Brave New Story

From the spring of 1973, when I was not quite sixteen and got it in my head that I wanted to make my living as a writer, until just about a year ago I functioned within the same basic story of how you make it in this business: You write or propose a book, send it to your agent in New York who sends it to editors, get an advance, revise or finish the thing, wait a while, hope for prestigious reviews, go on your book tour and move on from there.

      I lived that story from the time I started sending immature novels to agents in 1976 through that day in August 1981 when an agent—a real New York agent!—consented to represent The Beaver Papers, and that day eight months later when an editor—a real New York editor!—decided to buy it, and on through my sale of The Undressing of America to FSG a couple of years ago. There were times I couldn't make that story work for me, and times my frustration with trying to please those New York gatekeepers nearly made me want to give up on books. But the story always brought me back. It had been the defining narrative of the writer's life since before I'd come along—in my twenties I liked anecdotes about Scott Fitzgerald's dealings with Harold Ober and Maxwell Perkins—and I assumed it would go on being so for the rest of my career and beyond. Even when I got into the National Lampoon and comic books and screenplays because I couldn't crash those gates in New York, I was still always trying to come up with book ideas that would interest agents and editors. And when I started to sell books more regularly, I said to myself, "This is it. I can live the story now."
   

      Now, in just the last year, I've seen that story coming unraveled. It's still common, of course, and it may still be the story I live by for a while. When Undressing is done I'll send my agent a proposal for my next book and hope she sells it too to FSG, or some other big New York house. But it's becoming increasingly clear that it's not the way. The book business is shrinking, probably faster than anyone wants to admit yet. The latest scuttlebutt is that Borders Books is running on debt and when its current loan comes due next April it will, unless there's some drastic upturn in retail book sales in the next few months, have to close its doors. The loss of an outlet that big will take more than a few publishers down with it. Meanwhile, purchases of electronic books are skyrocketing, and channels for distributing those are taking forms that look more iTunes or YouTube than any book publisher. 
   

      I've been hearing more writer friends than ever before talking about how unhappy they are with their agents and how badly they want to find an agent who knows how to sell them, and bit by bit we're all starting to piece together that it isn't the agents that are the problem, it's the market. Lately the hallway conversations at the Writers' Grotto, where I share office space with about thirty other practitioners of the same trade, are less and less about how to find the right agent or publisher, and more and more about whether it makes sense to look into BookSource or Lulu or Scribd or the many other variants on what used to be the scorned netherworld of self publishing. 
    

      There's a part of me that likes the adventure of finding new ways to get my words read and new ways to make a living, a part of me that likes the idea of being free of the usual New York gatekeepers. And there's a part of me that's glad I still have irons in other fires, in case books don't turn out to be the main work of my autumn years after all. But there's a part of me that just grieves for the story. As infuriating as the tastes and whims and arbitrary demands of agents and editors could be, as much as I resented their control of the writer's life and wished there were other ways to sell my words, I guess I took more comfort than I ever knew from the continuity of the business, its rituals and rules, its punishments and triumphs.

      That continuity linked me to my younger self with his wild ideas of "being a writer" and to the long-gone writers who filled my imagination. Print-on-demand and digital downloads may well prove to be lucrative and liberating. They're just not the story I set out to tell with my life.

This Is a Good Thing. Really.

There was a time when the news that someone else was already writing a book about Bernarr Macfadden would have paralyzed me.

      See, I'm contracted to write this book called The Undressing of America for FSG, about how the "culture of concealing" was overthrown in the early Twentieth Century by the "culture of revealing"—more specifically, how that change was manifested through the creation of True Story magazine in 1919 and the subsequent explosion of tabloids, confessionals, movie gossip, true crime, and all the rest. Bernarr Macfadden was the publisher of True Story, and a bridge from the radical health-and-freedom movements of the late Victorian years (nudism, body building, sex ed when it was illegal, planned parenthood when it was really illegal) to the sensationalism that overtook and drove forward the love of explicitness that distinguished the '20s and just keeps snowballing through the present. (If you want to finesse a point, you can call him the father of reality media.) He's inescapably significant to the story, and for quite a while I thought my book would be something of a life story of Macfadden, all the big cultural developments to be viewed through him.

