What about short stories? I wondered, a form I loved to read. I had heard that one of America’s esteemed literary and scholarly periodicals, Playboy, paid upward of $5,000 per. Out came the typewriter, and I banged out dozens of stories, most of which skewed toward the polemical, echoing Jonathan Swift. I’d hit the reader over the head with the mallet of social conscience. War is bad, corporate greed is bad, forests and whales are good. Blah, blah, blah…
The movie producer Samuel Goldwyn said if you want to send a message, go to Western Union (now he’d say send a tweet or put it on Facebook, I suppose). And I wish I’d heard of his dictum back then. Nobody, I learned the hard way, wants to be ranted at; an obvious corollary is that editors don’t buy stories written by ranters.
I might have honed the craft of short fiction, but time was running out; student loans loomed, and I longed for such luxuries as food and shelter. I had gone to the University of Missouri School of Journalism, so I gave up fiction and landed a job as a magazine writer.
At last, I was making a living as a writer.
The profession and I were not a smooth fit, however. Like my previous forays into writing, journalism found me sailing amid rocky shoals. In this case, the problem was pretty much what I’d anticipated: editors wanted their writers to dig relentlessly for facts, to report the truth. They frowned upon making things up (these were the days before fake news became chic). Where was the room for creativity, for imagination? I felt stifled.
Discouraged, I abandoned my quest for the writer’s life and did what everybody in the 1970s, be they cab driver or brain surgeon, did when confronting the least degree of job dissatisfaction. I went to law school.
I was by no means a terrible lawyer, primarily because I could write well, and law is largely about written communication: court documents, memoranda of law, and correspondence threatening litigation. I soon learned that I didn’t have the steel to become a successful attorney.
I had one case in which my large, heartless multinational client—not to put too fine a point on it—was sued by a young employee who’d been fired. The termination was justified, and he had no complaint there. But he’d left a box of personal items behind in his office, and they’d gone missing. He was suing for their value, a small sum, about $500.
As a young attorney, I took the case more than seriously. I took it John Grisham seriously. On the appointed court date, I showed up with briefs, stacks of cases, and probably a musty old lawbook or two, as props if nothing else. The plaintiff presented his case, and then the judge turned to me. “The defense’s response?”
In my best Perry Mason manner, I began to cite cases and statutes. The judge, who had no patience for nonsense like that, cut me short. She snapped, “What do you want, Counsellor?”
“Um, dismissal, Your Honor? On the grounds of gratuitous bailment?”
“Granted. Case dismissed.”
I was ecstatic. I’d won my first trial. And then I looked over at the plaintiff, and he was in tears. Apparently among the missing items were one-of-a-kind photographs of his mother and his dog and other sentimental things. The glow of victory evaporated; I was stabbed with guilt. My inclination was to write him a personal check for the money he’d sought.
Clearly, I was not meant to be a Jeffrey Toobin or Alan Dershowitz—or even a Saul Goodman of Breaking Bad fame.
Where to go from there?
Let me digress for a moment. All of my novels feature at least two or three surprise endings. For these to work fairly, there must be a clue seeded early in the story so that when the twist is revealed, the reader says, “You know, I saw that but didn’t think anything of it.”
I’ve done exactly that in this essay. The clue was a sentence that appeared many paragraphs ago.
Among the various genres I tried my hand at…
I never said that poetry, short stories, songs, and magazine articles were the only genres I tried. From the very beginning of my quest to lead a writer’s life, I was working away at another form: popular commercial fiction. Specifically, the favorite genre of my youth: crime fiction.
While still a full-time employee, I wrote my first murder mystery. I did most of the writing on my commute, which was close to three hours a day, plenty of time to churn out a fair amount of prose. I had one of the first laptop computers ever made. I don’t know exactly what it weighed, but it had to be close to ten pounds. Yes, the manufacturer called it a laptop, but you could also call a ten-pound barbell a laptop, and it would put your legs to sleep just as quickly as that computer did. Many times, I left the train hobbling as my circulation slowly returned.
I kept at it, and despite the pressure of a full-time job—and numbness in the extremities—I managed to finish my first novel. I was proud as could be.
I was wary, though, too. Leading a writer’s life meant producing a novel with some regularity and consistency. Was this book just a flash in the pan? I set it aside and over the next six months wrote a second. Then I went back and read them both, beginning to end. I learned that they were indeed consistent.
Consistently dreadful.
Chunky prose, convoluted and improbable plots, characters right out of a bad made-for-TV movie.
I threw them both out.
That was it. The mystery of becoming a writer was solved. I wasn’t meant to be one. I would devote myself to the law and represent the poor, the helpless, the downtrodden. Or represent large, heartless multinational corporations and make a lot of money. The specific direction I took didn’t matter. What was important was making the liberating choice of giving up my goal.
And where did I find myself a week or two later? Sitting at my desk banging out a new novel.
When I read through my final product, I decided that unlike those first two, this one was, in my opinion, probably the best commercial novel written that year. An opinion not shared by any agent or editor on the face of the earth.
Usually the manuscript went out and vanished into the abyss, never to return on the wings of the self-addressed, stamped envelope I had dutifully included. However, several were returned. When I received the hefty envelope in the mail, it was clear that it contained not a contract and a check for $100,000 but my manuscript. I opened it up, looking forward to a pithy and helpful letter about how to repair the novel and resubmit it. What I found was this: the manuscript had been dropped on the floor of the publisher and the pages jumbled and stuffed into the envelope every whichaway. There was dust and dirt and, those being the days when one could still smoke, a cigarette butt.
In place of that carefully crafted and helpful rejection letter, I received back only my own cover letter, upside down with a shoe print on the back. Being as naive as I was back then, I figured someone had accidentally stepped on the sheet. Now, being a bit more skeptical about publishing, I suspect the editorial staff drew straws to see who won the right to stomp on the manuscript before it was sent back.
Another rejection of the manuscript went something like this:
Dear Mr. Deaver:
Thank you for your submission. I feel I must tell you that I believe this manuscript to be unpublishable.
Very truly yours,
[Redacted] Publishing, Inc.
I of course focused on the positive: the “Thank you…” and the “Very truly yours.” Which I took to be signs of encouragement and sent out the manuscript again. Over and over and over. With no success.