I sold my collected short stories, The Digital Hood, to St. Martin's Press/Picador.
So... how did I break into publishing? This goes back to 1975 when I wrote
and saw my first story printed in The Observation Post, the City College
of New York's student newspaper. The story, Huk-A-Poo, was a surreal mess,
trying hard to be clever. Still, having this distributed on newsstands all
over the 20-block college campus in Harlem was an incredible high. I'd sit
in the school cafeteria and watch people actually read my words. I'd watch
their faces and mouths. If they raised eyebrows, or a real treat, if someone
laughed out loud at what I had written -- a few did -- boy, was I thrilled.
That is the first step to breaking into publishing: It's the hunger to make
an impact in a small moment of someone's day.
This is why I believe it is important to get yourself printed anywhere
and everywhere you can. There should be no place too small because any place
that gives you readers is never too insignificant. I have colleagues who
are serious academics, scholars with a capital S, and they wince and cringe
at some of the small places I've allowed to print my work. But I say, that's
how you become an author: Get printed in your community newsletter, PTA
newspaper, or your company bulletin.
After all, if you have readers, their feedback and reactions will help
you develop your craft. When I wrote for my community newspaper sometimes
a neighbor would stop me in the hall and comment. One woman in my building
once said that my characters spoke in ways she didn't believe. (Maybe she
was right. I'd look into it, and think about it.)
But don't just publish creative work. The best advice I got was from my
mentor at CCNY, Donald Barthelme. One day at a writing conference (he was
going over my story to work out a grade, and I was feeling much like the
tutee at the elbow of the master) I asked him, successful as he was, canonized:
How can I be like you? He answered my question with a question: How many
words do you think I put into print before I sold my first short story?
I had no idea.
Thousands, tens of thousands... many. He'd been a reporter for a Texas
newspaper long before he was known for his fiction. His message: Get words
of any kind into print. That practice, he felt, that daily pressure to craft
words, pays off. It's a cliché by now, but whether one writes business
or technology pieces, the deadlines you face (the more your rent depends
on your output), the more you'll write your creative work without facing
the dreaded writer's block. You'll have a habit of deadlines. (Also, if
you do write your creative work for a community center, let's say, they
will give you a deadline.)
So, I moved into journalism, learning news and magazine writing. By the
time I was a senior at CCNY (1977), I was a New York Times stringer -- all
this to say I was still on my journey to break into publishing, which for
me meant my fiction in a book with a good publisher. Only suddenly it was
10 years later, 1987, and I was writing for OMNI magazine, burning out on
the same formulaic leads and subject matter. It was time I woke up. Time
to quit journalism and do my real work... but the nagging question (now
I had a wife): how do I pay the rent?
A former CCNY professor/friend Richard Goldstone had long been trying to
convince me to go into teaching. I was long against it, seeing it as something
a non-writer, a drone, did... In those days, journalist friends said, happily,
"Those who can do, and those who can't... teach." Goldstone made
me see what was before my nose anyway. Who was my teacher? Barthelme. Goldstone,
a Thornton Wilder biographer, also reminded me that Wilder wrote his American
theater classic, Our Town, while he was a teacher at a boys' prep school.
So I began teaching part-time, and I lived in a Greenwich Village studio,
practically a closet space, on little money.
I finally wrote my first novel, Benny My Man. It was told from a 13-year-old'
s point of view and so it qualified as a young adult book. The story focused
on my years in 1968 in the South Bronx, on how a friend, Benny, who was
black, became my enemy, and I his, during the civil rights riots which swept
the country. Benny's family, it turned out, joined the Nation of Islam,
during the early period when Malcolm X's rhetoric claimed whites were devils.
The day he called me a devil was the day on which my novel focused.
Anyway, this is where all those words in print pays off (including the
stuff from the neighborhood newspaper). You can show an agent that you're
not just a one-book writer, but that you are a writer... Agents, I see,
want clients whom they hope will create successive projects. (I've done
college basic-writing textbooks.) And there's question that always haunted
me, too: How do you get an agent? Notice, I didn't say where do you find
one. That is easy to know, but the trick is (as you may know): it's better
if you can press some flesh.
I'm a firm believer and a product of the café system. (David Mamet
wrote a book Writing in Cafés.) This means all those great new places
nationwide in Borders and Barnes & Noble. Many writers I know like to
be seen writing in cafés, including myself. And I see them, which
is what I did. In my Village neighborhood, I hung out in a place called
Lancianni. There I began to meet scribblers like me and one fellow, who
had published a string of books, fantasy/horror/westerns, etc., introduced
me to his agent who came to the café to meet him.
There it was. I told her about my book, and she looked and she liked it,
and took it. For three years, she passed it around publishing houses, great
and small. And even though she didn't sell it, the fact that she believed
in me, when no one else did, filled my sails. She also did something equally
important: After the rejections, she had me call back the editors and ask
for their reader's reports. Most didn't want to share it, but some did.
My agent wanted me to find out why my work was rejected:
One publisher said because my book was about blacks the whites wouldn't
buy it; and the blacks won't buy it because it's about blacks, like Benny,
who come off looking racist.
Another publisher said my book read too much like a memoir (which was true)
and if I were a famous actor they'd be happy to take it. But who'd care
what happened to Peter Rondinone?
Keep in mind, this was back in 1987.
But the best response came from an editor who said, if Rondinone would
rewrite this 1968 South Bronx story as a story of 1988 she'd give it another
look. It would be current and marketable. And that, my dear readers, was
the most profound advice -- which I ignored! I was still young enough, and
arrogant enough, to think: Me, mess with my vision? No way. I thought I
was being pure....
But flash forward to 1996, nearly 10 years since my agent failed to sell
my first novel. Now I had the rent plus a kid to feed... I started to rethink
that advice from years ago. I noticed how Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York)
and Jay McInnery (Bright Lights, Big City) were snapped up because they
were writing about what was happening in the 1980's. Dummy, jerk, idiot!
Turn my 1960's and 1970's stories from the South Bronx (which I was already
writing) into 1990's stories. Like, duh. Gangstas and the rappers were doing
(and singing about) things not much different than what I did (and my boys
did) when I roamed the streets with my box cutter, baseball bats, drug deals,
and blood-letting. Even learning the new street language wasn't hard for
me.
I teach in a community college and I have many students from the hood.
They teach me the words I need. I practice with them. We laugh a lot. "Now
Mr. R," one student teased me "It's not baby's mutha, say baby's
muvvah. Hear the difference?" I make friends with my students who are
on second-step jail programs -- like Time Bomb, which was his name in prison.
He and I rapped street in my office. I taught him my old gang words, like
Daddy Lo Lo.
The rest is history: In 1996 I gave my agent my rewritten gang stories,
set in the 1990's: The Digital Hood, 15 stories, almost all printed in literary
magazines like African Voices. She liked them, sent them out, and in two
weeks St. Martin's/Picador USA made an offer we just couldn't refuse. Twenty-five
years after I wrote Huk-A-Poo at City College, I had gotten my break, a
new writer at forty-three years old.
So keep in mind: It worked for me -- make your stories new, what's happening,
fresh, as they say in the Bronx, 1990's. Maybe that can work.