      To be honest, I wasn't so very interested in writing a life story of Macfadden. His was a fascinating life, but what drew me to the subject were other elements. It just seemed like that's what the book should be. So had the news hit me any time in the past year that Harper would be bringing out Mark Adams's Mr. America: How Muscular Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation through Sex, Salad and the Ultimate Starvation Diet  in March 2009, my heart would have dropped through the floor. Especially since there was once a chancemy book might come out in late 2009. Somehow "the second Bernarr Macfadden biography of the year" doesn't sound look good opening buzz.

      But a funny thing happened on the way to Mr. America. Actually a lot of things, some not so funny: my son's struggles with chronic migraines, for one, which was the first big reason I didn't start on The Undressing of America when I planned to. But there were a lot of other things, some really too minor to explain my stalling the book, clearly stand-ins for an aversion to doing the work. I just couldn't get my head clear on what this book was supposed to be or why I was supposed to be excited about writing it. By early this year I'd carved out some time and declared my intention either to write this book or give it up. But still I stalled and avoided. Until a friend sent me an email with the subject line "Seen this?" and a link to a review of the new Bernarr Macfadden biography.

      I'll confess to some dread and anxiety. For a minute I even kicked myself for not having written my book more quickly, before I reminded myself that even by the original plan my publication would have fallen after Mark's book. That's when I began to realize what a gift this was—not only Mr. America, which turned out to be a thorough and delightful biography, but the delays and procrastinations that enabled me to read it before getting deep into my own book.

      My editor's first reaction to the news was, literally, "Yikes!" But within a couple of days he was suggesting exactly what I was thinking, and what I think I had been groping toward all along: it's essential now that my book focus not on the long life of Bernarr Macfadden but on the cultural phenomena themselves, on the perfect storm of the '20s, on all the peculiar characters who swirled around Macfadden and competed with him and tried to shut him down. Especially since Mark's book focuses mainly on Macfadden's first career as a fitness and diet guru, with only a passing mention of his time as a publishing maven. Suddenly William Randolph Hearst, Joseph Medill Patterson, Fulton Oursler, and Anthony Comstock have much bigger roles. And suddenly I was able to turn out a detailed chapter breakdown in a hurry that my editor approved in an instant.

      When things like this happen I find myself believing that some sort of literary God is watching out for my career—a comforting thought, especially when I tend to great every stumbling block with dread and self-criticism. Although why He decided that my Men of Tomorrow screenplay, the best thing I have ever written by far, would be trapped for two years in my producer's Chapter 11 nightmare has yet to be revealed.

Just Don't Tell Me I'm Good

I'm used to good reviews and blurbs on my books, mostly of the "lucid and entertaining" sort. Sometimes I'll get an "eye-opening" or even "brilliantly constructed." My books are praised mainly (as usually happens with nonfiction) for their interesting subject matter and my ability to lay it out clearly and compellingly. I've rarely gotten much praise for the writing itself, for whatever I bring that's uniquely mine—until my latest book, Men of Tomorrow. I hit something with that one, stylistically and emotionally, that made people notice. There were some head-turning blurbs—"a constant delight" (Michael Chabon), "a magnificent piece of work" (Alan Moore)—and reviews to match, as well as some positively gushing reactions at readings. All of which made me a bit nervous and set off the voices in my head saying, "It can't really be that good." (An easy argument for me to make, because the book was about comic-book history, a subject that's inspired a lot of writing but not much writerly writing, if you know what I mean.) But at the same time it excited me. I wanted to jump into the next book.

      Then the worst happened. A great editor told me I was good. And he wanted to work with me.

Eric Chinski came up through Oxford University Press, then moved to Houghton-Mifflin, where he called attention to himself by discovering Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated on the slush pile. He moved to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the most prestigious purveyors of a certain sort of damn-the-marketplace literary writing, where he became editor-in-chief in what seemed (to me) like an absurdly short time. His specialty is literary fiction, and he was once quoted in Poets & Writers as saying, "an editor's job is basically to fall in love with a book and then to help it be more of what it already is." A writer's editor, the kind you fantasize about impressing when you're twenty years old and gradually come to think doesn't exist anymore.

