If you asked me twenty years ago who my favorite writers were, I probably would have rattled off a list of stylists. You know, people whose sentences were unique, flashy, clever, whose perspective was unusual, whose punctuation or layout was unmistakably them. You could identify the writer if presented with an anonymous sample of their work because it stood out. 

I collected these people. This was before recommendation algorithms, and so we’d all look at bookshelves when we’d go to one another’s apartments. I’d look forward to the Q&A after a reading when the guest of honor would do what I called “the name-dropping portion” and list some influences. You couldn’t yet use Amazon to peek into every book, but you could go to publisher sites and jot down names, stick it in your wallet, and keep your eye out when you’d stumble upon used bookstores in college towns. 

This isn’t that surprising: I was young, beautiful sentences were attractive and inspiring, and I didn’t know what I was doing. Plus, I was in an MFA program (for poetry, but still) and literary writing and education tends to focus on voice and style above all else. For writers who are stylists, it is not uncommon for two or three years to pass between books being published. 

These days if you were to ask me who my favorite writers are, I’m not sure there’d be a stylist on the list. The writers I admire now are writers who wrote, not writers who wrote uniquely. There would obviously be something to recommend each name, but most of all I am impressed with writers who wrote, finished, delivered, and moved on to the next. For this group, it’s not uncommon for two or three months to pass between books being published. 

We have this idea that something written slowly is somehow better than something written quickly. This is not always true, but I get why this feeling exists: being careful or deliberate about what you write should mean that more mistakes are caught, that there’s more time to get a thought right, more time to revise for the better, whatever “better” ends up meaning. You can put your full weight into it when you polish something, so the shine is shinier. 

Sometimes it takes three hours to write 500 words, none good. Sometimes you write 4,000 words in a morning and have the rest of the day to feel smug about it. Joyce Carol Oates writes 8 hours a day. Elmore Leonard wrote from 9-6 every day. Some writers stop at 1,200 words, but do it 7 days a week (Walter Mosley). 

For me, the sweet spot is between 1,500 and 2,000 words, probably closer to 1,500. After that, I feel spent. And I have also found that a lot of writing counts towards that 1,500, even if it’s not my active creative project; I can’t write in my journal first thing in the morning any longer, as my brain counts that towards my 1,500 good words. If I write in a journal at all, it has to be after my daily work is done. This has the downside of making shorter and weaker journal entries, but who cares? It takes away less from the stories I’m working on. 

Incidentally, a blog post also appears to count towards that 1,500 words, which might explain why this blog hasn’t exactly taken off; it might not look like it, but it’s a cannibal. 

While I don’t read fantasy, I do like the perspectives of all kinds of genre writers. And not long ago, I read a book on writing technique written by an independent fantasy author, who wrote about how his targets were thousands of words per hour. This seemed outrageous to me, so I looked into his work. Not to sound unkind, but the writing is about as good as what you’d think for someone whose output is that high. The first word that came to mind was “content.” 

And yet it sells, and sells pretty well. It’s not just pixels and space. People read it, favorably and enthusiastically, and the author pays his bills with the proceeds. Then he writes another one. My MFA teachers and colleagues might be horrified by it stylistically, but that fantasy writer is out there doing what he loves and has found a grateful audience willing to pay money for what to me looks like a well-constructed, dense fantasy world full of awkward sentences, enormous words, and enough work to keep a copy editor busy for a month. Readers are forgiving if the piece provides what they want, and while it was normal for us to want style back then, that doesn’t mean it’s common for a broader readership to want that same thing. 

It’s a bit of a mindfuck to admire what you don’t like. This doesn’t happen that often with aesthetic stuff for me – I’m used to seeing well-prepared food that I can ooh and ahh over, but still not want to eat. Yes, the sushi looks gorgeous on the plate, but I can safely guess what it’ll taste like. Whether this is maturity or stubbornness, I can’t say. 

What I can say – and here is a kind of name-dropping portion of my own – is that I have recently read several works of fiction, all different. First was Elmore Leonard’s Djibouti, immediately followed up with Lawrence Block’s Lucky at Cards, then Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son, then a Harlequin Romance novel that a friend edited. I noticed something about my own writing after I put the last book down and came up for air. 

