Someday I really do intend to write a book. Seems that ought to be a requirement for a person who has made a living as something of a wordsmith—44 years as a sports journalist for Long Island’s Newsday after four years of preparatory scribbling through college, plus another decade or so of freelance newspaper and magazine work. And now with my own Substack newsletter, (Mostly) Hot Topics—musings on journalism, geezerhood and current events (beware the occasional curmudgeonly inclination).
Lots of former colleagues—most of them, it seems—meanwhile have gotten around to writing at least one book.
I haven’t checked that box, and it feels like a failure of sorts. I think of my freshman-year college roommate, Skip. He had taped a large sign above our shared dorm room desk that lectured, “Procrastination is not an art.” Which didn’t prevent him from routinely putting off studies while he played music or cards or vacated the premises altogether in pursuit of a little relaxation.
But here I linger. It’s not as if I have writer’s block. I calculate that, over the years of newspapering, in attempting to produce information and possibly profundity on deadline, I cranked out as many as 200 articles a year, at an average length of 700 words—and not the very same words, either. Total, I’ve published something like 7 million such units of language. When one considers that the typical book runs from 70,000 to 120,000 words, that theoretically translates to 65 or 70 books.
Non-fiction. But, alas, disconnected and unbound. Not a single real book. I almost could write a book about never writing a book. First sentence: Call me indolent.
Part of the problem is settling on a topic. Anything biographical, along the lines of personal war stories—I use “war” only as a metaphor for personal frontline involvement—isn’t likely to get much traction. I have not chased any white whales; set out for California after being driven out of Oklahoma by drought, economic hardship and bank foreclosures; worked at a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. A straight memoir is out of the question.
I’ve certainly come across some fascinating characters in my decades as a journalist, people who could do the work for me of storytelling, contributing humor and insight, relating rare experiences. But my brief encounters with book agents have left me with the impression that a subject is not especially marketable unless he or she already is a ragingly successful celebrity.
Except, when I proposed a book some 45 years ago on Al Oerter, who already had won four Olympic gold medals throwing the discus but, at the time, was 43—11 years past athletic retirement and attempting to resurrect some Olympic greatness at the 1980 Games—I was told that a publisher would only be interested if I could guarantee that Oerter would pull off a fifth Olympic victory. Entirely unlikely at his age.
Oerter was a piece of work—sportsman, philosopher, regular human being. An enlightening interview subject, entertaining and thoughtful. But only a happy ending would do?
There was an old football veteran named Ray Mansfield who, days before he and his Pittsburgh Steelers mates won the 1976 Super Bowl, dismissed the idea that only heroes should be fodder for a good book. “Winning is too serious, a serious business,” he said. A better volume, he said, “would be about the old, inept Steelers [from earlier in his career]….who were so much fun to be around.”
Forget prose based on facts, real events, and real people. Perhaps, instead, the working hypothesis might be to present something unusual, quirky, amazing, shocking. Emotionally gripping. A tome based on an adventure, a dilemma, establishing a mystery the reader would want to solve. Possibly shaped into an historical novel.
Where to start, though? I have read War and Peace—587,287 words and, to my mind, in need of a good editor to trim out about half of that verbiage. The first sentence, translated from the French, is a quote, “Well, my Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now no more than possessions, estates, of the Buonaparte family”—said to set the stage for the novel’s political and social themes at the start of the Napoleonic Wars.
More of a grabber, to me, is Kurt Vonnegut’s first line of Slaughterhouse-Five: “All this happened, more or less.” Or the “Notice” preceding the Introduction to Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
That’s the ticket! So I’m jealous. Of Tolstoy, Vonnegut, Twain or anyone else with the discipline, planning and crafting of any form of literary work.
There is no white smoke here. Persons likely to come across such an output by this would-be author most likely will die of old age.