The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
Those words from the late great author Harlan Ellison so aptly sum up what it is to be an author.
Anyone can decide they want to write books, screenplays, the Great American Novel.
The problem is staying the course.
Writing, you see, is not among the lucrative professions out there. Oh. Did I call it a profession?
A profession, at least to me, means a career. You know, one of those jobs you show up for at some office – five, six, even seven days a week – that pay well and provide a decent living.
You see, that’s the crux of the matter. Writers, for the most part folks, don’t make a lot of money. In a world that, let’s face it, revolves so much around chasing the almighty dollar, it can come down to those very words uttered by Ellison.
Let’s repeat those words: The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.
Ellison knew whereof he spoke. He began writing as a kid, making very little money through the years.
He did it because he couldn’t imagine doing anything else with his life other than being a writer. His climb to success, like many writers, was a slow one.
If you want to be a writer, to put yourself in front of that blank computer screen or scroll of paper each day, without any guarantee of large royalties or even recognition, then do it.
Yes. It can be lonely, frustrating, and the 4 a.m. whispers of “give it up for God sakes you idiot” when the work is going particularly bad will likely hound you.
It’s going at it alone, getting inside your head, and spilling out the words.
There is an old belief that writers are not made, but born, that those who choose a life of sequestering themselves in a room to pump out their creations, opt for such an existence because they have no other choice. They simply must write, come hell or high water.
It’s probably true. But it’s also likely that those who believe they have no other option than to write will find a way not only to do it, but to find some joy, and dare I say, even fortune from their labors.
Last month, while in the grip of COVID and with little else to occupy me, I picked up my dog-eared copy of Frederick Exley’s classic novel, A Fan’s Notes and began happily re-reading it. For those who’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing the book, it’s perhaps the classic story of young manhood, of a life lived not so much gracefully as …. well … undignified.
Occasionally, one comes across a book like Exley’s – a tale that hits those familiar notes of one’s own feelings and yearnings and even experiences. And so, I decided to lose myself once again in Exley’s lyrical prose, detailing “that long malaise, my life,” of alcoholism, madness, and the American Dream gone awry.
This was Exley’s life, related to the reader in tones of dark humor, a man who hungered for fame, but felt he was doomed to a life of anonymity, a mere spectator, cheering the accomplishments of others.
Venture up to Exley’s hometown of Watertown, N.Y., where much of this novel takes place, and you can find his simple grave marker bearing the words: IT WAS MY FATE, MY DESTINY, MY END, TO BE A FAN.
Exley was born in this remote upstate New York burg in 1929, the son of Earl and Charlotte Exley, the former a fine athlete and larger-than-life figure, at least among the brethren of his hometown. That Exley would grow up in the shadow of his father is among the central themes of A Fan’s Notes.
We are introduced to Exley drinking beer on a Sunday afternoon in a barroom before a television set awaiting the start of a National Football League contest featuring his beloved New York Giants. Exley is a fan, of the team and its star player, Frank Gifford. It’s here where Exley’s perceived near-death experience sets the stage for the rest of the book.
For Exley, Gifford represents the fame he’ll never know. That he has formed an attachment to Gifford, the campus hero with whom he had a brief, tense encounter at USC, the college they both attended in the early 1950s, is part of the story. Gifford serves as Exley’s kind of alter ego, his funnel to glory and worlds he can only hope of achieving.
For Exley’s life is one long roadmap of failed jobs, bad relationships and marriages, stints in mental institutions. His days otherwise filled with drinking and watching football as he copes with his own unrealized dreams of literary fame. Remarkably, for all his failures and giant missteps, his jaded outlook on life, Exley demonstrates incredible insight, and at times even sensitivity, of the human condition, through his writing.
Like many memoirs, the reader can see Exley as a figure who wanted something more. But unlike these other stories of triumph over great hurdles, Exley’s is one of one ignominious defeat after another.
What did I long for? At twenty-three, I of course longed for fame. Not only did I long for it, I suffered the singular notion that it was an heirloom passed on from my father.
