A Stained-Glass View into a Simpler Time

In the early twentieth century, tourism was mostly an upper-class pursuit.  Due to the way the upper classes were (and to a certain degree still are) educated in those days, this made for a very different kind of tourism.  The mere concept of going to Coney Island for a Hot Dog Eating Competition would have been met with a mixture of derision and outright disbelief.

While you’re not really going to find too many equivalents of the glorious Grand Tours in the years just before the Great War, you still found erudite madmen going off on interesting expeditions.  Heirs to Victorian obsessions, these adventurers were hobbyists and diarists that make the people who dress up as Stormtroopers for Comic Con (or worse, science fiction writers) look like normal, well-adjusted human beings.

Many of them left books behind regarding the unlikeliest of subjects, I was delighted but unsurprised when a volume entitled A Stained Glass Tour in Italy appeared at the annual jamboree at our local Anglican Church.

But, before I talk about the book let’s talk about this church.  I’m not religious in the least (and certainly not Anglican), but I love the place.  It is a lovely stone building that looks like it should be situated somewhere in fictional Wessex in the early 19th century and not a block from my house in the middle of a heavily built up sector of one of the world’s megacities.  It was the perfect spot to find a book like the one above, my copy of the Stained-Glass tome.

The book itself is a first edition, albeit worn frayed around the edges and well-aged, and probably the thing that I loved most about it was the fact that I was the first person in its over 100 years of history to read the thing completely.  How did I know this?  Because some of the pages were still uncut.  So, for two dollars, I purchased a journey back in time and the thrill of trying to separate pages with a steak knife (long story) without tearing them.

The book itself was a charming example of something that would never have been touched by a modern day publishing house.  A couple of wealthy friends go on a tour of northern Italy for the express and arcane purpose of viewing significant works of stained glass in the regions churches.  As they guide us through the towns they visit, the focus is on the glass and a brief history of the art form, but glimpses of life in the Italian countryside before WWI peek nostalgically through.  My lasting impression of this book is one of sunlight bathing dusty country roads and sand-colored buildings, slightly crumbling but once magnificent.

The book itself is interesting, too, with a number of laid in photographs and a strangely folded map, its production values would be dismissed as an amateur production today, but carries the stamp of the Bodley Head, a major publisher in 1911.

But it’s the writing which carries the day.  This book functions as neither a comprehensive guide to Italian stained glass nor as a reasonable tour guide for the era.  A labor of love, written – and likely published – with little or no consideration for any commercial value, in a tone that is as affectionate towards the subject as it is to any reader interested enough to open the volume.  It’s the work of a generalist who happened to love stained glass, a product of a polymath and a man of his time (Charles Hitchcock Sherrill – ambassador, athlete and stained-glassophile) that we like to think would be an avid reader of Classically Educated today.

We were definitely avid readers of his book!

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine writer.  His best-known book is the science fiction novel Siege.

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The Razor’s Edge

Our guest blogger today is Clinton A. Harris, a travel writer who also writes fiction. You can check out his blog, Getting Out More, right here.  He is the author of Song of the Cinder.

The Razor’s Edge.

I have tried to read this book. Yes, I have an English BA, I am a writer, I have read many of the classics with varying degrees of difficulty, subtext, and mechanical artistry that make them nearly opaque. But for whatever reason W. Somerset Maugham’s story of Larry Darrell begins with the author himself standing right in the way, like someone with a really big hat sitting in front of you at the theatre, and he just never gets out of the way. So, I’m going to talk about the Bill Murray version of the movie instead.

Decades before Lost in Translation, this was his first serious role. Rumor has it that Bill Murray held out on taking the starring role in Ghostbusters just so this movie could be made. I read it on Wikipedia, so it must be true. Larry Darrell (Murray) is a member of the Chicago aristocracy. He is engaged to be married to Isabel Bradley and everything seems great until war breaks out in Europe. Like many of his peers, Larry volunteers for the war effort and finds himself postponing his marriage so he can be an ambulance driver on the Western Front. There, we get to see the absurdity of war as well as the tragedy of how easily human life is wasted. At a pivotal scene, Larry is riding shotgun in his ambulance, as Piedmont (played by real-life brother Brian Doyle-Murray), sings a flat, monotone rendition of Frere Jacques to the dying men as the Germans lob artillery shells at them.

