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PASS THE WORD
Pondering the
Perils of Publishing
BY PETER KURTH (published 12.21.05)
“Writing is easy. All
you do is sit staring at a blank
sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.”
– Gene Fowler
Friends, I’ve got a
million of these quotes. I collect
them. I adore them. But in fact, as British poet and playwright
Harold Pinter remarked earlier this month, accepting this year’s
Nobel Prize in Literature, “We don't have to weep" about the
fate of writers: "The writer makes his choice and is stuck
with it.” So there.
On the other hand, in his
address at Stockholm, Pinter
also said, in reference to his work, “There are no hard distinctions
between what is … true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or
false; it can be both true and
false.” So weep if you
want. It would make a lot of writers
feel better. For about ten
minutes. After that, they’d
probably tell you to get lost, because they’re busy. Writing.
Frequently on deadline.
I know -- a lot of writers
aren’t lucky enough to have deadlines. I am, or, at least, I have been. But it took a long time to get
there. And the “truth”
is – with apologies to Pinter -- I was about to give it up before I
got a publishing contract for my first book, back in the Dark Ages, 25
years ago this month.
I’m not kidding. I really was about to give it up. I had no idea what else I might do with
my life, but I was tired. Tired of
trying. Tired of rejections. The manuscript I’d been working on
and peddling by that time for nine years – you heard me: nine
years – seemed un-sellable.
This was the book that became Anastasia,
the story of the woman who claimed to be the daughter of the last Russian
tsar, for which I’m still best known and remembered. By 1980, I’d had a dozen rejections
already from “major publishing houses.” Probably more – I believe a lot of
people were anxious to spare my feelings and actually hid the mail. My friends and family were all looking at
me with a mixture of pity and terror.
My wife (at the time) was sick of working dumb jobs so we could eat
– and drink, I’m afraid, because I was doing a lot of that,
too. My father, bless him, actually
said to me, “Son, if you do nothing else but write it, and if it only
sits there on the shelf, you’ll have accomplished something. We’re proud of you!”
Maybe that’s what gave
me the stubbornness to continue (stubbornness or spite – I’ve
never been sure). That spring, I
took Anastasia out of the drawer
for what I thought would be the last time.
(There were no computers then -- a “drawer” was the only
place you could hide a manuscript in your humiliation and despair.) I said to myself, “I’m gonna
whack this thing into shape if it kills me, and if I don’t have a
publisher by the end of the year, I’m never going to look at it
again.”
I meant it. I felt
it. And lo! At the eleventh hour, I got a call. An editor at Little, Brown wanted to see
me in Boston. I’d already snagged an agent
– more about that in a minute – who said, “Get your ass
down there and do it now.” And
I did. And, somehow, it worked. Why they took a chance on me, I
don’t know. But on December 19, 1980, 12 days
before my self-imposed deadline, I was told that the deal was done. Little, Brown wanted the book.
How’s that for
karma? I was either so excited or so
stunned by this news that I forgot to ask how much they were going to pay
– that is, how high the “advance” would be.
“Don’t you want
to know?” my agent asked.
“Yeah,” I
said. “Um … I guess it
would be good to know.” But it
really wasn’t the main thing on my mind.
Oh, believe me, the advance
was a pittance. Money went farther
in those days, but no publisher is going to dump a lot of cash on an
“untested” author.
Remember that. They
won’t even do it for a “proven” author. It’s never given to you in a
lump. So much on “signing,”
so much on “delivery,” so much on publication, etc. –
that’s how they do it.
They’re very cautious.
And why wouldn’t they be?
They’re in business to do business, as the saying is. And they know what writers are like
(spendthrifts, maniacs, procrastinators – with any luck,
artists).
But to go back a bit –
the agent. I’m asked
constantly – constantly
– by would-be writers, “How do I get published?”
“Well,” I say,
“you should probably have an agent.”
“How do I get an
agent?”
“Beats me. The same way you get a publisher, I
suppose. The hard way.”
