Don’T Tell Me Your Wife Likes It: Writing and Publishing a First Novel

By Ronald C. Gordon

In 2009, Ronald C. Gordon published Not Fade Away, a coming-of-age story set in Texas in 1959. A first novel, it was the product of many drafts, considerable professional editing, and a long, arduous attempt to find an agent and publisher. Now, in Dont Tell Me Your Wife Likes It (one particular literary agents sole criterion for submissions to him), Mr. Gordon recounts his painful and frequently hilarious rollercoaster ride to publication.

The author details not only the joys and frustrations of creating a long work of fiction, but also the many pitfalls and compromises that await the first novelist with a marketable manuscript. He introduces us to the How-To tribe of Literary Wannabeeland, the horde of self-described experts who claim to know all the rules for writing saleable fiction and who, for a price (financial and otherwise), will share the secret to success with their even more numerous prey. He also explores the particular problems that await the author of literary fiction in a publishing marketplace dominated by genre fiction and a mythical target audience he designates dumb and dumber. In doing so, the author demonstrates a profound understanding of literary history, the craft of writing, and the role of autobiography in creating fiction. Above all, he convinces us that a good writer is first of all a good reader.

Part memoir, part literary analysis, and a thoroughly cautionary tale, Dont Tell Me Your Wife Likes It offers an entertaining and illuminating examination of what it means to be a unknown, unpublished novelist in todays highly competitive literary marketplace.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479797561

Ronald C. Gordon

In 2009, author Ronald C. Gordon published a first novel entitled Not Fade Away. His new book, Don’t Tell Me Your Wife Likes It, is a memoir recounting the writing of that novel and his long struggle to publish it. He has recently completed Yesterday’s Gone, a sequel to Not Fade Away, and is currently at work on Dancing in the Dark, a memoir of growing up with the movies. Mr. Gordon lives with his wife, Debra, in Houston, Texas.

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Prologue

The Problem

I consider myself a serious novelist, an artist, if only because I write with the speed of Flaubert. The subject of this particular book, however, encompasses not only art but also commerce and the conflict between the two in a literary marketplace dominated increasingly, if not exclusively, by genre fiction. The truth is I am an artist not only because I write with the speed of Flaubert. That is my blessing and my curse.

To write a first novel is one thing, and no small accomplishment, but to write a saleable first novel is quite another. (To write a second novel, saleable or otherwise, is a separate tale altogether.) So my concern here is as much with the marketing, or nonmarketing, as the writing of my first novel. It’s not a how-to book. If anything, it’s a how-not-to story. Kids, don’t try this at home.

In my case, the marketing was a long—an eon being the most useful unit of measure—and painful process, much more so than the actual writing of the novel, by which I mean, say, the first three or four drafts. Along the way, I’ve accumulated more than a few scores to settle, but that isn’t among my purposes here. Not that the prospect isn’t a tempting one. But I’m bigger than that. Actually, I’m not, so I’ll no doubt yield to temptation—later or sooner.

I’ve read a lot of fiction, good and bad and all stops in between. In this book, I mention a number of writers, great or famous or both, but for illustrative purposes only. I do not presume to equate myself with writers of the highest merit or stature, literary or commercial, or to suggest that what works for them works no less effectively for me. My views of what works or even what is at work are my own, informed by my reading, but neither systematic nor accredited. In other words, they are opinions.

I began by calling myself a serious novelist. But in the following pages, I make use of less serious or less literary fiction, which I read avidly and which has its own standards of excellence. I exclude (for the most part) only the alluring category of trash reading, which offers the same pleasures as junk movies. Standards exist, and the pleasures are genuine, but nonliterary. I also frequently reference novels and movies interchangeably, as if I recognize no distinction between them. I do, but in the commercial marketplace, that distinction is becoming all but impossible to discern.

Some names have been changed to protect, not the innocent, but myself. Sorry, no footnotes or bibliography. Sue me. Despite the name changes, someone will anyway.

It seems a simple proposition. You write a novel.

It looks like a novel, reads like a novel. Narrative, dialogue, description, not too many adverbs ending in ly. (Cleverly, you’ve edited as you go, even in that first draft.) Oh, and it’s got a plot too, a beginning, a middle, and an end. And solid characters as well as action. A novel even Aristotle would love.

You try to sell it. If it’s any good, someone will buy it. Sooner or later. You think.

Think again.