The World War I scenes are marvelous, and often echo the expatriate tales of disenfranchisement started by writers of the Lost Generation such as Hemingway, who himself was an ambulance driver in Europe during the war. The scenes of battle, loss, heartbreak and disillusionment are nearly cut and pasted from this film into the widely more popular film which launched Brad Pitt’s career ten years later: Legends of the Fall.

Piedmont’s cynicism is infectious and after his death and the war, Larry returns home changed. Isabel and his socialite friends haven’t missed a step, however Larry’s best friend, Gray, seems to have taken a liking to his betrothed, much to Sophie’s chagrin, as she was Gray’s fiancée herself. Larry seems indifferent to all this. Something inside of him has been lost since the war and so he decides to take some time to get his head back together. He goes to Paris where he lives in squalor, works menial labor jobs, and reads. Isabel makes a surprise visit one day and after seeing the state of Larry’s living conditions, she bolts and presumably gets more chummy with Gray. Larry is even more indifferent and so after being introduced to the Upanishads by a coal miner, he decides to go to India, then to the Himalayas.

The ahah! Moment hits Larry as he is freezing to death on top of a mountain where he has been reading and searching for answers in himself. Bill Murray captures this moment perfectly, in such a subtle way that makes the 1946 version of this movie so melodramatic and heavy-handed. You truly get to see Murray’s genius in this moment. He lets go and just starts burning the pages of the book he is reading for warmth. He had lost himself in the quest to find himself and has come through to the other side.
Returning to the world of his old peers, Larry seems relaxed. He has learned that Gray and Isabel are married, Sophie is an alcoholic prostitute, well, really a flapper, but potato-potahto. He doesn’t seem bothered by any of it. He takes in Sophie, gets her cleaned up and begins a romantic relationship with her, which pisses Isabel off to no end. The film ends in more tragedy, and even though Larry is saddened by it, he continues on. The years of his life and the pain being so many pages going up in flames. He isn’t lost or ruined. Larry continues on in spite of the way things have turned out.

I would consider this movie to be more of a travelogue than anything else. In his travels, Larry realizes that the person he is has been with him all along, but in his journey, he has lost so much of what has burdened him along the way. I think it is a story of survival as well as revelation, and would put it in the same category as Laura Hillenbrand’s novel, Unbroken, about Olympic runner, Louis Zamperini who was held as a prisoner of war by the Japanese during World War II, and also Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, which is a story of overcoming addiction and self-destruction and finding oneself at the other end of a long, difficult journey.

Those stories, as well as The Razor’s Edge are played off as victories, unlike the narrative of Chris McCandless’s ill-fated, yet fairy predictable tale told by Krakauer in Into the Wild, which though fascinating, is much more suited to the sub-genre of something more like Titanic or White Squall. A car-crash in slow-motion we continue to watch, but cannot pull ourselves away. We are at first wowed by the wonders and then tradegy brings it all into focus, rather than emerging from the chaos to find a sort of truth.

Stories like these are cathartic. The climax of the story is often reached when the protagonist learns a vital truth about themselves or the world and is better for it. Why did I drag everyone through this analysis of a 1984 movie? Because as a person who wants to write about traveling to places, I want to convey the spirit of the experience. How in leaving the comfort of our own homes and regions, we not only explore these places we are seeing, but also how we fit into the large scheme of things. By being open to new experiences we often reach a moment of catharsis. We lose something of what we once knew or held as sacrosanct and it is lost, yet replaced with something new. A broader perspective.

In writing fiction, you often take a kernel of truth and surround it with a fictional universe, or at least one that is somewhat recognizable. In writing about travel, you are drilling down through the layers to find that kernel and bring it into the light. An “enlightenment” in a very real sense. Sometimes our adventures are a mess and sometimes they are a way to find peace. The reality of both is being able to look into these experiences and gain from them, rather than detract. Anyway, that’s what I’m going with.

