LESSON ONE: WHY DO YOU WANT TO BE A WRITER?

When I teach at writers’ conferences, I always begin by asking my students, “Why on earth would you want to be writers?” They chuckle, assuming that I’ve made a joke. But my question is deadly sober. Writing is so difficult, requiring such discipline, that I’m amazed when someone wants to give it a try. If a student is serious about it, if that person intends to make a living at it, the commitment of time and energy is considerable. It’s one of the most solitary professions. It’s one of the few in which you can work on something for a year (a novel, say), with no certainty that your efforts will be accepted or that you’ll get paid. On every page, confidence fights with self-doubt. Every sentence is an act of faith. Why would anybody want to do it?

The usual answer I get is, “For the satisfaction of being creative.” The students nod, relieved that this troubling line of thought is over. But in fact, the subject has barely been started. I rephrase my question, making it less threatening. “Why do you want to be writers?” This time, I tell my students I don’t want to hear about the joy of creativity. Squirms. Glances toward the ceiling. Toward the floor. Someone is honest enough to say, “I’d like to earn the kind of money Stephen King does.” Someone else chuckles. “Who wouldn’t?” We’re on our way.

Money. We’re so used to hearing about the fantastic advances that writers like King, John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and Patricia Cornwell receive that many would-be writers think generous advances are the norm. The truth is that, in the United States, maybe as few as two hundred writers of prose fiction make a living at it. Every Thursday, in USA Today’s entertainment section, there’s a list of the top fifty bestselling books. Non-fiction is grouped with fiction, hardbacks with paperbacks. Fifty books. A longer list of 150 books is available on that newspaper’s Internet site. The lowest book might have sold only a thousand copies nationwide. Seen from this perspective, the figure of two hundred fiction writers who make a living at it seems huge. A couple of years ago, I came across an article somewhere that said the average income for a fiction writer in the U.S. was $6,500. I believe it. The unescapable moral, I tell my students, is that anyone who wants to become a writer had better not give up his or her day job.

“Why do you want to be writers?” I repeat. The squirms are more uncomfortable. Someone admits, not in so many words, that it would be neat to be the subject of magazine articles and appear on the Today show. The writer as movie star. We go back to the usual suspects: King, Grisham, Clancy, and Cornwell (while we’re at it, let’s add Danielle Steele and Mary Higgins Clark-–there aren’t many brand names). Again, the USA Today list gives us perspective. Scan the names of the top fifty authors. I doubt that more than twenty will be familiar to you. Even fewer writers are famous than earn a living at it. More important, while I can’t imagine anyone foolish enough to turn down money, I have trouble understanding why someone would want to be famous. As Rambo’s creator, I’ve had experience in that regard, and if your idea of a good time is to be forced to get an unlisted number, swear your friends to secrecy about your address, and make sure your doors are locked because of stalkers, you’re welcome to it. One of my devoted fans talks to my dead mother and to the brother I never had. Another was never in the military, but having convinced himself that he’s Rambo, he tried to sue me for stealing his life. In a connection I have yet to understand, he also tried to sue the governor of New York and the Order of the Racoon, which I had thought was an organization that existed only in Jackie Gleason’s television show, The Honeymooners. Fame’s dangerous, not to mention shallow and fleeting. I’m reminded of what a once-important film producer said to me before his fortunes turned for the worst: “Just remember, David. Nobody lasts forever.”

So if money and notoriety aren’t acceptable answers to “Why do you want to be a writer?”, and if I won’t accept the easy answer, “Because of the satisfaction of being creative,” what’s left? My students squirm deeper into their chairs. At this point, I mention someone who seems extremely unlikely in this context: comedian/film-maker Jerry Lewis. The students chuckle once more, assuming that this time I’ve definitely made a joke. But I haven’t. Years ago, Jerry Lewis taught a seminar in comedy at the University of Southern California. A hot ticket. How did Jerry decide which of the many students who applied for the course actually got to attend? Did he audition them? Did he ask for tapes of their performances? Did he read printed versions of their routines? Not at all. He merely asked for an answer to the following question: “Why do you want to be a comedian?” And there was only one answer he would accept.