      Eric loved the voice and the storytelling in Men of Tomorrow and called my agent to say he wanted to work with me. He didn't want me to write more about comic books, he didn't have any particular subject he wanted out of me, he just wanted to work with me. I had some half-baked ideas in my head about the early tabloids and True Story magazine and Macfadden Publications and ran them by him—still only baked around the edges and pretty gooey in the middle—and he said "go for it." Not literally "go for it." It was one of those, "All of us here at FSG are excited about...blah blah," emails. But the gist was, if it's fun cultural history and it's written by Gerard Jones, then it's what Eric wants.Which was good for about two days of euphoric fantasies about blowing away the critics and making FSG my literary home forever and ever.

      Until the terror hit. How could I possibly ever be half as good as this "Gerard Jones" whom Eric Chinski has somehow mistaken me for?

       During the same period I was freezing up royally on "the FSG book" (as I came to call it, in a neurotic fixation on who was waiting for it instead of what it was) my office mate Po Bronson started unveiling pieces of Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children, a book he and Ashley Merryman are writing. The first piece was an article in the New York Times that basically said, "Don't praise your kids." Or, rather, acknowledge them for working hard and doing their best, but don't try to pump them up with messages like, "you're so smart" or "you're so talented" or "you're very, very special." Because a kid will hear, "This is what mom and dad want me to be," which becomes, "This is what I'm supposed to be and if I don't live up to it all the time then I'm no good." And expectations like that...well, to invoke Philip Larkin, they fuck you up. They don't mean to, but they do. Po and Ashley rolled out a lot of hard data showing that kids who've been regularly told they're remarkable tend to perform much less impressively and end up a lot less happy with themselves than kids who've just been encouraged to keeping showing up and working hard.

      I think the hardest job I've had in getting from frozenness to fluidity on this book has been shutting up those voices that tell me I'm supposed to be smart or talented or special. Because the truth is, the only reason Men of Tomorrow impressed anyone is that I worked really hard on it. It sounds cruel, but the best thing I can do for myself now is pound home the truth that I'm really not special at all. I just have a fair amount of evidence that if I show up and work I can make something that somebody will like.

New Day

A year ago I wrote about how dearly I wished I could enjoy a Presidents' Day with a President I was actually proud, and how long it had been since I'd felt that, and how it looked as though I might actually get my wish this year. My success records on predictions like that isn't especially impressive: just a few months before that I'd ventured that it looked as though my screenplay might actually go into production in 2008, and almost immediately afterward I got the notice that my producer had gone into Chapter 11. But this time, this time, I was right.

       I wrote about how I'd grown up on my father's reminiscences of FDR, how wonderful and impossible it seemed that a President could have such power to inspire his people. I wish my father could see and comprehend that we finally, again, have a president with at least a portion of that power, that we may be entering another time of national reimagining like the one Roosevelt led my dad's country through when he was twelve years old. My dad's still here: he turned eighty-eight just eleven days ago. There just isn't enough left of his cognitive powers for him to grasp what I'm saying about that handsome black man on the TV. Sometimes I think he's got it for an instant, although maybe that's just my wishful thinking.

       Also a year ago I wrote about how I wished my mother could have lived to see this election. She loved Hillary Clinton, and I know she would have loved Barack Obama too, and I wish I'd had the chance to talk to her about the process of decision she would have to go through. My mother was a feminist and a civil rights activist, and as painful as the choices of February would have been, I know the triumph of November would have been one of the great moments of her life. Her birthday is in five days. She would have been eighty-four. Her mother, her many aunts, and her brother all outlived that by a decade or more. But my mom was the one cancer chose to visit. She died in March, 2001, and so she didn't have to pass through the long valley of the last seven years, but she also missed this climb up the peak.

     The augury of the future is already beginning. Obama has clocked twenty-seven days and we're already hearing assessments of his presidency. His Guantanamo decision was stunning. Daschle was crushing. The economic and finance advisors he's assembling are worrisome. There's no way to know yet whether these next four or eight years will be a great upswing, a great struggle, a great disappointment. But I treasure this moment, this Presidents' Day, so filled with hope and passionate engagement. This alone is a gift, and nothing can ever entirely take it away.

