returning vets and others were trying to find their footing in the new post-war reality.
In my entire life, I doubt if I will ever find an assemblage of "real" writing talent as I found at The New School in those years. Mario Puzo was a classmate.
William Styron was attending. But there were others who never became as well known. Indeed, many of them were never published beyond those books created under the auspices of The New School. Reading those short stories today, I am astounded by the display of pure writing talent.
Some of us would meet during the week to read our material to each other. We would meet in kitchens and living rooms and in cramped apartments, each of us burning to read our stories to each other. In our critiques we were always supportive, encouraging and collegial. There was no sense of competition. We knew exactly what was in each of our hearts and minds.
We were pursuing our passion, our calling.
Those sessions both at The New School and in the rooms of fellow students were life-changing and momentous. Except for those writers who were later to become "famous", I have no idea what happened to the others who were, if not a greater talent than those mentioned, but certainly, to my mind, of equal caliber.
It fills me with great sadness when I read the marvelous stories contained in one of our anthologies published at the time. It was titled
Which Grain Will Grow, the title based on a quote from
Macbeth "If you can look into the seeds of time and say which grain will grow and which will not then speak to me." I can only imagine the disappointments, rejections and defeats that must have plagued these fellow writers and forced many of them off the path of their true calling.
I was certainly the youngest of the group, 21 at the time, but I knew in those years that I had found my calling. Twenty six published books later, with my 27th
Children of the
Roses coming in the spring, I am still at it, pursuing the same schedule as I have for decades.
Where have all my fellow writer's gone? Are they alive? Are they still writing? I grieve for them and their dead dreams.
As I suggested earlier, I know this does not fully answer the question posed, but it does prove the old adage that it's not always talent that is the final arbiter in the game of life, it is luck….. as you will see.
2. How did you get your first novel published?
Every published writer will tell a different story. Some will laud their agent for "recognizing their talent" and fighting for its publication. Others will cite a perceptive editor (perceptive in that he or she chose the writer's work for publication.) Some will cite contacts or connections and networking. In today's world where technology has made it almost respectable to self-publish, writers will tell other stories.
Here is my story.
I was over forty years old. I had a young family to support. My writing skills enabled me to set up my own Advertising and Public Relations agency in Washington D.C. I bought radio stations. I put a television station on the air in a small market, Hagerstown, Maryland. Yet, money aside, I considered myself a failure, a
traitor to my calling.
I continued to write my novels and short stories before going to work but I could not get them published. I was drowning in rejections. I could not get an agent. Earlier I talked about that quote from
Macbeth about which seed would grow. Mine wasn't growing. I was fallow. Until…….
One day a man walked into my agency and asked if we promoted books. His name was
John David Garcia and he had written a philosophical treatise called
The Moral Society. It was published by a small publisher in Philadelphia but was not being promoted. He asked if my agency promoted books. I said we promoted everything, although real estate was our forte.
He asked how much it would cost.
Talk about "eureka" moments. Like in the comics I saw the balloon rise above my head.
I told him that we would promote his book at no cost, providing his little publisher Whitman Press would publish my first novel which had been written years before. No advance required. He said he would check with the publisher. He came back with an answer: If the publisher liked it, he would publish it.
The publisher liked it. I was in paradise.
As for
John David Garcia, my agency did promote his book, but with limited success. It was a book designed by John to hopefully, change the world. It was brilliant, inspiring and offered a set of ethical and moral principles that would indeed create a better society. This was 1973 and John accurately predicted the burgeoning problems that society would face.
In many ways
The Moral Society was a masterpiece. I later learned that John, a brilliant mathematician had given up his breakthrough technology business to purse the ideal of making the world a "moral society." This was his dream and his calling. He was a technology pioneer and would have surely become a billionaire. Instead, he chose another path and pursued it obsessively to the day he died just a few months ago.
His arrival at my doorstep that day was the greatest stroke of luck that ever crossed my path. Although, in general, I do not believe in miracles, this episode gives me pause.
John David Garcia's arrival in my life was my miracle.
The book was, indeed, published under the title
"Options." In setting up this website and putting my books in other formats, I changed the title to
Undertow. Options sounded too much like a financial how-to book.
"Options" was not promoted, not reviewed or adequately distributed. I undertook an author's tour at my own expense that was of little use except to stroke my ego. There were no books in the stores.
From a sales point of view it was a disaster.
But I was a published author and that fact gave me a modicum of validation that made my pursuit of an agent and publisher that much more credible. My second novel
Banquet Before
Dawn was published by a large mainstream publisher
Putnam, now owned by a giant conglomerate. They published six of my novels at a time when publishing was still a cottage industry run by book lovers. The notion of "bigger is better" does not apply to the publishing business.
This was not meant to be a "how-to" or "advice to aspiring authors" material. I humbly offer readers of my e-sheet a brief glance into my personal experience. The fact is that the business of novel writing is hazardous, difficult and frustrating. It is tied to reader and publisher's whims and attitudes at the time of publication. Note, I said business.
In an age of declining reading habits (and declining profits) where "genre" writing has gained greater respectability and now dominates best seller lists it is an increasingly hard row to hoe for a novelist who eschews genre writing and pursues a more generalist and mainstream approach.
Business aside, the ecstasy is still in the creation. Real writers know this. Thankfully, there will never be a shortage of them.
The
Henderson Equation
The power of the press to manipulate and persuade comes under
the microscope in this tense exploration of the media.
One's novels always
contain a highly disguised autobiographical element. This one deals with a Washington Newspaper which brought down a President and now hopes it has the power to make one of its own. The author draws heavily on his newspaper experiences in New York for ambience, background and accuracy.
***
The people who run the influential newspaper the Washington Chronicle
have just exposed and brought down a President through their investigative
reports. Flushed with power, they are now attempting to create their own choice
for Chief Executive. Clashing relationships within the media and in the
political arena reveal the motives, insecurities, and thirst for ascendancy
between rival factions fighting for power. With rich emotional
characterizations, this story tears the curtain from the spin-doctors and
sinister figures that populate the corridors of power in the nation's capital.
Anyone who wants deeper insights into the true nature of Washington politics and
intrigue will revel in this tense and suspenseful tale set in the cradle of
democracy.
Read the first chapter
- Free Now!
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