WRESTLING THE GORILLA

I've been having a lot of trouble getting my yah-yahs up to wrestle with my novel, a big hairy gorilla that runs through the jungle and turns and fights me with all its strength.

It makes me tired just thinking about it. 

Today, I was reading a bit of memoir by Robert Towne about writing his famous movie "Chinatown."

He said it drove him nuts. He retreated to Catalina Island to write most of it. The isolation helped him focus on it and wrestle with it every day.

I was glad to hear it was a beast to write. Made me feel better.

I realized that part of my problem is that I want it to be easy. I don't want to wrestle the 800-lb gorilla.

I want it to be easy like a short story, like "Casualty of War," which won the Random House short fiction award in 1999. That story took me about 20 minutes to write and I was smart enough not to change hardly any of it.

(Here is a link:)
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/contest/0999/sstory1.html

But novel writing is different. Takes me nine or ten months working all day every day to get a first draft and eight or ten years to do the rewrites. Of course I do much line-by-line revising. I should probably follow Borges's advice:

“Perhaps in order to write a really great book, you must be rather unaware of the fact. You can slave away at it and change every adjective to some other adjective, but perhaps you can write better if you leave the mistakes.” – Jorge Luis Borges 

Of course being a compulsive rewriter and endless futzer, that is hard for me to do.

Anyway, the important thing for me now is to realize that I cannot expect it to be easy. It is going to be hard. As someone once said, "If it was easy, anybody could do it." And as someone else once said, "Nothing great was ever accomplished without enthusiasm."

And courage. You have to have courage to tackle something as big and hairy as this.

Wish me luck. And energy. And perseverance. And guts. And willingness. You have to be willing.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

BESTSELLERS OR JUST CRAP?

Today, I went to the library to study bestselling novels, hoping I could learn something to use in my own work.

I browsed the shelves and got out six or eight books and sat down to read a page or two. You can tell a lot right off the bat.

The first one was by John Grisham. I think it was called "The Associate" or something like that. It started out about a law student coaching an inner-city boy's basketball team.

God, it was boring. I could hardly wade through six or eight pages of the first scene. It about wore me out.

The guy sees a cop or federal agent watching him. OK, big deal. Then later he gets outside and two FBI guys hassle him about an old rape charge.

Why should I care about this guy? I don't. This is a bestseller? You can't prove that by me.

Then I tried books by John Sandford, James Patterson, Richard North Patterson, Ridley Pearson, and three or four other big-time bestseller writers.

To me, they were all pretty much the same. These books are supposed to be thrillers, but I was not thrilled. I wasn't hooked. I wasn't even interested. They were unbearably dull.

This isn't the first time I've done this. In the past, I've tried Lee Child and Dean Koontz and Lisa Gardner and John Locke (whose stuff BTW is notable for its extreme use of cliches).

Years ago, I picked up a used copy of a John Sandford novel, and the first chapter was surprisingly good. It was about a group of high-powered biz execs who went on their annual deer hunt.

At the end of the first scene, somebody shoots and kills the chairman of the board. OK, so far, so good. Then the author says, "It was a real bad day for the chairman of the board." Or something like that. 

Yargh! I threw the book against the wall. That authorial intrusion ruined it for me. I couldn't read any further.

I even read a whole John Grisham novel once, "The Firm." It was so repititious and badly written that I vowed I'd never read another one.

This was typical. These bestsellers are almost uniformly horrible. Poorly written and boring. I can't even read that crap, let alone write it. Trying to read it is a form of torture. Yargh!

So I made a decision: I will pass on the bestsellers. Who cares? If I was doing this to make money, I'd become a pimp, or sell life insurance, or go to law school, or become a hit-man. (Joking now. Har-har.)  

From now on, I'm just going to write the best novels I can, by my own criteria. Travel my own road, and see that road by my own lights.

That decision feels right. It puts me in charge, the captain of my ship, the master of my fate.

For one thing, I can study the novels I love, the great books. You know, Tolstoi, Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, James Joyce, Hemingway, Melville, Camus, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

No more crap.
Whew, what a relief.

I don't know if I'll ever be a bestseller, or even publish a novel, but at least I'll be doing what I love and doing it my own way.

Wish me luck.

Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle