Rethinking My Books

I have lately been going back and back to the beginnings of my career as a writer, seeing how I got here from there.

The journey has been anything but smooth, but I think most writers would say the same thing! I know people who take pride in not having changed in any essential thing throughout long lives. I have changed though, and those changes are probably most obvious in my books.

The first piece of sustained fiction I ever wrote was an Avant-Garde novella set in a corn field in Mexico, where I have never once set foot in my life. A volcano erupts. This causes no end of personal and relationship problems for the people who live there. I knew, when I finished it--I think I was about 19--that it was junk. But I also knew I'd written something around 75 pages long, and before doing it, I had no idea I could.

At the time, I mostly saw myself as a poet and was already publishing in little magazines across the country by the time I got to college. And in truth I had never thought much about long-form fiction until the summer I was fifteen. That was when I read two books: The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone and Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (in English and, though I didn't know it then, abridged.)

During my years from 19 until about 27, I was almost exclusively writing poetry and learning my craft as a journalist. But my wife Linda kept nudging me to write a novel, and I finally did in 1977-78--a turgid mess called Let Us Have Madness. It was just over 400 pages long and dealt with a small-town newspaperman who discovers a small cadre of ex-Nazis living in his county. (To be fair, this was only a little more than 30 years after the end of the war, and a great many vets of all sides were still in their 30s and 40s.)

Looking back, I realize I didn't know a thing then about rewriting. This was also in the typewriter days, so a second draft meant starting from scratch. A clean copy was a nightmare from which I still haven't awakened, as Stephen Dedalus might say. I let a friend read Let Us Have Madness, and he gave it back and said it was hilarious. I didn't bother explaining that it wasn't supposed to be. It was like someone thinking Moby-Dick was a sit-com.

By then I was in my late 20s, and my choice was to quit fiction entirely or to approach it in a different way. So I decided to write only about things I knew and loved, and so I made a list of those things, and from that list came a plot and characters.

And also from it came what was to be my first published novel, The Heart of a Distant Forest, in 1984.