Writing Biography
Writing is an intrinsic part of my biography, but it’s a long topic, so I figured I’d treat it separately.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t write. One of my earliest memories dates from second grade, when I was given one of those exciting spelling assignments – write a story using every spelling word. In Inframan, I recount the experience:
For our homework, my teacher, Mrs. Balser, gave us the assignment of taking some twenty words ending in “ch” or “tch” and using them in a story of our own making. At home, I enthusiastically let my imagination wander, crafting the story of a wretched witch who lived in a ranch and stole my watch (which I had to fetch back) to use in a trap to catch her prey. By the story’s end, I had watched the witch through a window and lifted the latch, sneaking into the ranch to fetch my watch before burning the place down with a match.
I was proud of the story and showed it to my teacher the next day before school started. She nodded approvingly and praised my creativity. Then she pointed out that I had forgotten one of the words — “stretch.” I panicked. My story was flawed! She must have noticed my chagrin, for she explained to me that my omission hardly mattered since the story itself was so good. But I would have none of it. As the bell rang to inaugurate the school day, I sat at my desk and, in desperation, tacked an extra sentence on to the end of my manuscript—“After all of this, I was tired, so I stretched out on the couch.” I added the extra “ch” word on my own. But the sentence did not work with the rest of the story. It was obviously a useless appendage. The time came to check homework and soon volunteers were reading their stories aloud. Mine was better than anyone else’s, I knew. So did Mrs. Balser, for at the end of the time to read stories, she said, “We have time for one more. Would anyone like to read their story?”
There were no more volunteers. She looked right at me, remembering, I am sure, my pride just minutes before. “Barry, why don’t you read yours?”
And I said no.
So I’ve been something of an annoying perfectionist from the beginning, it seems.
I submitted my first story when I was nine years old. It was an idea for a Superboy story that I mailed to DC Comics. I wrote it in pencil on lined paper. Never heard back from them, so I guess it’s possible that they could accept it any day now.
In eighth grade, I sent off my first real submission, a science fiction story that went to Asimov’s. They rejected it, which surprised me because I didn’t know about rejections yet. I didn’t understand that hundreds of thousands of people were out there writing at various levels of ability and sending their submissions off willy-nilly and clogging the desks and mail slots and in-boxes of editors and interns throughout the free world. I honestly thought that you wrote a story, you sent it in, and you got it published. Wow! Pretty naïve, even for an eighth-grader!
That first rejection letter really shocked me. I wasn’t even upset by it – just puzzled, really. It was a form letter (of course) and I couldn’t understand why the story had been rejected or who had rejected it. And why wasn’t there a phone number or something on there where I could call to ask questions?
Oh, so young! So much to learn!
My second submission was a horror story, a take on the haunted house motif. The house was described as ancient and ramshackle, but for some reason, the front door was in perfect shape. I liked that idea. I liked the notion of something being wrong with the house from the outset and that the wrongness was symbolized by the one part of the house in perfect repair! I even wrote in the story that, compared to the rest of the house, “the fact that the front door was intact was amazing.” I sent the story off to Amazing Stories and got my second rejection. This one was personalized, though! It had handwriting on it and everything! It said:
“The fact that the front door was intact” is not amazing. And neither is this story.
Ouch! I can’t imagine that the editor who wrote that knew that he was stabbing a twelve-year-old in the heart. He must have thought he was stabbing an adult through the heart, which, of course, is much better.
Call it the eagerness of youth. Call it stupidity. Call it lack of anything else to do in the boring little town I grew up in. I kept at it. I plugged away at short stories and, in high school, wrote a truly awful sci-fi/fantasy novel that involved politics, corporate shenanigans, end of the world millennial terror (in the mid-eighties, mind you, before everyone else was doing it!), medieval magicians, and near-future technology. God, it sucked! (Although to this day, I still think that “TriVi” is a cool name for a three-dimensional television set.) I still have a copy in a filing cabinet in my office, and I occasionally consider burning it, but...
Well, for one thing, I’m a packrat. For another, every time I flip through it (once every ten years or so), I spot a sentence or a phrase that I don’t remember having written at the age of fifteen. And I think, Wow. Look. There I am. There’s the “me” who became a real writer, years later. And he was there, back in 1986, just poking his head out every now and then.
And I just can’t bring myself to burn it, no matter how howlingly, embarrassingly bad it is.
At around the same time I was writing this massively awful novel, I also became involved in comic book fandom. Now, I had always read comic books – and tried to write them, if you recall the Superboy fiasco above – and at some point I was invited to join fan clubs dedicated to two of my favorite comic books. Better yet, these clubs had regular, bi-monthly publications where I could – yes – write! Now, these weren’t real writing credits that I could use in cover letters or anything. This was fan fiction, and if you don’t know what that is, go to Google, type in “fanfic,” and come back in ten years when you’ve recovered.
