Getting Stupid

Whenever I finish a book I turn into a man of physical tasks and quit reading and writing and doing anything that smacks of literary life. I am a man cleaning his garage or his closet or fixing the smoke detectors or cutting the grass or raking leaves or shuttling kids or doing the million and one things that never get done. And then I start watching all the crappy television in the world. The Gold Rush. Every MSNBC show I can find, overdosing on hours of political melodrama. Then I swing to every old movie I can find and some not so old movies...How many times can a man watch Uncle Buck or Karate Kid? Too many times. Die Hard II comes in a close second.

And then I sit around and wait. Wait for the world to do something. It is this I find most boring. And yet I don't pick up a book but read the NY TIMES cover to cover and try and find authors writing about authors and take samples of Bukowski but don't finish them. I am at sea as all writers are between books. And so I float along and decide for the hundredth time to move and change my life. Or not to move and stay the same and isn't day light savings time strange the way it gets dark so early?

And then I pick up an old book. Something I would never read. I have The Marriage Plot on the Kindle but I want some relief from the mainstream fiction for a little bit and so I plunge into A.S. Byatts Passion of the Mind. That's when it happens. I realize I have become stupid again. The writing is dense and involved and I have to try and enter a world where Browning and Kipling and Russians and all those writers I should ahve read but didnt reside. I pu the book down and figure it is no longer relevant anyway. Who cares about essays on Dostoevsky or an essay on Proust or whatever A.S. Byatt decides is relevant to the world.

So I leave it and go do more physical tasks and go look for more smoke detectors without batteries or stuff more laundry into the washer or go buy salt for the softener or get the oil changed and get a brake job or  I can go read A.S. Byatt. I throw the book in my backpack...

Just in case I get tired of being stupid.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

How I flunked Comp 101

Bitter to say it but I flunked comp 101 in college. I was that freshman who had no clue about anything and was barely hanging on at the State College I barely got into. I was struggling through my first semester of about sixteen hours and figured I could  hang my hat on English. In high school I had been told that I had a hankering toward writing and wrote a few short stories a few teachers thought were mildly impressive. Besides,I came from a family of readers and our house was jammed with books. Comp 101 I figured would be where I made my mark.

But I didn't count on the TA (Teachers Assistant) with the Art Garfunkel hair who was teaching the class. He slouched in with his glasses and Afro and gave us our first assignment. Write about our summer vacation. A knock down. I had been out East so I wrote all about the beach and Baltimore and handed in the assignment. The man with the high hair handed it back with a big fat D and red scrawl: You did not follow the assignment. I went up to him and asked where I had not violated the assignment and he said that I was supposed to write an essay with conflict. My story did not have the proper conflict in the first third of the first page. So I got a D.

Then followed a series of writing assignments. Each time I wrote to what I thought the assignment was. Write about your best friend. Your worst experience. Write about college. Write about a political event. Write about a girlfriend or a boyfriend. Each time I got back my paper there was either a D or an F. The red scrawl pointed out that I did not follow the instructions. My final grade for the semester was a D. I would have to take the course over in summer school.

Summer school arrived and I went to my course makeup. It was a hot day in June and the old creaky English building was empty and smelled of moldy wood. I waited in a small conference room. A man in a bow tie came in and introduced himself. He asked me a few questions about my composition grade then asked me to write a story on anything I wanted. Then he left. A friend of mine had recently gotten married so I wrote about that for the next half hour while summer played out the window.

Forty five minutes later the teacher with the bow tie returned and read my story. He frowned, then looked up at me. Why are you here? Because I got a D in composition I told him. He looked back at my story. You have your own sense of style and you know how to tell a story. He shrugged. I'll give you an A. You passed. I looked at him. That's it? He stood up. Do you want more?