Something About Mary

Mary Williamson was not a girl you'd expect to change the world. She could swim, that's one thing. Not at any sort of Olympic or national championship level, but she'd win loving cups at local events and finish ahead of most of the pack in the crowded Thames races. And she'd come into her athleticism through hard work, at her father's urging, after a sickly childhood; that was the one part of her story that might have been worth telling.

      Otherwise she was strikingly ordinary. A middle class girl, finished high school with acceptable marks, then went to work in various shops and the local carpet mill while she decided who to marry. Her most likely suitor was the local church organist. Her dream was simple: lots of babies and a comfortable home. Attractive in a way that wouldn't haunt anyone's memory, occasionally sharp-tongued without being any great wit, a Yorkshire lass among many, many Yorkshire lasses.


      I think it's her ordinariness that interests me so much, that makes me want to view this book through her. Or I should say, the way her ordinariness made possible her one extraordinary contribution. Maybe it's too much to say she "changed the world," but she did play a central role in the conception of True Story magazine, one of the most influential publishing events of the early 20th Century. Whole magazine genres came out of that, most of what we think of as "tabloid culture," the seeds of reality media, an altered relationship between the consumers and producers of mass media, a new way for ordinary people to interpret the importance of their own stories. Maybe it all would have happened anyway, in some form or other, but it took the shape it has because history's great forces worked through Mary Williamson of Halifax.


      Her husband, Bernarr Macfadden, who actually pushed the idea of True Story to completion, may be the least ordinary person I've ever tried to write about. He's like a living satire of himself. Mary may be the most ordinary. My narrative will be most fun and surprising when I can hold them both in view at once. When I can capture those dynamic spaces where they came together—on stage, in bed, on the beach when she told him her idea for a new magazine—I think the book will jump to life.

Have yourselves a merry little Christmas?

My son made this movie as a Chrismas present for his mom and me. In less than half the length of a Vince Guaraldi tune it captures just about everything I like about this time of year. The performers are Godzilla, Godzilla Junior, Gigan, and "Toho King Kong," who isn't really King Kong but has his own charms.

Learning in Public

I have this problem with always wanting to look like I know what I'm doing. So I sell the idea for The Undressing of America to FSG and I immediately assume my duty is to turn in a draft that shows what a great investment they made. I'm impressed with my editor, Eric Chinski, and promptly think, "I can't send this guy anything less than brilliant." Which by itself accounts for about a year's worth of abortive drafts.

      But as I blog about these questions I have around the strangeness of Bernarr Macfadden, the surprising ordinariness of his wife Mary, the implications of picking a beginning point, I realize how much learning I'm doing with this book—not just about the subject, but about writing itself. There's some tricky new stuff for me to master here, and that's what's best about Undressing right now. (And yeah, I do mean Undressing and metaphorically "undressing.") Whether I knew it consciously at the time or not, I took this book on not as a chance to prove what I'd already learned but to learn something new and hard. And working with Eric—whose reputation is as a brilliant text-editor—is a chance not to impress him but to learn from him. Starting today, stop thinking of this as my masterwork and think about it as a school project. Show some humility for a change, and come out of it with some tools I would never have found on my own.

John McCain's lesson to us all

I didn't expect much when I tuned in to the Al Smith Dinner, the charity event where presidential candidates make jokes about themselves and each other. I certainly didn't expect much from McCain, as stiff and old and tentative and angry and uptight and creepy and false as he's looked lately. But he was funny. He was sharp. He looked ten years younger.
       Most of all, he looked liked the McCain I'd almost forgotten about, the McCain beloved by reporters, the McCain who most Democrats grudgingly admired, the "straight talk" McCain who was likely to make a cutting joke about anything, even himself. I thought maybe that McCain was gone, lost to age or rage, but apparently he's just been hidden for strategic reasons. No wonder McCain's been so wooden and rambling lately. The man whose entire charm, whose political potency, was based on showing up as his idiosyncratic self has been pretending to be someone else. A mouthpiece for Rove proteges, a sidekick to Sarah Palin, a hireling of the Evangelical right wing. Afterwards I felt sad, because the old guy I saw telling jokes seemed to be having fun. He seemed to like who he was. I can't say that about the guy in the debates.
       None of his pretending can win him this election. On November 5 he'll have lost the race, lost the affection of a lot of people who used to like him, and muddied the reputation that obviously means so much to him. He'll have hated every minute of it. And he'll start asking himself, "What the hell was I doing?" Maybe that'll be John's final lesson to us: whatever you do, make sure it's really you who's doing it.

