On Not Giving Up

Thoughts on a Lifetime of Writing

Dear Republic,

ROL is deeply moved by this piece. Hope you enjoy!

-The Editor

ON NOT GIVING UP

I am 74 years old. I no longer believe my writer dream will come true. My dream was that I would become a successful novelist and/ or playwright. My plays would be performed by professional actors in theaters in the big cities. My novels would be purchased by many, reviewed in newspapers and magazines. My name would be linked with the other “literary” writers. When I was young, the USA still had famous writers — Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer. I wanted to be like them.

What did I think was going to happen? What really happened?

When I got my first rejection from The New Yorker, I was only 19. I put a frame around it and hung it on the wall. I led people into my room (I was still living with my parents) and showed it to them. “Look at that.” My friends were impressed. No kidding. I mean, when The New Yorker sends you a form rejection, clearly you are on your way. Or so I thought.

Key ingredients for a writer, or at least the ones I possessed. Write every day; get up early, stay up late, find half an hour. Write. And then write some more. It helps if you overestimate the quality of everything you write. Never stop. Probably, almost certainly, you are not writing well. Editors and agents will tell you this by sending you rejection letters. Over the decades, I accumulated hundreds, thousands of rejections.

Every now and then, someone liked something I wrote, praised it, published it, produced it. Those little victories were all I needed. What did Emily Dickinson say, Hope is the Thing with Feathers.

I was a manic reader. An addict. I wanted to be a famous and acclaimed writer, so I imitated the style of all my favorites, my motley crew of influences: Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, J. P. Donleavy, Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Ray Bradbury.

When I was 20, I wrote my first novel. Then, I wrote four more. By then, I was infected with Dickens, his stream of verbal inventions, his ear for dialect, his social conscience, broad humor, and cartoonish characters with funny names. I wanted to become the New Dickens.

My college profs, some of them, took a liking to me. They encouraged me to be like them. Go to grad school. Learn to teach. Write about writers. I got scholarships, stipends. I met a lovely woman named Susie. Fell in love. Got married. I recommend love and marriage.

This was in the days when writers typed everything on expensive paper. A submission required a large envelope and a self-addressed return envelope in case of rejection. I spent a small fortune on postage.

While working on my dissertation, I got my first computer. A tiny dark screen. Letters that glowed green. And a printer, the kind that uses scrolls of paper with little holes in the edges. While I was writing my dissertation, I was also writing a lurid novel called Death Rattle. It was a dark and comic version of Hamlet, set in the American Midwest, in the state where I lived, Iowa. In those days, I often chose oddball projects. Come to think of it, I have always chosen oddball projects. Using a similar notion (a novel set in Iowa, based on a Shakespeare play) but choosing feminism and King Lear instead of Dickensian humor and Hamlet, a novelist named Jane Smiley wrote a novel called A Thousand Acres. My novel was dreadful and never got published. Hers was excellent, sold like crazy, and won a Pulitzer.

I felt crappy about the failure of Death Rattle, but in a way I felt good. I told myself I had not completely missed the target. The faithful ego and its unfailing ability to believe in itself. Bless its little heart.

I pursued agents and editors. When I was in my thirties, one of my novels was picked up by an agent. That novel was titled Chinaface and was about a spiritual teacher, a short man who wore a strange ceramic mask, a china face, and had a flock of disciples, old ladies. Unbeknownst to me, one of the many agents I sent it to turned out to be a real old lady. She thought my novel was brilliant. And continued to think so until it was rejected by a dozen editors. Then, with regret, she gave up on me.

Fantasy, sci fi, romance, humor, historical fiction, you name it, I wrote it.

I was picked up by another agent for a different project. I had sent him a sample of an unfinished novel. A tiny fellow no bigger than your thumb lived in a world of Talking Insects, many of whom vaguely resembled Dickens characters. By then, my prose was getting sharper, and I had discovered irony. Unfortunately, I got so big-headed when the agent called me and said he loved the bug stories, I ruined my novel by turning it into a dark and convoluted epic about a conflicted hero who spent 300 pages trapped underground in the complete darkness of an Ant Nest. This choice proved unwise.

The agent sent me back my manuscript, a very fat slab of paper.

My teaching career went much better than my fiction career. I finished grad school and got a job at a small college. It turned out I had a knack for getting students excited about masterpieces of literature.