The TD;DR is This is Larry. Larry went through some bad times. Now Larry is happy. Be like Larry.

 

Eco on Literature – An Acquired Taste

I love Umberto Eco’s fiction.  I believe The Name of the Rose is utterly brilliant (to the point where I actually bought a pretty edition of the thing.  And we’ve discussed Foucault’s Pendulum here before.

Eco’s essays, for me, were a different story.  At first reading, I found them a bit dry and boring.  Perhaps a little too philosophical for their own good.  They are certainly well thought out, but you need to be very awake to fully process them.  He was not a big believer in delivering easy to understand wisdom.

So the first time I read Umberto Eco on Literature, I had to read it when I was fully awake and alert, despite finding the subject matter, for the most part, absolutely fascinating.

But then, I discovered the secret to unlock the full enjoyment of this volume.  The trick lies in undersanding that these essays were actually speeches that Eco gave in different elite literary places: universities, institutes and such.

They are meant to be heard, not read.

Therein, however, lies another problem: most of these aren’t on YouTube.

No matter, I disovered.  All you need to do is to watch any English-language interview with the great man – I recommend this one – to see what he sounds like, just before starting one of the essays and, magically, as you read, you will read them in his own accent. That makes them utterly perfect.

Umberto Eco shouldn’t be anything less than brilliant.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist.  His latest novel, The Malakiad, will likely make a lot of Greeks angry, while making other Greeks laugh.  People from other nationalities will invariably enjoy it.

 

 

The Malakiad – Launched!

Every author on the planet loves book launch days.  That moment when people around the globe can (finally!) enjoy the fruits of all the hard work in writing, rewriting, selling the book, working with the publisher to edit and givin suggestions for cover art.

The Malakiad, my comic fantasy that takes place in Heroic-era Greece launched today.  You can buy it at Amazon right now.  Yes, right now!

As a special bonus for Classically Educated readers, I’d like to tell you about the genesis of this paticular volume.

It begins (as many of my writing adventures do) in the late 1980s when I read Another Fine Myth by Robert Lynn Asprin.  That was my introduction to humorous genre work, which eventually led to my love for Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett.  I devoured each book by these guys as soon as I could get my hands on them.

Unfortunately all three are now gone, having died much too young.

Worse, I am unsatisfied with the current crop of humorous genre writers.  The problem isn’t their talent–I believe most aretop-notch writers–but the type of humor they attempt: watered-down, milquetoast and nowhere near as funny as their precursors.  The problem, I believe, is that genre humorists today are genre writers first, humorists second.  So, like most people in SFF, they are extremely aware of the sensibilities around them and write in such a way that no one at all could ever be offended.  Punches are being pulled in unforgivable numbers.  The books are set aside with a sigh.

That method isn’t particularly funny.  As Seth MacFarlane or Mel Brooks would tell you, the secret isn’t to offend no one, but to offend everyone equally.

And that’s why I wrote this book.

The Malakiad won’t offend too many people.  It’s meant to make you laugh, not to make anyone unhappy.  But it does poke fun at human foibles and it does ridicule things that are open to ridicule.  I wrote, in essence, the book I wanted to read, hopefully the kind of book that the great writers of the past wrote.

Is this one as good as its predecessors?  That’s for readers to say.  Critics, of course will be fed to the nearest large carnivore (unless they like the book, in which case they are extremely intelligent people who should be celebrated).

For now, all I’ll say is that, if you miss Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett or Robert Asprin, you could do much worse than to give this one a go.

Enjoy!!

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer.

Remembering Why We Love Poetry in the First Place

Poetry.

To some, the word conjures images of inspiring speeches made by Robin Williams in The Dead Poet’s Society.  To other – dare I say a much larger number?  Yes, I dare – it calls to mind incomprehensible readings by pretentious twits (or should that word have an “a” in it?) in smoky bars in front of six (never more) equally pretentious twits.