In my case, it was luck
– luck and what they call “connections.” That is, I knew someone who knew someone
who knew someone, and on a blazingly hot day in New York – one of
those scorching summer days in the city when you feel like cutting your own
throat and everyone else’s – I met my first agent in a small
park near the Museum of Modern Art.
He was a eating a hot dog and a pretzel while I explained to him the
merits of the book I was doing.
Between noshes, he suddenly said, “Why should I care?”
This had the effect of making
me angry, and anger, evidently, had the effect of making me
persuasive. In both senses of the
word, you have to be “mad” to be a writer. You have to be driven, at least. You have to be obsessed. There’s an old theatre saw –
I believe it’s credited to John Gielgud or somebody – who,
faced with a row of eager young acting students, said to them, “Look,
if we can talk you out of this, you shouldn’t be here.”
It’s the best advice
there is. Really, it’s the
only advice. Picking his teeth, this
agent finally said, “Well, all right.
Let’s give it a whirl.”
But that was just the beginning.
The greatest shock of my
first publishing experience came immediately after the contract was signed,
when my editor told me that the entire manuscript of Anastasia had to be written again, from start to finish (it had
already been written four times).
“It’s
good,” she said, “but it’s not good enough. You’ve fussed over it too much. You’ve worked on it too hard. It’s lost its immediacy and
that’s what we need to get back.
So start over, please – page 1. Now.”
I thought I’d drop
dead. I really didn’t know if
I could do it. But she was right
– I had worked on it too
hard. I’d spent so much time
trying to get it “perfect” that I’d turned it into
stone. And because it was a
biography – that is, “non-fiction” – my editor was
able to say, “Use the drafts you’ve already got for factual
reference. Use them only for that. And remember we need it by
June.”
Well, as they say in Russia,
“Boja moi!” Loosely, this means, “Oh, my
goodness!”, although you can put it in more graphic terms than
that. I certainly did. I said, “What!?” – just like Tsar Nicholas when the
Bolsheviks told him he was about to be shot. But I did what my editor said, and
because of that I discovered something wonderful, something magical
and astonishing. All writing,
fiction or “non,” must
be immediate, on-the-spot, “right there,” making no excuses and
offering no explanations for itself.
At least, it has to seem
that way. It has to read
like that.
This isn’t always
possible to achieve – in fact it’s very hard to achieve –
but the rule remains: It has to be
fresh. Quoting the
“humorist” Dorothy Parker, from an interview in Paris Review in 1957: “There must be courage, there must
be no awe … There must be a disciplined eye and a wild mind. There must be a magnificent disregard for
your reader, for if he cannot follow you, there is nothing you can do about
it.” (In the same interview,
when asked what she “did for fun,” Mrs. Parker answered,
“Anything that isn’t writing is fun.” Why
is humor regarded as a minor achievement in the arts?)
Five books later, and God
knows how many cubic feet of water under the bridge – much more water
than money, I’ll tell ya -- I still return to Mrs. Parker’s
words. I’ve broken with
Little, Brown since it all began, and broken with the agent, too. I’ve moved around. I’ve even had to toss that splendid
editor over the edge (don’t worry, she’ll be fine –
she’s on salary). I have as
many “publishing stories” as I do “writers’
quotes.” But what do these
matter, really, if good writing is the goal? I can ask this question because, through
some miracle, I managed to beat the odds.
And if I do nothing else, as my father said, I’ll have
accomplished something.
Wait! I can’t leave it there –
it’s too sentimental. Besides,
no writer ever shuts up. I’ll
end this the way it began, with a quote from Gene Fowler. I’m not going to tell you who Gene
Fowler was – you can “Google” him if he interests
you. Suffice it to say that one of
Fowler’s sons went on to produce the 1950s horror flick I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and that
Fowler himself remarked, at the height of his considerable success,
“Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room
and left the typewriter running.”
Well, Gene, yeah … I
know.
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