Why We Write Page 5

  On the first page of Tropic of Cancer, Miller says, “I no longer think I am an artist. I am one.” I saw those thirty pages and I was like, There it is, man, there it is.

  Rich beats poor

  I’d been poor, and it sucked, and I didn’t want a shit job in a bar or a clothing store. So I started writing movies when I was twenty-five. The end game was always writing books, but there were plenty of dudes making dough writing bad movies. I thought, I can do that.

  I wrote the corniest, most commercial romantic comedy I could, in a pure, mercenary way, and I moved from Chicago to Los Angeles and I sold it. Between twenty-five and thirty-one I was a journeyman screenwriter. I had a job as a writer, but that’s different from being a writer.

  After I wrote that little burst of A Million Little Pieces, I knew I could do what I wanted to do. I just needed time. I took a second mortgage on my house. I had enough money for eighteen months. It took me about a year to write A Million Little Pieces, and then I sold it. And that’s what I’ve been doing since.

  I still do movies. I had a movie come out in 2011, a big, corny, DreamWorks teenage action movie called I Am Number Four that I did under a fake name.

  Persona of interest

  It’s funny to me to use fake names. Being a writer is about creating public mythology, creating a writerly persona, as much as it’s about what you write.

  There’s James Frey who goes home to his family, and there’s the public James Frey. Look at guys like Hemingway or Kerouac or Bukowski or Norman Mailer or Hunter Thompson. I’m willing to bet the person who was home with his family wasn’t the guy the public thought of as that person. These people had big public personas, and their public personas almost destroyed them. They got lost. They forgot that there’s a line between who you are at home and who you are in public.

  At this point in my career there’s the public James Frey: bad James Frey, notorious James Frey, egomaniac, arrogant James Frey. Who I am at home is different. I don’t need to swagger into my apartment and say I’m the best and the baddest. When I go home I’m just Daddy. I’m James, my wife’s husband.

  In my personal life there are plenty of things I’m insecure about. I’m scared I’ll wake up someday and not have money to pay my bills. I get nervous at parties; I don’t like being around forty people at once. Pretty standard human bullshit.

  I’ve had shitty things happen to me in my career—like getting eviscerated by Oprah on national TV, and having sixteen class-action lawsuits filed against me, and having a lawyer tell me, “You’re facing permanent financial Armageddon. You should think about moving to Florida or Switzerland or Monaco.”

  But what scares me most is that something might happen to my kids. My wife and I had a second child who passed away. A son. That’s the most brutal experience ever.

  Compared to losing a kid, losing a friend, having your heart broken—those horrific experiences as a writer are just bad days at work. Two thousand six was a bad year at work for me, but that’s all it was.

  When I’m at the machine, when I’m James Frey the writer, all that evaporates. I have no doubt. I have no fear. Nobody can hurt me, nobody can say shit that means anything to me. When I’m in the act of writing it’s not ego, it’s just work, just struggle and challenge. I keep a pretty strict wall between those things. People get into trouble when that wall falls down.

  My writing, me, all of it, is a big, long-running piece of performance art. The die has been cast. The mythology exists. Whether it lasts or not will be determined by how good the books I write are. That’s the beauty of it: all the bullshit in the world, and all that really matters to me, to readers, to history, is, Are the books good enough? What I want is to do to other people what Henry Miller did to me.

  Radical

  As I was trying to teach myself to write the way I wanted to, I looked a lot at literary history. I tried to figure out what different writers I admired had in common with one another.

  I looked at people like Baudelaire, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, John Dos Passos, Hemingway, Kerouac, Mailer, Thompson, Ginsberg, Bret Easton Ellis. When their writing first appeared nobody had seen anything like it. Take On the Road. How many road books existed before that? Billions. Don Quixote is a road book, two guys going on a trip. You have to radically reinvent not just how writing can be done, but how subject matter can be treated. You have to write great books, singular books that are absolutely unique and almost revolutionary and immediately identifiable as yours.

