Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
16
Life Is an Etch A Sketch
Sunday, October 9, West Homestead, Pennsylvania
Y
ears ago, when I first thought of writing for a living, it was fiction that appealed to
me, novels and short stories. In my college creative writing classes, I learned the import-
ance of writing with authority—that is, with knowledge of your setting and subject and
conviction in your observations and opinions. At the same time, I thrilled to the magical
idea that a fictional character might come alive in a writer's mind and act with seeming
independence, propelling the narrative on his own—the creation animating the creator
rather than the other way around.
Absorbing the cognitive dissonance within those tenets—relishing it, in fact—is a
job requirement for a serious fiction writer; it's the only way to establish a world for the
reader to live in that is both persuasively real and entirely made up.
And I could never do it. For ten years or so, I tried, but I always managed to violate
the literary equation one way or another. Mostly I wrote stories with protagonists who
shared a number of my experiences (though I remember one that was about a guy play-
ing minor league ball in Abilene, Texas, something I hadn't done and somewhere I'd nev-
er been), but either it became evident I didn't know what I was talking about or, more
often, the characters were never fully enough imagined to steer the stories on their own,
leaving me to rely on the desperate tactics of a puppeteer—dredging up clichés or, prob-
ably worse, explaining what actually happened to me—to sustain any kind of narrative
momentum.
In 1981, I got my first job in publishing, as an assistant fiction editor at
Esquire
, and
one of my tasks was to read the slush pile—the stories that arrive unsolicited with their
unsung writers' hopes attached. There were about a hundred of them a week, thou-
sands in a year, and they provided for me an intense seminar in recognizing bad writ-