As a writer, I fall somewhere in between.  While I’m well aware that postmodern poetry often descends into the deepest realms of obtuse navel-gazing and its practitioners include many people who might stop speaking to you if you inadvertently did something as accessible as rhyme the ends of two lines (or use recognizable meter, god forbid), I also have a soft spot for Poe’s poetry among others.

I’ve even invited guest posters here to discuss speculative poetry, which, as far as I can tell, hasn’t fallen prey to the postmodenists yet.

Every once in a while, though, it’s nice to conect with the greatest hits of the past.  Back in 1996, my wife was given a volume entitled The Best Loved Poems of the American People as a prize in school (she went to a bilingual school).  When I discovered that she owned this item, I tossed it into my TBR pile and eventually, it cycled to the top.

This is exactly the kind of volume that, if it were published today would a) sell millions of copies and b) come under severe critical fire for all sorts of reasons.

There’s many reasons for this one getting lambasted.  From a purely academic point of view, the poems are in forms and meters that have fallen out of favor.  Blank verse and incomprehensibility rule the roost.

The second reason they would get themselves attacked is that in many if not all cases, these works reflect their times.  They don’t address or even care about diversity or race or even, really, politics of any kind.  When attacking the big issues of life, they leave these considerations aside.  Poetry has become a political vehicle in many cases, and critics would not allow someone to backslide on this “progress”.

The final criticism, and perhaps the only valid one is that the poems themselves have become clichéd, victims of their own success.

That’s true.  And there’s a good reason for it: they’ve been quoted, referred to and have brought happiness, comfort and solace to countless generations.  The word “Loved” in the book’s title is spectacularly apt.

I thought the book would be a slog, but it wasn’t.  It was a trip down memory lane and a reminder that accessible, non-angry oetry isn’t a crime, and that the great human emotions are prety much the same today as they were 150 years ago, no matter how many shrill voices try to tell us that anything from that age must necessarily be racist (or whatever) and therefore no longer valuable.

It is a book to dip into as opposed to reading straight through, of course, but even reading as a single exercise, I enjoyed it enormously.  I truly wonder whether any of today’s poetry will be read a century hence.  I seriously doubt it.

There’s a reason these values (and these words) have a lasting effect and anyone reading these verses will remember why. In such a cynical age, perhaps it’s a good idea to reflect on more simple things every so often.  I know I enjoyed it.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine writer who has published exactly one poem in his life.  Perhaps that doesn’t make him the greatest expert on poetry, but his novels are pretty good.  Outside, for example, is about what happens when humans escape the harshness of reality to live in simulated worlds.

Free Gifts = Happiness

We’ve written about the Folio Society‘s beautiful books here before (I should probably ask them to sponsor me for plugging them so often…), but I’ll say that one of the nicest things about them are the free gifts that arrive with most purchases.

The first couple of times I bought from them I received totes, which were cool and are paticularly useful in Argentina where stores are prohibited by law from giving people bags (which is probably the dumbest new law I’ve seen in a long time, and illustrates once again how good intentions pave roads to hot places).  I’ve also timed a couple of purchases to ensure that I receive the Folio Diary (in fact, last year, I actually bought a book I wasn’t necessarily planning to purchase just to receive this one).  The diary is usually illustrated with plates from books, and organized as a weekly agenda, with the week’s activities on the odd side and the illustration on the even. It is a beautiful thing and my wife loves them.

My own favorite gift is the Folio Society magazine, Folio.  This onesometimes arrives with the books and, since it isn’t advertised, you never know if you’re going to receive one or not.

They’re a treat because, in much the same way as how you don’t know you’ll get one, you also won’t be able to guess what’s inside until you read them.  Of course their main function is to get one interested in other Folio titles but they also include a lot of content unavailable elsewhere.  I own the March 2014 and September 2016 issues (as I said, prety random) and can report that  they are the product of extremely thoughtful collation.  I think there’s something in each for any book lover – I myself enjoy them a lot.

