The Possibilities Are Endless

You write a story, but no one likes it. You write a story that people like, but you don't get into intro. creative writing. You take creative writing in college, but discover a consuming love of Scotch upon graduation. You don't have a drinking problem, but you demonstrate an interest in paying the rent every month, so you get a steady job. Your steady job doesn't take up all your time, but you develop a strong loyalty to a number of television programs. TV doesn't interest you, but your other hobbies (e.g., hiking the Adirondacks, teaching skeet shooting to youngsters, and COBOL programming) all prove much more gratifying and rewarding in the long-term. Writing stories continues to be a pastime, but you can't imagine how you'd ever quit your job to go back to school. You apply to MFA programs, but you don't get in. You get in, but you aren't awarded any scholarship money. You get a scholarship, quit your job, and move across the country for grad school, but your work is mocked and derided by your professors. Your professors say nice things, but your submissions are torn ball from socket by your fellow students in workshop like a gang of nicotine-starved hyenas. Your work is steady and good and admired, but you find that, once having tapped the well of adventures of a bitter teenager railing against distracted parents who don't understand, all funneled into a small sheaf of angry, pseudoautobiographical sketches, you never manage the stamina to write more than the first seventy pages of a novel. You complete a story collection and a solid five hundred pages of a novel, but then you're married and the first kid comes along and there's that thirty-year fixed-rate and diapers and a college fund and a revived enthusiasm for vermouth and who has the time? You write your story collection and your bildungsroman, but you have no idea where to send them. You send writing samples to a number of agents, but they all send polite rejections back saying they're not smitten with the work and anyway this is a tough time for story collections. You find an agent who loves your work and wants to represent you but after a while phone calls go unreturned and letters unanswered and eventually he turns up in Brazil, in hock, and addicted to yagé. Your agent sends your manuscript out to a number of presses, but they all gently decline, saying they're not sold on the work and anyway this is a rough season for bildungsromans. Your agent goes down the publishers, rung by reputation rung, until your book is picked up by a small outfit based in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, but your first print run is only three hundred units, all flimsy and curly and print-on-demand, and none get sent to reviewers, and the only distribution this outfit has, you notice, apparently due to a small arbitration case or two and perhaps a few other various contractual contretemps, is from its own website. Your agent sells your manuscript to a respected New York publisher, but your editor is fired before your book's pub date and no one else at the house ever picks it up and your words are consigned to the oblivion of the remainder bin. Your first book comes out and is championed by your publisher but PW, Kirkus, and Library Journal all trash it. Your first book is loved by the trades but Michiko Kakutani guts it with a strange, metaphorical meat cleaver. Janet Maslin calls your writing the new sliced bread, but the book never gets legs and the large print run of the paperback gets whacked by returns. Everyone loves your first book so much that your days are filled with praise and your nights with unceasing debauchery, but when the dust settles you find that you're done, you've had your say, that was it, and you never write a second. You almost finish your second book but one morning while you're out getting coffee your house burns to the ground, the only copy of the only draft of your manuscript inside it. Your second book is lousy. You're proud of your second book but it's universally eviscerated, said to suffer from an inoperable case of sophomore slump. Your first two books do so poorly commercially that you're forced to begin your career all over again under a pseudonym. After your second book and first marriage you decide to throw in the towel and go to law school. After your third book and second spouse and first disappointing film adaptation you channel all your energy into teaching undergrads. After your fourth book and third affair with a former student and second arrest for public déshabillé and first libel suit you move to a remote region of New England, utterly disgusted with the phoniness of the world and determined to withdraw from it forever. After your fifth book and fourth conversion to Catholicism and third stay at McLean Hospital and second Pulitzer and first failed run for office you find you simply have little interest in anything other than angry letters to the editor and herb gardening and that old flame, come back to love you once more, schnapps, sweet schnapps. After winning the Nobel prize for literature you are cursed, damned, as so many claim to have been before you, and you never write another word you're happy with again.