“Because I have to be. Because there’s something in me so nagging and torturing and demanding to get out that I absolutely have to make people laugh.”

Why do you want to be a writer?

Because you have to be.

My students glance up and nod, their relieved expressions saying, “Sure. Right.” They have the contented look they displayed when they decided they wanted to be writers because of the satisfaction of being creative. But we’re still in the land of easy answers. Do they truly understand what “have to be” means? A long time ago when I was a literature professor, a student came to my office and announced that she was going to be a writer. “When was the last time you wrote?” I asked. “Six months ago,” she answered. I politely suggested that she might consider another line of work.

Writers write. It’s that basic. If you just got off an assembly line in Detroit and you’re certain you have the great American novel inside you, you don’t grab a beer and sit in front of the TV. You write. If you’re a mother of three toddlers and at the end of the day you feel like you’ve been spinning in a hamster cage and yet you’re convinced you have a story to tell, you find a way late at night or early in the morning to sit down and write. That’s a version of how Mary Higgins Clark succeeded, by the way. Because she had to. Because something inside her absolutely insisted. A half hour a day. A page a day. Whatever it takes.
Tough stuff. The profession is not for the weak willed or the faint of heart. But there’s a pay off, and it has nothing to do with money (although it would be nice if hard work were rewarded), and it certainly has nothing to do with having your name in the newspaper. The satisfaction of being creative? Sure. But only partly and only as it relates to my next and final question. “You have to be a writer. Why?” This is the key to the treasure. Why do you absolutely need to be a writer? What’s the source of the uneasiness that nags at you, the compulsion to spin tales and put word after word on a blank page?

That question is one of the most important challenges any would-be writer will ever have to face in his or her creative life. How honest are you prepared to be with yourself? Earlier, I mentioned that, when I was a young man learning my craft, I met my first professional writer, an expert in science fiction whose pen name was William Tenn and whose real name is Philip Klass. Klass didn’t like the early stories I showed him because their subject matter was familiar. They weren’t any different from hundreds of other stories he’d read, he told me. The writers who go the distance, he insisted, have a distinct subject matter, a particular approach that sets them apart from everyone else. The mere mention of their names, Faulkner, for example, or Edith Wharton, conjures themes, settings, methods, tones, and attitudes that are unique to them.

How did they get to be so distinctive? By responding to who they were and the forces that made them that way. Everyone is unique, Klass told me. No two lives are identical. The writers who discover what sets them apart are the writers with the best chance of succeeding. “Look inside yourself,” Klass said. “Find out who you are. In your case, I suspect that means find out what you’re most afraid of, and that will be your subject for your life or until your fear changes.” But he didn’t mean fear of heights or closed spaces or fire. Those fears were merely versions of much deeper fears, he said. The fear he was talking about was like a ferret gnawing at my soul. The ferret didn’t want to be caught, though. It was going to take all my honesty and introspection to find it and determine what it was.

I eventually called this method “fiction writing as self-psychoanalysis.” The theory goes like this--most people become writers because they’re haunted by a secret they need to tell. They might not know they have one, or if they suspect they do, they might not be sure what it is, but something in them is bursting to get out, to be revealed. This secret might be a trauma that happened to them as an adult. A lot of young men came back from the Vietnam war wanting to write novels, for example. More often, though, it’s something that occurred in childhood and was never understood. To paraphrase Graham Greene, an unhappy childhood can be a gold mine for a fiction writer. Abuse comes to mind, but not necessarily sexual. Any psychological trauma, never adjusted to, can be the impetus for someone to want to be a story teller. A contentious divorce in which one child went with mom and the other went with dad. Or a large family in which one child never got the attention that the others did. Dickens fits this theory well. After his father went to prison for failing to pay his debts, the young Dickens was taken out of school and forced to be a laborer in a squalid factory. Prisons, oppressed children, and the suffering of the poor are constants in his work.

