Thirty years after publishing his first novel, an UMSL professor decides a life in books is nothing to write home about
By David Linzee
My first impression of what a novelist’s life was like, long before I thought of becoming one, came from Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. My family subscribed when I was a boy, and I was fascinated by the author bios. They always gave the sense that this guy (back then, almost always a guy) had it made. He lived in Connecticut, usually, with his family and Irish setter, and every morning he went to his study, lit his pipe and wrote a chapter. Every year or so he published another novel. When he retired, he’d have a shelf of his books above
his desk.
Acceptance of your first novel, I assumed, was the only admission ticket you needed to this wonderful world. I’m not the only aspiring author who thought so: Robert Mayer said that he once believed “getting a book published is the launching pad to the-rest-of-your-life success.”
I’ve never met Mayer, but we have two things in common. We both published our first novels in spring 1977. Thirty years later, neither of us has come close to filling a shelf with books.
Back then, it was the quaint custom of Library Journal to invite the season’s first novelists to make a statement about their work and their hopes for their budding careers. I kept the issue in which Mayer, myself and 35 others appeared, though as the years passed, my statement became too embarrassing to read. My pitch for my first novel was so confident; I was so sure I’d come up with just what people were dying to read. I hadn’t. Sales for the hardcover edition could be counted in
the thousands.
It could have been worse. At least I wasn’t the guy who stated, “I wrote this novel because ... I want to be rich and famous and get a date with Candice Bergen.” And whose first novel was his last.
Last summer I dug up that old Library Journal. I now head the University of Missouri–St. Louis Writing Lab, and many of the tutors who work with me are students in the MFA program and apprentice fiction writers. I thought it would be useful for them to find out about the careers of the previous generation. Apart from the bestselling celebrities, it’s hard to find information about novelists, even the thriving ones.
I was confident, then, that we’d find plenty of thriving ones in the class of 1977.
I didn’t want to give advice to the younger generation based solely on my own career, which was, I believed, a singular disaster. It was not just that my own efforts resulted in catastrophe, but they also seemed to be the reason catastrophe befell others. Every editor who acquired a book of mine got fired. Every firm that published me went broke. (The exception was Dutton, which met a more sinister fate. One day in 1989, its corporate owners fired all the employees and kept only the name.) My agent, an able and energetic person, left the business.
As the students began their research, I expected them to find that many of my ’77 classmates had done better. One, I already knew, had become rich and famous and hung out with Spielberg and Lucas. You’ve probably heard of him: Terry “Shannara” Brooks. He has written one bestseller after another for the last three decades.
I wasn’t expecting to find anyone else that successful, but I thought we would find several who were doing well. There was a guy named George C. Chesbro, whom I had known slightly back in the late ’80s in New York. He was publishing a book a year. I assumed that, like those Reader’s Digest authors with their pipes and Irish setters, he had it made.
But it turned out that when Chesbro’s agent put his 20th novel on the market, nobody was interested. He got so disgusted with the publishing business that he decided he could do a better job himself. He started his own company.
When we completed our research, we found that nobody besides Brooks and Chesbro had published anywhere near 20 novels. In fact, I turned out not to be the bottom-feeder I’d thought I was. With five novels published, I’d done better
than average.
It was gratifying, but only for a moment. This wasn’t supposed to be the Schadenfreude Project. What had I gotten my students into? I felt like the tough sergeant in an old war movie who tells a company of recruits newly arrived at the front line that their first job is to bury the dead.
It was too late to cancel the project. We’re at a university, whose mission is to collect and disseminate knowledge. It would be a bit inconsistent if I said, “Want to be a writer? You’re better off not knowing what happened to the previous generation.” So I kept anxiously asking my researchers, “Is this depressing for you?” The response was usually a judicious, “It’s not ...
too depressing.”
With the project finished and the site online (www.umsl.edu/~umslenglish/novelist/david'snovelistscareers2.html), I’ve decided it was a dirty job, but someone had to do it. The phrase “getting published” has a golden aura completely unconnected with reality, and aspiring novelists need to know that. Otherwise they’ll continue to imagine themselves stepping into the arena to the cheers of thousands—like a matador. In reality, the first novelist is more like the bull. Half the writers in the class of ’77 were dropped by their publishers after their first book.
Fortunately, we writers are unlike the bull in that after being dragged from the arena, we can get up and write on. We just have to do without the cheering crowds.
I have found it’s easier to keep writing fiction than to quit. And when I finish something, I send it out. The only genre I’ve given up on is the screenplay. The guys in the mailrooms of Hollywood agents seem to have a lucrative side business going selling the names of aspiring writers to scam artists. Send scripts to the coast and you’ll get back lots of offers to make you rich and famous and get you a date with Angelina Jolie. But sending short stories to magazines is a straightforward business. Since I started keeping track, my record stands at 49 rejections, two acceptances. Not bad! I have four stories out now. And I have a novel in my bottom drawer, but to judge from the reactions so far, it needs
more work.
Among my ’77 classmates, I found others just as persistent, and a few who have been well rewarded. Take Roderick Townley. In his fifties, he wrote a novel for teenagers, and it turned out to be his big break. Now he’s publishing books steadily and winning rave reviews. Or Mike Slosberg. He just published his second novel, 30 years after his first. Or Ron Swigart, who has been publishing fiction steadily for three decades, in any form he could sell: sci-fi, mystery, novelized computer game, cyber-poem.
I wonder if my novel would work as a cyber-poem.