Just as I realized that a blog entry or journal entry seems to mentally count as my daily writing, so too did I notice that reading for style tends to muddy the waters. When I was reading Jesus’ Son I kept defaulting to a Johnson-ish voice while getting my daily work in. My character would have to make a choice, and they’d choose hitchhiking or drugs. I’d have to go back and rewrite, forgetting at times what I sounded like. But the other three books were kept at arms’ length while I wrote, and I could be myself without any extra effort. 

Style is contagious, and I’m a germaphobe now.

I can accept that I might have a Romantic view of voice and style, as I’ve always defined it as “what comes out when you sit down to write and don’t think too hard about what you’re doing.” If I have to steer things in a certain direction, that feels unnatural and is therefore less desirable, like having to consciously maintain a foreign accent while speaking. I’m too old for affectations, and am inclined to let myself speak. I do want to revisit the idea of style in genre fiction, because there isn’t exactly zero style there. But I’ve reached the bottom of page 2, and it’s time to move on.

 

While I’m not the greatest mathematician, and perhaps not even a competent one, I know how to count the number of unread books in my house, divide by the number of days in a year, and determine that I have approximately eleventy billion years of reading material ahead of me if I read a book per day and never buy another book again. 

Well, I don’t read a book per day, but I do read a lot. This is largely possible because I read fast-paced books between 45,000 and 60,000 words most commonly; I’m not polishing off Gravity’s Rainbow every three days, and no one should feel bad if they don’t. 

But no matter how large my unread backlog is in the shelves behind me, it’s hard for me to pass by a bookstore without at least checking it out, and it’s hard for me to check it out without walking away with something. I used to only make the mistake of “buying a book I don’t need and can’t make time for,” but there are other types of mistakes I can make now. This is how I now own two copies of James Ellroy’s Brown’s Requiem. One was found at a used bookstore in Ithaca, NY in mass market paperback form, a form I prefer. The second was brand-new and waiting for me at Barnes & Noble. I forgot I bought the first, which is how I came to buy the second.  

Last time I mentioned that Lawrence Block was publishing a lot of his pseudonymous back catalog in either his Classic Crime or Classic Erotica lines. I also mentioned that there are a few books that appeared in both lines, so sexy were their crimes, and so criminal was their sex. Confusing matters even more, sometimes the books would have different titles (I haven’t made this purchasing mistake yet, but give me time). 

I just finished Block’s A Diet of Treacle, published by Hard Case Crime; if you had read it in 1961 when it was first published, it would have been called Pads Are for Passion, published by Beacon Books under a pen name that Block used for mostly erotica. Similarly, The Sex Shuffle and Savage Lover were (much) later reissued by Hard Case Crime as Lucky at Cards and Sinner Man, respectively. $20 Lust reappeared as Cinderella Sims. 

I recently got excited as I thumbed through a book about Manhunt magazine, and saw that there was an unknown-to-me Ross MacDonald story called “The Imaginary Blonde.” It was attributed to John Ross MacDonald, one of his early pen names (before the other John MacDonald was as well known). That initial excitement lasted long enough for me to discover “The Imaginary Blonde” was in fact an alternative title to a story I already had, called “Gone Girl.” 

We all have a complicated relationship with Amazon these days, but I do appreciate that it tells me when I bought something, because as far as books go, I have the middle- or upper-class problem of not remembering what I already own. Not long ago I saw a reprint of an older book that had a very affordable Kindle edition, got excited, and discovered after I clicked on it that I had bought it a few months earlier. Whoops. 

Which brings me to my point: there are lots of ways to screw up lots of different things, even in something so seemingly innocuous as buying or reading a book. Which is why I’m still struggling with whether or not to use one or more pen names for what I write. There was an old joke that authors would use pen names for genre work and save their real name for the serious, literary stuff. I see the appeal here, but I’d likely use my real name for crime fiction and pen names for everything else. 

Because I can easily see readers getting confused when books of different genres appear under the same author name, especially if one relies on Amazon as a platform to keep one’s work organized and available. And because I have a lot of ideas for stories in a few different genres with very little crossover appeal (presumably), this is a problem I’ll eventually have to contend with. Is it a major problem? Well, no, especially for someone who hasn’t published anything in these genres yet; those books-in-progress don’t exist until they’re out there, and they ain’t out there yet. But it is a modern distribution problem, something independent authors have to contend with. 

