Living to Tell About It

Discoveries of a Literary Agent Who Dared to Write a Book

By Jim Hornfischer

[Keynote, Writers League of Texas, Agents and Editors Conference, June 12, 2004, Austin]

This past February, Bantam published my book, a work of naval history titled THE LAST STAND OF THE TIN CAN SAILORS. It’s the true story of an undeservedly obscure battle that a small U.S. fleet fought against Japan’s mightiest ships during World War II.

In writing it, I joined a growing number of industry professionals who have gone across the line into book-writing and put on the hat of the author. Many of you know that I’ve been working as an agent here in Austin since 1993 after having worked for two of the larger publishers in New York as an editor.

It’s natural, I suppose, that people who are pursuing their careers in a business that’s driven by a love of books should one day try to write one. (Since leaving HarperCollins in 1992, at least six of the people I worked with there have published books.) The inclination many of us have to write unavoidably gets a big boost from the fact that the editors, agents, publicists, and other insiders who make the leap into print have a close working familiarity with the mechanisms of the publishing business. We know what goes into a good book proposal; how to frame a story so as to highlight its sexiest, most publicity-getting aspects; how to write in that assured, knowing way that induces publishers to say “yes” then, more importantly, “how much?”

Yet I’m sensitive to the possibility that writers who don’t have years of experience in the trade may feel this is more than a little unfair. They may feel that … when people like us write books, it’s like a cow drinking his fill in a bar that serves only milk.

That’s probably less of a joke than it seems. It’s certainly an imperfect metaphor. But it does illustrate what’s doubtless a perception by some that editors and agents who write books are benefiting some a sort of inside job, if not an actual conspiracy of self-dealing.

I had to get that cynical thought on the table right up front. Now that it’s there, and hopefully out of the way, I’m going to move on, and share with you a few of the lessons I’ve learned from my journey into the writer’s life.

The essence of it has been the realization that although my industry knowledge doubtlessly helped get the ball rolling, it was only the rawest form of amateur’s enthusiasm that enabled me to sustain the energy to finish the project, and to overcome the fact that when it came to writing a book, I was as out-to-sea as any other first-time writer I’ve met.

I knew how to propose a book. I knew, from writing pitch letters and jacket copy for many years, how to make the promise of it sound good. Doing the hard part—rolling up the sleeves and actually writing it—was another thing altogether. A lot of it I had to figure out as I went along.

I have to say first, the experience has been a lesson in humility.

After years of cultivating the aura of unapproachability that I know all agents aspire to, I’m suddenly, upon publication of my book, in a different posture entirely. Whereas before I was largely aloof, if not altogether dismissive, now I am learning to be downright solicitous. This transformation may well have started with the book proposal itself. In it, I wrote something like, “It’s time Americans learned the story of the greatest David versus Goliath moment in naval history

Now that the book has been published, I’m going out gladhanding, doing the author’s yeoman labor of trying to get an indifferent universe to pay attention. I will speak to audiences as large as my self-consciousness dares, or as small as my ego will tolerate, saying this very same thing out loud, and with an eye toward salesmanship. “Americans need to learn the story of the greatest David versus Goliath moment in naval history. It’s $24.95. Will that be cash, check or charge?”

I walk into that bookstore and see my book spine out, contending with 100,000 other titles for the attention of browsers. It changes the entire attention-getting dynamic of the business for me, and makes me appreciate the fragility of the author’s place in a world that’s always ready to say “No.”

Now that the quiet desperation of authorship has come over me, I come to you, in part, I guess, to seek absolution for my sins perpetrated as a literary agent, to ask forgiveness for every form-letter rejection I may have cavalierly tossed off to anybody in this room.

The lonely experience of authorship has changed my attitude as an agent. I’m much more understanding than I used to be toward my clients who are struggling to finish an ambitious book. It no longer mystifies me, for instance, why so many of them begin to lose their grip on sanity in the months between the submission of the final copyedited manuscript and the publication of the book. In that time, the anticipation is so tremendous, the sudden idleness so exquisitely tortuous. After all the busy work of writing the book, you have nothing left to do. You’ve been locked in a cave with this beast of a manuscript for a year or more. During this time, you’ve drifted from family. Your friends have stopped calling you. When the book is finally done, out of your hands and grinding through the production process, the silence can just swallow you.

At that point, months ahead of the on-sale date, it’s too early to be obsessively checking your sales ranking on Amazon.com (which by the way I did three times while polishing up this talk this morning). And so you’re left with plenty of time to do things like watch and re-watch certain cathartic scenes from the movie based on Stephen King’s “The Shining.”

You’ll remember that Jack Nicholson plays an author, Jack Torrance, who takes his family to a winter resort to play off-season innkeeper and find a little quiet time to finish his book. The wife and kids are exploring the old place’s nooks and crannies, and Jack is downstairs, just typing away like a book-writin’ fool. The wife gets curious to see how Jack’s been coming along. She goes over to the typewriter while her husband is away. She picks up this whole stack of typed pages. The words stretch in crazy kaleidoscopic patterns from page to page. She leafs through them and discovers to her horror that he’s spent all these days and weeks typing the same sentence: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

It all makes sense to me now. I feel your pain, Jack Torrance.

