But that didn’t matter. I’d caught the bug by then. I was going to get published—damn the clichés—come hell or high water. I thought back to famous rejection letters of authors who had gone on to great acclaim. This is anecdotal, but I understand that F. Scott Fitzgerald received a letter that read, “You’d have a good novel if only you’d get rid of that Gatsby character.” And another one of my favorites; I’ll let my readers figure out the author and the novel: “My dear sir, I’m afraid I must ask: Does it have to be a whale?”
But, since it wasn’t selling, I shelved that novel, which I came to call, with affection, The Unpublishable, and wrote another one.
Something must have gone wrong somewhere because that manuscript was bought on first submission. It wasn’t a publishing event; there was no big advance, and the New York Times did not review it. But I had a contract, and a novel with my name on it was in bookstores. There was no feeling like that in the world. Another novel with that company followed, and then I moved on to a bigger, better-known publisher with a three-book contract.
I delivered the first novel to them, and it received good notices, a movie option, and an Edgar Award nomination.
Then, a speed bump.
I had always told myself that if I were lucky enough to be published as a fiction writer, I would treat the craft as a business. Part of this meant never missing a deadline. But I was still working full time, and as the due date for the second book in the contract approached, I realized that I would be two months late in delivering it. What to do? As Baldrick in Black Adder would say, I came up with a cunning plan. I would dust off The Unpublishable, slap on a new title, and submit it to my editor. The six or so weeks it would take her to read it would give me the time I needed to finish the book I was working on.
She would contact me and say sheepishly, “Sorry, Jeff, I’m afraid this won’t do. Do you have any other ideas?”
Whereupon, like an illusionist, I would produce a proper manuscript, awing her with not only my fine prose but my apparent superheroic stamina and speed.
She called me a week after I’d sent her The Unpublishable and reported that it was the best thing I’d ever written.
Go figure.
The challenge of becoming a writer occasionally extends off the written page. There have been several movies based on my books, and Hollywood is exponentially more mysterious than writing fiction. I love the comment by a producer that when he’s looking for a book or script to turn into a movie, he wants something that’s been wildly successful in the past… yet is completely original (which may explain the surfeit of sequels). The movies based on my books are Dead Silence with James Garner, The Bone Collector with Denzel Washington and Angelina Jolie, and The Devil’s Teardrop. NBC is currently shooting a TV series based on The Bone Collector.
Hollywood is certainly ripe for experiences that might figure in this piece, since why and how a book is turned into a film are an utter mystery. But those tales will have to be penned by scriptwriters, those in the trenches. My involvement in all three movies and the TV show was cashing the check. Period. I respect filmmakers immensely and love movies, but I’m a person who does not play well with others in creative projects, and moviemaking is a form of entertainment whose engine is the collective.
An example of why I’ve chosen this path is a rather telling anecdote about the first movie—the one that came out as Dead Silence. The original book was A Maiden’s Grave. The studio wanted the story but felt the title was too archaic and not literal enough. They wanted to call it Dead Silence. I pointed out that A Maiden’s Grave was a vital motif in the story that echoed the past and foretold what would happen toward the end of the book. It was, in short, a perfect title.
Their response: Sorry, we want Dead Silence. In the book there were no maidens and no graves.
I pointed out that this same studio had just produced Barbarians at the Gate, about a modern-day corporate takeover, a story that featured not a single barbarian or gate.
They laughed at my clever rejoinder and said, “We still want Dead Silence.”
I continued to resist.
Whereupon they said, “The other option is that we can find someone else’s book to turn into a film.”
And I replied, “Dead Silence has a nice sound to it.” They missed the irony completely. And we moved forward with the deal.
Hollywood…
For three and a half decades, I’ve produced a novel and several short stories a year, and it was exactly twenty years ago that I quit my pesky day job to become a full-time fiction writer. There were many confounding trials and setbacks along the way—and there still are (like watching bookstores close and sales erode as people turn to streaming TV and video games). Still, there’s no better profession. Think about it: I get to make up things for a living. Does it get any better than that?
I’m sure every author has a different approach to the challenge of how to lead a writer’s life. It might be pursuing nonfiction or technical writing or graphic novels or the genres that I tried and discarded (or that discarded me!): poetry, songs, journalism, literary fiction, film.
In my case, the answer was stunning in its simplicity: coming to write the types of books and short stories that so captivated me as a young boy spending hour after hour in the Glen Ellyn Public Library many, many years ago. Just as in good detective fiction, the plot twist in which the mystery is solved was right before my eyes the entire time.
AN EXTRA CHILD
– Sulari Gentill –
THE BOX LIVED IN THE BACK OF A CUPBOARD. THAT IN ITSELF made it interesting. I suppose our flat-roofed house didn’t have an attic, so the cupboard served that purpose. In it were stored those items that had no place in the light of day but were valued or somehow important, even if the reason for that importance had been long forgotten. As a child, I would hide treasures in the cupboard and try to forget that I’d done so, just so I could rediscover them after they’d had been imbued with the magic that lingered there.
The box, however, did not need such contrivance; it was truly an object of wonder.
It contained evidence of a life that had become a secret, lost to an agreement to pretend.
I am the middle of three daughters, born in Sri Lanka in a province known as Slave Island—so named because it was once a port at which the slaving ships stopped on their way to America. My parents made me an immigrant before I was two years old. Of course, I was too young to care one way or another. The boundaries of my world still stopped at my family. After a brief stint in London, we spent five years in Zambia, where my sisters and I learned to speak English. By the time I was seven, I was Australian.
Ours was a typical immigrant family from South Asia. My parents placed a premium on education and were indifferent to sports. It made us a little odd in sports-mad Australia, but we became Australian nonetheless. We adopted the inflection and humor of our new country and navigated that line that all immigrant children walk, between the customs of where we were from and where we stood.
As the years passed, my sisters and I stopped speaking Singhalese, and, like trees, our new growth was ever further from our roots. We unfurled and flowered in the Australian sun, thriving in the dappled shade of gumtrees. Even so, I was aware that we were alone in this wide brown land. My parents were both from large families, but we lived half a planet away from grandparents or cousins or anyone who knew our history. There were no aunts and uncles to tell us funny stories about our parents, no collection of people with similar faces. At that distance, secrets were easily kept.