It soon becomes a more complicated proposition. No one will buy the novel or attempt to sell it for you to someone who might buy it, without reading it. Seems reasonable. You get the right person to read it. Your wife likes it. Some of your friends like it. Not that you press the latter too hard, lest you discover they didn’t really read the draft you gave them. Not all of it anyway. Your former English teacher loves it. You know he’s read it because he loves the adroit simile buried on page 237—this is long before any darlings get murdered—but then he’s not exactly impartial. He turned you on to the writer’s life, as lived by Fitzgerald and Hemingway, in eleventh grade.

It doesn’t take long for you to learn a few Big Truths about the marketplace. Big Truth #1: you’re seeking not a sale but a read. Big Truth #2: you’ll never get a read if you send the manuscript directly to a publisher. The last such novel read, let alone published, was probably Castle Rackrent. The underpaid reader with the MFA in creative writing from Brown and an eating disorder from Scarsdale (sorry, I held out as long as I could) saw the name Maria Edgeworth and having been instructed to look for something edgy went for it. When Melville referred to dead letters in Bartleby, the Scrivener, he no doubt had a slush pile in mind.

The real complications begin with Big Truth Number #3. To be published in the traditional manner, a novelist needs an agent. The good news: it’s easier—in theory at least, like winning a powerball lottery—to get a read with an agent than with a publisher. The bad news, a.k.a. catch-22, to get an agent, the novelist needs to be a published writer.

It’s like the conundrum many people face in first applying for credit. In order to obtain credit, they have to establish credit. In order to establish credit, they have to have credit. Maybe they get around this by having a cosigner the first time they borrow money, but I realized very quickly that Joyce Carol Oates or Pat Conroy wasn’t going to cosign my novel, and I’m not sure I’d have wanted either of them to do so. It would be like your parents still having a claim on you as an adult because they guarantee your first car loan. (Parental claims being complex and eternal, perhaps they do.)

Maybe you establish credit by obtaining and using wisely a credit card with a very low limit. In this application of the analogy, you sell a short story or two to a magazine. You become a published writer. College literary magazine not allowed, but you’ve moved way beyond that. After all, you’ve written a novel. The New Yorker or Harper’s will grease the skids nicely.

The problem is, with magazines of that caliber and lacking an agent, you’re back to the slush pile. Better the little or literary magazines. Build a resume that will impress agents. Perhaps win a prize. The little magazines that do pay don’t pay much, but money isn’t the issue. Yet.

This can be an effective approach, but it rests on some questionable assumptions. First, the author wants to write short stories. Second, he or she has an idea for a saleable story or stories. Third, and most important, a short story is only a shorter form of a novel rather than a different form, particularly at a length that would make it saleable. It isn’t. In its compression, a short story resembles a sonnet, not an epic poem. Its effect is immediate, not cumulative.

Split the difference then. Publish a short story—length excerpt from the novel. This has the additional advantage of providing a preview of the novel itself, of perhaps whetting the appetites not only of agents and acquisitions editors but also of reviewers and readers. Maybe make the agent’s job easier after he or she takes you on as a client.

Except that no one will publish any part of an unpublished novel by an unpublished novelist. Maybe they would if the excerpt had the unity and concision of a short story. And what portion would that be? Chapter 1? What happens to the characters after that chapter? If chapter 1pays off like a short story, it isn’t chapter 1. So what’s it doing in a novel? Ditto any other chapter, especially the last. If it is has the setup and payoff of a short story, why’d you even write the novel?

Maybe it isn’t a novel but a collection of short stories linked by time, place, characters, or all three. Congratulations, you’ve written Dubliners! Try getting it published in today’s marketplace without the name James Joyce attached to it. No one wants a book with the word gnomon on page 1 and a last chapter called The Dead.

Maybe you should just write the screenplay first, the one you were going to write after the novel was published and a success, the one that was going to make you real money no matter what the novel did commercially and, not incidentally, win you an Academy Award. Flipping things around isn’t exactly what you imagined, but it might lead to the publication of the novel. Assuming of course that the screenplay actually gets written and that you can get a read for it, followed by representation, sale, and, eventually, production. Assuming too that it’s still your screenplay. And the Oscar—is it for original screenplay or adapted screenplay? In either event, you’re now identified—indeed, branded—as a screenwriter. And being a screenwriter when you want to be a novelist is like being Pinocchio instead of a real boy. Someone else is always pulling the strings, and you’re trying to survive in the belly of a beast. A place where even the dumbest starlets are smart enough not to sleep with the writer.

These few examples don’t begin to exhaust the complications and the seeming resolution of them that ensue with the writing of a first novel by an otherwise unknown, unpublished writer. Welcome to the fun house, an industry unto itself.

