My talk this morning will be about something I love very much -- although, as lovers often do, I hate it when it disappoints me. It's about writing; and, specifically, that demanding genre known often disparagingly as the "action adventure" novel. I'd like to explore with you this arcane but accessible art, from the following angles:
The ancestry of the action adventure story
The action adventure novel itself -- what it is, and what it does
The process of writing them
The process of marketing them, and
Reaching for more than category success.
In the process, we'll touch on a number of things; the viciousness and cheapness of much contemporary literature, and why it's that way; the nature of the novel, and how it's like a recipe, a blueprint, or the programming of a computer; the uses of book jackets; what inspiration is, and why novelists come to disbelieve in it; and many other cabbages and kings. In the process I hope I can entertain you, interest you, instruct you, and move you -- all things that any person who ventures out upon the wide and stormy sea of fiction in the frail craft he's cobbled together out of his own years and dreams -- tries to carry out between the covers of the strange amalgam of fantasy, art, and merchandising that we call, simply, a novel.
WHO'S SPEAKING
It's the words that are important, as Faulkner said, and not the writer. But it's always nice to know something about a speaker, before you consider what he says.
I began writing novels when I was two. Like most of you, I knew when I first picked up a book that this was a special object, an object of awe. As I learned to read I wondered more and more about the craft of making these wonderful things. I had then little hope I'd ever be able to do it. But I resolved that someday, whatever it took, I would. To that end, I spent my childhood reading indiscriminately and omnivorously -- something I recommend to all of you.
Between then and the first time I sat at a typewriter I lived. I went to school, to college, and spent seven years at sea. At last I left the Navy and began to write full time. Since then I've published something like sixty short stories, around a hundred articles and nonfiction pieces, and twelve books, ten of them novels. About two million copies of my books are now in print, and three have been bought for movies by Universal and Columbia. Of the last two, THE GULF did 50,000 copies in hardcover and half a million in paper, and BAHAMAS BLUE, which sold out its first printing in thirty days, is now in its second printing in hardcover.
I've written science fiction, sea fiction, Navy fiction -- and adventure. My adventure series stars Tiller Galloway, a n'er-do-well diver and salvage engineer from Hatteras Island, North Carolina. Today I'm going to be talking primarily to my experience in this series, which can be classified fairly, I think, as a modestly successful action adventure series.
WHAT IS A NOVEL?
When we consider the thing or process we call "a novel," we're faced with a bewildering variety of forms. There are dozens, scores of "kinds" of novels, any of which can be good or execrable; novels of manners, novels of morals, romans policiers and romans a clef, Russian novels, French novels, Irish novels, Southern novels, comic novels, black novels, pulp novels, exquisitely literary novels -- and action adventure, which from now on, for short, we'll just call adventure novels. What can all these different animals have in common?
In English classes, and in courses that purport to teach us how to write, we hear a novel very generally defined as "a long piece of fiction." Generally this definition goes on to bracket it as from about 40,000 words on up to the half-million or so you will find in "War and Peace" or "Ulysses" or "From Here to Eternity."
But I'm not going to use this kind of artificial distinction. Instead I'll try for the kind of definition a four-year-old would give: a functional definition. For example, when Binet, the inventor of the IQ test, asked a four-year-old what an apple was, the child would generally say something like, "you eat it."
So let's try to define a novel in terms of what it does; what it does to you; what you do to it. Because unlike television, it is an interactive entertainment. I read Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny" in high school and thought it was a good story. I reread it at thirty, after seven years in destroyers, and was appalled at its richness, its immensity, and its truth. The difference was not in the book. It was in me.
"A novel," said Stendhal, probably the first naturalist in literature, "is a mirror carried along the road." But it is more than that, as he knew, and as every novelist knows. It's a vision of the world, not as a mirror sees it, but as a human being does. It's a view of our world, or of any other world, from a moral position, whether that vision be positive, or nihilistic. It not only reflects the universe; it tries to make sense of it. The artist organizes stone and paint into meaning. The writer does the same, but his materials are life itself.
