The show “Lou Grant,” which was a strange spin-off from Mary Tyler Moore, was the first bit of pop culture that I ever saw where writers were cool. I call it a strange spin-off because it’s not that often that a sit-com will spawn a dramatic series and–don’t make me swear to it–but I think that might’ve been the one and only time that ever happened.
Regardless, whenever I’d be up on a Sunday morning, hours before the rest of my family, I’d be clacking away on a red typewriter we owned and my father would sarcastically refer to me as “Lou Grant.” Lou was okay, but it was really Joe Rossi, who was played by Robert Walden, who I was trying to take after. He was cool and Italian and those were things I figured I could be without too much trouble when I got older.
When I found myself starting my life over again in 2017, at the age of 47, I sat quietly in my new apartment trying to figure out what to do. I had just been hired by a company that was going to pay me more than I ever earned before, I had really good credit and a little cash saved up.
Days earlier, on a long distance phone call with an old friend, I was given the unsolicited advice that now was the time for me to pursue everything I had put aside when I had supposedly become responsible. “Think about that thing that got you excited when you were young and do it with every fiber of your being,” was the exact quote.
Now it wasn’t as if I had completely abandoned the world of words and then found myself returning to it. I always kept attached to that planet, even if that attachment was somewhat tenuous. I wrote songs in my band after college, I published some poetry here and there and I began blogging for Elephant Journal, but what I wanted more than anything was to write a book and see it on the shelf at Barnes and Noble.
I’m going to cut to the chase here because most of you know my history: after a few years of dogged determination and quite a bit of financial debt, my dreams came true. I was signed by a fancy literary agent in NYC and she subsequently got me my first publisher, my first book deal and my first advance.
I always thought “Kickass Recovery” would do well in the recovery book market, but that is an arena that is virtually saturated with titles and generally dominated by the Russell Brands and Luke Perrys of the world. I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. This was the gist of almost everyone of the dozens of rejection letters I got from the likes of Little Brown, Simon and Schuster, Penguin Random House, and MacMillan.
I probably only finally got signed by New World Library because they were more interested in putting things into the world that were potentially going to help people. I always got the impression that they’d love if the book sold a million copies, but that wasn’t really their motivation. The idea that recovering addicts who were struggling with poverty and thoroughly unsatisfying lives could have a resource to help them escape that fate–now that they considered interesting.
It isn’t a total flop, either. Right at this very moment the book is #200 on the Amazon Drug and Alcohol Recovery charts and 300,000 on the general book charts. When you consider the fact that there are 10 million books available for sale on Amazon, that number is really somewhat formidable.
To believe in God or any higher entity is to know that it is this magic force that instills within us the nagging feeling of dissatisfaction. So after being hounded by advertisements on my timeline for years, I finally signed up for MasterClass and am taking full advantage of all the writing classes I can get my hands on.
I began with Margaret Atwood and then David Sedaris. These turned out to be fortuitous choices because they both have such differing styles. Atwood is a lot like a formal writing teacher and Sedaris muses on this and that subject but each one is valuable in their own respect.
The one golden nugget I received from Sedaris’s class was his advice to read Ann Patchett’s essay, “The Getaway Car.” If you are an aspiring writer—and I know many people who read me are—you need to get your hands on this. If you’re savvy, you can obtain it for free online or you can buy the book, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” and it’s the fourth chapter.
Sedaris mentions having read it numerous times and I can see why that is. It is both inspiring and inspired. The most important point is that, as writers, we need to work. We need to plant our ass at that desk until something worthwhile is born.
Personally, I started and deleted at least a dozen articles before finishing this moments before my self imposed deadline of 8 am Saturday morning. So, if anything, I know what I speak of. I began on Thanksgiving trying to write something around a fabulous dirty joke I invented, I gave up on that and wanted to fill you in on what my therapist refers to as this new stage where I am “reparenting” myself and finally, after clearing away all of the frivolous bullshit, I am here.
A small treatise on the value of persistence. If I didn’t have that, I never would’ve known what it was like to park my behemoth tractor trailer on the shoulder of Route 9 in Poughkeepsie and walk into Barnes and Noble and see my book on the shelf. Next to Russell Brand’s. Nor would I know what it was like to step in the shower on a weekend morning knowing that I finally wrote something that was worth your valuable time.
And seriously, that feels just as good.
Love this Billy and I remember the Lou Grant spin off. Writing is a passion and I think once we get hooked, we cannot stop, although we may take pauses. I will check out the Getaway Car- thanks for the heads up. And, keep writing.