There’s this thing Stephen King talks about in his book On Writing that rubs me the wrong way. Now I should confess up front that I love Stephen King. As far as adult fiction goes, he was my first love, and while that love dimmed temporarily when I became a snotty elitist literary student in college, it came back when I matured a bit more, and On Writing is a great book about the craft with loads of fantastic advice about writing. The thing that rubs me the wrong way is Stephen King’s disconnect between the life he leads as a successful novelist who has made millions from his craft and the lives the rest of us struggling writers lead where we don’t make any money but persist nevertheless. This advice that rubs me the wrong way would be his advice to try and write 3,000 words a day. 3,000? Really, Uncle Stevie? I mean, I know you can do that, but you have the entirety of your mornings to write while the rest of us…

Well, okay, I might have been able to write 3,000 words a day when I was in my 20s and single. But again, at that time, owing to my literary snobbery, I hadn’t read On Writing yet and my benchmark was Graham Green who wrote 500 words a day. And 500 seemed like a manageable number. But I had to work a 9 to 5 job, and though I took a 9 to 5 where I sat at a desk and had access to Word and could write over my lunch break, the continuous responsibilities of the job made it so that accessing the creative part of myself between noon and 1 o’clock was difficult. It wasn’t impossible, no, just the activation energy to get the chemical reaction was higher. So I worked when I could and accepted what the muse gave to me. Not that I believe in the muse. In high school, a friend’s dad was an art professor and painter, and he instilled in both me and my best friend, his son, that to be successful as any of kind of artist, you have to work every day. And for the past twenty years, I’ve mostly worked every day. Let’s face it, you’re not going to work every day, but holding that as a value means you do end up working more days than not.

Cut to now, I have a 9 to 5 still. I’m married. I have two kids, a house, a mortgage to pay for. I have a lot of responsibilities outside my dream of selling a book and starting to make a living as a writer. All of which means, I wake up around six a.m. every morning before anyone else in the house is awake, and I come up into the attic, and I work on whatever project I’m in the midst of at a given time. It generally takes me about an hour to get 1000 words done. Around seven the kids wake, and I don’t have to come down out of my attic office immediately. My wife, god bless her, gets the kids’ breakfast ready and packs their lunches. I do tend to come down around 7:30 to oversee getting the kids out the door, making sure they brush their teeth, pack everything they need in their bags, laptops, lunch bags, snack, homework folders. And I get my daughter to her bus stop around 8 o’clock. And walk my son to his school up the street at 8:45. On my best days, before I come downstairs, I might get as many as 1,500 words, especially if I know where the story is going. Some days, the 1,000 words is a struggle, but I’ve set my quota there as a manageable one. I think why the 3,000 word quota bristles is because King is known to be extremely prolific, more so than other writers, and he’s applying his current regime as advice to everyone. (Also perhaps despite being prolific, I’m still a fan and read everything that comes out, and being a fan, I have no problem saying, I’m one of those people who believes his books might be better if he spent less time getting to 3,000 words and more time in the editing process….presumptive of me, I know, given I don’t have his success, but I’m still a reader with an opinion, not to mention an editor myself, and there are just times where I’m reading his work and really, really want to cut phrases, sentences, paragraphs).

In any case, this blog series has chartered the course of me learning to write full-length books, and if you want the Cliffs Notes version of the first three entries, I spent my first decade of writing books composing three autofictions and a memoir, all of which I deemed too personal at the time to pursue finding an agent, let alone publication. So, if I’m going to succeed, I needed to find something commercially viable. But I’m also not going to spend a year on a project simply because I find the idea commercially viable. I have to fall in love with the work as well. It’s the only way I’m able to keep going. So one night, as I was reading Sara Pennypacker’s magnificent book, Pax, to my children, I got to thinking about this short story I had written back in 2012 called The Elusive Black Truffle. Now as a story, it never really coalesced. It was about two boys, Peter and Chris, who get lost in the woods while looking for a truffle. Peter’s parents have recently become distant and he’s worried they’re going to get divorced, and since his mom is a foodie, he thinks maybe if he finds this rare and valuable ingredient, he can get his mom and dad talking again and stop them from splitting up. The boys end up facing off with a wolf at the climax of the story, and well…I don’t want to spoil the end here, since I adopted the structure for the YA book I’m shopping around, but suffice it to stay that although the story didn’t work, the seed for the story, its basic plot and structure, stayed with me enough so that when I was reading Pax and thinking, why don’t I try to write a YA novel, The Elusive Black Truffle was the first thing that popped into my mind. I have a box in the corner of my attic where I keep the paper copies of stories that were reviewed by my writer’s group, so I pulled their notes for The Elusive Black Truffle the next morning and got started.

