First, a request. I’m posting earlier than usual because my last two posts about being a trial lawyer have garnered fewer views than usual. I really hope you’ll go back and read them. Those posts contain everything: a little guy who beats a cheating landlord and wins a lot of money; a charismatic, loyal man who treated me with kindness; one of the worst mistakes I ever made; and a yacht seized to pay off a judgment. The arc of history tends toward justice!
“Jarecke is brilliant, for a liberal. I laughed, I cried, I took an expensive plane flight at absolutely no expense to me, other than my reputation, so, yeah, no expense!”—Justice Sam Alito
I began thinking about how comfortable I’ve become writing lately, how much fun it is, how good at it I appear to be (no kidding, and no modesty). I let my mind wander around it during the day and typically write at night. I’ve figured out that along with misunderstanding everyone else, I’ve misunderstood myself.
I said that I raised myself; I also just realized that I taught myself to write. I’ve really had no mentors or teachers. At my MFA program, I’m not sure what the head guy was doing. Here is the only thing I ever learned from him:
Assume that you’re writing the present action of the story in past tense. Then you want to write a flashback. To show that it’s in the past, you use the past perfect. As in, “John had not known till now that he had wanted a horse.” OK, teacher, that’s fine, but do you have to keep using all of those cumbersome “hads”? No, we were taught. After about 50 words of that, you can slyly slip back into past tense. “But John didn’t have any money for a horse.” Then, when you end the flashback and come back to the present action, you need a signal: “Now John was glad he didn’t have a horse.”
That’s it. The sum total of what I remember learning from my MFA program. Oh, also, read as many stories about death as you can, but no one pays for the funeral. Well, someone has to pay for it, but it won’t be described. That’s the other thing.
No doubt this says more about me: I was too dumb to pick it up. But as we learned in the law, you take your plaintiff as you find him, so some grown-up needed to read my ill-formed fiction and realize that I was a remedial case and bring me up to speed.
After I finished my MFA, there were writers’ groups and adult education classes. I hate writers’ groups, as there’s so much jealousy and one-upmanship involved. And the criticism isn’t good. I know I’ve gotten good advice if someone makes a comment and I think, “Ah-HA! THAT’S what was wrong.” That never happened in writers’ groups.
I also took an adult education class at Duke, but same thing, and we had to discuss everyone else’s amateur stuff too much. I quit. The instructor graciously read one of my stories and said that the voice was engaging, good company, and I should keep writing, and good luck.
No one else was around to teach me anything. I hired a couple of people over the years to comment on manuscripts, but the best help came from one guy who said that my problem was that there really wasn’t anything at stake for the characters.
He was right: I brought no courage to my fiction. My horrible mother once said that she had recently read that writers generally have terrible childhoods, so I would not be successful because my childhood was happy. See how brilliant she was there? Along with destroying my spirit and making me question myself, she praised her motherly skills. Two testicles with one stone.
The fact is that I had a traumatic childhood. One shrink said it bordered on child abuse. I’ve been in therapy for decades, and the telling moment was when I’d say something about my mother and the calm therapist would suddenly look panicked, pick up a pad of paper, and start taking notes. I figure I’m in some journal somewhere.
So the pain that makes good fiction was in there; I just didn’t have the courage to confront and give voice to it. She was right for the wrong reason.
In the event, I only published two short stories in the six years after the MFA, when I was on the faculty at Auburn. Oh and one clever poem. Not enough for tenure. I wrote and wrote and wrote, but I was on a treadmill, using up a lot of energy but not getting anywhere. Having gotten an MFA, I thought I knew everything--after all I’d been certified--when I was hopelessly sprinting toward nowhere.
I didn’t want to get a Ph.D. in English lit—so much work, and they were auctioning off tenure track jobs by then anyway. And I wonder if I’d had the talent for a Ph.D. I’m a terrible reader.
The short stories in The New Yorker are beyond me, and when I finish reading a novel, generally I have no idea what it’s about. Book reviews are full of themes: this book is about love and family, that is about ambition and failure, the other is about lust and betrayal.