Writing a book can be overwhelming. You feel like the poor kid in Dr. Seuss’s Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, who has to mow his uncle’s huge lawn filled with fast-growing grass: “The faster he mows it, the faster he grows it.” At a certain point you’ll be done. And you’ll be a little bit unhinged by the experience, be it by excitement or anxiety or both.

And the final cruelty now, as your book is finally shipping to stores, is that after all this time you’ve spent underground writing the book contending with Jack Torrance’s paranoia about all-work-and-no-play and your cruel uncle’s fast-growing grass, and all this time waiting for the book to come out while suffering this eyes-rolled-back-into-your-head anxiety over having nothing to do for six months— after all this furious work and idle anguish, once the book is out, you’re expected to go out and be an engaging public performer. To entertain people.

Most authors are poorly equipped for this. Most of us are introverts. We keep to ourselves. We sit alone and write books. It’s the nature of the work.

Not all of us are introverts, of course. Do you know how you tell, by the way, if an author is an introvert? When he talks to you, he stares at his shoes. Do you know, on the other hand, how you tell if an author is an extrovert? When he talks to you, he stares at your shoes.

Having spent a significant part of the past three years sitting quietly writing a book, and staring at my shoes, I see now in hindsight two things:

First, the surest sign that I would write a book, was probably my steadfast denial, over quite a few years, that I ever would have the discipline, focus or commitment to do so. This denial, I now see, was an acknowledgment of possibility. The idea was niggling at me, making me feel guilty; hence I denied it. As it turned out, it would be merely a matter of time before I found a subject—or more accurately, before a subject found me—that seized my imagination and compelled me to make the subject my own and work up the nerve to just write the lights out on it.

And second, the surest sign that I would find the motivation to work hard enough to write a decent book was the fact that when I got started, I had only the vaguest idea of what I was actually doing.

Now to be sure, I had seen the process of publishing a book unfold many times—for my clients, for my authors at HarperCollins. But I’d never gone through it myself. I’d never struggled with how to start, where to end, and how to manage the flow of events and turning points in between in a way that would hold a general reader over the course of a long-form narrative.

What fired my fingertips every morning, it turned out, what fueled my efforts to figure these things out on the job, as it were, was not the knowledge I had acquired over the years pitching books, or writing flap copy, or cajoling editors out of another $10,000 on a book contract. What did it was the amateur desire to try my hand. Once I got started what kept me going was not so much the contract, but the doubt that I could do it in the first place. (The contract is merely the enforcement mechanism behind this deeper doubt.)

It was fear of failure. Unlike Houston Mission Control, in the writing life, failure is always an option. T. S. Eliot observed, “I suppose some editors are failed writers. But so are most writers.” The concern that I might not be up to it helped push me to success.

The book has been well published. Book clubs have taken it, Bantam has been back to press, they’ve advertised it, it’s getting good word of mouth among history readers, and it’s still selling.

This would not have happened if I didn’t tackle the book with an amateur’s passion. The book is a good read. It’s a good read because I wanted more than anything else to just make this fascinating subject my own, and then write the hell out of it. I wanted to reach beyond my established sphere of accomplishment and tackle something larger.

I wanted the book to concisely and memorably explain large swaths of history and bring the history to life through untold personal stories. I wanted it to have the immediacy of Black Hawk Down and the poignance of Flags of Our Fathers.

I wanted these things because I have been into this stuff—naval lore, World War II history—since I was a kid. The book project, then, has been a vehicle for reconnecting me to a childhood interest that seems to run in my bones. I first read about these ships that fought this battle years ago. But thanks to the cursory way the story of the Battle off Samar has always been treated—it always seems to be folded into, and buried by, larger events—the full story has remained submerged. I knew nothing of the men on these ships. I wanted my book not so much to be a big overview of what the admirals were doing, but to drill down and put readers on the decks of these warships as they sailed to their certain destruction and came out, impossibly, on the winning side of a battle they were destined to lose.

When I discovered late in the year 2000 that no book had been written since this incident happened in 1944 that did justice to the ordinary sailor, no book that brought to life in this Stephen Ambrose fashion the trials of naval combat, and when I found out that the men who were there on that day were neither hard to find nor hard to persuade to cooperate with me, I was off and running.

I was off and running not because I had made a shrewd calculation of market opportunity. If I were doing that I would have avoided World War II altogether. World War II books had been seriously overpublished by the time I signed my contract with Bantam in March 2001. Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation had sold more than a million copies. It and Flags of Our Fathers had inspired a whole host of competitors, all rushing toward publication. WWII was anything but a sure thing.

This was not about trend-chasing. This was not about financial calculation. I got this project off the ground because the story at the heart of this book has formed the very core of my ideas about gallantry and sacrifice since I was a young boy.