Where Do I Begin?

I don't have to know how a book starts before I can write, but it definitely helps. A lot of my writer friends say quit worrying about it, write it in any order and move the pieces around later. My head agrees, but it's never quite satisfying. I want something firm to push off from: this is the first thing I tell the reader, then this, then this. I know I can cut and paste when the draft is done, but I can't do a draft until I commit to an order and see it through. This book's been especially hard for me to figure out, I think because the story has so many movements. In my wild stabs at drafts so far I've tried a few starting points:

      Barney McFadden as a beaten little boy in rural Missouri, in church seething about the hollowness of Christianity, breaking away from the farmer who makes him labor him, running across the fields and into the bog where he feels an upwelling of the earth's "magnetic power," finding his new religion in his own body.

      Bernard McFadden on the midway of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, a small-time professional wrestler and fitness instructor, unemployed gym teacher looking for a way to make it big—when he sees the Great Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding, perfect showman of the naked body, and is reborn as the seraph of Physical Culture.

      Anthony Comstock, head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and special inspector for the Postal Service, grand high censor of America, on the day in 1906 he made enemies of both George Bernard Shaw and Bernarr Macfadden, kicking off a climactic battle in the Victorian war against truth.

      Macfadden's flight from New York to Chicago, across the border to Toronto and then to London, with the postal authorities coming after his publishing company, his shot at wealth and influence seemingly gone.

      All good hooks. And I couldn't figure out why none of them were working, until I realized that all of them forced Bernarr Macfadden to be the eyes through whom we see the story. The poor reader would be asked to inhabit that strange, impenetrable, narcissistic man. Forget the reader—the writer would have to inhabit him. I needed someone I could live with like a conjoined twin.

      So the book, in its current draft, starts with Mary Williamson, the 19-year-old Yorkshire lass who rode the train from to London to compete in Macfadden's "Britain's Perfect Woman" pageant and never went home to the life she thought she was going to lead. Then Bernarr is viewed from the outside, as an enigma, as nearly a force of nature or history, changing people but never really connecting with them. The story I write, and people read, is a human one.

      We open as Mary. The nervous train ride from Halifax is fresh in our memories. We're at Kings Cross. We see Macfadden in his "long rabbical overcoat." We step out. We greet him. And he takes our wrist.

Happy Birthday, Bernarr

Today is the birthday of the central figure of my book: Bernarr Macfadden, publisher of True Story magazine and prime mover in the "undressing of America." He'd have been 140 years old if his natural health ideas had worked as well as he said they would. I think I'll toast him by starting work on the next draft, the first "submittable draft" of Chapter 1. He was never a guy who shied away from reckless action, after all. And certainly never a guy who wasted time thinking....

The Writer Whisperer

I just found my new words to live by—in PetCo. I had to buy a Ph test kit for my kid's aquarium (for months the water's running acidic, and then I give it a little NaHCO3 goose and it jumps to pure-blue alkilinity—I figured I should buy a new test in case the old one was going whacky, but no) and while I was standing in line I started reading a poster advertising a new book by this guy who calls himself the Dog Whisperer. Three big words, his guiding principles, across the bottom:



EXERCISE. DISCIPLINE. AFFECTION.