Thats how I passed Comp 101.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

Rocket Man will blast off in April

The Writer's Dream

My life changed in one summer. I had just signed a two book deal with Bantam after years of struggling in total obscurity and actually been  paid good money after making nothing for years and now was on my way to the Big Apple to ink the deal and have dinner with my new editor and agent. A  year before my manuscripts had been sitting in the basement in a box where I put all those books and stories that never see the light of day, but events had flipped on their head as they tend to do in the careers of writers and acrobats and now I was headed for a victory tour of sorts.

The dinner was on the lower East side in a French restaurant with Conan O'Brien at the next table and you sort of leave the table and float down the street in the warm summer night because finally finally you have broken through to the other side. I didnt' know exactly what the other side would bring, but the biggest change is you have to adjust the way you think about yourself. Failure had been the shadow following me for years and I really wasn't used to that new ghost called success, but here she was. And so I sat and made small talk with the two people who could potentially launch my stalled literary career and then it was over and I was waking up the next morning.

I went for a run and then walked down through Manhattan still hung over and buzzing on adrenalin. I was due to meet my agent again that evening, but for now I was free and I drifted into an old bookstore and bought two very old editions of Fitzgerald Short Stories( Tales of the Jazz Age and Flappers and Philosophers)  They were the original Scribner binding with the cut pages and the slightly smaller than trade size. Second editions that I picked up for a hundred bucks, but I was making money now. And then I started walking down Fifth Avenue and that's when it hit me.

It was summer in Manhattan and one of those hot blowy days where everyone has left. I walked with my two books and knew then something had ended. I had struggled for ten years to get published and now I had and whatever happened next would be consumed with business and sales and publisher agent shenanigans. And so I walked and walked and walked those empty streets with my two copies of Fitzgerald on that hot summer day in Manhattan. I walked that whole island.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man will be out in January

Publishing that First Novel

Publishing your first novel is like having a baby. It is very very hard. Of course the first novel is an experiment and you have no idea what you are doing. Apologies to all those writers who knew what they were doing because I did  not. I had just graduated college and decided against the advice of parents and friends to take a summer and write a novel. Now I had a Masters in History and a minor in English and I did like to read and I had published a few editorials in the college newspaper. But after that it was all uncharted territory.

So I sat down and began pecking away. I had just learned to type so I thought if I could just write five pages a day I would hit my goal of three hundred and fifty pages by the end of the summer. I had nothing to write about except my youth and so I wrote down things that had happened to me and hastily constructed a diary of my life. By summers end I had my three hundred and fifty pages and gave it to a friend of mine who said it read like a diary. Armed with his critique I moved in with my parents and started sending out the manuscript. Rejection letters rained down.

Meanwhile I began a process of rewriting. Again, I had no idea what I was doing but as I stumbled from apartment to apartment I carried the manuscript along. Years passed and the rejection letters grew friendlier but there were  no takers for a man with a first novel. Five years passed and my novel, (Ripples) still had not found a home. I was probably on my twentieth rewrite and I began to despair that my nights after my sales job were not bearing fruity as I sat and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote.  I had already covered two of my walls with the proverbial rejection letters in my apartment.

I went up on a camping trip up in Michigan and was standing around a camp fire with a friend of my wife who said to me, I hear you are a writer. I muttered something about yes I was a writer. I hear you wrote a novel he continued. I'm a printer, I should publish your book. Magic words. Years of rejection came down to his wife who read my manuscript and liked it. The man published my book a year later, his first book and my first novel. Three years later Bantam bought the rights. That's how I published my first novel.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
Rocket Man is due out in January

When you know you have to leave your writing group

You come into your writing group full of great intentions and are delighted to find kindred souls, people who do this brain cracking work of writing and for a long time you glide along with your fellow scribes. You look forward to reading your work and getting the feedback and now you have a thick skin and are able to ferret out the good criticism from the bad and you all sort of move along at the same pace and then suddenly like high school, you graduate...you get published.