I wrote a novel loosely based on Greek mythology. One of the editors who had “almost” liked it remembered me years later. His company was producing a series of what they called “educational novels.” Three kids and their talking cat have “adventures in learning.” He offered to pay me handsomely to write a book in the series. The kids and their cat would find out about Greek mythology. I like to say, “When they will only pay you to write a book about a talking cat, at least make sure the cat has something interesting to say.”

When the mythology book didn’t sell many copies, the same company paid me to write a similar book about spelling. Just try to write a fun and entertaining book about spelling. Go on, I dare you.

Neither book sold well enough for the publisher to commission a third, but the advances paid for the down payment on our house.

By then, I knew a bunch of college professors, my colleagues at the small college that employed me. I befriended two drama professors who put on plays every semester. I met friends of theirs, people who ran a community theater.

I wrote a dozen plays. Most of them were produced by amateur theater companies. My theater friends produced four of them. Two of my plays were published and one of those was produced 16 times (community theaters and high schools). I had a lovely time watching those plays get produced, but I made almost no money. I never could have made a living from writing; I made a living as a college professor.

My kids grew up, went out on their own, prospered.

Just before the pandemic arrived, I retired. Retirement turns out to be a lovely thing. No responsibilities. It is a bit like being a teenager in the summer again, except you have grey hair and a paunch. And more money.

When Covid closed the theaters, I went back to writing novels. I wrote five in the five years after I retired. That is what daily writing can do for you. I was a man on a mission. The first one is an autobiographical novel about a teenager named Jack DeWitt who like me grew up in a factory town in the 1960s. The civil rights movement, antiwar protests, the Beatles. I started emailing chapters to anyone who asked. Friends, former students, family members. One of my former students knew a woman who had worked for a textbook firm for years. She had left her job, gone out on her own, and created her own little publishing company. My former student connected me to this woman.

By then my tale about Jack DeWitt had grown so big, it had turned into two novels. She published both of them. I launched them in a bar, surrounded by friends who kept buying me drinks. The first Jack novel sold a hundred and fifty copies. The second sold fifty. My publisher eventually gave up. No one wants to lose money forever. She restored the rights to my novels to me. The editor I met along the way, the one who commissioned me to write the books about the kids and their talking cat, took pity on me and republished my novels under a new imprint. They still haven’t sold many copies, but at least they are in print.

I found my next publisher online in a Facebook group dedicated to writers. She too had her own small press (in England). She announced she was open for submissions – for one week. I jumped into that window and sent her a sample of RONALD, the boy who was allergic to everything, a tale similar to The Boy in the Plastic Bubble. By then, we had all experienced the pandemic lockdowns. Maybe isolation was a universal experience. Maybe a kid stuck in his room would strike a chord. She published RONALD and then another novel, one called POSY, about two grad students who live in a university town. One is a bisexual alcoholic, and the other is a genius poet, or at least hopes she is.

JACK DEWITT IS CLUELESS, JACK DEWITT IS AN IDIOT, RONALD THE BOY WHO WAS ALLERGIC TO EVERYTHING, and POSY. As I type this little essay, those four books written by me are sitting in a pile three feet from my elbow.

Four little dreams that came true.

Did any of my novels turn into a bestseller? Win an award? Inspire a Netflix series?

Nope.

I’ve been posting my fifth novel on Substack. Every weekend, I post another chapter. It too is an oddball project, THE YEAR OF THE MURDERS, a murder mystery without any murders. A young professor with two kids gets a job at a small Catholic college. And then nuns start dying. He isn’t killing them. They die of natural causes. But rumors fly anyway. “St Mary’s, Where Nuns Come to Die.” “Who’s Next?” And then the press gets interested.

Do I have thousands of paying subscribers? I do not.

What is that famous definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

It is clear to me that my dream of becoming a popular and acclaimed writer is never going to come true. And yet, I go on writing. I like doing that. I get up early, drink coffee, and type. Characters, sentences, scenes, dialogue. None of that ever loses its charm for me. It’s curious. When one is young, writing without much success is a way of feeling important. When one is old, writing is a way of reminding oneself to be humble.

Gary Arms was born long ago. He married his true love, Susie. Two kids. Taught literature classes at a college for many years. Retired. Wrote some books and plays and poems.