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MANY PEOPLE SAY they have a book in them, and I believe them. Everyone has lived through at least one time in life that could become a book if they could find the way to tell that story. All you have to do is ask a few questions and it tumbles out, even if you’re chatting with strangers. The trouble comes when you try to take it from the perfect way it exists in your mind and get it onto the page. The story may be strong and clear in your head, but when you sit down to write it, the ghosts of dozens of successful novels smother your confidence, and you begin to think that your beautiful idea is a tired cliché.
At a New Year’s Day party in 2016, I tried an experiment that demonstrated this, although I didn’t intend it to.
I had moved to a new town and wanted to make friends. As I was driving to the party, I tried to think what I could ask people besides where they grew up and what they did for a living. I wanted to come up with a question that would reveal something more. I decided to ask, “Did you ever have a moment when your whole life fell apart?” That’s a bold question, so I expected some would refuse to answer, but I knew that those who answered would be more likely to become a friend.
People were not put off by my question, but they answered bluntly, without details: divorce, bankruptcy, death of a friend. As the party progressed, I started to think that the question was not a good one. In my last attempt, I interrupted a man who, if I remember right, was talking about beer.
He paused before he answered, as if he were not sure he wanted to tell me. Then he raised his right arm and pulled back his sleeve to reveal his forearm. The muscle bulged thick at the back of his wrist and swelled broadly at the middle, outsized for his limb.
“This is my thigh muscle,” he said. “I was in a car accident that stripped everything to the bone. And I’m a bass player.”
I had an impulse to embrace him, because I believed I had felt some of his pain and I wanted to take a bit of it away. The intensity of the moment was uncomfortable. I deflected this genuine connection by starting to describe a car accident in which a friend of mine was almost killed. All I got out of my mouth was, “I have a friend who . . .” The man held up his palm to stop me. “Please,” he said. “I can’t hear comparisons.”
I felt that rebuke, and then I felt the power of his story more strongly. I respected his instinct to protect it. He couldn’t bear to have what he had experienced ranked against others’ losses. For that reason, he kept a good deal of his story private. Yet he said these three sentences to a stranger because this was a story he still needed to tell.
We come to the craft of writing with this same emotion. Something happened to us: we witnessed something or observed something that defined us or reordered our world. If we can describe it well, we may illuminate this experience for those who read about it. The story is not like other stories because of what we bring to it, and we want with a full heart to get every detail of it right. This story is our own, but it is not our possession. It is something we ache to give to others because in doing so we can touch another, as that man touched me. Yet often we hear people talk about writing as if it were a gimmick or a racket.
You’ve heard the people I’m describing here, the ones who scoff at every book on the best-seller list, every author who is a commercial success or has a franchise through which he’s published dozens of novels, like James Patterson or perhaps a more high-toned series, such as the novels of Alexander McCall Smith. These cynics say popular books are all crap, just commercial products like every other bastardized commodity produced in corporate America. They look at a ghostwritten memoir of a reality television star, a cheesy self-help book, some noisy spiritual advice from a charlatan that has sat on the best-seller list for ten weeks, as proof that if you want to be a successful writer you have to sell your soul.
The writing cynic speaks about writing in commercial terms, conjecturing how to turn his or her painful breakup into a blockbuster hit. “This could be a great romcom,” one might say, using movie slang for a romantic comedy. “Or a thriller or a thriller-romance with a sci-fi twist.” They think less about how the story might unfold and more about how to shoehorn it into a genre that has a predictable form. Through that form, they imagine, they will receive a big payoff from a long stay on the best-seller list, the very list they scorned.
This attitude toward writing brings with it a distorted idea of time. These cynics say that because the work they are attempting is formulaic, it shouldn’t take much time to get it done. “I’ll just bang it out this weekend,” I’ve heard people say. “Strap in and slam it out.”
Cynicism is armor to protect the tender spirit from the widespread world of crap. Our daily interactions with mediocrity and manipulation are bound to make us feel that if this is what sells, the effort required to write something good is hardly worth it. The gatekeepers who refuse to publish good writers’ work have made huge mistakes that make you question why they hold the power they do. Publishing scandals like James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (3.5 million copies sold) and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson (four years on the best-seller list) help make the case for such cynicism. These nonfiction best sellers were later discovered to have significant sections that were wholly made up. The writers lied, and the publishers did not check to ensure that readers were not being scammed by a powerful tale. Pile up these frauds and popularly acclaimed phonies and you have a heap of crap tall enough to justify a dismissive attitude toward those who are idealistic about their writing.
James Frey is a gifted writer, and many parts of A Million Little Pieces are quite moving. They would be moving in a novel too. Frey broke trust with his readers when he said all of his story was true. Saying it’s nonfiction makes him more of a hero of his story. He’s saying he was brave enough not to blink at the terrible things he did, nor to exaggerate for effect. Then he did the opposite. He exaggerated his fall so his recovery would seem more remarkable. As he said in his apology interview with Oprah, who had magnified his success by touting his book in her book club, “I was a bad guy. If I was gonna write a book that was true, and I was gonna write a book that was honest, then I was gonna have to write about myself in very, very negative ways.” He did not want to face the truth of who he was, but he wanted to write a best seller. His ambition, his cynicism, and his insecurity met up on the page to create the fraudulent storytelling that eventually produced his downfall. At first I was angry at the contempt he showed for his readers, but then I saw how terrified he was of them.
Ken Kesey wrote about America’s fog of cynicism, our lost belief that anything can be true or good. And although Kesey was writing decades ago, that fog seems only to have thickened. Our world numbs us with its superficiality and speed, making all of us, no matter how young and beautiful, feel that we are out of date and being left behind. Value is something established in the marketplace rather than something that reflects our principles, and this makes us feel that what we value is worthless if the marketplace doesn’t value it too. Cynically bad-mouthing the business of publishing may make a writer temporarily feel superior, unable to be fooled. But this knowing attitude is a thin cover for an underlying tenderness the writer is struggling to find the words to express.
When the cynic discovers that writing the truth is harder than imagined, denigrating publishing becomes an attractive way of avoiding the work ahead.
If you have this attitude, you will never finish. Contempt for the work does not motivate you to work. If you think this way as you write, you are essentially doing it because it’s not worth doing. If you are going to keep going, you’ve got to love the work, the thing itself, and all it is putting you through. There are no shortcuts through this process, and cynicism is a waste of your time.
The man at the party was the opposite of cynical about telling his story. He had reduced it to its essence and left enormous space around it by saying it so simply. In those three sentences, he described a whole world. Everyone near him when he pulled up his sleeve at that party rushed forward to feel his loss, as they had felt many of their own. In this way, storytelling can be a bulwark against a world in widespread decline, as it can be a point of genuine connection between strangers. You cannot stop the world from being mediocre, but you can write something that is fine and true and says exactly what you have to say. In Finishing School we put aside bravado and cheap cynicism and find satisfaction in making measurable progress toward this goal.