Hemingway fits this theory, also. His prim home town of Oak Park, Illinois, was where the saloons ended and the churches began. In a conflicted household, his mother wanted him to wear sissy clothes and play the cello while his father encouraged him to hunt, fish, and play football. His best times were summers spent at a lake up in Michigan where the outdoors provided an escape from family disagreements. As soon as Hemingway was old enough, he left his repressive environment, tried to enlist as a soldier in the First World War, was turned down because of weak eyes, and finally got accepted as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front. His almost immediate duty was to pick up body parts after a massive munitions explosion. A few assignments later, he visited an Italian sentry post where an Austrian mortar killed the Italian soldiers with him and riddled him with shrapnel. While he struggled to reach cover, an enemy machine gun shot him.

The consequence of all this was that Hemingway suffered from what is now termed post-traumatic stress disorder, with symptoms that included insomnia, nightmares, and fear of the dark. But once he had sufficient distance from the war and its effect on him, his imagination returned again and again to those traumas, using them in his first mature stories and novels. From his boyhood on, Hemingway had wanted to be a writer, but his early attempts had been conventional and flat. One of his teachers, Gertrude Stein, had told him to throw it all away and start over. As soon as Hemingway confronted his nightmares, he did start over, using a tense lean style to communicate the “grace under pressure” that his characters, like himself, struggled to achieve from their tense childhood onward. Understanding the importance of trauma to a writer, Hemingway once advised a would-be writer to hang himself but to arrange for a friend to cut him down before he died. That way, the would-be writer would have something to put on paper.

As for my own traumas, my father (whom I never knew) died in the Second World War. As I grew up, I keenly missed the affectionate attention of a male authority figure. My feeling of abandonment was reinforced when my mother, in dire financial straits, was forced to put me in an orphanage. Eventually she reclaimed me. Or was the woman who took me from that orphanage the same person who put me in it? Am I adopted? My stepfather and I didn’t get along. We lived above a bar and a hamburger joint. Drunks fought under our windows. We couldn’t afford a telephone, so when my mother needed to make a phone call, she went to a payphone in the alley below. Once, a stray gunshot shattered the phone booth’s window. At night, the arguments between my mother and stepfather were so severe that I fearfully put pillows under my bed covers and made them look as if I slept there. Then I crawled under the bed to sleep where I hoped I’d be protected if anyone came into my room to harm me. I made trouble at school. In grade six, I belonged to a street gang.

An objective observer would realize how disturbed my youth was. But to me, since it was the only reality I knew, my youth was normal. That’s the thing about youthful traumas. Most of the time we don’t know they’re extraordinary. Only when I was in my twenties did I begin to come to terms with the psychological ordeals of my youth. By then, I was writing fiction, and even when I was dramatizing a metaphoric son in conflict with a metaphoric father (First Blood), it was only belatedly that I understood my fascination with the topic. Fathers and sons. The theme shows up in many of my books. I’m still adjusting to the death of the father I never knew, and writing fiction is how I accomplish that-–or try to. Come to think of it, the reverence I had for Stirling Silliphant and Philip Klass is close to that of a son for a father.

Consider your traumas, or perhaps you don’t feel that you’ve had any. A writer friend once told me that he hadn’t had any traumas, that his childhood was about as perfect as any child could want, until his father died. He added that comment about his father’s death as an aside, something that he gave the impression that he’d gotten over. But his fiction reveals that he’s still adjusting to his father’s death, for in numerous books, he dramatizes an idealized version of his childhood, showing how much he longs for the perfection that ended when his father died. In a similar fashion, you might be unaware of how certain events in your life affected you so strongly that they compel you to want to be a writer. A better sense of the incidents that motivate you could take you farther on your way to reaching the Holy Grail of writers: a subject matter that’s uniquely your own.

How do you discover what those traumas and that subject matter are? Here’s an exercise that I’ve found to be helpful. People often ask me where my story ideas come from. Repeating a joke by Stephen King, I answer that there’s a company in Cleveland or some such place. It’s called the Writers Idea Shop, and the first of every month, it sends me a box of ideas. This usually gets a laugh, after which I say that actually ideas swarm around me all the time–-from newspapers, magazines, and television, from casual comments that my wife makes, from things my cat does, whatever. This is partially true. But it’s a simple answer to a complex question, and only if I feel that the person I’m talking to has the time and is receptive do I say the following.