Poking A Dead Frog Part 14

Let's say there's a new show that they're staffing and they're accepting submissions from writers. The number of scripts they're sifting through is probably four hundred, five hundred scripts. There has to be a way to differentiate yourself from the pile. The idea of having an original voice has become something of a premium. Everybody feels like the bar has been raised. So you have to be able to prove that you can write something original and unique.

How much material does a writer need to submit? How many scripts?

You need at least one great sample script. But if you are an aspiring writer, you should always be writing. One of the greatest frustrations I have with my clients is that they get staffed on a television show, and then, three years later, the television show goes down and they don't have a piece of new material. And you just want to say, "What the f.u.c.k have you been doing for the last three years?" So to get that first job, you need one great piece of material. It doesn't hurt to have a second piece. There are writers and showrunners who ask to read two things, but one great piece can get it done. But the next time out, you've got to have something new. You can't just send the same great script to all the same people again. They've already read it.

Can you submit other forms of humor writing? Say, funny print pieces?

It depends. It depends on the showrunner who's hiring. If you look at animated shows like Bob's Burgers or Family Guy, those are shows that have hired writers based upon alternative format comedy. Their interest was not generated by a writer's spec half hour. So, you know, it depends entirely on the showrunner. Writers have been hired from Twitter streams or short films they've made for Channel 101 or books that they've written. This can all pique a showrunner's interest. But ultimately most showrunners want to read something structured and narrative before they make a hire.

How do you, as an agent, differ from a manager?

I differ enormously from a manager. Managers are not able to negotiate employment for their clients. Lawyers are. Agents are. Managers are technically not. This is a line that is crossed all the time, every day. It's not upheld, generally. But I view a manager's job as sort of holding the hand of the client and working on a piece of material over a long period of time before it goes out to the world to be judged. And to help a client with long-term career goals.

I view my job of an agent as securing work. But it's become much more than that. It's not just about staffing people, securing people's jobs. It's also about when writers are selling their development deals. It's my job to help put together the right pieces that can make those deals attractive to a network.

Is it virtually impossible to get hired as a television writer without an agent?

It is not impossible. It does happen now and again, but rarely.

It always tends to be one of those chicken-and-the-egg things. You can't get an agent without having the possibility of getting a job because agents are animals who want people who pay commission. On the other hand, you can't get a job without having an agent. So how do you break through that? The most organic way is to move out to Los Angeles immediately after college. You have to move out to LA. New York just doesn't have that many television writing jobs.

Once you get out to LA, try to get a job as a production a.s.sistant on a show, and start to get to know writers. Then work your way up and eventually become a writer's a.s.sistant. You have to become a known commodity. That's the real way to do it without going through a program. If you work your way up to writer's a.s.sistant, eventually you'll get hired on a show that works. And then you start getting promoted. The minute anybody in Hollywood sniffs that you're getting promoted, you'll start to receive phone calls from UTA, William Morris, ICM, and all the rest of the talent agencies, with all of them saying, "Hey, man, I hear you're great. I'd like to read your stuff." And then you'll get an agent.

PURE, HARD-CORE ADVICE.

MARC MARON.

Host, WTF with Marc Maron; Performer, Late Show with David Letterman, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Comedy Central Presents; Creator/Writer, Maron For awhile, I hit a wall where in my mind the choices were pretty dire. I didn't have any idea how I was going to continue to make a living. There was real f.u.c.king fear there. For one reason or another, the timing was right in the medium [podcasting] that I chose in 2009, and things evolved.

Quite honestly, I try not to have regrets in my life, because it is what it is. But whatever I went through, there was not a plan. My process creatively is not an easy one. I'm impulsive, I'm filled with anxiety, I don't have the ability to compartmentalize, I don't have the wherewithal or the confidence to plan and follow through when working toward a goal. Everything has always been very immediate to me, and that is exhausting. It could really have gone either way. In talking to other people and looking back at my own career, the people who were more aware of their talent and how to use it, and more aware of their limitations and what they were really shooting for, were able to find their place a little easier. If you start out as a comic, you want to be a big comic. But as you get older, you realize, "Wow, there are only a few of those at any given point in time, and it's a tough life." The possibilities of not getting to that level, where you can really bank some money or build a career, are very high. Depending on what your ego can handle at those crossroads in life, you might say, "I do write great jokes, and I know I want to be involved somehow, so how do I adapt?" The ability to get away from your ego enough to recognize your limitations, and to take action toward becoming a writer or working for a sketch group-that's a big moment. The thing I now know is that the people who were aware and cognizant of the business ultimately found a little more peace of mind-a place to express partially, if not more so, their particular sense of humor.