He recalls his younger days in New York, hopeful times when he sat in barrooms, dreaming his dreams, a man apart from others, awaiting the fair maiden who never arrives. In Chicago, his life takes a turn for the better, when he lands a plumb job doing public relations work, traveling the country by rail. Evenings are spent hanging with other striving young men of the city, drinking, plying their male charms with the many available women.
It’s in this middle portion of the book where he meets a young woman, a dream girl, who represents everything he thinks he wants or should want. But Bunnie Sue is a mirage, a dream gone awry, an allegory of the bourgeoise existence he realizes he can never achieve or want. The scene of Bunnie Sue’s father proudly showing off his remote-control garage door opener to Exley and repeatedly opening and closing the door is a hilarious and unmistakable jab at middle class, suburban life.
Back in the book’s first chapter, an older Exley at the cusp of middle age, anxiously awaits the start of the football game and experiences what he fears might be a heart attack. Taken to a nearby hospital and afraid of dying, a chiding nurse assures him he is having not a heart attack, but a bad physical reaction to a long weekend of heroic drinking sans food. Here, an attending physician asks of Exley if he’s Earl Exley’s father, a man the doctor recalls as a good man “and tough too.”
It was the latter that got to me, said as it was in such a way as to indicate that my father’s son might not be so tough.
There are numerous references to his father, including a likely fictional episode in which Exley accompanies him on a trip to New York to track down Giants head coach Steve Owen to set up an exhibition between his dad’s semi-pro Watertown team and the Giants. Exley, though a child, can see that the proposed game is preposterous, though he of course doesn’t utter such words to his father.
I do remember that Owen, too, thought the idea of such a contest ridiculous. Worse than that, my father had already been told as much by mail, and I think that his having made the trip in the face of such a refusal struck Owen as rather nervy, accounting for the uneasiness of the meeting. On Owen’s leaving I did not dare look at my father. It wasn’t so much that I lived in fear of him as that I had never before seen any man put him down, and I was not prepared to test his reaction to a humiliation which I had unwittingly caused.
The book is sprinkled with eccentric and interesting characters who serve no other purpose, I suppose, than to make his life bearable. Among them is Exley’s friend, The Counselor, who like Exley, has not wholly embraced the American Dream. The counselor, a brilliant lawyer, who is eventually disbarred, opens his home to a parade of outcasts and oddballs. It’s here where Exley spends his days on The Counselor’s couch, reading, drinking, and getting to know some of these visitors, among them Mr. Blue, a slippery door-to-door aluminum siding salesman, with an obsession for cunnilingus and with whom Exley accompanies on his sales calls.
Early in the story, Exley makes solo trips to the Polo Grounds when Gifford is a young player in the full flower of gridiron talent and reaping the sort of fame in the great city of New York of which Exley can only imagine. Years later, with Gifford an aging player, Exley makes a final trip to Yankee Stadium, where the Giants now call home, and witnesses the famous Bednarik hit, the vicious tackle that knocks out Gifford – a cruel, sad reminder of his own mortality. (You can find it on YouTube.)
A Fan’s Notes is perhaps not for everyone, notably women readers. Much of the focus is certainly on football and male escapades of drinking and sex from a world of more than a generation ago – the 1950s and 1960s – when women were mostly excluded from the front ranks of society. Indeed, it wouldn’t be unfair for a reader to conclude that Exley was perhaps a misogynist. Or does he portray himself as such to remind us his utter failings as a human being?
Still, it’s a book that gripped me from the time I first read it at age twenty-two and perhaps unavoidably, a story of which I strongly identified, and continue to identify, even if I didn’t experience all the misadventures and dark episodes of Exley’s life.
What is interesting to note is that the very fame Exley desired, and which he never thought he would achieve or perhaps deserved, did come to him with A Fan’s Notes, a critically acclaimed, award-winning story that remains a cult classic.