I’m not going to get into the ins and outs of fan fiction. It’s an argument that will never be settled. But for a teenager looking for writing practice, discipline, and feedback, those days of writing fanfic were absolutely invaluable. I learned a lot. I learned what did and did not work in terms of structure, pacing, and character development. Since I was using someone else’s characters and universe, I didn’t have to worry about backstory or exposition – everyone reading the stories had a common frame of reference. I was able to focus almost exclusively on dialogue, structure, plot development, stuff like that. And if I wanted regular feedback, I had to hit regular deadlines. (This was before the proliferation of the internet, so stories and feedback both traveled via U.S. Mail.)
I used what I learned writing fanfic on my own “real” writing, improving my short stories and working up the courage to start on another novel.
Once I was in college, I had a decent collection of short stories that I was sending out regularly, as well as a steadily growing stack of rejections. I started and discarded two different novels while at Yale before finally settling on Inframan, my unfinished metafiction. (Ah, Inframan himself would laugh at that idea...and probably is, somewhere...)
I had some important formative experiences in college in terms of my writing. Probably the most important was meeting Tom Perrotta. Tom was one of my three creative writing professors, and the only one from whom I learned anything. Here’s the most important thing I learned:
On the first day of class, Tom went around the table and had each of us say what book we were currently reading and give a brief description of it. I sweated in dread; everyone was discussing high-brow stuff, either classic literature or recent, avant garde titles. Me? I was in the midst of reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. A comic book. (It wasn’t even a graphic novel series at that point. And you have to remember that this was the early nineties – comic books weren’t cool, weren’t considered educational, weren’t anything at this point. Hell, Gaiman had just won the World Fantasy award for Sandman and the folks who give out the award were so horrified that they changed the rules so that no comic book could ever win again!)
I considered lying, but my mind blanked and I couldn’t come up with anything to say when it was my turn, so I fell back on the truth. I told everyone about Sandman and felt like an utter fool.
Days later, during an office consultation to discuss a short story of mine, I told Tom that maybe I wasn’t right for the class, that maybe I should drop out of it. Clearly, everyone else was better read than I. I was reading comic books, for God’s sake!
Tom looked at me like I’d grown horns.
“Barry, you’re at Yale.” I knew that. He felt he had to remind me. “Everyone here has read the entire canon of Western literature, but how many of them have read comic books?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Damn few of them. But you have. And that’s what you bring to the table and to the class. That’s what makes you unique.”
He then proceeded to go through my short story (my attempt at a very literary piece) and show me the obvious comic book influences. More important, he showed me that those influences worked, that they made the piece stronger and more powerful.
I couldn’t believe it. Being a comic book geek was paying off!
I guess I thought that being at Yale would mean an automatic acceptance letter from someone, but that was not the case. I kept writing fanfic (for practice) until my senior year and I also wrote short stories and worked on Inframan. At the same time, I collaborated with an artist friend to try to put together a comic book series. (For its time, it was a radical departure from mainstream comics. If we were to publish it now, it would look like just another dog in the pack. Timing is very important.)
When I graduated, my delusion went one step further – I thought being a Yale graduate would open some doors. And, you know, for some people, it does. But not for me.
So there I was, engaged to be married, possessor of a degree that I had earned by reading Beowulf in the original Old English, and with no immediate prospects for writing success. What to do?
At the time (early nineties, remember?) the comic book industry was in the midst of a boom. Diamond Comic Distributors was one of the biggest wholesalers in the business, and its home office was half an hour from where I lived. I knew comics. I knew writing. I figured that if I worked at Diamond, maybe I’d get my shot at writing comics...and that could then subsidize my more ambitious work.
Well, things didn’t quite work out the way I’d hoped. I did indeed get the chance to write some comic books. They were truly awful. Writing comics is very different from writing prose (you’ll find some words to that effect elsewhere on this site) and I had a lot to learn as a new comic book writer.
Unfortunately, my debut as a comic book writer coincided with the sound of an enormous implosion. That’s right – the comic book bubble started to deflate within six months of my starting at Diamond. Within a couple of years, it was tough to make a living writing comics and even tougher to get started.
I stayed at Diamond (it paid the bills) and decided to go back to prose. By now, though, it had been a few years since I’d even attempted anything long-form. I looked at the partially completed Inframan manuscript, but I couldn’t summon the heart to work on it. It was too big, too ambitious, and, honestly, I felt like I didn’t deserve to work on it. (Inframan himself agreed, in a rare instance of accord between us...) I was five years out of college now and I’d accomplished precisely zilch in terms of my writing.
