John Darnton got the idea for the Writers on Writing series shortly after I decided to become –of all things– a writer. Actually, to be a stickler about it, I didn’t really decide to become a writer. As with many of life’s intriguing surprises, the decisions sort of crept up on me and made itself.
I had been thirty years in the newspaper business (where I still am). Much to that time had been spent abroad, covering Africa, Europe (East and West) and the Middle East. During that time I tried to craft my stories in what I thought of as writerly way, with plenty of what the foreign desk would call “color”.
But despite the fact that I sent hundreds of thousands of words halfway around the world by every conceivable means, and despite the fact that those words were presented in configurations called stories, I didn’t conceive of myself as a writer. Like most foreign correspondents,
I prided myself on getting the facts in a difficult situation, not on how those facts were arranged. Nor did I object when we called ourselves “hacks”, the self-denigrating term of preference, though in our heart of hearts when we said it, we didn’t believe it.
(If you ever want to reach a report with a compliment, don’t tell him that he dug out all the facts or presented then fairly; tell him he writes brilliantly and then you’ll see his chest swell).
Once I was invited to a writers’ workshop in Vermont and I experienced deep ambivalence: I was pleased at being on a panel with writers, but I couldn’t help feeling like a impostor.
I began a novel, Neanderthal, during a stint as an editor in the New York office when I had some time on my hands.
At first it was a diversion. I had read an article with some new information about those fascinating, extinct relatives of ours and I thought it would be fun to imagine a little band of them still existing in today’s world and to bring them into conflict with our own devious, predatory tribe.
I lathered the story with a lot of science, as accurate as I could make it, and so what I was working on, while technically a novel, was really commercial fiction. That’s the term for a book that sells, and it’s easier to do because you don’t have to worry about being Faulkner every time you face a blank screen.
Soon I discovered a little gimmick. One day I complained to a friend and author, a fellow “hack” from the Nairobi press corps, that the work was going slowly, that I had been writing only a thousand words a day. He sat up like a bolt, downed his scotch and peered at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“One thousand words a day! That’s terrific! Don’t you realize? That’s thirty thousand words a month. Three, four months and you’ve got a book.” I did the math; he was right.
I set my computer so that I could knock off the moment I hit a thousand words. The device worked.
A momentous task had been cut down to bite sizes. No longer was laboring to climb a mountain while staring at the snow-covered peak far above; instead I was climbing a single slope day after day until one day I would arrive at the summit. And one day I did. I began to feel like Molière’s
Bourgeois Gentilhomme learning that he has been speaking prose all along. The thought struck me that maybe I am a writer after all.