  We think of Hemingway now and it’s just Hemingway. But when his books first came out—short, declarative sentences, tight, lean, easy to read, plot-intensive writing—it was radical. If you think about Kerouac, radical. Henry Miller, radical. Ginsberg, radical.

  The best best of all

  I’ve had some spectacular moments as a writer. It’s awesome the first time you see your book in a bookstore; the first time somebody says, “Damn, dude, I love your books.” I love starting a book and finishing a book. There’s pure pleasure when you feel like you wrote a sentence that’s perfect for whatever it needs to be. I’ve had readings with thousands of people at them, I’ve sold ten or fifteen million books, I get to go on book tours around the world. At one point I was number one on both the hardcover and paperback New York Times bestseller lists.

  You would think that would be the greatest moment. But it wasn’t.

  The greatest moment—I might even start crying when I talk about it—was when I typed the last word of A Million Little Pieces. I looked at it and burst out into tears. I don’t know if there will ever be a moment in my writing career better than that.

  I have a deal with myself. If I’m ever more concerned with what people are saying or with what my sales are or how many people show up at my readings than I am with writing shit that rocks people’s worlds, I’ll quit and find something else to do. I’m not going to be some seventy-five-year-old man who’s just cranking shit out because my ego won’t let it go.

  Marvin Hagler just walked away from boxing one day. Everyone was asking, “When’s he coming back?” He’s never coming back. I have huge respect for the way he did that.

  At some point I’ll just leave, and nobody will ever hear from me again.

  James Frey’s Wisdom for Writers

  In true art there are no rules. It doesn’t have to be fiction or nonfiction. You don’t have to have gone to a certain school or have an MFA. Either you can write or you can’t.

  Work hard.

  Thanks to e-books, publishers aren’t necessary anymore. If you want to publish a book, do it yourself.

  Believe in yourself. If I can do it, you can do it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sue Grafton

  Phillip Lanahan drove to Vegas in his 1985 Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet, a snappy little red car his parents had given him two months before, when he graduated from Princeton. His stepfather bought the car secondhand because he abhorred the notion of depreciation. Better that the original owner take that hit.

  —Opening lines, V Is for Vengeance, 2011

  I dare you: read a page one like the one above and put the book down. Go ahead and try.

  “Bet you can’t read just one” could be Sue Grafton’s brand identity. And—in addition to being a gifted writer who rightly prides herself on her rare dual achievements, rave reviews and blockbuster sales—Grafton is a brand. Fortunately for her millions of readers in twenty-eight countries and twenty-six languages, she’s a brand with twenty-five built-in sequels.

  Published in 1982, when Grafton was a forty-two-year-old successful but unhappy screenwriter, A Is for Alibi was the first in her mystery series featuring female private investigator Kinsey Millhone. A wasn’t, in fact, Grafton’s first novel. She wrote her first at age eighteen, and six more in quick succession, only two of which, Keziah Dane (1967) and The Lolly-Madonna War (1969), were published. After years at author boot camp, a.k.a. screenwriting, an irresistible mystery plot presented itself. Enmeshed in bitter divorce proc
eedings, Grafton found herself fantasizing about murdering or, at least, maiming, her soon-to-be ex-husband. Luckily for all of us, she turned those fantasies into a novel. Grafton has already completed A through V in the series. Never have so many wished so fervently to add a few more letters to the alphabet.

  THE VITALS

  Birthday: April 24, 1940

  Born and raised: Louisville, Kentucky

  Current home: Montecito, California, and Louisville, Kentucky

  Love life: Married 33 years to science lecturer Dr. Steven F. Humphrey

  Family life: Three adult children, four granddaughters (including one named Kinsey)

  Schooling: Graduated from the University of Louisville, 1961, with a BA in English literature

  Day job?: No

  Honors and awards (partial listing): Three Anthony Awards, three Shamus Awards, the Smith-Breckenridge Distinguished Woman of Achievement Award, the Ross Macdonald Literary Award, the Diamond Dagger Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Crime Writers’ Association, a Grand Master Award from Mystery Writers of America

  Notable notes:

  • Sue Grafton is the daughter of detective novelist C. W. Grafton.

