A WRITER'S DREAM

When I first decided to become a writer, I was about 20 years old. That would be about 52 years ago now. A long time in a way, and a short time in another way.

My friend Bob Jacka introduced me to good books, mostly published by New Directions. I read "Crackup" by F. Scott Fitzgerald and stuff by Henry Miller and Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, and more.

I was in college and I got a lot of encouragement from my creative writing teachers. I had an artist friend, Jim Davis, who spent a lot of time in Mexico and met some artists and writers there who published their work in The Plumed Horn, a literary magazine published by Margaret Randall and her then-husband, Sergio Mondragon.

I sent in some poems, and, lo and behold, they got published. Voila! I had found my passion. I became an artist, of sorts.

Over the years I got a degree in literature and sent out poems and short prose pieces, and they mostly got published. I went to graduate school and got an MFA and worked for Poetry In The Schools, an NEA program, and I met a lot of poets and writers. Great people.

It seemed I had found my milieu, my place in the world. Before I graduated college, I had pictured a dusty office, with a frosted-glass door panel that had my name on it and the word "Poet" underneath.

After being a newspaper reporter and traveling some and getting to know the world a little bit, and going to graduate school and writing avant garde fiction, I decided I wanted to make a living as a novelist.

Aye, there's the rub. Sometime in the mid-70s I started studying and trying to write popular fiction. My old teacher, Oakley Hall, didn't like that.

But I persevered. Spent about 20 years hard at it. Wrote drafts of three big novels. One was about some guys who stole a top-secret experimental fighter plane and tried to ransom it back to the government. Years later, a similar novel was published and a movie made. So I guess that was a good idea.

Then, in 1996, I finally worked my way up the food chain of agents. I had spent 10 years working on a novel called "The Disappearance of Maggie Collins," about cops, hookers and a serial killer in NYC.

Trouble was, an obscure ad guy named James Patterson had come along and created a new sub-genre of pop fiction about serial killers. He owned that market.

I had the vague notion that was going on, but I decided to persevere, bull-headed as I am. I was rep'd by a new young agent at the best agency in the biz. He sent out seven copies of my novel. The next day, the head of one of the other publishing houses called him and said, Why didn't you send us this novel?

He said, Well, you've seen an earlier version from another agent. She said, well, since you re being honest with us, we'll be honest with you. We have already pirated a copy and we are reading it now.

Ultimately, 13 publishing houses--all the big ones--read it. I got a lot of praise for the writing. One editor said, "I read every word over the weekend, and I never do that." Another editor said, "This is the best written thriller I've every read, and I've read 700 of them." 

One publishing house said, "We won't go as high as $500,000. But we like this writer, and we'd like to grow this writer."

Three editors at that house had to say yes. Two said yes--the acquisitions editor and the head of the house--but one said no. The paperback rights editor said he didn't think it was a "big-launch book." The two who said yes were women, and the one who said no was a man. I thought that was significant.

All of the other 12 publishing houses said there were too many serial killer novels in the pipeline. Hollywood said the same thing. James Patterson had not only captured the market, he had spawned about two hundred imitators. Success in this business draws a lot of flies.

My number one publishing house said they'd like to bid against somebody else. If anybody else bids, they would bid, too, they said. I told my agent that's like saying to your girlfriend, Honey, I don't really want to marry you, but if any other guy asks you to marry him, I will ask you, too.

No one else bid, so number one house didn't, either. And the deal fell through. No bid, no offer, no contract, no deal. No dream.

Let that be a lesson to you. If you're going to write schlock, study the market and love the schlock. Know the rules. Hew to the form, as one agent had told me years before.

But if you're going to write real novels, for Christ's sake write real novels. Write the kind of novel you want to read. In my case, that means a literary novel with crime elements, a type of novel that is rare.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

DOPE

Years ago, I had a girlfriend, Judy, who grew weed at home. You know--grass, M.J., Mary Jane, el ropo, whacky tabbacky, a.k.a. marijuana.

I'd call Judy in the evening and ask, What are you doin'? She'd say, Oh, nothin', just smokin' homegrown and watchin' TV. She liked to watch Ch.28, public TV, educational shows, while she was high. She got high every night.

Her ex-husband had been a cocaine dealer of some wealth and repute. He paid her alimony and child support in coke, which she preferred. Another time, I'll you the story of why he quit dealing. It involves high seas and guns.