From the outset, I knew I was going to have to make some changes beyond simply expanding it from 30 pages to 210 (which is what the final count of my final draft is). First, I had to really develop Chris from a sniveling wimp (which he was in the originally story) into a fully rounded character who can hold his own against Peter, who’s quite brainy. And I did this. I actually did this by starting with Chris as a Stephen King fan. I gave him a back story in which he’s orphaned and has come to live with his Uncle Dave, a Afghan War vet and recovering alcoholic, and has to fit in at a new school in this rural environment after living in a city. He gets bullied his first day for carrying around a copy of IT, and Peter steps in to defend him and this is the way they become friends. Chris admires Peter for being brave enough to stand up to the school bully, and Peter likes that Chris isn’t ashamed of being a nerd and standing out in the way Peter is. Now Dave has become a father figure to Chris, and he’s taught both boys outdoor skills, which is what helps them survive when they get lost.

Overall, drafting the novel version of this, I fell in love with the boys and the chapters with them in it and their relationship really felt like it was popping for me. I even had the brainstorm to add some dramatic irony by making the reason for Peter’s parents’ silence different. He thinks they’re headed for divorce, but it turns out that the reason the house has grown cold and silent is that his mother has received a cancer diagnosis and does not know how to tell him. There are four side-chapters that I introduced in between chapters about the boys being lost. One is told from her point of view, and I loved her. Her chapter is a short one, but it feels alive and I hope gives the reader a sense of surprise and twist and turns. Another is told from the point of view of Peter’s dog Scratch, whom Peter brings to the woods in hopes that Scratch can sniff out the truffle. Scratch is the first to sense danger in the woods, alert to the wolf’s presence. A third is told from Uncle Dave’s point of view where he’s at an AA meeting and he hears about the wolf being sited in their region, and a fourth is from the point of view of the wolf. Here is where the first draft ran into problems. I knew very little about wolves at the time I was writing and the wolf, who, aside from the elements, was supposed to pose the greatest threat to the boys, was flat on the page. Still, I persisted in finishing the first draft so I would have the basic structure when it came time to re-write.

Now I started off this blog entry by talking about Stephen King’s On Writing, but in terms of revision, I actually had just read Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation where he touts the virtues of doing the entirety of a first draft, stepping away and rewriting from the bones of the first draft entirely, and then editing after all that, playing with and tweaking the language. It seemed a good way of working that fit with the way I liked to work. I put the first draft aside and checked out several books about wolves from my local library, since it was pretty clear to me that the wolf’s actions and character were the weakest part of the first draft. These books included The Redemption of Wolf 302 by Rick McIntyre and Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men, both of which were most useful to me in schooling me on wolf behavior, mainly cluing me into the fact that wolves attacking humans is a rare event and they don’t simply attack unprovoked. Which left me with what appeared to be a problem? Why does the wolf attack the boys at the end of my book? And then the solution: maybe the wolf’s intention wasn’t initially to attack the boys and it only turns aggressive after the boys, in turn, attack it?

To this end, I had also watched several documentaries on wolves, mainly wolves in captivity, and what I took from these was that wolves raised in captivity don’t fare well in the wild. They become acclimated to being around humans, they don’t learn to hunt in packs and so can’t take down big game properly. Essentially, lone wolves are a myth. Wolves need packs to survive. But sometimes wolves in captivity can become too aggressive to stay with a particular sanctuary, and if this happens, they look to either transfer them or they need to put them down. Bingo! There was the wolf’s character right there. He would be a sanctuary wolf who turned aggressive and was scheduled to be euthanized. The vet can’t bear to do it and so steals the wolf from the sanctuary at night and releases it into the wild, which sets it on a collision course with Peter and Chris. This meant that the wolf was no longer a villain but a tragic figure, so I named him Agamemnon to give it that Greek feel. This also mean that in the revised drafts, I could draw sub-textual parallels between Peter, who feels like an outsider in his community because he’s gay, and the wolf, who having been released into the wild, belongs neither in the wild world nor the domestic one he was formerly a part of.

And the second draft turned out much better than I had anticipated. If you’ve read the other sections of this blog, you know that I’ve been writing seriously since 2008. I’ve published many essays and stories, and in that time, I’ve developed the sense of whether something is working or something is not, and The Elusive Black Truffle was working. I mean, it wasn’t just working; it actually felt magical, like I was creating something special. Don’t want to jinx anything by saying that, but when I finished the second draft, in spite of knowing it needed more editorial work on the line level, I was proud of what I’d created. And this book is one where, unlike the autofiction, I have no reservations about putting it out into the world of agents and seeing what comes of it. I know it’s an uphill climb. Rejection is more common than not when it comes to publishing your work, but it helps, facing that rejection, when you’re certain that the work is good, certain that somewhere along the line, you’ll find someone it clicks with to champion it.

But how does one find an agent?

I’m not going to profess to be an expert in that, but in the next blog entry, I’m going to dive into what I’ve learned so far. Now if an agent comes across that entry, they may laugh at my naivety. But you’ve gotta start somewhere, you’ve gotta learn somewhere. I’m sure I’m making mistakes, but I’ve also done my research, so, with that, I’ll leave you now with a little appetite for what I’ll be discussing next time.

Until then…