Query letters, proposals, synopses, outlines, sample chapters, the weeks or months of waiting for a reply, the form—letter rejections with the occasional gift of a single scrawled and scathing comment or the damning-with-faint-praise that passes as kindness.

How-to books: how to write a novel; how to write a query letter; how to find an agent, an editor, a publisher. Regional publishers, vanity presses, book packages, e-publication, paperback publication, self-publication.

Writers’ magazines, writers’ Web sites, writers’ chat rooms, seminars and symposia on writing, writing competitions. The special hell of workshops and writing groups, with their perpetual clash of preening egoism and self-flagellating defensiveness. Literary conferences and retreats, the middle-tier genre writers who star at them, and the desperate wannabees who pay to dance attendance on these pseudo-celebrities, convinced that a single clever question or fawning praise of Murder by Beef Bourguignon will somehow end in publication of their nine-hundred-page historical novel, a fictionalized epic about the heroic westward trek of pioneer ancestors from St. Paul to Minneapolis.

Unscrupulous agents, reading fees, phony contracts, spurious marketing mavens. Above all, promises, promises, promises. For a price, Ugarti, a price. False leads, false hopes, false advertising, false advice, false prophets dispensing false wisdom. (Sell everything and move to New York.) Rejection disguised as opportunity, an endless dance known as the string along.

I’ve experienced them all. And then some. I was the biggest wannabee that ever went down the money pit into Wannabeeland.

PART I

Backstory

Chapter 1

The Autobiographical Element: Part I

When it comes to first novels, certain truisms apply:

Many, if not most, are coming-of-age stories.

Many, if not most, have first-person narration.

Many, if not most, make direct use of events and persons from the author’s own life.

Many, if not most, have young authors.

No less obvious are the factors that link these statements. In most cases, young writers have a small stock of observation and incident to draw upon, simply because they are young and the central experience of their lives is growing up and the forms of education it involves. These are the only certainties they know. First-person narration serves both a technical and substantive purpose. It is the easiest point of view for the apprentice novelist to manage, and it gives a sense of legitimacy, however spurious, to the autobiographical material by seeming to eliminate the issue of narrative distance. It produces a sort of negative-negative capability, the equivalent of an algebraic positive. First-time novelists of any age may have a broader range of experience but lack the artistic assurance to render it except from a personal, positive perspective. The seasoned writer—Henry James in The Ambassadors, Joseph Conrad in Lord Jim—uses personal experience no less frequently, but much more obliquely and effectively. Only a gifted ironist could write a masterwork about his own unlived life (or the complementary The Beast in the Jungle about the emotional withdrawal of the artist-observer). Only a supreme symbolist could transform the desertion of an oppressed Poland into a leap from the tramp steamer Patna. It’s not incidental to point out that both books demonstrate a sophisticated use of point of view. But the novice should probably abide by a simple precept: Don’t fuck with omniscience.

To the first two of the four points listed above, I plead guilty. Not Fade Away is a coming-of-age story with a first-person narrator. To the fourth, I cannot; and to the third, I do not.

I was over forty when I began Not Fade Away. The Buddy Holly connection was there from the start, though the title wasn’t. The idea had been percolating in my mind at least since 1971, when Don McLean recorded American Pie. Before I ever had a novel, I had an epigraph from McLean’s lyrics (though the published novel doesn’t have one): Do you recall what was revealed/The day the music died?

In fact, the original impetus to the novel occurred years before, not in an incident but an image—that of a pretty dark-haired teenaged girl sitting on her front lawn on a sunny spring afternoon. I was a teenager myself, fifteen years old, Andy Lerner’s age in the novel. She was older than I by a year or so. This was in Clai—uh, Houston, in 1962.

Some friends and I were riding around on a Sunday afternoon. You could still get a driver’s license in Texas at fourteen, and most families of my acquaintance had more than one car, cars and gas being cheap then, even in relative terms. It was another guy’s car that Sunday, and we were driving through a neighborhood known to us as the ghetto—the area off Stella Link Boulevard where many of Houston’s Jews lived.

We all knew each other, or of each other, or so it seemed. Houston was already a big booming city, with an even bigger boom just beginning. But there were only four synagogues: two Reform, one Conservative, one Orthodox. For Southern Jews, assimilation was an article of faith, so the Orthodox congregation didn’t count, and the Conservative one, though a vigorous via media, was smaller than the two Reform congregations. In any case, the heart of social life for most Jewish teenagers was not the temple but the Jewish Community Center on Hermann Drive, where multiple chapters of the B’nai B’rith high school fraternity and sorority, AZA and BBG, met and mingled.

