How you ask?
It’s simple! And ANYONE can do it! Even you!
Here’s the simple and effective, sure-fire method:
First…get a million dollars somewhere.
Then--when the IRS audits your taxes--just say, “Hey—I forgot!”
You’re covered!
Okay, I stole that bit from Steve Martin. But it does raise a salient point about writing, I think. Mainly: why the hell are we doing this?
As you can see from the egregiously shameless cover of my latest tome, I have completed another novel. Within the week (Nov. 2012) I’ll have completed one more, written with wife April Campbell Jones, for a total of twelve (count ‘em, 12) novels, including one short story collection, since we began writing ebooks for Amazon two years ago. That’s a lot of verbiage.
Before that I had approximately the same number of novels published by legacy publishers, some back in the 90’s when legacy still paid big advances. In between I wrote scripts for TV and Hollywood, and wrote (and drew) for the comic book companies, a lot of them. So far I have not come close to earning with Amazon ebooks what I did as a legacy, Hollywood or comic book writer. Yet I’ve eschewed all of those forms lately in favor of sticking with Amazon. Why? Because time is precious and I’m not, strangely, getting any younger.
And because I am insane.
Well, that goes without saying. But here’s the thing: I published my first novel back in (giving away my age here) the early 70’s and I’ve never really quit writing fiction since then. If you want to be really accurate about so boring a subject, I started at about age six or so and never let up. There have been gaps--especially when I drew or painted, which takes up a lot of time—or when I was writing TV or movie scripts Out There, which I don’t count for some reason (let’s not get into it now)—but sooner or later I always found time (read: MADE time) to write fiction. There were many ups and many more downs, but the compulsion, in the end, always won out.
I could say—having said all that—there are many perks to writing ebooks. No editor (unless Amazon finally invites me to join Thomas & Mercer), total creative freedom (not always a good thing), the ability to write anything I bloody well feel like writing (see last parenthetical), retaining the rights to my own work (something legacy publishers only MAKE you think you’re doing), no editor (did I already mention that?), no marketing platoon telling me why my book is not publishable, no two year wait before the book appears in print, no editor (almost sure I already mentioned that), the chance to have a say in my own covers, the ability to set my own price, no editor…well, you get the idea.
But also—so far—not a lot of money.
In short, I do not believe Stephen King goes to bed at night thinking: “That damn Jones guy, he’s crawling right up my back!”
He doesn’t do this because, for one thing, he has enough cash in his back pocket to have me killed many times over, but mostly he doesn’t do this because, assuming he’s even heard of me, I am not a discernible threat. Also, probably, because he’s a nice guy. I met King once out there in H’wood on the Warner’s lot, the set of The Green Mile. It was his birthday and the crew had arranged a cake for him, a piece of which King and I were sharing as we chatted between takes. I turned to him and said, “Mr. King, I’d really like your autograph,” and he said, “Sure,” and—being the wiseass I am—I pulled out my checkbook and handed it to him: “Just put in any figure that comes to mind,” I said glibly. And he got it, and we laughed about it a while and then went back to our cake. After a moment, he turned to me again with an earnest look. “Are you really short on cash?” he asked sincerely (I was). I told him no, of course. But the whole thing gave me pause. My point being that Steve King may be a rich and famous sumbitch but he’s not an asshole. Looking back, in fact, I think he may have been the most down-to-earth person on the set.
But I digress. What else is new?
The real point here is that rich or no, big shot or not, King and I may actually have one thing in common; that even without the fame and fortune, he would still be writing every day. And he’d be doing it for the same reason you and I do. Namely: we cannot do otherwise.
It’s what we love. It’s what makes us whole. It’s what gets us through the day…hell, sometimes it’s what gets us through the next five minutes, and that’s no lie. It can even get us through the worst kind of unimaginable grief life throws at us. It can make us believe, temporarily, that we’re going to live forever, even (impossibly) cheat death…which we do, I guess, in a way, if our stuff ever eventually gets before the public. The only downside to writing, it seems, may be the sneaky way it has of making time fly, even on our worst days. You know the feeling; you sit down at 9:00am and you’re really barreling along at the keys, and suddenly you look up and it’s 4:30pm! Where the hell did the day go? It’s almost time for Adult Swim and Cartoon Network!
Which, in turn, makes you wonder why you’re paying that expensive cable bill every month, you hardly ever watch the tube anyway. Which then makes you think: if writing speeds up time so much--makes the days go so fast—doesn’t that mean you’re really approaching death all that much quicker? Well, maybe. But as every heroin addict and guilt-ridden teenage masturbator knows… it just feels too good to quit. (Or for those of us who are blocked: it feels worse if you don’t start!) And anyway, if you write the kind of stuff I do, you’re likely to give death its due ten time over. Suspense writers are always thinking about death. The difference is they’re thinking about it--not worrying about it. Unless it involves the plot.
The simple truth is, I write every day because I’m afraid. Of the alternative.
It’s true. I’m afraid of death, yes, but more than that (hey, it’s inevitable, right, what’s to fear?) more than that I’m afraid of those hours, maybe days to come just before my demise. Afraid that I’ll lie there in bed, or be walking along just before the heart attack or aneurism, and start thinking about my life…and I’m just sure as hell bound to think what we’ll all think at such a time: what in God’s name did I accomplish here? I sure wasn’t any brain surgeon. I never really got the hang of rocket science. Fell a few votes short of making president. So what did I accomplish during my brief stay on planet Earth, what did I leave behind that made any difference?
Yeah, I know. My children. My wife. The friends whose lives I might have touched.
But doesn’t everybody sort of do that anyway, if even by default?
What I hope I think I left behind is a whole lot of scribbling. And the majority of it most likely won’t be that good, let alone stand the test of time.
But it does show one thing. I may have been a crappy father, maybe a crappier husband, maybe not the number one altruistic Boy Scout golden character my parents or God or the Cosmos or whomever may have wished. But when it came to writing—scribbles or not--I by God tried. Put my heart and soul into it every time and suffered the financial downs, rejections and otherwise heart-breaking baggage that went with it; because it felt worthwhile. The kind of worthwhile, maybe, that’s beyond my corporeal, earthbound self--beyond sex, and money and fame and possibly even breathing.
There was a reason they put that strange last line in the Constitution: “the pursuit of happiness.” When you think about it, that line really makes no damn sense at all, certainly not enough of one to found a country on. Was that Jefferson’s idea? Why in the world did he even put it in there? What was he thinking? I don’t know. But I do know Jefferson was a well-read man.
And it came to him when he was writing…