If a novel were merely a mirror, it would be a guidebook or a work of history. But it is more than either, though it can partake of both. It is more than a description of the outward ways of the planet. It is a means of entering the consciousness of others, of supplying a temporary anodyne to that lack that grieves us all our life long more than any misfortune or evil: our enforced and untransgressable solitude, our separateness from others. Perhaps no one else has written it more clearly than Thomas Wolfe, in the words he used to open "Look Homeward, Angel:"
"...Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
"Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
"O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door...."
A novel, then, of ANY variety, is a means of crossing this uncrossable boundary; it is a means of bridging the separateness that cleaves us from other selves. It is a separate life that we are able to become.
Only the novel can do this for us. A short story or a poem is too short. It's over before we can submerge ourselves in its alternate universe. We can learn from them, they can make me feel, but not deeply. Most short story characters are a Picasso sketch. A novel is a triptych by Heironymous Bosch. It's another complete world, one with enough detail we can lose ourselves in, that we can live in. We can live in Stalin's Russia with Solzhenitsyn, we can live on the road with Kerouac or William Least Heat Moon, live in Schofield Barracks or in Venice or in Holcomb Kansas or in Yoknapatawpha County after the War Between the States. We are not limited in our locales, nor in our persons. We can be an aging intellectual, and our name is Artur Sammler. We can be a pie maker named Mildred Pierce or a journalist named Dominique Francon. We can be a rebellious slave, Nat Turner, or a hypocritical preacher, Elmer Gantry. We can even be a dog, and our name is Sirius or White Fang.
The point is that any novel is a sustained narrative, depending far more heavily on delineation of character than do short stories or poetry. It depends for its power on the sustained development of character as develops under the influence of a given environment and time.
In this respect, fiction is one of the few remaining cements that bind together a divisive and disintegrating world.
What novels do, then, is to lift us out of our own identity for the span of a few hours -- probably about all we can take. In the span of that few hours, the writer has his choice of what to do with the access thus given to the less-than-usually protected soul of the reader. Some of what he must do is given: before all, he must entertain, or at least interest. No matter how timely or well-researched, a novel that is not interesting and not entertaining, in the dictionary sense of "taking hold of" -- middle french, entretenir -- will not be sold, and not be read, and will gain none of its ends; and rightfully so. We do not pick up a novel to be bored. That is what calculus textbooks are for.
Entertainment alone, pure entertainment, is all right. There's nothing wrong with an entertaining but otherwise messageless novel, if such a thing could ever be written; but no matter what the critics say, I doubt it could be. Even the lightest and most action-packed Western tells us that men can determine their own destiny. Even the most escapist romance teaches us that love is the grandest adventure and the most nearly true delight that earth can give us. Even the most outrageous bugeyed monster movie teaches us that the universe is a wonderful and terrible place, where in the fullness of time we may someday confront beings almost as strange as ourselves.
Or, as Philip Roth has it: "Reading a novel is a deep and singular pleasure, a gripping and mysterious human activity that does not require any more moral or political justification than sex."
But the mature novelist, and the mature reader, seeks more from the art than entertainment. This is a matter for your individual vision. No one can tell you what your novels will be about -- not in this country. Sometimes even the author cannot tell until years later what he meant by a particular passage.
I believe, as John Gardner asserts in ON MORAL FICTION, that literature exists to promote moral values, to affirm life, and to tell a story, not to assault narrative forms or bewail modern despair.
Make no mistake about it, this is a noble and powerful art, one of the greatest though most subtle that exists. It's worth your time; if you can do it, it's worth your life. Fiction is as powerful as our vaunted modern technology, but differs from it in this: the stronger it becomes in our hands, the more surely it works for good and not for evil.
THE ADVENTURE NOVEL
That said, let's narrow our focus now to one out of the many genres or subdivisions that fiction has split into, market-driven, over the last century. For in the nineteenth century, novels were accepted simply as "literature" -- works by Jack London, H. Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson, and other writers who are still widely read today -- which today would be instantaneously pigeonholed as action adventure.
What is the action adventure novel? When did it first appear? What sets it apart from other types of fiction? Who reads it? What is it supposed to do?
Let's start off with a plot. A group of men, some professional military, some reservists, some brave, some cowards, some braggarts, some liars, but most of them reasonably efficient fighting men, are called on to resolve a hostage situation in the middle east. The protagonist is a skilled soldier and a brave man, but he's prone to anger and obsessed with his image. Over a long period they battle frustration, a strongly entrenched enemy, and their own internal problems, and finally liberate the hostage by use of a clever trick.