  • Grafton cites Ross Macdonald as her strongest literary influence. She set her “alphabet series” in the fictional town of Santa Teresa, California, which Macdonald had created as a stand-in for Santa Barbara.

  • It wasn’t until G Is for Gumshoe that Grafton earned enough money as a writer to quit her day job.

  • Grafton has refused to sell film rights to her books and has threatened to haunt her children if they do so after her death.

  Website: www.suegrafton.com

  Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/sue-grafton/112566022091435?ref=ts

  THE COLLECTED WORKS

  Novels

  Keziah Dane, 1967

  The Lolly-Madonna War, 1969

  A Is for Alibi, 1982

  B Is for Burglar, 1985

  C Is for Corpse, 1986

  D Is for Deadbeat, 1987

  E Is for Evidence, 1988

  F Is for Fugitive, 1989

  G Is for Gumshoe, 1990

  H Is for Homicide, 1991

  I Is for Innocent, 1992

  J Is for Judgment, 1993

  K Is for Killer, 1994

  L Is for Lawless, 1995

  M Is for Malice, 1996

  N Is for Noose, 1998

  O Is for Outlaw, 1999

  P Is for Peril, 2001

  Q Is for Quarry, 2002

  R Is for Ricochet, 2004

  S Is for Silence, 2005

  T Is for Trespass, 2007

  U Is for Undertow, 2009

  V Is for Vengeance, 2011

  Fiction Collections

  Kinsey and Me, short stories, 1992

  The Lying Game, short stories, 2003

  Sue Grafton

  Why I write

  I write because in 1962 I put in my application for a job working in the children’s department at Sears, and they never called me back.

  Seriously: I write because it’s all I know how to do. Writing is my anchor and my purpose. My life is informed by writing, whether the work is going well or I’m stuck in the hell of writer’s block, which I’m happy to report only occurs about once a day.

  My best time as a writer is any day, or any moment, when the work’s going well and I’m completely absorbed in the task at hand. The hardest time is when it’s not, and I’m not. The latter tend to outnumber the former. But I’m a persistent little cuss. And I soldier on.

  I’m a persistent writer. And also a terrified one.

  Most days when I sit down at my computer, I’m scared half out of my mind. I’m always convinced that my last book was my last book, that my career is at an end, that I’ll never be able to pull off another novel, that my success was a fleeting illusion, and my hopes for the future are already dead. Dang! All this drama and it’s not even nine a.m.

  Writer’s block is a subject I’ve given a lot of thought to, since I come up against it so often. I used to try to power through, overriding the block by sheer force of will. Now I look at it differently. I see writer’s block as a message from Shadow, informing me that I’m off track. The “block” is the by-product of a faulty choice I’ve made. My job is to back up and see if I can pinpoint the fork in the road where I headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes I’ve misunderstood a character or his or her motivation. Sometimes I’ve laid out events in a sequence that muddies the story line. Usually I don’t have to retrace my steps more than a chapter or two, and the error is easily corrected.

  I write largely by trial and error, which means I often run into dead ends. I pursue possibilities that peter out. I devise and abandon whole story lines because they turn out to be unusable.

  To steady myself, I keep a series of journals for every novel I write. That’s where I allow myself to whine, wring my hands, fret, scheme, experiment, and occasionally pat myself on the back. Writing is tense and stressful work. My theory is that if I don’t own my dark side—my frustration, my fears, and the bumbling about I seem destined to do on any given day—my negative emotions will sabotage my ability to write.

  My working journals serve several purposes. They give me a record of my process, a day-by-day account of the problems I see as a book takes shape. When I come up against writer’s block, I go back and read the journals from the early stages of the writing. As odd as this sounds, more than once I’ve solved a problem and tagged the solution long before I began the actual writing.

