My Favorite Mistake

I was twenty-two years old when I decided to write my first book.  I wrote every day after work, during weekends, vacations and holidays.  Three years later and a week shy of my twenty-fifth birthday, I finished.

Part of the reason why the book took so long had to do with the fact that I had no idea what the hell I was doing – or if what I was writing was any good.  (Most of it wasn't.)  I knew how the book began and how it would end, but I had absolutely no idea what would happen in between, that damn middle part I call the "vast wastelands."  I spent many, many months there stumbling about, getting lost and taking wrong turns and detours that more often than not led to dead ends and deserted homes; the edges of cliffs. 

The biggest problem was I didn't trust my tour guide and sole companion – my imagination.  This was our first foray together, and I was often shocked and appalled at some of the places it wanted to take me.  I refused to go.  To write about all the creepy and disturbing things my imagination was so eager to show me would open me up to scrutiny.  Someone who could make up such incredibly ugly and violent ideas had to be thinking such incredibly ugly and violent things and therefore was – to use one of my mother's favorite terms – "sick in the head."  Worried that people would think I was sick in the head, I decided to reign in my imagination.  I held back a lot of things.  In other words, I decided to play it safe. 

It took me another year to find an agent.  After numerous rejections – about fifty or so – I finally found an agent who agreed to represent me, a wonderfully talented woman named Pam Bernstein.  Pam liked the book but told me it had problems.  She couldn't tell me what, exactly, they were – she wasn't an editor, she reminded me – but she offered some guidelines, and I rewrote the book.  When she sent it out, the rejections were mixed.  Some liked the characters, others like the story; many disliked both.

Pam wanted to submit the book to an "independent editor," a kind term for what some people call a "book doctor."  She had one person in mind: Richard Marek.  Dick had worked in publishing for a long time before going out on his own.  In addition to discovering Robert Ludlum, Dick had edited my all-time favorite thriller, The Silence of the Lambs, and I jumped at the chance to work with him. 

Dick agreed to read the book over the weekend.  He promised to call me first thing Monday morning, and did.

The book didn't work.  I'd have to start over.

Dick faxed me a detailed analysis of everything I did wrong.  But what he wrote in the closing paragraph still resonates with me now, fifteen years later:  "I don't believe you've really gone deeply enough into your own fear and your own pain; rather than facing them, I think you're using this book to run from them, and that won't work.  (Forgive the glib psychology, but it's the way the book made me think.) . . . Writers expose themselves to themselves (it's a terrifying and brave act) and then use their books to disguise what it is they've discovered as a way to expunge their demons.  This may sound melodramatic, but ask any writer.  You too, I'm sorry to say, must do the spade work and experience the pain."

Dick, I knew, was right.  I had turned away from my imagination – and Dick knew it. I was embarrassed and angry – at Dick for finding me out; at myself for not having the guts to write a book that scared me – and I decided, right then, to write a new book from scratch and not hold back a single fucking thing.

And I didn't.  I worked with Dick for two years, and the end result was Deviant Ways, my first published book.  Working with Dick taught me never to hold anything back.  To put everything you see and feel down on paper even if it makes you uncomfortable.  You have to give a book everything you've got.