A lot of the dudes I started with, the ones who didn't fall away or end up club comics for life, very early on went into writing. Whether you get into producing, or directing, or management, relationships are built early on; crews start out generationally. You build those relationships when you're all struggling, and those are the relationships that are going to carry you through a career-if you're lucky enough to have one.

As far as whether you choose this career, I have not found that to be a choice. In my experience, somehow or another, your brain has already told you that this is a reasonable life to live, which is nuts. That comes with the territory. You're going to have those things, no matter how crazy or insecure you are, that continue to propel yourself into this life. Some of that may be rebellion; some of that may be, "f.u.c.k you, Mom and Dad." Some of that may be grandiosity. But whatever it is, you're already in it. And the deeper you get into it, it's very hard to get out of it, even when things aren't going well.

Don't kid yourself: A lot of people fade away. A lot of people become tragic, whether they see it that way or not. I don't know. There's always this weird thing in show business where you never know when success is going to happen. It's not a meritocracy; so much of it is about some weird s.h.i.t aligning that's usually out of your control, and you catch your break. And a lot of people don't ever catch it.

I've learned from talking to people over the last few years on my podcast [WTF with Marc Maron] that people who work hard find something. There's a certain amount of ent.i.tlement when you're a young comic living the life, like, "Oh, it'll happen," even if you're getting high every day and sleeping until three. The truth of the matter is that eventually you're going to have to do the work. You're going to have to find your consistency and your groove-somehow.

You just have to do it. There's no schooling; there's no anything. Find a place where you can get onstage and do it. Do you have favorite comics? Watch them. It's very self-explanatory: You stand up there, by yourself, and you try to get laughs. I usually say, "Look, you might bomb, you might do great, but you're not going to always do great. You're not always going to bomb." You have to figure out once you do it whether or not you're infected with the bug that makes you keep wanting to do it. When you get off that stage, no matter what happens-whether they hated you or loved you-you have to get up there again. And if you do get up there . . . well, good luck, and welcome to the life.

GEORGE SAUNDERS.

Comedy isn't always the domain of comedians or traditonal comedy writers. Sometimes a writing professor who works alone in an office, doesn't have a Twitter following or a TV show, and has never told jokes at comedy clubs can have a fundamentally better grasp of how humor works than those who make their living writing and saying things they call "comedy."

Enter, stage left . . . George Saunders, one of the very best writers working today-and also one of the funniest. Born in 1958 in Amarillo, Texas, and raised in the south suburbs of Chicago, Saunders originally sought a career in geophysical engineering. After graduating from the Colorado School of Mines in 1981, he worked as a "seismic prospector" for an oil exploration crew on the Indonesian island of Sumatra (where, according to The New York Times, he discovered Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, having read "virtually nothing" until that time), and then worked later as a technical writer for an environmental engineering company based in Rochester, New York. Saunders has also been employed as a Texas bar band guitarist, a Beverly Hills doorman, a Chicago roofer, an LA mover, and even a slaughterhouse worker in West Texas. (In a somewhat backhanded compliment, online magazine Salon used the following headline in a 2000 article about Saunders: "Knuckle-puller Makes Good.") Somewhere in there, during what he calls "a series of attempts at channeling Kerouac," Saunders enrolled at Syracuse University and earned an MA degree in creative writing. And then in 1996, at the age of thirty-seven, Saunders published his first collection of short stories, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline. At the time, according to The New York Times, David Foster Wallace declared Saunders "the most exciting writer in America."

Over the past two decades, Saunders has published several more best-selling and critically acclaimed books, including the short story collections Pastoralia (2000), In Persuasion Nation (2006), and Tenth of December (2013); the novellas The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip (2000) and The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005); and an essay collection, The Braindead Megaphone (2007).

Saunders has received numerous awards, including the coveted MacArthur "Genius" Award, which he was granted in 2006 for "bring[ing] to contemporary American fiction a sense of humor, pathos and literary style all his own."

In the past, you've talked about growing up in South Chicago, and that, as a child, you felt total freedom. But how do you think South Chicago affected you as a writer?

I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns. They were just merciless in terms of grammar and syntax and spelling, which was incredibly helpful later: They gave us the tools we could later use to build our taste. They forced us to become little language fiends-almost like, say, a great chef might force his kids to become food fiends. That taught us basic discernment. Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun. So in some ways this is good-it makes for good revision. But it can also be killing-you're never satisfied.