That it never became the best seller of more widely known and lesser works of literature is perhaps the cruelest joke of all. But if the joke is on Exley, he probably expected it, maybe even embraced it.
He would complete just two more books in his life to wrap up the trilogy he had set out to write, neither of which approached the richness, the full storytelling of his first effort. To say that Exley was mostly an unwriting writer, a one-book wonder, is probably on the mark. But my, what a wonder that one book is.
Mike Reuther is a freelance writer and the author of numerous works including Baseball Dreams, Fishing Magic, The Baseball Losers, and Write the Darn Book. He makes his home in central Pa.His author website is https://www.amazon.com/Mike-Reuther/e/B009M5GVUW
I am the author of some 20 books of fiction and non-fiction, including novels with baseball and fishing themes and what people might call “navel-gazing, philosophical, what’s the meaning of life?” stories.
I also have books on writing that, I hope, target that vast crowd of beginning and struggling writers out there.
I have worked as a newspaper reporter for more than 30 years, with time out now and then to pursue freelance writing and a few sales jobs that didn’t come to much. Hey, what’s life without a little variety … right?
What I am is a writer and an author, getting my voice out there to be heard by people like you who stumbled onto my page.
Check out my books. Or … if you must … click off this site and look for something else that tickles your fancy.
Thanks for checking out my site. The image above with the bookcases holds all my titles. Okay. That’s a load of crap, but I have written books, about twenty at last count. Check out the link below to see what I’ve written. C’mon. It won’t take that long.
Photo by Markus Spiske temporausch.com on Pexels.com
The radio playing at the camp site segued from a jazzy blues number to NPR public service messages and then the voice of Jon Ritter: “Do catch the next program of Brit Talk with our very special guest .. Robbie Pop.”
“Who?” Moran asked.
“Robbie Pop,” Ritter said, poking at the camp fire.
“Who in the hell is that?” Moran said as he used his foot and his walking stick, Misty Blue, to clear a spot on the forest ground in preparation for his evening exercises.
“Robbie Pop,” Reuther said in an annoying tone.
“Never heard of him,” Moran snorted as he launched into his Royal Canadian jumping jacks.
“Well … he’s our guest on the next show.”
“But what does he do?” Moran asked, stopping from his exercises.
“He’s British,” Ritter said.
“Okay. Fine. But what does he do?”
“He’s British,” Reuther said. “Egads.”
“And I hold a Ph. D. in classical literature,” Moran said. “Again, what does he do?”
Reuther and Ritter looked at each other. They both well knew that his Ph. D. had been earned through an online correspondence course.
“He’s going to come on our show and talk about …” Ritter looked to Reuther for help.
“Brit stuff,” Reuther said.
“Brit stuff. Ha. You guys are pathetic. Can’t you find someone with something interesting to talk about? Who in the hell books your guests? Who is your program director?”
“Er …Annie,” Ritter said.
“Annie. Ha. Cozy arrangement for you Jon.”
“Now look,” Ritter said, pointing a finger at Moran.
“It’s going to be a good show,” Reuther said. “We’ve never had an English fella on our program.”
“Yeah,” Ritter said. “I mean … the show is Brit Talk after all.”
Moran shook his head. “You two have hit a new low. I mean … for the love of God, what was that nonsense you aired last week?”
“You mean … our comedy act?” Ritter said.
“If that’s what you call it,” Moran said.
Reuther and Ritter exchanged looks and then launched into it: A pair of mimes locked in a square glass box, trying to feel their way out.
“Mimes on the radio. How utterly ludicrous.”
“Hey. What’s good for the ratings is good for our show,” Reuther said with a grin.
“You got that right Mike,” Ritter said, grabbing a can of Vienna sausages from out of his backpack.
“For the love of Pete, why don’t you put me on your show?” Moran said, closing his eyes and rocking back on his heels.
“You?” Reuther said.
“Yes me.”
“But what will you have to offer?” Ritter asked.