  Another joy of keeping journals is that on days when I’m feeling especially frustrated and despairing, I can read through the journals from an earlier book and realize that I felt just as baffled and frightened when I was writing that one. Knowing that I’ve survived all my bumbling and fumbling in the past helps me survive it in the present. And sometimes, the odd and unrelated ideas that occur to me while I’m writing one book spark an idea for the next book in the series. I don’t know if other writers operate this way, but it’s worked for me.

  When I reread the journals, I can see I’m telling myself the story in endless loops, repeating myself until I can see the whole of a narrative. So the journals are incredibly boring. I don’t try to be literate or lofty, and I ignore the fact that one day someone else might read every tedious page. The purpose of the journals isn’t to impress myself or anyone else; it’s to verbalize my challenges as I meet them and to weigh all my options. Writing in the journals is a warm-up, the repository for my research, dialogue fragments, and character sketches. There have been times when I’ve lifted entire paragraphs from a journal and stitched them into the scene I’m writing, which always feels like a gift.

  The six working journals for V Is for Vengeance totaled 967 single-spaced pages. The finished manuscript was 662 double-spaced pages. This might appear to represent a whole lot of wasted effort. But in truth, every wrong turn eventually led to the right one. In the end, I wouldn’t have given up a single moment of the process.

  Eudora Welty once said, “Every book teaches you the lessons necessary to write that book.” To which I add, “The problem is that the lessons learned from writing one book seldom apply to the next.”

  Father knew best

  I was raised in a household where reading and the love of good literature were an essential part of our daily lives. My father, C. W. Grafton, was a municipal bond attorney. He wrote mysteries in his spare time, if lawyers can be said to have spare time. He’d put in a full day’s work as a lawyer, come home for supper, and then go back to his office to write.

  After years of doing this, he managed to publish two novels of what he intended to be an eight-book series, The Rat Began to Gnaw the Rope and The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher. He borrowed the titles from an English nursery rhyme about an old lady trying to get a pig over a stile. (These days, there’s probably not a kid in this world who knows what a “stile” is, unless it’s mentioned in the same sentence with Juicy Couture.) />
  When my father realized he couldn’t make a living wage from his writing, he was forced to set aside his series in order to support his wife and two daughters. His intention was to go back to writing when he retired, but he died before he was able to do that.

  As I was growing up, my father talked often and lovingly about the process of writing. Those lessons sifted down into my consciousness long before it occurred to me that I might write one day. His passion for the mystery genre was something I picked up at an early age.

  I wasn’t cut out to be a ballerina

  When I was growing up long, long ago, girls had limited career options. In alphabetical order, the choices were: ballerina, nurse, salesclerk, secretary, stewardess, or teacher.

  I had no physical talents whatever, so there went Swan Lake. I suspected that teaching, which is extremely fulfilling for some people, would be a bore for me. I was married and a young mother, so Pan Am was out of the question. I was interested in medicine, although perhaps not for the loftiest of reasons. When I was in my early twenties, the two most popular television series were Dr. Kildare and Marcus Welby, M.D. In my fevered imagination, I conjured myself in a white cap, white shoes, and a crisp white uniform, awash in purity of purpose, sacrifice, dedication, drama, emergencies, lives saved, and all made right with the world. How much better could a job be?

  Unfortunately, I’m squeamish about blood and suffering. I’m also needle-phobic. So becoming a nurse in real life meant I’d actually spend my days stretched out on the floor in a dead faint.

  I’ve mentioned the sorry results of my dreams of working at Sears. So my last hope rested on my untapped secretarial aspirations. Hell, I was game. I taught myself how to type, pretended I knew medical terminology, and got a job as an admissions clerk, and then as a secretary, in a hospital clinic for the indigent. Later, I processed applications and typed up intern and resident rotations in a hospital. Later still, I ran the front office for a family physician. All of this, please note, in the white uniform and white shoes I’d originally pictured myself wearing.