And I thought, "That's what I need." I roll out of bed and go straight to my computer—until after Labor Day, when I'll roll out of bed, wake my kid up, drive him to school, and then go straight to my computer—check my email to make sure I still exist and didn't fade away during the night, mess with my Facebook page (which of course I only use to "promote my work"), check Google News ("Oh my God McCain's closing the gap again!"), and go to my blog pages and Red Room to see if anyone's commented. Somewhere in there I'll drink coffee, maybe eat something, and walk the dog. Then maybe I'll blog about how I'm not getting enough work done. For some reason.


      But these are things that I know from experience make me feel better and lead to more productivity: Running. (Lately I've been using the old "I'm too busy" excuse. Except that I secretly know that when I was running every other day months ago, 30-70 minutes per run, I was getting more work done than now.) Having to do work now because I have a deadline. (Best thing I've ever written was the Men of Tomorrow screenplay, up against the wall of the Guild strike.) And community. (In person, not electronically mediated. Sharing pages with writers. Meetings of this spiritual group I'm in. Talking to my family without a computer on my lap and one eye on the screen.) 



      Exercise, discipline, and affection make me happy, relaxed, productive, and well-behaved. But by some perversion of personality or old habit I pull toward indolence, chaos, and isolation. I need somebody to show up with a leash, that's all.

Out of Sheer Masochism

Some of my friends are jumping on me as I talk about my procrastination: "Snap out of it! Quit complaining and write!" What they don't understand is what a strange pleasure it is to be caught in that suspense: haunted by the book, putting notes and words down, throwing them away, never quite able to pull that trigger, say "This is it." It's an electric place. Tremendously alive. Full of possibilities that can't be grasped, ghosts in the corners. Agonizing—but sweet.

     It's not the high of pouring out good material, but a lot more fun than just doing work. And things come out of it too. All those insights I had in Ojai, about Bernarr and Mary Macfadden acting out the 20th Century drama of the Self, which shifted the orientation of the book and keep opening to new ideas—those came because I was fretting about the book but wasn't in a flow working on the book as it was. As much as I grind my teeth and say, "I should be months into the actual writing of a draft," the truth is that the draft I would have started months ago may not have been nearly as good as the book I'm still building up to.

      My favorite book about writing is Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage. Which is actually a book about not writing. Dyer told himself that he was going to write either a critical biography or a novel about his literary hero, D. H. Lawrence. What he actually did was squander years of his life, and a significant amount of his publisher's money, "researching" the book and frantically, angrily, insanely procrastinating. The title comes from a quote of Lawrence's, who went through similar agonies trying to write about his own hero, Thomas Hardy, before finally writing it "out of sheer rage." But Dyer's rage—although it builds relentlessly and poisons every last experience—never even drives him to write the Lawrence book. It only drives him to write a book about not writing the Lawrence book. And it's funny as hell. In a nauseating sort of way.
     

      This is the single most-recommended book about writing among the writers I know. But never quite out loud: it's never assigned at a writing workshop or listed on the website of any writer trying to sell his services as a coach or teacher. It's whispered about at intimate parties and passed from hand to hand in communal workspaces, like The Gulag Archipelago in the USSR. Because it tells a terrible truth about the writerly personality: we don't just have terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. We love having terrible neurotic blocks to getting our work done. The pain just feels so good.

      But of course that doesn't make our suffering seem noble, or even like just a minor neurosis to be banished by "shut up and do it" homilies. It makes us look like a bunch of freaky masochists. So please...don't tell anyone!

With Brush in Hand

As I got to work today, all the repellent implications of Caroline Paul's "sometimes you have to approach writing like cleaning the toilet" became clear to me. If writing is like kneeling on the floor with a round-headed brush, then what exactly are the words in my first draft? Nothing I didn't already know they were, I guess... But here's the good thing I've discovered: if you approach writing as cleaning, then the bad stuff, the feculence that must be effaced, is at least part of a job. For the first time I can welcome lousy sentences. That ridiculously self-conscious opening paragraph that strains to create a mood of urgency but says nothing concrete...it doesn't mean I failed! It means another piece of glittering porcelain to be revealed! Which means that I don't have to be afraid of...of...producing bad writing. I owe it to myself! (I was going to say I don't have to be afraid of putting out crap. But every metaphor has to know when to stop.)