They’re not big – you can probably consume each in a lunch hour – but, as little bite-sized breaks from routine that remind of why we enjoy books so much, they are wonderful.  The March 2014 issue is especially nice because it discusses book arts and speaks to the artists.  Fun stuff.

Anyway, thought I’d share.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer and an all-around lover of books.  He is the author of the well-received Siege.

The Collaboration Effect

I recently read a thriller by Tom Clancy and Peter Telep entitled against all enemies, which got me thinking about collaborations between colossally famous writers and relative unknowns.

The book, entitled Against All Enemies is a good one.  It pits a classic Clancy-esque lone wolf hero against everyone from the Taliban to Mexican drug cartels.  How cool is that?  (Answer: it makes for a very entertaining book which is definitely better than this one).

It’s a successful collaboration which, having read some of Clancy’s later solo efforts, makes one think that Telep did most of the writing.  It also makes one thankful.  Clancy had, either because no one dared to edit his work in his latter years or simply because his writing had deteriorated, become a bloated bore in books such as The Teeth of the Tiger.

But basically, these aren’t collaborations between two bright stars.  For a brilliant example of that, check out Good Omens.  No, these books are built this way for the simple purpose of bringing a steady revenue stream to a needy publisher.

Simply stated, before his death in 2013 Tom Clancy was (and if he’s anything like Robert Ludlum, he still is) a cash cow for his publisher.  But for whatever reason, Clancy couldn’t push out all the books the publisher wanted.  Enter the “created by Tom Clancy” and “Tom Clancy’s Op Center” or whatever.  A similar (albeit not identical) approach works really, really well for books sold under James Patterson’s name.

These books sell.  They adhere to the brand and they give customers what they want.  People know what they’re getting with these. So… are they a good thing or a bad thing?

The people who say “no” will argue that the time wasted with these is time that could be better spent reading the classics.  Or the newest truly deep modern novel which finally explains the human condition.

I beg to differ.

I ascribe to the  school of thought that says that anything that gets people to read is a good thing, even if these books are essentially brain-off beach reads.  That’s fine.  Reading is reading and it isn’t staring at a cel phone to see if anyone has posted something a little less stultifying on Facebook.

And, now that Clancy isn’t writing them, they seem to be reasonably decent books, too.

And besides, afer reading The Stranger, I was ready for something a bit more entertaining!

 

Gustavo Bondoni is the author of Outside, which, if you like a good thriller, should be right up your alley.

Stripping the World to its Bare Bones

It’s amusing to wonder what the Wehrmacht censors thought when presented with Albert Camus’ novella The Stranger for their approval in 1942. One can imagine them getting together in a smoke-filled meeting room, looking into each other’s eyes to see if any of them had taken any particular offense (or even any particular meaning) from the book and then, with a collective shrug, approved it for lack of any better idea.

After all, a book about the world’s indifference to someone completely outside of all its rules–Nazi, Allied, Polynesian, it makes no difference–can’t be framed as a political tract or even particularly subversive.

And, in that light, they were correct.  The books subversiveness is aimed at a much deeper level of existence than mere politics.

But let’s talk about the politics for a second.  The Nazis–the freaking NAZIS–let it pass and yet in the post-colonial world a sequel was written where the arabic characters were given a life of their own. Talk about completely missing the point and making a fool of oneself.  This is why so many post-colonial movements are derided: they put anger ahead of brains, and it shows a little too strongly.

So what does it subvert if not the social and political structure of its day, which it accepts without question?

It goes after the very core of what it means to be human.  By looking at the world through the eyes of the ultimate flatliner and alienated outsider, Camus questions the botom layer of the fabric of society.  Family.  Friends.  Lovers.  The very existence of a possible connection between two individuals besides shared interests and shared pleasure.

In that sense, it’s a brilliant exercise and flinches away from the end consequences only a couple of times that I was able to spot.

Of course, it’s also a dead end.  The reader is left feeling very little for the character at the end of the book.  Perhaps a vague sense that it would have been a happier ending if someone had recognized his right to be different… but also that it probably wouldn’t have made all that difference after all.  The nihilism is a bit contagious.

