When it comes to novels and columns, I'm not done yet
Over two decades ago, I wrote the opening page of my first novel to lose myself in another world, one of my own creation. I couldn't control the hatred, war and tragedy that abounded in the real world, but I could ensure justice prevailed and love triumphed in the fictional world I made up.
Now, with five novels published whose settings span from Silicon Valley to Washington, D.C., to Jerusalem, I've created parallel worlds featuring protagonists who are braver, smarter and more charming than I am.
Yet, in these turbulent 2020s, gallivanting around a world drawn from my own imagination was no longer enough. I could no longer hide out from a world going to hell in a handbasket. I started regularly writing the column you are now reading. Here I can explain to you, dear readers, my take on this horrible but wonderful, callous but caring, unjust but righteous, cowardly but courageous world we are both lucky and unfortunate to live in.
I compose a rough draft of the column on Tuesday and get it in good enough shape to submit by Wednesday lunchtime. Here's how Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Red Smith replied when asked if column-writing was hard: “Why, no. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” I get it. I have metaphorical scars running up and down my forearms.
The screw turns. Now I'm doing the final edits on a sixth novel that's scheduled for publication next spring. I guess I couldn't bear remaining stranded in this world without seeing if I could return to a better one of my own making. Sidney Sheldon, whose novels have sold over 300 million copies, once said, “A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.”
The work is indeed excruciating, but in writing a single column at least, the pain is fleeting. In writing a novel, it persists for months, years, and maybe decades. What a 100-meter sprinter is in the world of track, a columnist is in the literary world. A novelist is a long-distance runner, if not an ultramarathoner.
And, for me, the worst part of getting it all done is not finishing the first draft — it's the next one, and the one after that. For that sixth novel, I don't know how many drafts I've done, making the changes I deemed necessary while rereading it on the screen or hearing it read aloud or receiving critiques from fellow writers and expert editors. By the time I submitted it to an agent who liked what he saw and signed on to find a publisher, I was on draft gazillion.
My agent found a publisher who was as excited by my opus as he was. I recall a quote attributed to the novelist William Campbell Gault: “In our field there are only two kinds of stories, the salable and the unsalable. Our highest acclaim is a two-word sentence: 'It sold.'”
Hallelujah, right?
Not so fast.
With five novels published, I expected the editorial review of my sixth to point out only a few minor miscues for me to clean up. Then what I'd written would be typeset for print copies and ebooks and recorded for the audiobook version. This time, though, my sharp-eyed editor at the house sent me seven pages of notes along with copious comments in the margins of the novel's 300 pages. It's my book, of course, and it's my name on the spine. Maxwell Perkins, the legendary editor of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, said, “The book belongs to the author,” meaning the writer should ultimately be the final judge, even when the editor disagrees.
The problem is almost all of what my editor says this time makes sense. For example, she writes, “We should never get too far away from the plotline.” Well, gosh, I do know that. But then she points out more than a few passages where I digress into philosophical dueling between the two main characters. I loved that stuff and thought it was so darned clever. For that matter, so did she as a college philosophy major, but I'm grateful she helped me realize most readers would not. The digressions violated writing rules set forth by Elmore Leonard and Stephen King. The former admonished, “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” The latter wrote, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.” In editing, there is no choice but to be ruthlessly darling-cidal.
So, now I've found my comfort zone. Two days a week I can rage about the state of the world in my columns. The other five days I can construct worlds where I, and with luck some readers, like to spend time.
The Irish wit and author Oscar Wilde once asked himself what the difference was between literature and journalism. His answer? “Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.”
But with readers or without them, I'm committed to sending my words out to the world. As the novelist, essayist, and playwright James Baldwin said, “If you are going to be a writer, there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you.”
Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Caine Mutiny” and “The Winds of War,” published his last novel at age 97. The columnist George Will, also a Pulitzer Prize winner, is still going strong at age 85.
They are worthy role models. When it comes to writing, I'm not done yet.
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