The problem with using drugs is, when you are with someone who is high, you are not with the whole person or with a real person.

It's like being with a version of the person, a cardboard cut-out that resembles the person on the outside. But their personality, their character, their soul isn't there.

It's like you're dancing with her retarded twin sister who doesn't have a normal brain. 

So it's hard to develop a relationship. The retarded twin can't sense your moods, and she doesn't really have moods of her own. Or thoughts or feelings or ideas. All she is, is high. She doesn't have the sensitivities that a normal person would have. 

Pretty soon you realize this isn't a normal relationship. It isn't a relationship at all.

People in Narcotics Anonymous say that when you are on drugs, you don't develop normally. You don't mature. If you start using drugs when you are 15 and stop when you are 30, you are still an emotional 15-year-old. I think that is true.

In spite of that, I believe that all drugs should be legalized and taxed and controlled by the government. Nothing could be worse that alcohol and tobacco. Booze kills, what, 17,000 people a year on the highways, and tobacco kills some 400,000 people each  year in the U.S. alone. 

But drugs don't make for good relationships. 
They make for none at all. 

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

http://www.drugpolicy.org/homepage.cfm

WRITING KEEPS ME SANE

I was thinking over the weekend, I don't know what my life would be like if I wasn't a writer. I would go crazy.

I don't understand how "normal" people do it. What do they do all day?

For me, I have to have this huge project going on, with new problems and new challenges coming up all the time. It is like building an airplane from scratch in your backyard. It's easy to build one, but not easy to build one that flies.

So many things have to come together at the same time for a novel to work. You have to have a main character or group of characters in motion, involved in something that is vitally important to them. They have to be trying to accomplish something and take a series of increasingly serious emotional and physical risks to get it done.

The whole thing has to engage the audience and keep them engaged. You have to make a series of decisions before you start: point of view, attitude, tone, story problem, premise, setting, time frame, the list seems endless.

And then you have to "sing like you don't need the money" as one old song goes.

If I didn't have that to do, every day, I think I'd go bananas. Life would be so boring. I'd have to find a job where I could travel all the time and have constant adventures. Otherwise, you'd have to lock me up, for my own protection.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

NOVEL TROUBLE

Novels always give you trouble. Right now, I'm about 90 pages into the current rewrite, and it doesn't seem suspenseful enough or mysterious enough.

For suspense, you need to have dramatic questions that drive the story. For a sense of mystery, you need to have important things that need explaining.

I'm feeling like I don't have enough of either one, so I'm introducing a new character who is going to go up against the scariest character I've ever invented and see what happens to him. He's just a college kid, too. Poor guy.

I think of Hamlet, who comes home to find his father dead and his uncle married to his mother. He suspects his uncle killed his father. Dum-dee-dum-dum.

Raymond Chandler said that when he had trouble, he would just bring in a new character with a gun in his hand. This may be just the opposite. A gun implies power, and this kid has little of that.

Wish me luck. And him, too.

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

NUKES IN JAPAN

These leaking and exploding nuclear power plants in Japan are scary. I wonder if we are doing the right thing building more of them here and in Europe.

Of course, Japan is on a slip-fault zone, or whatever it is called, and it is an island nation, so it is more vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis. Still, that is some spooky stuff, a warning to all of us. I think we should help, as a nation, as much as we can. Send in the Navy.

It seems that every form of energy is either dangerous or inconsequential. Can we really build enough solar and wind farms to power our cities? I think that three-fourths of our electricity in this country is supplied by coal, which loads up the greenhouse gases. And we use so much oil and gasoline. The Prius and other "green" cars just don't seem like enough. 

Maybe every little bit helps, but it all seems inadequate to me. I think we humans need a massive change in lifestyle, world-wide. Otherwise, cough-cough, we are going to need a new planet. And I don't see another one handy.

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

MY DEATH

There comes a time, as you get older, when you start to measure your life, not from the beginning, but from the end.

You stop thinking of how many years you've lived, in my case 72. You try to figure how many years you have left and what you can do with them.

The standard formula is to split the difference between your parents' life spans. My father died at 72, the age I am now, of a heart attack, and my mother at 85.