It Has to Get Done

At the SF Writers Grotto about twelve of us are in this mutual goal-setting group. We meet every other Wednesday, tell whether we met our writing goals for the previous fortnight (you get a star on a white board if you did, you have to kick in five bucks to a group kitty if you didn't), spend most of an hour sharing thoughts on why we did or didn't and how to improve our work habits, then set new goals for next time. We call ourselves the Borstians, because it's a spin-off of a workshop we did with a great coach and consultant named Martha Borst. Our basic operating principle is that if we're having trouble getting work done, it's not going to help to keep beating ourselves up about it, worrying about it in solitude, or thinking endlessly about "what's wrong with me." The way to get something done is to decide what we're going to get done by when, tell other people about it who we trust not to let us off the hook, and do it. And if we don't do it, take responsibility for that and move to the next set of goals.

      It's pretty basic stuff—but it's infernally hard. For some of us, at least. Yesterday's meeting was full of wisdom, a lot of which boiled down to "Stop thinking about your book and just sit down and write it," and everything anyone said shot through me with an "Of course!" I talked about how I was feeling a bit overwhelmed or intimidated by new insights into the theme of my book, and Ethan Watters said how the only really effective thinking for him occurs in an interaction between his thoughts and the words on the page. You can bring head-stuff to the work, but nothing really happens until you try this, discard it, try something else, discover it works, keep going from there.

      Then Caroline Paul said, "Sometimes you just have to approach writing as a thing that has to get done. Like cleaning the toilet."

      We all jumped instantly on that one. So humbling, so quotidian, so elegantly inelegant; no false glamor or self-aggrandizing agony could survive it. A way better than Sisyphus—no French novelist ever wrote an existentialist essay about cleaning toilets, as far as I know. We all reminded each other of the importance of just taking action and not chewing over why we weren't taking action, and when we adjourned I felt lighter and ready to work.

      But then a feeling of familiarity stole over me. How many times had I said and heard phrases like that? Never as elegantly apt as Caroline's toilet, but still—the words are all around us. Advertising says it: "Just do it." Recovery programs say it: "Act as if." "Do the next right thing." Entertainment says it: "Don't think. Throw." (My friend Karen Green reminded me of that line from Bull Durham the last time I was fretting about my inaction.) We say these things to each other all the time, not just writers, everybody. And why? Because we can't fucking get it, that's why. Because the excitement of realizing yet again that action is the answer is such a big mental thrill that it alone can take the place of action for hours. And by the time the thrill wears off, we're back in the thinking again. Why am I unable to apply that epiphany about the toilet bowl again...?

      It is true, though, I know that. And when I wake up and start work again, it's Caroline's analogy I'll reach for first. I have to confess, though, when Caroline said that about the toilet bowl, my first thought was to wonder if I can get my cleaning lady to write my first draft.

The Haunting

This is the phase of every book that I call the Haunting. Actually, I've never called it that, I just all of a sudden thought of it. But it fits. It's when everywhere I go, everything I see, reminds me of the book. Even when I'm not writing it, even when I'm strenuously avoiding it, I find myself trying to connect every experience to it. I would say that's a good omen for actually getting it written except I'm afraid of jinxing it.

     What the book's haunting now is Ojai. My son and his mom flew to San Diego to meet me for half of the comic book convention and we spent a few days driving back to SF together. My first visit to Ojai, which Jennie's been wanting me to see for years. It's my kind of place, all right: hill-nestled oak valley, hot dry summer, white stucco, Spanish revival buildings, Arts and Crafts furniture, a main street colonnade, working fountains, outdoor dining, orange groves, ancient pepper trees, old Hollywood connections. My personal heaven, right this moment, would be Ojai with a gift certificate at Hacienda Antiques. But what put me in mind of the book was the role Ojai played in the history of 20th Century spirituality.