It’s also a dead end because it doesn’t really deal with the human condition except at one extreme, and that extreme, though valid as an argument–why can’t humans be allowed to live within their own moral codes–is still not a discussion (seventy five years after the book was writen) that humanity is mature enough to have.  People who deviate from the social establishment (be that a small group such as an office, a medium-sized group such as a political party or a large one such as a nation-state) are treated badly and metaphorically put to death.

I’ll leave others to attempt to link this one to the modern world (try analyzing a school shooting through this lens and you’ll come up with a disturbing and different take), but I do recomend giving it a read.  It’s one of those which sets the borders of human thought, and that’s always valuable.

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argetine novelist and short story writer.  If you enjoy reading about outsiders, check out his novella Branch, which explores what might happen when humanity splits into distinct species.

The Fascination with Lost Worlds

In the late 19th and early 20th century, European maps still had large swathes of terrain marked as unknown.  The siren call of these blank spaces led to some of the greatest explorations known to man and sparked the imaginations of countless young and not-so-young readers.

Writers, of course were quick to fill in the blanks that real-life explorers were leaving.  It was a time when one felt that anything could be found in those spaces, from an advanced civilization, to Prester John’s people to Shangri-La.  Readers couldn’t get enough of it, and some truly talented people took up the challenge of revealing what lay behind tropical jungles, Asian mountains, African deserts and Antartic ice.  Perhaps the most recognizable today are Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, H. P. Lovecraft and, of course, most famous of all, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Each of these men gave the genre their particular spin (especially Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness).  Haggard was the great doyen of the genre, and Burroughs was perhaps better known for Tarzan (which we discuss here) and Barsoom, but all three were inspired by the same terra incognitas.

Conan Doyle used his fame to create what is arguably the purest form of the lost world story, however, and my recent reading of The Lost World and Other Stories (essentially the complete Professor Challenger tales) is what inspired me to write about the sub-genre here.

The first thing we need to understand is that, while they may seem to us to be Fantasy stories today, these books were very firmly planted in Science Fiction convention when they were written.  Even At the Mountains of Madness was more akin to a modern SF story than the usual Lovecraftian horror piece.  These writers, while poring over their incomplete maps were asking the central question of science fiction – “What if?” – and attempting to answer it in the most plausible way while telling a gripping story.

Professor Challenger himself is an interesting character.  A rough-around-the-edges, unapologetic genius who is loathe to suffer fools – or anyone else really – he is the driving force behind the discovery of a world of prehistoric creatures (and both uncivilized natives and under-evolved proto-humans) on a plateau in South America in what is almost the standard recipe for Lost World tales.

The science fictional purity is lost in later Challenger stories as the protagonist (and Conan Doyle himself) become lost in their attempts to put a scientific frame around the period’s craze for spiritualism.  In my opinion, these are the weaker books, but perhaps, like so many others, I am tainted by my modern views.

That last brings us neatly to the central point of any discussion about lost world stories.  While they certainly had a golden age, that era passed as the gaps in those maps steadily got filled in with the names of villages and rivers and mountains.  The need to suspend disbelief became too great and people, more sophisticated now, moved on to newer things.

Worse, modern reevaluation has cast many of these explorers as little more than land-and-resource-grabbing colonial exploiters.

My response to this is twofold.  I am saddened by the fact that I will never be able to feel (as an adult, at least) the wonder that must have been common for educated people who understood that those blank spaces existed, and there was actually something there… and wouldn’t it be nice to imagine that that something was a wonderful something?

But even with a modern education, I still enjoy these romps into the supposed unknown, and my sadness is heightened by the knowledge that very few really good Lost World type books are published each year.  It’s a loss to readers everywhere, but it’s logical and follows the market.

Finally, it becomes necessary to address the whole revisionist thing.  No one will pretend that the scramble for Africa didn’t happen (or was in any way positive for the people already living there) but I am of the opinion that classic literature needs to be evaluated within the mores of the times, and that any attempt to apply a post-colonial prism is a waste of time and space in academic journals which could much better be used for praising my own books (or panning them – all is well as long as they spell my name right).