What's the name of the book?
The Iliad, right. Okay, again; a young prince is called in to destroy a monster who has killed many men. He destroys it, but its mother returns and kills one of his retainers. The hero plunges into a pond and destroys the monster's mother as well, rules as king for fifty years, then is destroyed through the cowardice of others. The name of the book?
Beowulf, of course. Okay, this one:
A mighty king is oppressing the land. One man, raised by animals, dares to challenge him. First the king sends a beautiful secret agent to seduce him. This fails, and the king challenges him to a duel. But when the king's defeated, the man spares him, and they become friends.
After fighting and defeating a monster and a huge bull together, the man dies of a gradual disease.
The king, grief-stricken, crosses the ocean of death to learn the secret of eternal life. He finds it, but it's stolen by a snake. The king returns to his homeland. Resigned to the common fate of all men, he rules more wisely, grows old, and dies.
This is the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Babylonian tale dating back to about 2000 B.C. , decoded from clay tablets thought to belong to the library of Assurbanipal.
Have I made my point -- that the story of action and adventure is nothing new? In truth, its pedigree dates back to the dimmest reaches of time, the earliest tales of the bards. In the last century it was just as popular as ever. And its appeal is no less great today, with such practitioners as Hammond Innes, Alistair MacLean, Len Deighton, Clive Cussler, and others. Indeed, the adventure field itself is now subdividing into subgenres like technothrillers, sea books, air fiction, and so forth.
In searching through my own private library of writings on writing, I've been unable to find a preexisting definition of adventure writing, though there are definitions for such parallel or related forms as romance, science fiction, horror, and military fiction. As you can easily imagine, adventure, or action adventure, can and does overlap at many points with other genres. Let me attempt a definition, though.
The adventure novel is a quest story, where the primary complications are physical danger to the protagonist. It usually takes place in exotic settings, or at least, in out of the ways corners or underworlds of areas closer to home. The protagonist is usually, though not always, male, and usually, though not always, in the age span from twenty to forty -- that span where a man is at the peak of his physical condition, best able to respond to mortal challenge in whatever form it comes. The "action" part of the description simply seems to be an adjectival doubler, a spare word used as an intensifier to underline the fact that the primary challenge to be met in the course of the novel is physical, life-threatening, but ultimately can be defied by force and courage in the way, say, that a mortal disease cannot.
Now, what do I mean by a "quest story"? The concept itself comes from mythology. Since I know no better explicator of the relation of myth to story than Joseph Campbell, I'm going to quote, from The Hero with a Thousand Faces, his definition of the typical myth of quest and adventure.
"The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragon-battle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold . . . the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero's sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again -- if the powers have remained unfriendly to him -- his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir)."
If we match the events in my last novel, Bahamas Blue, against this primordial or universal monomyth, the parallels and differences become clear. Tiller Galloway, freshly out of prison, is trying to go straight and make a living at home in Hatteras. Instead his old employer, Juan Nunez, wants him to work for him again. Tiller's business is bombed, his boat sunk, and his friends threatened, until he decides to go to the Bahamas and see what task Nunez wants him to do.
Once in the outer islands of the Bahamas, a mirror-world of drugs and violence, Galloway meets Troy Christian, Nunez's crack-crazed executioner. Christian forces him and his friend Shad Aydlett to dive to three hundred feet to investigate the sunken wreck of a trawler said to have 55 drums of cocaine aboard.
Nunez arrives. Over a week of diving, battling inadequate equipment, Christian's suspicions, the cold and pressure of the sea, his own fear, and a mysterious toxic ooze from the wreck, Galloway succeeds in hoisting the wreck almost to the surface, when the hoist lines break and it tumbles heartbreakingly back into the deep. Investigation shows that someone sabotaged the lift lines.
In a break ashore, Tiller makes contact with native Bahamians who hate drugs and who suspect whatever is in the trawler is responsible for the destruction of their fishing grounds. He's also introduced to Bahamian politicians and businessmen, all obviously living well on bribes from the drug lords.
