Chapter 51: Must I Keep “Playing Scales”?
A story, but first a caveat: the story involves a book written over fifty years ago by an author who until its publication had a writing career marked by disappointment. I mention this to avoid making this story feel like a parable about a certain path to success as told by a writer old enough to have read the book when it first appeared.
So, to the story: In 1960, Mario Puzo was a novelist whose work had to that point sold modestly, and whose critical acclaim was typified by such comments as “solid talent” (the literary equivalent of having your heart’s desire telling you that she or he “will always care for you as a friend”). He set aside his grand literary ambitions and took a job at Magazine Management Co., a writing factory that could have been envisioned by Henry Ford. He needed the money, given his many debts including to his bookmaker. Writers like Puzo were paid to churn out shlock – magazines and novels aimed at a male audience eager for such titles as Stag. Women generally appeared only as participants in the many sex scenes the writers were expected to produce, along with a lot of blood. Puzo was a copious producer. He wrote like a fiend, eclipsing his colleagues with as many as 40,000 words a month.
Though writing such titles as “Girls of Pleasure Penthouse” was not work he was necessarily proud of, it was in its way, a gift. The more he wrote, the more Puzo was able to hone his craft. He had brought his talent to titles like For Men Only, but talent, even his “solid talent,” was not yet matched by his skills. He spent eight years at Magazine Management. He wrote and wrote and wrote and at the age of 45 set to work on what he called his “Mafia book.”
Mario Puzo was 49 when “The Godfather” was published in 1969. It took off like a bottle rocket. I discovered it in the summer of 1970, when I was working as a busboy in a summer camp where everybody, and I mean everybody was reading and talking about it. You could not put it down; I tore through its 450 pages. My God, the man could tell a story.
The tale of that book (and movie) and of Puzo’s rise and education as a writer, as told in Mark Seals’ “Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli,” can be read as testimony to the good things that come from a willingness to spend the time necessary to perfect one’s craft.
So end of parable, yes? The more you write the better you get.
Perhaps..
The problem is the word better.
Experience is always seen as a virtue by those who have it. We – yes, we – look back at the writers we were in our twenties and even thirties, with a whiff of condescension: If only we knew then what we know how to do now.
I am a more skilled writer now than I was when I was younger. It is not just a matter of having written more words. I have written enough of the same words, in roughly the same ways, to be able to recognize how to use them to get me out of trouble, to resolve a scene, to move the pace along, to explain, to make connections. In other words, I have, through the writing of those many words, gained ever more command of my voice, so that I can use it to do what I want it to do – and not feel as if it’s racing ahead of me, leaving me lost and unsure how to go on.
I suppose I could say that means I am a better writer. Or perhaps the more fitting word is different. Because even as I look back and wince at some of what I wrote decades ago, I also recognize that there is something wonderfully exciting about making discoveries – in the stories you tell and the ways you tell them – when you are younger. You are seeing things for the first time, and set to work capturing them in words that you are still learning how to use. You make the mistakes young writers make. But it is often the case that those mistakes are more than made up for by the excitement that can, when you’re on your game, feel as if it's bursting from the page.
When his first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” debuted, the then-22-year-old Truman Capote was asked about achieving literary success at such a young age. Capote replied that the years were incidental because, by his estimate, he had already written a million words.
In other words, he had paid his dues. He had learned to "play scales” so proficiently that by the time he was ready to perform, he knew what he was doing. But “Other Voices, Other Rooms,” is a young writer’s novel. And that is what made it good. It is not “In Cold Blood,” his nonfiction masterpiece. But that does not mean it is a lesser work, just different.
When I was young I took music lessons but quit playing when I graduated from high school. I hated playing scales. Later, when I was 30, I decided to take up the clarinet. I found a teacher and started taking lessons. But I once again found the repetition tedious. I wanted to play music, right then. I learned a few songs but did not stick with it. I recognized that I would only improve if I developed my skills and that was not going to happen unless I was willing to practice scales.
By that point I had been writing for a living for seven years and did not appreciate that in every tedious news story I wrote, in every feature that I tried to coax into something that sounded writerly, in every revision of every magazine story I labored over, I was, in fact, playing scales. I was getting better by doing it more, by writing more words, sentences, and paragraphs.
But all the while, I was also telling stories. Were they as assured as the stories I would one day tell? Not really. But were the newer stories better? More refined, certainly. Assured. Less all-over-the-place. But better? In many ways, yes.
But not in all ways.