An example, sticking with Lawrence Block and his many pen names: quite a few of his books have reviews that are some variant of “not up to Block’s usual quality,” which is correct – the book in question was one of his first, was not a crime novel, and wasn’t even something he publicly acknowledged until very recently. But it was listed on his Amazon Author page, and not on a page for Sheldon Lord, the pen name under which the book originally appeared. 

If you want a real chuckle, take a look at some reviews for the books Block wrote under the name John Warren Wells; these were ostensibly written by a medical professional who shared lurid details of the sex lives of numerous “real” people that he interviewed and studied. Of course, it was really Block, and it was all made up. But the reviews make it clear that some readers lack all the context necessary for knowing what the book is, who wrote it, and why. Readers who are fans of one pen name and one genre may not be fans of everything that author writes under all pen names, and keeping everything separate seems pretty practical. To my knowledge, there’s no way to subcategorize on an Amazon Author page (though you can, it seems, organize books by series). 

I share all this because, borrowing from Block and how he began life as a writer, I spent the last few weeks experimenting with short erotic romance writing, and it has been much more fun than I ever thought it would. I have no idea why. I have never read these types of stories, as a genre. I have no idea who major publishers are (Harlequin?), I have no idea who luminary writers in the field are, I have no idea what the most common genre tropes are. But it has been terrific practice for writing characters, and thinking up plot problems that can be solved by sex or connection. 

Why am I sharing this? Because today is January 31st, and I currently have one paying client for my Day Job (which is as a freelance Instructional Designer). All of my writing over the last year has come in the non-contiguous pockets of time when I was not busy with paid client work, and that is scheduled to change no later than Friday, February 17th. That is the last day of my current contract, and as of right now I have no paid work waiting for me when I wake up on Monday, February 20th. Given the lead time that these contracts typically need, it is highly unlikely that something materializes between now and then. 

Meaning: I start my gig as a full-time author on February 20th, for an indeterminate length of time. I decided that what I’m doing first is to write (and publish) romantic fiction under a pen name. I will not be referencing it here, I will take no ownership of it here, it will not appear on any bibliography here. These stories (I have several in progress) have nothing to do with crime. But they have been (to borrow a phrase from Lawrence Block again) a wonderful apprenticeship.

Marijane Meaker (who wrote crime fiction under the pen name Vin Packer) supposedly loved pen names because she could invent a personality with each one. I see the appeal of that, and for whatever reason, the personality I channel when writing a romantic short is the personality most likely to actually, you know, finish a story. Since I want to actually finish things, here we are. I have a theory on why that is, and it has to do with the size of ideas. But we’ve wandered enough for one day, and I’ll pick up that train of thought another day.

In a previous writing life, I was a poet. I wrote a lot, had a small amount of micro-success publishing in little literary magazines, and loved investing the time, energy, and money into finding rare books of the minor writers I came to identify with and love. This felt like I was living a life that was unique, original, and aesthetically principled, but ultimately, I wasn’t as uncommon as I wanted to feel: I had the same dream a lot of other people did, which was to get my undergraduate degree, then get my MFA in Creative Writing, then get a teaching job at a small Pennsylvania college like Haverford, where I’d write poems, teach creative writing to motivated students, and gather my poems into a book every two or three years where I’d have a readership ready to buy whatever I’d put out. Eventually I’d have enough books for a Selected Poems volume. I’d own a leather chair, I’d sit at an old desk, and I’d type on a vintage typewriter. 

For a variety of reasons, this never materialized, and I don’t recall exactly what killed the dream for good. But I do remember, vividly, the moment that dream was born. When I was somewhere around 16, my friend Sharlene gave me a copy of Run With the Hunted, which was a Charles Bukowski reader. It contained a poem called “john dillinger and le chasseur maudit,” and this poem managed to stop me in my tracks, instantly. I was aware at that moment of a new direction my life was going to go: I was going to be a writer. I didn’t get all of the references – pre-Internet, I didn’t know who Dillinger was, or Franck, or what ‘plagiostomes’ were, and made no effort to find out – but something about the language hooked me immediately. It was hard, tough, crass, with little bullshit. It was more than iambic pentameter, more than dactyls and trochees, and in no way resembled the antiquated, overwritten meditations I was meant to perpetually decode in school. 