As Bahamas Blue draws to an end, Galloway has to dive again, discover what's really in the wreck, and bring it to the surface. Only he knows that, as soon as he does so, he and Shad are immediately excess baggage. EIther Christian will have them shot -- or Nunez will reward them richly and let them go.
I think the parallels with Campbell's outline of the typical mythic quest are pretty plain!
If we look at the adventure tale in this light, we see that each story will start with a quest. The quest may be to gain something desirable, such as the Ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark; or to elude some darker fate, as in Bahamas Blue. Generally, I think the lure of gain shows us a stronger character in the hero than does a simple desire to avoid something disadvantageous. The traditional Grails for which heros of adventure strive don't vary much: treasure of some sort, a mission, a quest, an exploration, or, at its starkest, simple survival.
For example, all the Ian Fleming stories begin with a quest in the form of a mission, as do most military adventure novels. This is an assigned quest, but since the hero has presumably bound himself to obey prior to the opening of the story proper, it becomes a traditional quest again.
Once the quest has begun, whether the hero has chosen it, been assigned it, or been forced into it, he must make his way to a different, otherworldly realm. In Bahamas Blue that realm was the remote outer Abacos, where drug lords buy the law and violence is common. In Hatteras Blue it's the sea itself, fifty miles off Hatteras and two hundred feet down. In Louisiana Blue it'll be the world of the oilfields and platforms off New Orleans, where divers' lives are traded every day for oil money. Your novel will have a different setting, but the essence of it, that ordinary laws and rules no longer apply there, that the hero's on his own -- that will still be true.
Now let's talk about complications, what Campbell calls obstacles. These can be human: the Enemy; savages; criminals; corrupt police. They can be elemental: the sea, the jungle, the ice, the desert. They can be institutional: the army, the CIA, the KGB, the political system. Finally, they can be obstacles the hero discovers within himself: pride, physical weakness, desire for luxury or comfort, greed, or fear.
I personally believe that the more types of obstacles are incorporated in a single story, the richer and more complex the result becomes, if the writer's capable of handling them all credibly. Remember Tiller's obstacles: human -- Nunez and Christian; elemental -- the sea, toxic waste; institutional -- the crooked Bahamian police and customs; and finally, personal, his own fear and greed. This last is very important and too often overlooked by beginning writers of adventure. The hero himself should be imperfect or flawed in some way. Hemingway's heroes, for example, were either impotent or unable to relate to others in important emotional ways, and this lends a tense and disturbing undercurrent to all the overt action, which takes on, in the light of this knowledge, an entirely different meaning.
One point we need to address about the adventure novel is the idea that its readership is primarily male. I think no one will argue with me here. There will be arguments, however, as to why this is. Certainly one can make a case that the adventure novel, especially in its cruder forms -- "The Penetrator" #152, "The Destroyer" #43, et cetera -- specifically and consciously targets certain male fantasies in much the same way that romance fiction is seen as addressing certain widely shared female fantasies. Or, as one woman of my acquaintance puts it, "men like to read about muscular heroes killing off bad guys, in front of admiring, brainless bimbos."
Without addressing the unsolvable question of how deeply our fantasies are rooted in biology, and which are traceable to culture, I think she has something there -- though I might not put it in exactly the same words. Most men, for whatever reason, feel that part of their role is to physically defend themselves, their families, and their society. In adolescence, they typically daydream about impressing the opposite sex by feats of bravery and daring. The adventure novel responds to these desires, sometimes blatantly, sometimes subtly. But in so doing, it also imposes rules.
Violence is not justified simply for personal gain. It's justified in defense of others, in defense of oneself, in defense, usually, of a wider moral order. The goal of the action, whether it be material or intellectual, such as the excitement of discovery, must also meet standards of acceptability. A hero may be justified in rigging a roulette wheel in order to bankrupt a gangster who has threatened his family. He would not be justified in rigging the game simply in order to win money. This is a broad enough rule that I think you will find it applies in almost every adventure novel and story written. The Achaeans attacked Troy not for loot -- at least, according to Homer -- but because Helen had been kidnapped, and had to be restored to her family.