I want to grab the reviewer by the lapels or blouse shoulders and ask, how the fuck did you figure that out? It’s a matter of not very serious (or, at this point, very important) debate whether I’d have managed to conquer the reading for a Ph.D.
It's too bad; I was a helluva teacher. It’s my only real skill.
I went to law school, which kept me too distracted to write much. Then the practice of law, which was so challenging for me and therefore so exhausting that I had no emotional energy left for writing fiction. Still, I managed to write a little. It was some dark stuff. I was nonstop depressed from 1989 through 1999, and then off and on, usually on, till maybe 2015.
Now that I’m retired, I read voraciously. Quite often I think, “Nope, I couldn’t have written that.” Right now I’m finishing The Guest Lecture, by Martin Riker, and it’s a good example. Inventive, insightful, funny, smart. But almost as often I think, geez, I’m better than that. Given the way the industry has evolved, I doubt I could publish a novel now—you need contacts that I am without. But I’m in the process of revising a novel I wrote 20 years ago, so who knows; there are stories about 80-year old ladies with debut novels.
I didn’t feel comfortable being a lawyer till we moved out here to Seattle where finally I did what I’d learned best, to negotiate software-related transactions. When I got competent, it became boring. I was Of Counsel to a little boutique firm in a funky part of Seattle called Belltown, and I had to work with a Yalie who was always putting me down. And in the end I had to work for Amazon.com, which was horrible. One in-house Amazon lawyer said, “Fix what’s not clear and then you can send it out.” I couldn’t read her mind, and I’m not in the habit of writing contracts that are unclear. Anyway, she and the Yalie ended their conversations saying, “Moo.”
So I came to the end of my working life unfulfilled. I told myself that the problem was that I belonged in neither world, literary nor legal. I liked academic colleagues, but I didn’t fit in with the mental gymnastics, like deconstructionism. And then I hate lawyers, in general, and, if I didn’t, I despaired at the actual practice.
After I retired, I thought I should do something with myself, so I joined two State Bar committees: continuing legal education and the bar magazine. I lasted just two meetings of each. Lawyers can’t shut up, and seldom do they say anything useful. The committee chairs weren’t happy, but how about telling your members to shut up once in a while?
Then I started writing this blog. I liked it, then I really enjoyed the work, and then people began to like it. Some of the posts get well north of 150 views, and I have only about 25 subscribers. Who are these people? (If you’re one of them, tell me who you are! Please!)
A surprise: many people are amazed by my memory. Nancy and I never thought I had a particularly good one, but I guess I do. Writers tend to have excellent memories. Nabokov wrote Speak, Memory about it.
When I work on this blog, it isn’t work. I often get started at 7:00 p.m. and find myself working easily till 10:00 and I’m always surprised at how late it is. I think I’m getting better. It’s crucial that I’m writing about things that matter to me. When I was coaching lawyers on their writing, I told them to get their blood pressure up because that injected some magic into their prose. I can feel that happening with me.
My cousin Kathy Retan, a trade book editor, suggested that this blog was the first draft of a book. She pointed out a freelance editor in the Boston area, and he’s agreed to advise me on it. I’m going to pay him, so he has some financial incentive to take it on, but he said that I had a real voice that was funny, engaging, and self-deprecating. This is a third party who doesn’t know me at all. I feel encouraged.
Another thing: that novel from 20 years ago that I’m revising? It is stunningly better than it was 20 years ago. OK, I may still not be able to publish it, but somehow all of that reading I’ve done over the last 20 years has taught me, I suppose by osmosis, how to write fiction. Nancy read it and said she was sorry when it ended, which is just about the best compliment you can get.
When we were in law school, some funny guy who followed professional wrestling avowed that the iconic announcer Gordon Solie was “on a crash course with self-realization.” Suddenly I get that.
So I’ve been wrong all of these years. I’ve misunderstood myself. I didn’t belong to either world, OK, but I’m a writer, and I always was. I just take a solitary route, which is what I thought you were supposed to do all the time. Now it is up to me, in the time I have left, to make the best use of these talents. If it means writing this small-time blog, so be it. I’m content. Most important, I finally get myself. I’m happy, which is a very new thing.
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