After one meeting, several of us were riding around the ghetto, having already dropped off somebody else. We stopped to talk to someone we knew out on his or her front lawn or driveway on that pleasant afternoon, one of the last before the interminable, intolerable heat began. I don’t remember anything else about the incident, not even whose car I was riding in. Whomever we stopped to talk to, the girl was sitting outside the house next door.

A pretty Jewish girl with long dark hair, large brown eyes, and a slim but womanly figure, sitting on the lush green front lawn like a swan in repose—legs under her full skirt arranged not only decorously but artfully around them, bobby socks and suede penny loafers peeking out from under it. Perfect calm, perfect composure, an attitude entirely unaffected. A sixteen-year-old beauty with a reputation that belied her repose. I never knew exactly how she’d acquired that reputation, except that of course it had to do with sex. I knew her only by name—and the reputation. That was the last glimpse I had of her. My widowed mother married her longtime boyfriend in June, and we moved to California.

Only after writing Not Fade Away did I understand why that image persisted in me. The girl represented not only erotic possibility but its fulfillment. At the same time, her composure suggested some quality soft and nurturing. I saw her at once in the beautiful, perfect mother sitting on her front stoop in Park Slope in Paul Auster’s The Brooklyn Follies (2006). All right, I know what you’re thinking. If you’re not, you should be.

Or maybe not. Maybe just a pretty girl sitting on her front lawn who somehow became Judy Berman sitting at the soda fountain in Dexter’s Drugstore on June 1, 1959. I wish I could say the girl on the lawn looked up and smiled at me, as Judy does at Andy, but she didn’t. On the other hand, she didn’t need to. She only needed to be there. As the film critic David Thomson remarks, writing of Donna Reed in From Here to Eternity, she had the sure look of a first love that lasts forever… There is a dream in American movies that the girl who looks like mother may be a sexual paradise—and that a slut is really a good girl. And Andy Lerner is obsessed with movies.

More about that later. The point here is that I never knew Judy Berman or had a relationship with her. I made her up. I fabricated her and everything that happens between her and Andy. The same is true of virtually every incident in Not Fade Away. I tell readers of the book that only one actually happened to me. That is true. Most people think it’s the beating-up scene, and I get asked if I was ever similarly beaten almost as much as I get asked whether Andy and Judy actually had sex or not. The answer to the latter is, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. To the former question, the answer is no. I wasn’t an imposing physical specimen at fifteen and was reminded of it frequently enough, but I could run faster than Andy.

And yet at an age when I had experienced much more than adolescence, I wrote a coming-of-age novel set at the time when I was an adolescent in a barely disguised version of the city where I spent most of my boyhood. Though the events didn’t happen to me, I drew other characters—even Judy Berman—from people around me.

I did what every novelist does, young and old, novice and master. I’d suggest that coming-of-age novels are no more autobiographical than any other type of fiction. If they seem to be, it’s because, almost by definition, they offer a less refined version of the autobiographical element. I’d also guess that first-person narration is no more common to them than to any other category or genre of fiction. It may simply be that first-person point of view is particularly suitable to the coming-of-age story, as it is to detective stories and for the same reason. Both genres deal with discovery, and in the first person, the reader discovers things only as the protagonist does. The problem with many first novels is not that they are autobiographical coming-of-age narratives in the first person, but that they are event driven, and the events recalled rather than fully imagined. Been there. Done that. So what? All fiction is inherently and profoundly autobiographical, but if it were only autobiographical, everyone would have a novel in them crying out for transcription and presentation to the world. (Guess what. Everyone doesn’t.)

When autobiographical first novels succeed, it’s because the author achieves sufficient distance from autobiography substantially to reimagine his or her own life. To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway, the writer always begins with reality but finally produces something more interesting and significant than the original experience. In two supreme first novels—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Swann’s Way (in Proust’s case, I exclude the unfinished false start, Jean Santeuil)—the autobiographical features are barely disguised at all. It isn’t what Philip Roth calls the facts that matter, but what the writer does with them.

Okay, Joyce and Proust, genius trumps everything, as it does for James and Conrad. (How many of us can mine the anxiety of moving, in middle age, to a new home to produce The Turn of the Screw?) But if so, then we have to consider the rather ludicrous notion that autobiographical novels, especially first novels, are either works of genius or abject failures. In fact, there’s a broad middle ground occupied by works as various as Of Human Bondage, The Way of All Flesh, Clayhanger, This Side of Paradise, and Other Voices, Other Rooms.

Sometimes, everything hangs on the autobiographical element, two major examples in American fiction being Invisible Man and To Kill a Mockingbird. Neither