How about as far as humor? Is it tied in any specific way to Chicago?

I think I got the idea that the high-serious and the funny were not separate. The idea that something could be gross and heartfelt at the same time. Some of the funniest things in South Chicago were also the most deeply true-these sort of over-the-line, rude utterances that were right on the money and undeniable. Their truth had rendered them inappropriate; they were not cla.s.sically shaped, not polite, and they responded to the urgency of the moment.

In Chicago, people often told these odd little Zen parables, ostensibly for laughs, or to mock somebody out, but behind which I always felt were deeper questions looming, like who we are, and what the h.e.l.l are we doing here, how should we love, what should we value, how are we to understand this veil of tears.

Do any specific anecdotes come to mind?

My whole childhood we lived next door to this family I'll call the Smiths. We didn't know them very well at all. At one point, Mrs. Smith's mother, who was in her nineties, pa.s.sed away. My dad went to the wake, where this exchange occurred: Dad: "So sorry for your loss."

Mrs. Smith: "Yes, it's very hard."

Dad: "Well, on the bright side, I suppose you must be grateful that she had such a long and healthy life."

Mrs. Smith (mournful, dead-serious): "Yeah. This is the sickest she's ever been."

My dad came home just energized from this. I loved his reaction. My family was such a big influence on me. There was a real respect for language. It was understood as a source of power. Everyone was funny in a different flavor. You could make anything right-diffuse any tension, explain any mistake-with a joke. A joke or a funny voice was a way of saying: All is well. We'll live. We still love you.

Can you talk a bit about your mother and father?

My father was from Chicago and my mother was from Amarillo, Texas. They met at a dance when my father was stationed down in Texas, in the air force. They were nineteen when they married, and had me when they were twenty-one. My dad is one of the most intelligent people I've ever met, but he didn't go to college right out of high school. He got out of the air force and moved back to Chicago and he did a bunch of different things-he was a collection agent for State Farm Insurance and then ended up as a salesman for a coal company. This was when there were still a lot of buildings being heated by coal. For awhile he was selling directly to landlords, and apparently sneaking into bas.e.m.e.nts to do reconnaissance on the type of coal they were getting from other companies. But then he gradually worked his way up, and when I was in grade school he became vice president of the company. Around that time he had a falling-out with his boss and quit. He bought a couple of now defunct fast-food franchise restaurants called Chicken Unlimited, and that's what he did while I was in high school. Well, that's what we all did: worked in the restaurant. My mother and sisters worked the counter; I drove the delivery truck; my uncle managed one of the stores.

The main beauty of that job was getting to go in there day after day and see this parade of American characters. For many of those people, our restaurant was the closest thing to family they had: lonely, lonely, lonely. It would have been impossible for me, before that job, to imagine how filled America is with lonely, isolated people.

Many of the characters in your stories, whether they are good or bad, young or old, tend to be quite lonely.

What I remember about all this is that particular gloating teen delight that there were such crazies in the world and that I wasn't one of them. But also the way this got complicated by coming to know them, by seeing them in these sad private moments, in our restaurant, sitting at one of our plastic booths all alone. The other kids and I were actually pretty good and gentle to them when the chance arose. But, of course, among ourselves, it was all posturing and harshness and war stories about what "the wackos" had done that day. Makes me sad to think of it at this thirty-year distance.

Do you remember any customers in particular?

Oh, sure. There was a woman we rather brutally called, but not to her face, "The Wacko." She'd come in around four in the afternoon and chain-smoke and chain-drink Pepsis hour after hour. She used to wear a ratty imitation fur coat and talk to herself. She lived in a complex behind the restaurant. Almost the minute she got home, she'd call for delivery: a pack of cigarettes from the machine we had in the store and a large Pepsi. She'd sometimes order three or four times a night. I was the delivery guy, so I'd go over-I made seventy-five cents a delivery-and she'd be in this furnitureless apartment, shaking and talking to herself. And she wasn't all that old either. She later slit her wrists and jumped in the Chicago River-only to be pulled out by some pa.s.sing hero.

Then there was a guy whose claim to fame was twofold: He'd try to pick up girls by wearing his old security guard uniform and hara.s.sing them at the mall, and it was his "old" security guard costume because he'd gotten fired from his job as a security guard after being caught doing what he described as "allegedly masturbating against the curb of a Fotomat." I didn't even know what that meant, exactly. In his defense, he always claimed innocence. But the charge seemed pretty . . . specific.

