On Writing
The four failed novels that might turn into a narrative history
I used to be confident, full of blood.
Full of blood and hubris.
I thought I could do anything. First, it was film school. I was going to go to one in Tennessee, but then I realized movies are group projects. I’d done a few of those, like the time I got partnered with two athletes in history 202 on a project about the Battle of Thermopylae (the zach snyder one), and the three of us sat in the student union while I pulled maps and put it all nicely into a PowerPoint, and the two of them were on Snapchat.
One of the guys was a soccer player from Chile. He spoke about seven words of English, just enough to order a coffee or turn in an assignment. He usually was partnered with a buddy to translate. His name was Hugo, and his neck was the size of my thigh. When I said ‘Thermopylae,’ you could see the defeat in his eyes. For some reason, our benevolent history professor didn’t pair Hugo with his buddy. He got a skinny white guy and a basketball player named Trey. Neither of us spoke Spanish.
When it came time to do it, Trey folded his hands neatly in front of himself, looked to the right wall, then the left wall, down at his feet, cleared his throat real slowly, and said: “uhhmmmmmm.”
And then I delivered the project, got animated about “THE GOAT PATH!”, and we got a C.
“Not because it was bad,” said the professor, “but because one guy did all your work.”
So film school was out. I wasn’t about to go write a script for some guy, or a collection of guys (gals too) who would look at it and say, “nah.”
If not film school, maybe novels.
I wrote four. They fill drawers now.
The first one was Game of Thrones-lite. George Martin was my god, and I was his prophet. Which is code for, I’d only read about 17 books.1
The second was about this guy who basically was a walking polygraph with the personality of Robert Pattinson’s Batman. If John Grisham were into fantasy books and were a worse writer, he’d have plunked out that book.
Then there was the heist novel that had promise but floundered after 25k words. It had the right voice, but I didn’t plan it enough, and ended up tinkering with it for a year and a half before abandoning ship.
There’s the sequel to the first novel (because, remember, I was a serious fantasist at 22), which I think featured a guy going through a wormhole on the back of a demon and becoming a king… or something. I can’t remember. It’s crap.
fast-forward to 28. I’ve got a kid now, a dog, and a mortgage. I started reading history, and a lot of other things, too:
The western. It’s got promise. A guy goes out west after the Civil War, ropes cattle, deals with Comanche, and some stranded soldiers. I’m about 27k words into it, and I’m still wrangling it. But the voice is good. For the first time, it’s got some legs. I read a 700-page study of Comanche ethnography from 1848, which I’ll always have on hand if the novel doesn’t pan out.
And then there’s the history book. A history of 1861, essentially. When the war wasn’t a war yet, just a giant mishap and a question mark, when nobody knew what it would become. When Lincoln referred to the Union in those early months as a bunch of “rats in a trap.”
I’ve dumped 11k words into the chapter outlines, which means I’ll have a seriously long proposal when it’s done that I’ll need to trim down to just moderately long before an agent decides yes, I will champion your history book and make us some money.
Assuming the thing is good enough to make us both some money.
The point of all this is that I started wide-eyed and stupid. If film school wasn’t in the cards, heck, I’d get an MFA and write books. But writing books is a little harder than snapping your fingers, clopping your heels, and clacking the keyboard a few times.
I learned how little I know, how infinitesimal I am in the grand scheme of things, how little energy I’ve got pumping through me, how I’ll probably sit down to dedicate the thing when it’s done, and the first three names will be my wife, coffee, and Steve Jobs, who insisted that the iphone should have an alarm clock in 2006.
I’m not confident the way a 21-year-old is about life, the future, and taxes. Taxes take all your money, and life files off your edges or makes new ones, and I’m less sure I can write after trying to do it for a decade, but I’m still full of blood.
And I suppose there’s always self-publishing.
I do still think the books are fantastic. But every wannabe fantasy author between the ages of 25 and 50 wrote at least one GOT knockoff.
The craft teaches the craft. I have faith in you.