When I was writing that book proposal, I knew that I had never even come close to writing a book like this before. I’d written essays and book reviews, edited a college newspaper. I had helped in a small way to shepherd other people’s books to market.

But it was a real question in my mind—as late as half way into writing the manuscript—whether I could pull off a writing project on this scale: a 145,000-word book based on a research effort that would fill a twenty-five-page bibliography, and involve interviews with more than fifty survivors of the battle.

What kept me going was the sheer enthusiasm to do it. I approached it as an amateur, a studious one to be sure, but an amateur nonetheless.

I figured it out as I went along. I don’t outline especially well. In fact, I don’t outline really at all. I do not know how to systematically organize research. I struggled to figure out where the starting point to this sprawling story was, and I ran like hell for the finish like once I found it.

I taught myself how to do interviews, to take oral histories. I learned how to listen. I feel like I’ve always been able to use language well. What I didn’t know what that I could use it in volume. Volume turned out to be a problem actually. The first draft I sent in was almost 50 percent over my contractual word count. I struggled through four major revisions with an editor who drove me to such lengths only because she cared about this story as much as I did. Tracy Devine at Bantam … she’s one of the absolute best. We restructured, moved chapters around, tried to bring down the word count before we realized that too much cutting was going to hit bone with a story this large and dramatic. We took our time. Possibly the most important thing Tracy and Bantam did for me was delay the book by a season. With the final delivery date for a Fall 2003 publication looming, we were racing to finish our last revision. At the eleventh hour, they decided to postpone the book until Spring 2004 so that we could tighten up the manuscript one more time.

Tracy’s a tough customer. She moved heaven and earth for me to get nice endpapers, thirty-two pages of photos, nice text stock and a redesign on the cover. On one occasion she and I fought like a married couple—the illustrations were tough to get together. But we kept our heads in the game and our eyes on the prize because we both had the sense that this story was far larger than either of us, and that it deserved to be told as well as possible.

Every publishing success story I’ve been associated with has been the product of a sort of obsessive passion of some kind. In most cases, the author at the center of it is not a grizzled, jaded, bored professional but a zealot, an amateur with an enthusiastic sense of mission. The more experience I get, the simpler this industry becomes. Experience is best profited from when it helps you to simplify the complex world around you. My experience has me convinced that this sense of passion is what the entire publishing business is all about.

Now before I close, I’d like to move from generality and inspiration into some actual writing advice, which I can now impart to you on the authentic foundation of hard experience.

It’s really simple, actually.

1. Figure out where your story starts. A memoir should probably not start with your birth; a biography starts with the subject’s childhood only at great peril. Start with some tension, in the middle of a situation. Start at a place where the reader will feel compelled to turn those critical first few pages.

2. When you begin, have at least a rough sense of where or how you’re going to finish. For me, this was a constantly moving target. As I was writing, having settled on a starting point, I created a Microsoft Word file that I named with two digits: “99.” The Word file for each main part of my book was named numerically so that they would line up in order on my display: “01 - Tin Cans,” “02 - Last Stand,” and so on. The file named 99 always fell right at the end of the list of files, where I could find it easily. It was a grab bag of interesting little tidbits I turned up in interviews and other research. I didn’t sweat too much how I was going to use those tidbits to finish the book. I just kept tossing these interesting items—quotations, facts, observations, random ruminations—into file 99, and I kept the faith that a satisfying conclusion could be formed out of them.

Now for the most important thing.

3. Keep typing. Keep typing until you work your way from your starting point to that grab bag in file 99.

Keep typing. That’s fundamental. I subscribe to the “seat of the pants” theory of composition. Its precepts are simple. In fact, there’s only one: Apply the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. Don’t stop typing.

Making it my mantra enabled me to overcome my fear that I wouldn’t have the discipline to get this thing done. I did some simple arithmetic. 200 work days a year. 500 words per day. 200 times 500 equals 100,000. And 100,000 words is a manuscript.

Some writers get all psychological when it comes to talking about writing motivation. They talk about “giving yourself permission” to write. Things like that.

For me, it was all about channeling passion—amateur enthusiasm—into this elementary arithmetic formula.

And it worked out. I got the thing done. I’m very proud of it. They’re selling copies in the other room if you’re curious to see how it all turned out.

I’m getting started in the late-night hours on another book now. It’s about the USS Houston and the ordeal of her survivors building the Burma-Siam Death Railway (including the Bridge on the River Kwai) for the Japanese. And I’ll say that I can already sense that writing a book is probably never quite the same thing the second time around. As much as I enjoy writing this history, and as tremendous an epic as this new story is, I can already feel the creeping influence of experience. On my work habits. On my perspective. On every aspect of bringing a story to the page. And as beneficial as that experience is, I can sense how it is already short-cutting some of the amateur’s sense of wonder and discovery that drove my first project.

I want to encourage all of you who are lucky enough to have found a subject that commands your energies like this to feel the confidence to trust your passion, to embrace this amateur’s enthusiasm and harness its energy to dare something great.

Thank you.