Our obsession with judging the past by our standards and rewriting it to suit our tastes has been particularly cruel to this brand of literature.  The fact that it still survives to be enjoyed today by those with the open minds needed to do so is a testament to how much fun it was in the first place.  And “The Lost World” is as good a place to start as any other (although my own personal favorites are the Haggard books).

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an award-winning Argentine novelist.  He is the author of Siege, a well-received far future tale of survival and determination.

Why Write?

On more days than I care to admit, I sit around and try to understand why writers write.  There are probably as many answers to this as there are internet sites devoted to writing out there, but I still wonder.  The fact that many sites title themselves with names such as Writing and Other Forms of Insanity (this is just an example I happened to see today, but many writing sites have a variation on this title) should be a pretty strong clue that even writers aren’t quite sure why we do it.

Is it the fame and fortune?

Sorry, I’m back.  Had to stop and laugh.  Even writers with a long career and several excellent books to their name, published by the right houses and available on bookshelves aren’t precisely rich.  Other than the hyper-famous ones, the lucky writers make about the same amount of money as anyone else does from their job… but with less benefits.

As for fame, I personally know a los of brilliant, successful authors whose names, if you mentioned them to a random stranger on the street, would elicit a single word reply: “Who?”

All right.  Yes, Stephen King exists, and so does J.K. Rowling.  It’s possible to become rich and famous through writing in a way that you probably can’t by pursuing a career as an accountant.  The golden dream is always there, but most writers who start along the path chasing these things exclusively abandon their ambitions for some easier way to make a buck.  You may get there through writing, but it will be neither easy nor quick.

So it’s not money and it’s not fame.  Recognition, then?

Again, some starry-eyed folk might, armed with their mother’s kind words and their college professor’s admiration, embark on a publishing career expecting unlimited praise and adulation.  That usually lasts until the first rejection.  If they can get up after that, the next ten usually finish the job.

Then why? (Btw, I have a print of the above cartoon sitting on my desk)

All I can give you is my case.  I’ve been telling stories since I can remember.  I had a brother who is two years younger than I was who had to listen to a lot of them when we were kids.  He still reads my novels because I give them to him, so he is likely to be canonized once his story gets out.

And then, I discovered that, when not sweating blood over a keyboard (yes, this happens), I often enjoy writing.  Yesterday, for example, I wrote 1800 good words without even realizing it (this is in no way, shape or form normal).  I had fun and wrote a scene which made me chuckle.

But it isn’t all fun and games.  Now I have to write the next bit, and I have no clue as to what comes next.  Time to sweat those bullets.

So, habit and occasional enjoyment.  Is that it?

Probably not.  The sheer joy of getting an acceptance email has never disappeared.  I no longer dance down hallways as I did when I learned of my first sale, but I still have a nice warm glow that lasts all day.  Kind of like when you drink Irish Coffee in front of a roaring fire.

That many writers give up before experiencing this is a true tragedy.

Also, no matter where you are on your writing career, there’s always another hill to climb.  You sold a story to a magazine?  Great!  Now sell another to a bigger mag.  Published a novel?  Cool, now publish a better one, or sell one to a bigger publisher, or hit the NYT bestseller list.  Already a millionaire bestseller?  All right, but are you a critical darling?  If not, that could drive the next book.

In my own experience, it might have been possible for me to stop when I was just writing for fun – I might not have stopped completely, but I might have just written occasionally for a laugh – but once that first acceptance happened… there was no question of ever giving it up.  Worse than crack, better than sex.

So there’s something.

And finally, there’s the fear of death.  The fact that our writing, even if it was just printed in a photocopied local rag, has the potential to connect with people long after we are gone.  If just one copy of one story survives to be puzzled over by scholars in a few hundred years, it will have left a much greater mark than several lifetimes of accounting or marketing or managing a restaurant.

To incorrectly quote Queen:  Who doesn’t want to live forever?

 

Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer.  His novel Outside explores immortality in a much different and less obvious way than this post.