And then there was "Gagger"-for some reason he didn't even get an article in his name. He was an old man dying of emphysema, who would come in and sometimes literally cough himself unconscious in a back booth. He had no family and so we were it for him, more or less.

You've talked in the past about how important compa.s.sion is when it comes to writing. That writing, in your opinion, is an exercise in compa.s.sion. You strike me as someone who is not only a compa.s.sionate writer, but also a compa.s.sionate person.

Yes, but people think of compa.s.sion as, like, kindness. The image comes to mind of some nice New Age guy bending to something with a look on his face like he's about to cry. And I don't think that's it. I think of it more as a quality of openness that comes with being in a state of unusual attentiveness.

Yes, but with other writers, I don't always sense compa.s.sion when it comes to humor or satire. I'm not sure if they don't have full control of their toolbox or if they're just not compa.s.sionate. Can satire work if the writer isn't a compa.s.sionate person?

Sure. I think a harsh truth can be compa.s.sionate, in the sense that it speeds us along from falseness to truth. So, if a friend is wearing something ridiculous, you can say, "You look like an idiot," and maybe that will save him. I think we wouldn't want to a.s.sume that compa.s.sion is always gentle.

I think this quality you're talking about in my work might be more about fairness than compa.s.sion. By which I mean one's willingness to stake out a position (Kevin sucks!) and have a lot of fun with that, and then run around the table and a.s.sert another position (Although Kevin does care for his sick grandmother) and then do it again (But yuck, Kevin m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.es while thinking about whales!) and another (And yet Kevin once saved a man's life).

I sometimes think of this as "on the other hand" thinking-just that constant undercutting of whatever (too) stable a position you find yourself occupying.

You once said that satire is a way of saying, "I love this culture."

It's hard to be sufficiently involved in satirizing something you don't like. That's just sneering. Satire is, I think, a sort of bait-and-switch. You decide to satirize something, so you gaze at it hard enough and long enough to be able to say something true and funny and maybe angry or critical-but you first had to gaze at it for a long time. I mean, gazing is a form of love, right?

Right, but gazing is also a form of fear, too, I'd think. As well as staring at something beautiful, one can also stare at someone, or something, different from the norm, such as a freak at a sideshow.

In either case, it's attention. You are paying attention to the thing, spending your time on it, which is a form of . . . something. Love? Respect? You're honoring the thing with your attention and allowing it to act upon you, to change you. In terms of writing, if you are writing and rewriting a paragraph or section that concerns a person, you are allowing your initial, often simplistic or agenda-satisfying notion of that person to be softened or complicated-you have to, for technical reasons. If you don't, the reader will antic.i.p.ate where you're going and be p.i.s.sed or b.u.mmed when you go there.

So I think it's the attention that matters. You are paying attention to this fictive creature via paying attention to the words that have caused him to-sort of-exist. It's a kind of double-attention-paying. And the more attention you pay, the more you're going to eliminate the lameness in what you're doing. Even if your idea is to pillory someone, doing this double-attention thing is going to force you to pillory him at a higher level, more honestly.

You seem to be the opposite of many writers who deal in satire, such as Mark Twain, whose work became darker and darker as he aged. For instance, in his uncompleted book The Mysterious Stranger, Twain questions whether or not G.o.d exists. With your work, however, there seems to be more and more evidence of lightness.

Yes, so far. But Twain was older then and had gone through some really dark s.h.i.t-he went bankrupt, lost an infant son, outlived two of his daughters and his wife.

But of course some things are just dispositional. I think I've always been a fairly happy person, just in terms of my physiology. Also, I think you have to keep growing aesthetically in whatever way feels essential. You can feel in Twain that when he went toward that darkness he was, in some ways, going against his own early grain. He was facing facts, in a sense, being more honest, striving for his truth. At the moment, I'm trying to resist any kind of knee-jerk darkness that might have to do with some feeling of wanting to remain "edgy," if you see what I mean. At this point, "more light" feels like "more honesty." But, you know, we'll see. One of the perils of any sort of interview is that the thing you are so pa.s.sionately saying might turn out to be all wet, once you actually start working again.

Another thing I love about Twain is the way his clear-sightedness expresses itself in exact language. Also, to be as funny and loose as he is in Huck Finn but also dense enough with his language that it evokes a rich physical world-that is very hard, I think. He hits a lot of different modalities in that book. It's funny, it's smart, it's tragic, some of the language presages Faulkner, but also presages Nathaniel West.