I decided to keep sending out short stories and also to work on something “easy.” I always loved science fiction, though I’d written very little of it, so I decided to write a sci-fi novel. It would, I reasoned, be easy because I could make up everything. New planets, new societies, new technologies... Very little research involved! That was appealing to me. I joined a local writers’ critique group, which was a godsend for one very important reason: Just as with the fanfic of years before, I had to produce work on a regular schedule if I wanted to get feedback. So being in the group forced me to write that novel within a year, despite a full-time job.
Was it a great novel? No, not really. But I had done it. I had written a novel, and now I knew that it was just a matter of writing a better one.
I tweaked the sci-fi novel several times and started to send it around to agents and editors. I was a little savvier now, having been paid as a writer. (Unfortunately, back then you really couldn’t use comic books as a publishing credit...not that I would have anyway.) I did my research, targeted my markets, and started getting some good rejections, the kinds of rejections that make you think, “Hey, I’m close! I’m actually close.”
I had one especially frustrating moment, when an agent sent me a six-page memo from his assistant, detailing everything wrong with the book. It was a terrific help because I got to see how my work was perceived on “the other side,” but it was also annoying because some of the issues just weren’t in the book! Clearly, the assistant had mis-read some stuff, such as complaining that a bald character suddenly had hair on another page...when I had specifically called him almost bald from the get-go!
Still, I was being taken seriously at least, so I persevered. I rewrote the book and sent it back to the same agent...who promptly told me that it was “clearly much improved,” but that since he’d read it once already, it just didn’t seem fresh to him anymore, and he was going to pass.
At this point, I had had my fill of the sci-fi novel, so I moved on to something a little closer to where my ambitions lay, a cross-genre literary piece that blended politics, Western motifs, and the supernatural with actual history and real people. I was enormously proud of the book and I was sure that it would be my ticket to the writing life.
I went to a writers’ conference (I can’t oversell writers’ conferences; they’re important to your development as a writer) and had a meeting with Don Maass, one of the top agents in the field. He loved the premise of the book (he said “Your ideas are better than most published writers’”), but he felt that the pacing of the book was too damn slow. (It was.) He gave me the best advice I’d gotten to date: “Find yourself a writing mentor.”
So I did. In fact, I got one of Don’s clients – a science fiction writer whose work I admired – to agree to mentor me. She read the book and gave me all kinds of suggestions, asked all sorts of questions, generally bugged the hell out of me, but in the best way possible. She forced me to pick apart my own work and figure out what did and didn’t work. Did I agree with everything she said? Nah, of course not. But I agreed with a lot of it, and even the stuff I didn’t agree with was helpful because it showed me the pitfalls in the story.
I spent a lot of time rewriting that novel and in the end she was very happy with it, though Don Maass still didn’t want to represent it.
I guess I should mention at this point that a couple of major changes had happened in my writing “career.” For one thing, my rejection letters were starting to look a little less...formulaic. I was getting handwritten comments on some of them (encouraging comments!) and even the ones that were typed just didn’t have the flavor of form letters. I was being rejected in a more positive fashion. (My father insists that there’s no such thing as a “good rejection.” He’s an engineer, though, not a writer.)
I had also scored (very limited) success by being published in some small literary venues, topped off by harpooning my white whale: Glimmer Train, the prestigious literary magazine. I had been trying to land a spot in Glimmer Train for years and then I finally did so with a 9/11 memoir about what it’s like to turn thirty at the end of the world.
Last but not least, I had also begun going to writers’ conferences. Not many, but just enough of them to meet other hopefuls like myself and compare notes. I learned a lot by going to those conferences – at the very least, I got to meet editors and agents in person, and suddenly those cover letters I had to write were much less intimidating. They were just people, like me. They drank too much at the bar at night. They giggled and acted like teenagers in the hot tub at two in the morning. They laughed at stupid jokes and then looked embarrassed for it.
All of these things combined to form a crucial notion for me: I wasn’t a bad writer. This was very important after a decade of rejection letters. I could very easily have looked on the lit mags and Glimmer Train as a fluke. But meeting other writers, talking to editors and agents, getting those good rejections... All of it convinced me that I was doing something right. I felt like I couldn’t give up on writing – I was meeting people, networking, learning... And those rejections had that flavor to them, that taste that I was so close...
So, I kept at it, though I switched gears a bit.
My wife had, for years, told me that I should try my hand at young adult fiction. I had always balked because for some reason “YA” equaled “immature” in my mind. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I could do this. So I set about writing The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy & Goth Girl.
It wasn’t a magic ticket to publication, but it was the closest thing I had. I tested it on some teachers and librarians; they all loved it. I showed it to some editors and agents at a local conference – they all wanted to see it. A few months later, one of them even said that she might be interested in it, with changes.
A little while after that, I met my agent. And the rest is history.