Does adventure have to address a primarily male readership? I suspect so, but I'm not sure the evidence is really all in yet. Already, in science fiction, strong female heroes, once known as heroines, are common. In an increasingly androgynous culture, this may happen in adventure writing too. For those of you who are women, or who like to feature strong female leads in your fiction, this may be a trend you can start.
And finally, let's scroll back again to that issue of quality. The adventure novel, like any genre of literature, has its detractors. Let's face it, there are a lot of writers out there making money who artistically are several sandwiches short of a picnic. Like lawyers and politicians, genre writers tend to be judged by the worst examples of their profession. But I take my stand with Raymond Chandler, who said: "When a book, any sort of book, reaches a certain intensity of artistic performance it becomes literature." It's up to us, the writer, to pass up the easy thrill, the cheap sensation, and search deep into ourselves and our art to make whatever kind of writing we do relevant, thoughtful, and just plain good.
THE NOVELISTIC PROCESS
Let us now, having defined the adventure novel more or less to our satisfaction, turn to the writing of it. In my own experience, the novelistic process can be divided roughly into five stages:
Cognition
Development
Rewriting
Evaluation
Rewriting.
Cognition is the recognition, at its simplest and most hotly glowing heart, that you've found a story worth telling, and people worth telling it about. This is not a matter of formula. You can often write a short story quite successfully by a formula, but it won't work very well for a novel, because of that inevitable involvement with character.
People have asked me where I get ideas for novels. The answer is simple: I don't know. Novelists eventually grow to mistrust inspiration, because it's not dependable, and you need something reliable to get you through weeks and months and sometimes years of work. But you have to depend on inspiration for that initial germ. In most cases, it occurs when you are doing something entirely separate from writing. I found my apprenticeship as a freelance writer valuable here, because I learned always to be alert for a story. A reporter does this too. I can't reduce it to words, quite, but it's a matter of seeing something interesting, a way of seeing that that something means more than it seems to. Then, in order to explain why it affects you that way, you have to write a book.
For example, I found the initial idea for Hatteras Blue in a combination of a wreck dive I made off Cape Hatteras, and a series of oral history interviews I did with old folks in that part of the country. Then I ran into a fellow who cried out to be the hero of a book. Put these together, simmer for about seven years, and I had the first in the Tiller Galloway series.
Bahamas Blue was a more consciously crafted plot. In that case, though, it took form after a rather disastrous sailing trip to the Little Bahamas Bank that Frank Green and I took a couple of years ago.
I guess the lesson we can draw from both those is that to be inspired by ideas for adventure novels, it helps to have a few modestly exciting adventures yourself. You don't need to be Hemingway, but you can't be the Armchair Traveller either. It may even help, I think, not to be terribly well skilled at mountain climbing, sailing, flying, surfing, whatever the milieu or activity of the book. That way you communicate more easily with the usually less skilled reader, and you also retain the freshness and excitement of experiences that are new to you.
I think it's also safe to assert that whatever fascinates you, and intrigues you, will also fascinate others. In my opinion, it's a mistake to try to fabricate plots based on what you see other writers doing. Do you see a lot of drug novels being written? If you don't really care about drugs, or know a lot about that milieu, my advice is, don't try to imitate others. Explore your own background and interests for what fascinates you. Do you like antiques? Structure your plot around the seamy side of the antique business. Do you like to run? Write Marathon Man. Do you know a lot about banking, international finance, and bond issues? You may be a competitor for Robert Ludlum. I believe you can build an adventure novel around anything that's intrinsically valuable, dangerous, or exciting. And the more out of the ordinary it is, the better chance you have of creating something uniquely your own.
All right, now we have an idea for an adventure story. How do we judge its quality? How do we decide if it can sustain a booklength work?
A good way to learn to judge your ideas is to read book jackets. They set forth the idea of the story in its simplest, most gripping form, something like the way it originally must have occurred to the author. Think of your idea as a book jacket. Walk around with it and try to sell it to people. If they like it -- if they say, "I want to hear more, tell me the story" -- you may have something worth pursuing. Only the writing of it will tell.
Development is the sweaty part of writing. This is what separates the writer from the onlooker, the person who is always going to write a novel "some day" from the one who in fact does. It's wearying. It's dull. It's not nearly as much fun as the research. It is hard. It takes a long time.
There are a few ways I have found to make it easier.