For me it wasn't such a draconian moment. My publisher was tiny and in Chicago. Still, I brought the galleys with me and showed them around and it was then I felt a sea change. Everyone nodded and murmured congratulations and then the group fell into its old routine. I was in the middle of editing the galleys so I hadn't really written anything new and  I read some of the novel.  The comments were muted, some were complimentary, but I felt I had brought a gun to a knife fight.

So I took a few weeks off and worked on my galleys. When I returned I was exhausted and hollow eyed  and only had my novel to read again. I sat and listened to the same works in progress, the bits of poetry, short stories, fragments of novels, then it came to Robert's piece. Robert wrote non fiction for a small magazine in the city. He tried to write fiction but it never worked. For years we had listened to Robert read these words that were like boxcars in a line but there was no ignition. We had all been in a secret conspiracy with Robert, who was a very nice guy, to give him a pass and not really criticize his work.

But this time I felt we were doing Robert a huge disservice. For two years I had been listening to Robert's bad fiction and for two years I had said nothing. He was a lifer. They existed in groups. People who came for the social aspect as much as the writing. And so you laid off. But l had changed. Something about working on those galleys with an editor had pushed me to the next level and I couldn't go back. So when it came to me, I blasphemed. I commented on Roberts work.

We are doing Robert a big disservice here. I looked around at the group. We haven't been honest with him...I paused. We haven't told him his fiction doesn't work. Someone dropped a pen. Someone coughed. I have violated a group taboo. A little man named Pee Wee who was also a lifer piped up. You have no right to judge Roberts fiction that way. I looked at him. Are you kidding? That's why we are here. No, Pee Wee persisted. You are assuming you know good fiction and Robert doesn't and you have no right to tell him he doesn't know how to write fiction.

And it was then I knew I was done. The group that I had been so much a part of for years was suddenly irrelevant. I couldn't stay if  I wanted too. So I sat through the rest of the readings and said nothing. There was no point. I never went back. It was much later I realized my crime wasn't that I had criticized Robert's writing, it was actually something much deeper and much more serious-- I had stumbled into becoming  a professional.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/

William Hazelgrove's latest novel Rocket Man is due out in the fall.

What College Doesn't Teach You About Writing

When I graduated college I sat down and read F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise and didn't know half the words. This is after I had received a Masters in History. So I started a notebook of words and it really wasn't until I worked the night shift for Gonella Bread on the West Side of Chicago that I received my literary education. It was there that I discovered the secrets of men and women who smithed words.


I worked in the shipping office of the bakery and took the bread orders all night long. The phones rang and rang and I sat in the flour and filth that is a bakery with the long loaves and flat rolls going around the bakery on a conveyor belt much like a roller coaster track. The Italians who worked there (they were all Italians) didn't speak much English and they all swore and gesticulated in the shipping office drinking their coffee with the red stain on their tennis shoes from the ink on the long loaf bags they held in place with their shoes.

Alonzo the foreman could speak English and he would come in and shake his head. What the frick you doing with all them books Jack? What in the frick you going to do with them? You need a job not books. You need a good job. Forget about them fricking books. And then he would head back out into the bakery. Around three AM the bread orders would die down and the route drivers would start to appear, sleepily drinking their coffee in the office.

It was then I pulled a book from the stack I kept on the corner of my desk. The stack was two feet high and had Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Faulkner, Lowrey, O'Connor, London. I couldn't decide what I wanted to read so I brought it all and for the next three hours I read while the loaves and rolls fell off the conveyor with soft plops to the bakery floor. When the sun started to creep into the loading dock I put on my backpack and loaded up my books.

I went to the conveyor belt and picked off the hot rolls and wrapped them in brown paper and stuffed them in my leather coat. Then I rode my motorcycle home through the cold quiet streets of Chicago with that warm bread keeping me warm. I caught my wife just before she went to work and we had warm bread and coffee. That was my literary education.

http://www.billhazelgrove.com/
William Hazelgrove's latest novel is Rocket Man due out in the fall.