If Mark Twain were around today, do you think he'd have a difficult time finding an agent and getting published? In today's publishing world, humor and comic novels aren't always "marketable."

He'd still be a superstar. I mean that in two ways: I think his work is still great, so great that no one could deny it, so that, if you could erase all cultural memory of Huck Finn and then send it out fresh it would still be a sensation. Second, let's say there was never any Twain to begin with and he was then born in 1957 or something-I think he would adjust to and imbibe this contemporary life of ours and do something unimaginable and great.

Who were your comedy influences?

I was a big fan of Steve Martin's. It was absolutely new at the time, the early- to mid-seventies. We'd never seen or heard anything like it. Now I can see that what made his work so radical was that it was so self-aware, so postmodern: He was making comedy about the conventions of making comedy. But then it just felt . . . limitless, and honest. In those days so many comics were completely conventional. You'd see them on The Tonight Show, and they felt old-fashioned and sort of dead. I mean, George Carlin was around, and Richard Pryor-both geniuses-but I felt they were kind of outliers. They were radical and angry, whereas Martin presented himself as a sort of mainstream comic who tore the whole thing down from inside, very sweetly. He wasn't really rejecting anything; he was accepting of everything, with the force of his charm and his will. I also picked up from him something that reminded me of the way some of my uncles were funny-that whole comic riff of pretending to be clueless, exaggerating that quality and not flinching. I loved that.

Who else?

I loved Monty Python for the wordplay-this sense that you didn't have to squash your intelligence to be funny. In fact, you could walk right into your intelligence and nerdiness and self-doubt, and that could be funny.

I liked the Marx Brothers for the irreverence, the way they tore everything down. That's where humor enters the domain of the philosophical and starts to say: "What seems obvious, isn't; what you think will sustain you, won't; what you trust, will fail you; what you think is permanent, is fading; your mind will go, your body will rot, all that you love will be cast to the wind."

I loved Dr. Seuss. The funny thing was, we never had his books in the house. My mother claims this is because my father confused Dr. Seuss with [pediatrician and child-care author] Dr. Spock, and considered Dr. Spock a communist. My father denies this. And honestly, it doesn't sound like him-the guy who gave me Michael Harrington's [1962 book on poverty] The Other America to read when I was in seventh grade, along with Upton Sinclair's [1906 novel on Chicago working-cla.s.s conditions] The Jungle. But who knows? Anyway, we didn't have the Seuss books, but a neighbor did, and I remember whenever we would go over there I would sneak into the kid's room and read all the contraband Seuss.

I loved the simplicity. Very elemental and profound. Also completely weird. You can't trace any predecessor or agenda in those books. Just sui generis. I loved the level of detail-I used to sort of linger on the pages, especially the more panoramic ones.

Somehow I group Seuss with Samuel Beckett and Raymond Carver and Charles Schulz and the Pica.s.so of those famous vanishing bull lithographs: Less is more, if the heart is in the right place.

You once mentioned that you had a stylistic breakthrough by writing Dr. Seussiantype poems. What was the breakthrough? Where and when did it occur?

It happened in a conference room at the engineering company I was working for in the mid-nineties. I was supposed to be taking notes on the call but not much was happening. So I just started writing these goofy little rhyming poems and ill.u.s.trating them. I liked them enough to bring them home, and later that night my wife read them and . . . liked them. I'd just come out of the experience of having written a seven-hundred-page novel that didn't work and it was mind-blowing to see that she was getting more pleasure and edification out of these ten poems I'd written off the top of my head than from this whole big book.

So that helped me turn the corner on accepting humor into my work. Humor and a whole bunch of other things I'd been denying for some reason: speed, pop culture, irreverence.

Did it take awhile to come to terms with the fact that you were a funny writer? There's a feeling with many writers that if you're not Hemingway-serious you're not as important as you could be. That you're not living up to your full literary potential.

I did have that feeling, yes, in a big way. I spent about seven years trying to keep humor out of my work, but finally had this catastrophic break, where I almost instantaneously rejected my rejection of humor. That was the beginning of my first book. It was sort of powerful: I just realized that I'd been keeping all the good parts of myself out of the fight-all the humor and irreverence and my extensive body of pop culture knowledge and fart jokes, and the rest of it. But I'd also been afraid to embrace, for example, a certain high-speed manic quality I have in person and in my thought patterns. So it was like throwing a switch when I finally got desperate enough.