One of the best is an outline. After you mull that exciting initial idea around in your head for a while, you will find an outline forming. A few scenes, perhaps. Write these down, on one sheet of paper. This is your initial outline. Then you write a little. Maybe not the opening, but one of the scenes that you can see well. Make up provisional names for the characters. Try out the background or locale of the book. Think about problems that the hero will have. See how it goes.
This is the stage where you'll decide on your point of view -- usually third, but occasionally first person. If you aren't sure what a point of view is, if you don't know the difference between a roving omniscient narrator and a third person limited point of view, I advise you to study up on it. It's a technical matter, sure, but it's something you need to tie down before you set your pen to paper, or sooner or later it will get loose and bite you.
When you feel comfortable with your trial run, go back and revise and extend the outline. Now you have three or four pages. You may have a list of scenes you want to do. You have a couple of thumbnail sketches of the major characters.
This is all most people need to start writing. However, you may not be "most people." Sinclair Lewis loved long, detailed outlines. His outlines were longer than his books -- I'm serious. But I find that, for me, getting too detailed in the outline stifles the spontaneity of prose, and not incidentally takes the fun out of the writing itself. And believe me, you want to have fun at this stage. You'll be living with the book too long for it all to be a grind. You should enjoy sitting down every day with your characters. You should look forward to it.
The value of the outline is most evident at that moment, when you sit down for the day's work. The outline replaces inspiration. You don't need to be inspired in order to go to work. You have the outline, you know what's going to happen next. All you have to do is imagine it, and get as much of what you see down as you can. Worry about phrasing and smoothness and spelling and consistency later. Your job now is to let things happen. If they do -- and they generally will -- you are on your way. If they don't, after twenty or fifty or a hundred tries, you should be grateful. You have been let off cheap. You can now be a real estate broker, or a shrimp fisherman, with a clear conscience. But if the novel gradually takes fire, if it burns in your brain at night in bed, if you fall asleep during the day at work because you spent all night at the typewriter, you are hooked and you'll know it.
Occasionally a novice writer will tell me he or she has started a novel, then frozen at some point in it from sheer fear. I can understand that. Let's face it, this is a rough task, one of the few left that machines can't do for us, and it will demand everything you have in your mind and heart if you do it the way it should be done. You are putting yourself on the line when you write, in a way most people only do with those who are very close to them, a few times in their lives. It's natural to be scared the first time you do it. I was.
The way I got around it was to make a solemn promise to myself, when I was writing my first novel, that no one else would ever see it. No one else would ever have the chance to judge it. From that point on the fear disappeared and I had a great time. That first book was called "The Hill," and no one but myself has ever read it, or ever will. It was purely for drill, for practice, to see if I could write sixty thousand coherent words. If you feel that fear, you might consider doing the same thing.
Rewriting, to judge from the published letters of the masters, can be hell or it can be easy as pie. Whichever it turns out to be for you, I hope you like it, because you're going to be doing a lot of it.
The rewrite is the cold morning after of creation. Dizzy, headachey, with growing nausea and fear, you look on what you wrought so painfully and find it worthless. It looks like a term paper written by a junior high school student whose second language is English. It has nothing of the glittering power of the idea you began with. It is wretched.
The awful thing is, this feeling is usually true. I never let anyone see a first draft. It is juvenile, it is puerile, it is repetitive, it is redundant, it is maudlin, and it is full of cliches worn as thin as the seat of a novelist's pants. The only good thing about it is that it's DONE.
Don't ever judge yourself by a first draft. The writer is like a sculptor: he creates by what he leaves out. The difference is, that the writer has to create the stone first, and then begin to chisel at it. My advice is to go away to Paris or Rio for at least a month. If you can't do that, put the thing in your freezer and forget about it for the same length of time. Then come back to it cold and clear and separate. It's outside you now. It's a manuscript you found on the subway. Now make it into something worthy of your name on the cover.
When you rewrite, study every word, every comma, and every sentence. Each word must belong, and each punctuation mark, and they all have to make sentences. The sentences have to make paragraphs. The paragraphs make scenes and chapters. The characters have to be consistent, or if not, their inconsistencies have to be either explained or skillfully hidden behind the scenery. If you do all that right, once in a while -- even in an adventure novel -- the reader will stay with you, and you can even get away with saying something profound occasionally.