      The Theosophical Society was a Victorian "spiritualist" group, one of those séance-and-medium deals, a lot of clairvoyants with huge beards and black-garbed ladies with scary gleams in their eyes, but one that opened up to an interest in Buddhism and Hinduism before such things were fashionable in America and England. They were a weird bunch, mixing valuable scholarship and social work with a cultish belief in the imminent coming of the World Teacher, the new incarnation of the Christ. Then, in 1909, one of their leaders discovered a beautiful, dreamy, gazelle-eyed, 13-year-old Indian boy named Jiddu Krishnamurti and declared that this was Him for whom they waited. The Theosophists persuaded the boy's father to allow them to adopt both him and his younger brother, and for the next thirteen years Jiddu was raised to become the new Christ.

      Part of the job of the World Teacher turned out to be lecture tours. In 1922, needing rest after an exhausting world circuit, concluding with a long voyage from Sydney to Los Angeles in the close company of his Theosophical handlers, Jiddu was allowed a little R&R in a cottage in a secluded California valley—Ojai—owned by one of his followers. His handlers mostly left him alone, and in the company of his brother and some Ojai neighbors and a few lower-level Theosophists more inclined to honor than indoctrinate him, he began to see things in a new way. He experienced the first of a series of spiritual crises that would eventually lead him to break from the Society and deny that he was any sort of Christ. He was no more, he realized, than a man with the opportunity, the knowledge, and the temperament to bring the philosophical insights of Hinduism and Buddhism to Western awareness in a way that was relevant to the modern world. He rejected organized religion as a whole, even the Hindu guru tradition, and gave his life to teaching an ethical and personalized spirituality that he hoped might lead to individual freedom and universal peace. "Truth is a pathless land," he said. The marriage of Eastern philosophy and Western individualism that underlies so much of modern spirituality and psychology was shaped more by him than any other teacher.

      Krishnamurti lived in Ojai until he died in 1986 at the age of 90, and around him the town grew into an artistic and spiritual center. It's still full of spas, art galleries, lecture facilities, and philosophical foundations, not to mention a lot of shops selling those big pink crystals and the rest of what I think of as the goofier accesories of individualized cosmology. Looking at all this in my current haunted state, I started lining up Krishnamurti's story next to the story of The Undressing of America. While the Theosophists were preparing the world for The Coming, a wave of natural-health gurus were seizing the American imagination, and just as young Jiddu was being drafted for his holy role, Bernarr Macfadden reached the first peak of his fame. Krishnamurti began to rethink his destiny during the same years Macfadden rode True Story and its tabloid children to a new kind of power and influence. And as Macfadden began to behave more weirdly, finally throwing away his own empire, Krishnamurti was coming into his own as a teacher.

      Suddenly some patterns started to emerge, and I had another one of those thrilling "So that's what this story's about!" moments. You have the messianic zeal of the early 20th Century, with all these charismatic eccentrics saying, "I have the Truth! Follow me and be saved!" Then the frightened pause of the War, and afterward a huge turn toward individualized, relativistic, experiential journeys, illuminated but not led by teachers who encouraged people to examine their own stories.

      Macfadden had always told his readers that listening to their own bodies and their own experiences was the best way to health, but in his earlier days he always drowned that out with his louder, "But of course what you will discover are the Laws of Nature, which I have already mastered." But with the publication of True Story, and its subsequent overshadowing of his health crusade, he became an intermediary for people to tell their own stories and learn by reading their peers'. Soon enough the true-story industry, the confessional culture, could roll along just fine without him, in the same way that Krishnamurti's message spread far beyond him until even his death was just a historical footnote.

      Then I started seeing the same wide cultural turn all over the place around the same time. Like how Bill Wilson and his fellow drunks seeking a spiritual solution to alcoholism made their slow, painful break from specifically Christian organizations in the early '30s to create the Twelve Step Program, the "higher power," "God as you understand God," a program that just keeps splitting and spreading and rambling along anarchically in the hands of a bunch of addicts with no leaders. Each story reveals the mechanisms, the rewards, and the costs of the same profound shift in our relationship with self and truth.

      I have a lot of those "So that's what this story's about!" moments, to the point that I could probably list twenty things the book is "about." But what starts to happen in this haunted phase is that those abouts all start to hook up and overlap, turning into one big—still probably too big, but at least comprehensible—story. Which reminds me that there may be a real reason to delay and procrastinate on writing the thing. It may still need something I haven't found yet. Like a trip to Ojai.