What I've come to realize is that, for me, the serious and the comic are one and the same. I don't see humor as some sort of shrunken or deficient cousin of "real" writing. Being funny is about as deep and truthful as I can be. When I am really feeling life and being truthful, the resulting prose is comic. The world is comic. It's not always funny but it is always comic. Comic, for me, means that there is always a shortfall between what we think of ourselves and what we are. Life is too hard and complicated for a person to live above it, and the moments when this is underscored are comic. But, of course, they are also deep. Maybe the most clearly we ever see reality is when it boots us in the a.s.s.

You once said that Kurt Vonnegut was more of a purist than Hemingway in his "aversion to bulls.h.i.t." What did you mean by this, exactly?

Well, it always seemed to me that Hemingway, especially in the later period, would ignore a lot of data, and sort of avert his eyes in order to stay in a certain kind of style we a.s.sociate with him. His style became a prison of sorts. He had an ethos and a rep and he had all of that fame and I think by the end he was just writing stories that confirmed his view of things. Whereas I always felt Vonnegut was actively investigating. He had less of an agenda and so could present the world as he actually found it. His stuff was weird and weirdly shaped but, based on my experience, it had more of the real America in it.

Or saying it a slightly different way: Vonnegut wanted to investigate how life really is here on Earth. Whereas, especially in the later work, it seems to me that Hemingway had a big investment in turning aside certain realities-maybe in the name of style, maybe because he couldn't see them, famous and enshrined and trapped in his image as he was.

Beyond Dr. Seuss, how well-read were you as a child?

I watched a lot of TV as a kid-I mean, a lot. Including hundreds of episodes of Twilight Zone and Night Gallery, both by Rod Serling. I would never have thought of these as being influential. But they had to be, I guess, just in terms of communicating some early idea of story shape and story expectation. I expect that someone of my generation would have to have had his or her storytelling mode colored-or corrupted?-by the volume of TV we watched and the odd storytelling mode TV occupied in those days.

When I was older, I attended the Colorado School of Mines to study geophysical engineering, so not only was there not much literature studied, there wasn't much time for me to do it on my own either. I did it on the sly, in a spotty way.

Were you unenc.u.mbered by coming late to the literary game? In the sense that you didn't feel buried beneath the weight of countless writers and cla.s.sics?

Well, "unenc.u.mbered" is a generous way of putting it. Like saying to a monster that he is "unenc.u.mbered" by physical beauty.

When I finally figured out that I wanted to be a writer, I came at it with this combined sense of mission plus inferiority-which can be pretty good. In other words, I kind of conceded early that I wasn't going to be a scholar of literature. I wasn't going to be somebody who'd read and was synthesizing everything ever written. I was too far behind already. But I'd find a writer I loved and read him over and over, and copy him, and then read his favorite writers and so on.

I was surprised to learn that there are quite a few writers, like yourself, who also studied engineering: Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Norman Mailer, among others.

It might just be that an unconventional background liberates you from knowing the proper way of doing a thing. If you train ten people in a method, and the eleventh comes along untrained, he's going to be off step, and maybe-maybe-this will be to his benefit. So when I look at other writers my age, I am struck by how different my life was from theirs when we were in our twenties. Sometimes this feels like an advantage-I read differently and with a different intention and got to do a lot of strange things. But other times it feels like a disadvantage-I lack a solid grounding in, say, the history of the novel, and so lack confidence and am tentative in that area. On the bright side, I do know how to identify many different minerals-or did, anyway.

Sometimes I have to remind myself that, for all my writing life, I'll be coming from behind, and I should be happy to be a sort of mutt running alongside the pack. If I ever make the mistake of thinking I'm one of the alphas, I'll blow the whole thing.

I've heard that, in the early days, n.o.body in U2 could really play their instruments. But that became sort of central to what they were doing. They played around that fact, essentially. That resonates with me: this idea of deeply musical, deeply feeling people who maybe don't have virtuosic technical skills but who are able to make what they do have work for them.

I actually prefer U2 in the beginning of their career. There were mistakes, but maybe they were better in spite of, or because of, those mistakes. Can this also hold true for writers?

I think so. Maybe not "mistakes," but a certain crudity of expression; this feeling that the writer is bearing so much vital news that he can't slow down and be fastidious about presentation. Or, conversely, that his truth is so powerful that it is malforming the vessel that is carrying it. And for writers, with our infinite powers of revision, we can even go a step further: We can be spontaneous and messy and, liking that effect, revise the text so as to make it seem even more spontaneous and messy-while at the same time actually "clarifying" those qualities.