Don't ever skimp or take shortcuts rewriting. If there's one thought I leave with you today, it should be this: rewriting is where your book will sit up and breathe or else be DOA at the publisher's office. Ideas are cheap. Quality execution of them is difficult. Spend twice as much time on the first rewrite as you did on the first draft.
Evaluation. This stage of writing marks the first time you expose your infant to the stares and whispers of the multitude. When you have a rewritten draft, it is useful, at last, to let someone else look at it. Do not show it to your mother or your husband or your friend. Show it to someone who reads a lot, or to another, more experienced writer.
One reason for an outside evaluation is technical vetting. This is easy to understand, because no writer can know everything about every subject. If you have a scene set in Japan, hire a Japanese to read it. If you have a young mother as a character, ask a young mother to read the book, or at least that section of it. It can save you some horrible mistakes, and often these readers can make suggestions that actually help you in trying to say what you mean. Don't be afraid of criticism. Seek it out, and learn to take it without flinching or getting hostile.
The more difficult form of evaluation to take is the comment of a good reader. If you could regard your novel as a program for a very complex computer, this is the equivalent of seeing whether the program runs. No Broadway play goes direct from writing to a live performance. It's staged before a discerning audience, and that audience is carefully observed. In the same way, you need to find out whether the parts you thought funny are in fact droll, and whether the reader will see scenes and understand character in the same way you thought you wrote it. An excellent way of doing this is to read your work before a critical group of fellow writers, in either a formal or informal workshop. You'll be surprised at how many interpretations there will be of passages you thought perfectly plain, and how often a reader can misinterpret your words. In many ways, you're too close to your work, and always will be, to see it clearly. You need an outsider's eye to help you in the final stages of refinement.
This is not to say that you automatically change things because one or two people dislike them or don't understand them. Use your judgement here. You are the author. Seek criticism; always offer thanks for it, never argue, never become defensive; but take it with a grain of salt.
Rewriting. Didn't we cover this stage already? Well, yes and no, because you're going to be rewriting your novel all the way to the last galleys. The more rewriting you can do, the better the book will be. When do you stop? When you can't stand to look at the bloody thing one more time. Or when it hits the street. And even then, as John Fowles showed us with "The Magus," the rewriting may not be altogether finished.
This is the process of writing, plain and simple. There's more to it than this, but precious little that you can learn by listening. A Chinese philosopher once said, "I hear, and I forget; I see, and I remember; I do, and I understand." Ninety percent of a writer's skill is learned at the keyboard.
THE MARKETING OF ADVENTURE NOVELS
Now let's talk about marketing.
I may speak from weak and specious grounds when I discuss the grand questions of literature -- what novels are for, what they mean. I am sure any MA in English Lit could do better, for he or she has the advantage of me in depth of exposure to those who have commented and thought about these matters. I was almost entirely self-educated in writing, and am still discovering my mistakes.
In discussing the sale of the finished product, though, I think I am on firmer ground. I have gone through all the pains and joys of rejection and acceptance, negotiated contracts, fought with ignorant editors and learned from good ones, carried the finished book to booksellers and reviewers. I have done this for fifteen years now with some modest success, and you might as well benefit.
I'm sure that those of you who have written novels, and tried to sell them, already know that the prime difficulty facing today's novelist, today's writer of any form of literature, is the limited market; the difficulty of publication today.
Why is this so? Our presses publish more new works per year -- I have seen the figure 20,000 more than once -- than at any time in our history. We are inundated with print. I admit that a lot of these books, including a couple of my own early works, aren't worth the price of the cheap art on the cover. But then, hasn't it always been that way? The domination of cheap and vicious writing is a recurrent complaint since Gutenberg liberated us from the cramped cold fingers of the monkish scribes. I think it may be a little better today than it was fifty years ago, though. The worst sludge has been drained from literature, and channeled into television.
