My Life As a Writer

I learned early on that I was good with words. I began writing a novel about pirates at eight, but never finished because my dad was so proud and excited that he whisked the manuscript off and induced some poor secretary at his place of employment to type it up even though it ended literally in midsentence. By 14, I was winning the creative writing award at my junior high school two years running, and then getting to sit up on stage with the big shots at graduation because I’d composed the most heart-tugging speech. My high school English teachers oohed and aahed.

In the lonely summer before my final year of college, I composed a diatribe against The Doors just for something to do, and quickly found myself writing regularly first for the student newspaper’s arts section, and then the Los Angeles Times, and then Rolling Stone. The Monday after the Friday of my graduation (which I skipped so I could interview my idol, Pete Townshend), I began a well-paying job writing advertising and other copy at a big record company, an opportunity I failed to appreciate because of the Groucho Marx Effect — how good could any job for which I’d be hired be?

I felt the beneficiary of a case of mistaken identity; couldn’t people see that I wasn’t very good at all? Wasn’t it obvious, insofar as my reviews were concerned, that my playing this scathingly dismissive character in print was meant to conceal either that I had no idea what I was talking about, or actually didn’t care one way or the other?

I guessed not, because for around four years there, magazine editors kept inviting me to write for their magazines, and record companies kept offering me big bags of gold to write advertisements, and book editors in faraway New York were only too delighted to agree to read the unspeakably awful first novel of which I managed to grind out three sample chapters.

As I started to get better, the world became less and less interested; I’d been praised (and paid!) far out of proportion to my abilities at 23; couldn’t I, at 35, at least get a job? After years of declining income and then poverty, I took the first non-writing jobs (typing, and then word processing) of my adulthood, and boy, did I feel humiliated.

In my 30s, I wrote a great many screenplays I thought very much better than most of those being produced. None was even optioned, and most of the time I didn’t even have an agent. I finally got a literary agent, and she got me deals to write books about The Kinks and David Geffen, but it was my fiction I cared most about, and nobody wanted it. By the early 90s, I’d pretty much abandoned for good the idea of writing for a living, and turned instead to digital design — which wasn’t exactly a hardship, as I adored it, and in fact still adore it, and consider myself better at it than at writing.

I finally managed to get my fiction between hard covers while living in the UK, but had to come in through the back door. Dominatrix: The Making of Mistress Chloe, which I ghostwrote for a big reputable mainstream UK publisher in 2002, was a novel masquerading as a memoir, but no one was supposed to know.

Oops.

While working on another novel, about a body-dysmorphic guy who imagines himself into a state of painful alienation (write about what you know!) I was invited to do a biography of Kate Bush. My editor acknowledged that Bush was unlikely to cooperate, and agreed to let me add obsession with her to my fictive protagonist’s list of problems, slipping in biographical information as and when I could. Waiting for Kate Bush wound up around 20 percent biography and 80 percent fiction. A couple of people wrote very nice things about it, and it was translated into German. Kate Bush’s fans loathed it, as I pointed out that, while she’s been brilliant, she’s been unlistenably self-indulgent and silly just as often.

The editor nonetheless assigned me another book, about The Pixies, whose manager said the group would cooperate. This was splendid news, as I hadn’t much cared for what little I’d heard of them over the years, and relished the idea of writing a straightforward reportorial biography rich in fascinating detail, free of my own opinions. The manager lied, though, and the book wound up half biography/critical (very critical; the more carefully, I listened, the more I loathed The Pixies) overview, and half a series of short stories about how her love for the group affects a particular young woman over the course of 20 years’ fandom. Pixies fans wanted to disembowel me, and then feed my entrails to rabid dogs, and then to boil the dogs alive, and then to defecate in the water, and then to drown me in it, assuming I'd survived the disembowling.

I’ve since written a couple of complete novels, about a third (enough for prospective patrons to make a judgment about) of half a dozen others, about a third of two memoirs, and a screenplay. I had an adoring young woman agent in the UK who didn’t sell anything for me, and then defected to the other side, becoming an editor. I briefly had another literary agent, an ebullient Manhattan-based Aussie who predicted big things and didn’t deliver even little ones.