My father ate heart attack food every day of his life. You know, bacon and eggs or ham and eggs for breakfast every day. Hamburger or ham or some other kind of meat for lunch. And steak or roast for dinner, along with potatoes and a few vegetables. He didn't get the kind of aerobic exercise we get now. He played golf once a week and volleyball one night a week. He was a big, barrel-chested man, at 5-11 and 185. My mother died when she was 85, and she smoked all her life and ate crappy food and didn't exercise much either.

So I figure I might have 10 more years, or 15. Maybe 20, if I'm lucky. Or 30, if I'm unlucky. Life after 100 doesn't sound like much fun.

As you get older, time goes faster and faster. I've lived in this place 12 years, but it seems like three or four. So I know the time is going to go fast. The grandkids are growing up, and my son is middle-aged, amazingly enough. I'll probably be a great-grandpa soon enough.

The question is, am I going to look forward or look back? Am I going to live my life or my death?

I've got unfinished novels and other books to write, about 10 projects that I'd like to finish. If I only have two years, or three, how much can I get done? What difference does it make if I do them or not? Who does it matter to? Mostly to me, I guess.

None of my works have achieved much in the way of fame or money. I've published poetry and short fiction 20-some times in literary magazines, and I was a journalist for years, nominated for a Pulitzer Prize once, in 1967. Didn't win. But I did win the Random House short fiction contest in 1999. (Link:)
http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/contest/0999/sstory1.html

None of my big novels has been published. So far. There is always hope. So I don't know if I'll leave behind an impressive body of work, something I wanted to do when I was young.

Anyway, I have decided not to worry about how many years I have left. I've decided to live my life, as if I had plenty of time, and to look forward to each day and make the most of it.

It's the positive choice. Otherwise, you are just waiting to die, which means you are already dead.

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle

FAULKNER, AFFLECK, AND ME

I hope this isn't too confusing, but this post, or column as I think of them, is about three things: William Faulkner, Ben Affleck and my own work.

The past few days, I have been reading and re-reading my favorite writer, William Faulkner, Nobel prize winner, son of the South, he of the long, impenetrable sentence and driven, ecstatic, almost apocalyptic prose.

Faulkner was a hell of a writer. He infused his material--his words and sentences and paragraphs and scenes and stories and novels--with an intensity of meaning found in few other writers. Certainly James Joyce. Some would say Ernest Hemingway, though I would not. Certainly Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville and their artistic descendant, Cormac McCarthy.

Isn't this what writing is all about? Yes, it is. Language charged with meaning. As Faulkner said, he "found a way of writing where each word was as dangerous as a stick of dynamite."

How did he do it? Through a combination of narrative drive and energy both from his narrators and his characters. His words do not lie dead on the page, like they do with most if not all modern popular writers. His language is alive.

I have been reading a book called, oddly, "Knight's Gambit: Six Mystery Stories by William Faulkner." Strange that the master would turn his hand to such a popular art form. I don't know if he intended these as mysteries. Perhaps he did. Certainly they have mystery elements: crime, danger, a smart "detective" who solves the mystery.

As my old poetry teacher, Charles Wright, used to say, "You have to tell 'em something new, or tell 'em something old in a new way."

Faulkner does that. These stories are further revelations about human nature as fired in the kiln of his native Mississippi, in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on his own home area around Oxford. His revelations are always new.  

I don't understand why anyone would try to remove layers of meaning from his language, as some writers say they do. Suffice it to say, Faulkner is always rich with meaning.

Now let's turn to another art form: film. Last night, I tried to watch "The Town," directed by and starring Ben Affleck. I didn't last long. I have the weird notion that if you you're going to spend several million $ making a movie, it should have something new to say. Or something old in a new way.

This movie starts out with a stock bank robbery, that we have seen a trillion times before, a violent thug, a woman victim. Snore. Sorry, but I didn't see anything new here.

Not that these elements don't interest me. They do. Crime, selfishness, violence, brutality, unequal power relationships, the good people of the world protecting themselves against the bad.

That is the stuff of fiction. But whether something is art or schlock depends on how you use the elements. As the publisher and porn star Gloria Leonard famously said, “The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”

Well, it may be a little more complicated than that.

In those terms, what I am trying to do is similar to what I think Faulkner was trying to do: create art out of these elements.

Wish me luck.

(I'm in a hurry because the new New Yorker magazine came in the mail, and I haven't done my ten pages on my novel yet today.)

-- Roger

© Copyright 2011, Roger R. Angle