The writer who has begun to publish learns very quickly that low-quality, sensational books are easier to sell than quality literature. This is not the fault of New York. In my experience these people are more like us, here today in this room, than we might like to imagine. They would be more than happy to give good literature its due. But they must respond to the bottom line, and there is a limited demand for quality work. There is a rule of economics, called Gresham's Law, that is stated "Bad coin drives out good." That is, when inferior coinage arrives on the market, the good money disappears. We saw this happen in our own lifetimes when sandwich coinage replaced silver. How quickly the silver coins disappeared!
What can we, as writers, do about it? Simply this: to read, and to produce, only the best of which we're capable. Individually, we can keep the light of quality alive, though it will never, I fear, set the planet afire.
Let us pass on, then, shedding a tear for the way the world is, to the process of marketing itself.
Once upon a time the process of marketing a completed novel was well-defined. Many of the shibboleths vended by writers' magazines date from that time. That is: the novel must be typed in a certain format; submitted in loose double-spaced sheets; to one house at a time; or via an agent.
Today if you submit a novel in this format to most major hardcover houses it will be lost or will be returned immediately without having been read by anyone. There is no time to do it. I remember once visiting an editor at Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, and seeing masses of manuscript piled up to the ceiling around all four walls of her office. Were these, I asked her, incoming manuscripts to be read? No, she said. These are the books we're going to publish in January.
This is no exaggeration. Several houses publish over 700 books per year out of one floor of a building. They have no time to read things some stranger sends them in the mail.
There are some channels in, though. From my short story publications, I knew some of the editors in New York, though they are now at different houses. That's how I got into Doubleday: I knew someone in the Subsidiary Rights department, and he walked around the building with the book until he found an empty space on a desk. How does a beginning writer make connections? You're doing it now. Keep trying. Keep sending queries and books up there. Meet agents and editors at writers' conferences, writing courses, booksellers' associations, and magazines. I agree, it's rough, but it's not impossible. You can get published, but you have to do two things first: write a book worth publishing; and keep trying until things click for it.
THE REWARDS
And that brings us, at last, to the question of rewards. Why should we put ourselves through this effort, this fury of work? What is at the end of it? I'll let you in on a secret: I hope, for your sake, it isn't money. I must warn you that it is usual to be thorough and talented and driven and still not be rich and famous.
That said, adventure novels DO offer you something poets and dramatists would kill for: a paying market. If you can write a good adventure, and keep on writing them, you can actually make a living in America today. My adventure novels aren't my best sellers. The Navy novels make several times what a Galloway does. But the Galloways are making mid six figures, and since they only take four to six months to write, that's not a bad paycheck. Making it look even better is that adventures are pretty easy to sell to films. Both Hatteras and Bahamas have been optioned by Columbia. So I'm making almost as much from Hollywood on them as I am from New York. And if the studio decides to start photography, I really cash in.
So it IS possible to make a living in this market. But once again, a warning: Luck and good breaks are just as important as the quality of your writing and the diligence of your marketing. And most writers will never get those breaks. Therefore, I advise you to seek most of your reward in the process of writing itself. Write the kind of book you like to read. Or, better yet, write the kind of book you always wanted to read but could never find, be it adventure or anything else. SUBMERGE yourself in your work. ENJOY it. REVEL in it. While you're doing it, don't look for anything beyond that. Even after your first book is accepted, or your sixth, just smile wearily and lift an eyebrow when your friends tell you how they are waiting to see your best seller made into a television movie. They mean well, but they know not what they say. Forgive them.
Do you think I'm painting too gloomy a picture? Then all I can do is lift that same weary eyebrow myself.
And yet, I can't leave you with that note in the air. All is not lost. There are, by some oversight, a few writers even today who still manage to combine good technique and a moral sense with wide popular appeal. Exciting stories, interesting people with a literary flair and a buried message. Joan Didion, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Saul Bellow, William Styron, Joyce Carol Oates. Witty books, but with deep moral and philosophical messages. Tom Wolfe. John Gardner. Last, but probably even more popular, genre novels -- ADVENTURE novels - - that transcend entertainment into literature. Len Deighton. Peter Matheissen. Wilbur Smith. Stephen Coonts. Hammond Innes. John Le Carre.
Maybe you can be one. I wish you luck.
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David Poyer is possibly the best known writer of American sea fiction
alive today. His most recent book is THAT ANVIL OF OUR SOULS (Simon
& Schuster, July 2005). Check out his work and career advice at
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