Trying to get another has been like removing impacted molars — of someone who refuses to open his mouth. I'll send out around 120 query letters, and in response receive maybe 20 form rejections and half a dozen invitations to send sample chapters and a synopsis. Of that half dozen, three will never be heard from again, and as we speak, the only writing I’m able to do for actual pay is for a Website devoted to triathletes (write about what you know!), and that only because the editor’s a pal. A graph with my success on one axis and the quality of my work on the other would look like a big X.

I just knew it. I should have been a rock star.

[Exciting news: On Lala.com, where you can hear my new album Sorry We're Open, I am now ranked 80,573rd; next stop: stardom! Facebookers: Read more little essays and subscribe here.

Toil and Trouble - Part I

My friend Handsomeboy, the intellectual thug (he reads Nietzsche in German on the bus on his way to brawls) recently observed that there are few existential ills that hard work can’t cure, or at least mask. I, who have been out of work (the somebody’s-official-employee kind) for all but 11 months of this decade, wholeheartedly believe him to be right. I can subsist for the time being on the money my parents left me, so the hardest part isn’t paying for groceries or shelter or a fast connection to the Internet, but making sense of each day, feeling purposeful in a world that, until a few weeks ago, felt fervently indifferent to everything I do.

For instance, on losing my most recent job in March, I, brave little soldier that I am, immediately undertook to write a commercial Stephen King-ish novel, with lots of characters, thrills ‘n’ chills by the crateful, wit, topicality, and far lovelier prose than King's. I worked hard on it, was pretty pleased with what I’d come up with, and invited around 120 literary agents to consider taking the project to market. Around 45 responded. Of those 45, 39 lamented that the book Didn’t Sound Quite Right for [Them]. The other six, to whom I sent the first 20,000 words, and a synopsis of what was to follow, thanked me for my interest and declined to represent me.[Want to see for yourself? Email me.]

It’s been like this for decades. Since co-winning the PEN Syndicated Fiction Contest in 1986, the only fiction I’ve actually published was what I sneaked into the two music biographies, of Kate Bush and The Pixies, I wrote for a UK publisher earlier this decade. In both cases readers were too incensed by what I said about their heroes (I love around a tenth of La Bush’s work, find around 70 percent of it unlistenably self-indulgent, and loathe The Pixies) to notice how sublime it was.

I’ve had a great many jobs over the years, from assisting a guy who drove around Playa del Rey peddling fruit off the back of a big truck when I was 12, to being one of the first designers hired by Deloitte & Touche San Francisco’s ultradeluxe (and ultra-ill-conceived) Web Division 122 years later. The ones I enjoyed most were assisting the fruit truck guy, taking money from motorists who sought to park at Zuma Beach, parking cars at the Tonga Lei restaurant in Malibu, and designing phone cards and other, you know, collateral for Destiny Telecomm (an elaborate pyramid scheme overseen by a charismatic evangelical) in Oakland in 1996. Those I hated most included washing dishes at the Malibu Pharmacy, busboying at Ted’s Rancho Restaurant in sort-of-Malibu, senior-editing Larry Flynt’s Chic magazine for three months that probably lopped five years off the end of my life (stratospheric stress, you see), and processing words for a big fascist law firm in San Francisco, where I was condescended to, at nearly 40, by 25-year-old recent bar-passers who couldn’t write a grammatical English sentence.

Nor was my most recent job, in New York City, from a year ago tomorrow to the beginning of this past March, a day at the beach, though I mostly loved (honestly!) having to get up early, trudge down to the train station through snow and ice (on which I took more than a few spectacular pratfalls), ride, ride, ride down to Grand Central Station, and then hurry through the armies of fellow employed people to my office a couple of blocks from the Empire State Building, all of which took no less than two hours. The job itself wasn’t much fun — I’ll tell you about it tomorrow — but for 13 hours a day, I didn’t have to confront any agonizing choices about how to make sense of the endless hours that loomed accusingly before me, and was only fleetingly beset by existential doubt ‘n’ dread.

I’ll mention briefly in closing today that I’ve gone back — at my age! — to wanting to be a rock star, toward which end I’ve just made a new album that you’ll just love if you give it half a chance. Smirking emoticon.

[From the blog For All in Tents and Porpoises. Enjoy the archive and subscribe at http://johnmendelsohn.blogspot.com]