My reaction to the poem was not to be moved by it as a poem, or to see myself in its lines, or to run to an Encyclopedia and learn who the poem was even “about.” Instead, I finished the poem and thought “that was pretty good, but I can do better.” 

I don’t know whether I should be proud of that or not. It’s pretty absurd for a high schooler to think that highly of himself before ever writing a poem, but we don’t always get to choose what drives us or why. Re-reading that poem over the years has been strange, as I don’t feel much of that connection any longer; I now just think I could do better because it’s not that great to begin with (so maybe it wasn’t that absurd for this high schooler to feel that way). But to be fair, I do still feel a little tingly spark at the end of the poem that does remind me, if just a little bit, of that first read almost 30 years ago. 

So what happened? Did I do better? What happened after that is probably familiar to many writers: I did start writing, but began by copying my inspiration. The first stuff I wrote was garbage, so no, I did not do better, at least not for a while. I loved that Bukowski gave me permission to use simple, aggressive, blue-collar language, but I hadn’t had any experiences that lended themselves to that language. It was raw, direct, no-nonsense, tough guy writing, and I wasn’t that guy. 

Fast forward through a bunch of stuff I’ll probably write about one day. Right now it’s six months after my decision to write mystery/crime/noir stories, a much better outlet for Tough Guy Language than poetry ever was, especially since I have characters who are actually tough. But it’s early, and I have what a lot of writers probably have to show for their earliest efforts: a lot of drafts. Certainly nothing finished. I do have one draft, considered maybe 80% “done,” of what will probably be the first thing I submit to a publication. Maybe I’m not submitting it with total confidence, but I‘m submitting it. The story is currently called “The First Walk Home” and the plot was something that came, almost fully-formed, while I was walking some books back to the library one night, making up stories in my head about the people who lived in all the houses I was walking past. Eventually I walked past a blue car in a driveway and imagined it was locked with the keys in the ignition, and off my imagination went. 

Well, maybe it wasn’t fully-formed. The idea for the story was fully-formed, and that made it pretty easy to sit down at the computer and type out a first draft. But I cut a ton of the material that was in that first idea, because it ended up being not very good. I was making a lot of classic blunders in my very first attempt at a mystery/crime story: I was making the main character too passive, in that the story was happening to her. I made her rush around, which isn’t the same thing as action. I also wasn’t clear on the stakes of the story, as she was barely emotionally invested in resolving the case; she didn’t know the criminal and had no stake in the victim’s life. What would happen if she failed? Well, not much, as it turned out. If I was being honest with myself, I had to take my completed draft of my first story, read it over, and think “that was pretty good, but I can do better.” 

That strikes me as a perfectly healthy attitude to have about one’s own work. Further, it should probably always be the attitude about one’s own work. That story will hopefully be something I link to here, to whatever mystery/crime magazine it gets published in, or available as a download or ebook that I self-publish. Either way, right now it’s simply not done. It does feel great to have something where the story flows, logically things make a kind of sense, and there are some nice sentences, but it needs a lot of polish. 

I have mixed feelings about Ron Carlson’s book “Ron Carlson Writes a Story,” which is a detailed account of how one of his stories came to exist, how it changed, and how it ended up the way it did. On the one hand, it’s a deep dive into a relatively minor story. I don’t know how illuminating that ultimately is; if dinner was merely OK, I’m only listening to your story of how you made it out of politeness. On the other hand, most stories are minor stories, and that’s especially true in the world of genre fiction; yes, I can do better, but how much better? And if I took pleasure in finding rare books of minor writers that were major to me, isn’t there some kind of dignity in being a minor writer? 

All that is to say, I’d like to write more about “The First Walk Home” and share it here. If for some odd reason it doesn’t end up being the first story I complete and submit, then I’ll write about whatever that story is. The process part of making work is important regardless of the reach, cultural impact, or whether it was made by that professor at Haverford. Making something minor is infinitely better than making nothing at all.