“Indeed,” Reuther added. “Shall we talk about your history of plagiarism or the student sexual harassment scandals that have followed your academic career?”
Moran leveled a hard gaze at our heroes. He raised Misty Blue and charged.
“The thing is,” Reuther said as he stared off at the scraggy mountain top, “I’m past my fertile period. Making it as a fiction writer is out of the question.”
“That again,” Ritter said, rolling his eyes. “Every time you hit a wall with your writing you go on about being past your fertile period.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“It’s not true. C’mon. Let’s check out the Deckers Bridge and see if any trout are rising.”
“Since when do you care about trout rising?” Reuther said.
Ritter hoisted up his backpack and started off toward the bridge some fifty yards away. “I don’t, but it will get your mind of your stalled writing.”
“It’s not stalled. More like done … over, finished, kaput.”
Ritter didn’t want to hear it. Just that past winter, Reuther had come out with a dozen short stories that had wowed the literary world. What had followed had been the kind of success and attention that anyone would kill for – glowing reviews in the New York Times and Publishers Weekly, interviews on CNBC and the major networks, even a bit part in some silly reality show. Sure, it was October now, and much of the hoopla over Reuther’s book was in the rearview mirror. And that, as Ritter saw it, was the real problem.
“You’ll just have to write another book,” Ritter said as they stood on the bridge and peered into the roiling waters of the South Platte River. Ritter liked it here, particularly in the fall on weekdays, when it was quiet and the summer vacationers were long gone.
“I guess so,” Reuther said.
“You guess so. Shit. Just do it,” Ritter said, turning now to face his longtime hiking buddy. “I mean, God sakes alive Reuther. When you got into this writing business, you knew it wasn’t going to be a walk in the park.”
“But I’ll never write anything as good as Misfits, Dreamers and Mad Poets again,” Reuther said, referring to his book.
“Probably not,” Ritter said, as they both watched a blonde woman in a skin-tight kayaking outfit suddenly emerge from the Ponderosa pines on the far bank.
“Wow. Not bad,” Reuther said.
“Er … not bad at all.”
“Boyfriend is probably right behind her somewhere.”
“Of course,” Ritter said.
Sure enough, a young, svelte and sturdy man clad in his own skin-tight kayaking outfit, the lightweight water craft balancing upon his back, emerged from the forest.
“You see Mike. We all have our time in the sun.”
“Guess so ol’ Bean.”
They watched the couple move quickly down the embankment and to the water before climbing into the two-person craft. All at once, the man looked up toward the bridge where our two heroes stood, giving them a thumbs-up, a gleaming toothed smile, before using a paddle to nudge the the kayak into the swirling water. The woman, sitting behind him in the kayak, smiled and waved as well. They two of them appeared, Reuther thought, to be the very epitome of youth, and beauty and vigor. They were, he realized, the kind of people that could be found everywhere in the West anymore. And just like that, the kayak was heading downriver and then under the bridge and past them.
“There’s a rise over there,” Ritter said, pointing to the spot behind the boulder known as Elephant Rock that formed a deep pool.
Reuther had been watching the kayak carrying the young couple grow smaller down the South Platte. He turned to look where his buddy was pointing. Sure enough, a large ring slowly expanded from near Elephant Rock. “Guess I should have brought my fly rod,” Reuther said.
He thought back of a few years ago, when he first came out here from back East. Back then, he’d been fishing four and five times a week – when he wasn’t writing his brains out that is.
“You need to quit moping around and get back to it,” Ritter said as if reading his mind.
“Guess so,” Reuther said.
“You guess so. Hell.”
They stood for a while on the bridge not saying anything. A breeze carrying the hint of winter blew against their faces. The sun disappeared behind some clouds.
“A cold beer wouldn’t be bad right now,” Ritter said. He was leaned over the bridge’s iron railing watching a cluster of fall leaves drift below him. He straightened and smiled at Reuther.
They both turned to gaze across the two-lane road feeding into the village at the blinking beer signs of the tavern.
mreuther 