I had no special use for the pittance that I earned from this activity, no dreams of unlimited wealth. After all, I had taken in no more than two dollars before savvy relatives and neighbors conducted a secret and highly illegal meeting to agree that they wouldn't any longer permit trafficking in hand-printed fiction by eight-year-olds. This, of course, was at least restraint of trade, if not a serious abridgment of my First Amendment rights. If anyone in the United States Department of justice is interested, I think some of these co-conspirators are still around and available for prison.
Although I had no intention of either investing the nickels in a playground loan-sharking operation or squandering them on Twinkie binges, I knew instinctively that I must charge something for my stories if I wanted people to take them seriously. (If Henry Ford had launched the automotive industry by giving cars away, people would have filled them with dirt and used them for planters. Today there would still be no federal highway system, no drive-in burger joints, a gajillion fewer chase movies than Hollywood has thus far churned out, and none of those aesthetically pleasing wobbly-headed dog statues with which so many of us accessorize the ledge between the backseat and the rear window.) Nevertheless, when the local fiction-consumer cartel tried to close me down at the age of eight, I continued to produce stories and gave them away without charge.
Later, as an adult (or as close as I have gotten to being one), I began to write stories that were published by real publishers in New York City, who didn't bind them with staples and electrician's tape and who actually produced more than a single copy of each tale. They paid me more than nickels too — although, at first, not a lot more. In fact, for years, I wasn't convinced that it was possible to make a living as a writer without a second source of income. Aware that second occupations for writers need to be colorful in order to make good biographical copy, I considered bomb disposal and hijacking airliners for ransom. Fortunately, my wonderful wife's earning capacity, frugality, and awesome common sense prevented me from becoming either a resident of a federal penitentiary or a pile of unidentifiable remains.
Eventually, as my books became best-sellers, the nickels piled up, and one day I was offered a substantial four-book deal that was as lucrative as any airliner hijacking in history. Though writing those four books was hard work, at least I didn't have to wear Kevlar body armor, carry heavy bandoliers of spare ammunition, or work with associates named Mad Dog.
When word of my good fortune got around, some people — including a number of writers — said to me, "Wow, when you finish this contract, you'll never have to write again!" I expected to deliver all four novels before I turned forty-two. What was I then supposed to do? Start frequenting bars that feature dwarf-tossing contests? That is exactly the kind of aberrant and socially unacceptable activity that guys like me are liable to slide into if we don't keep busy.
More to the point, I had written most of my life, undeterred when the pay was poor, unfazed when writing didn't even pay nickels, so I was unlikely to stop when, at last, I found an audience that liked my work. It isn't the money that motivates: It's the love of the process itself, the storytelling, the creation of characters who live and breathe, the joy of struggling to take words and make a kind of music with them as best I can.
Writing fiction can be grueling when I'm on, say, the twenty-sixth draft of a page (some go through fewer than twenty-six, some more, depending on the daily fluctuation in my insanity quotient). After endlessly fussing with syntax and word choice, after having been at the computer ten hours, there are times when I'd much rather be working as a stock clerk in a supermarket warehouse or washing dishes in a steam-filled institutional kitchen — jobs that I've held, though as briefly as possible. In my worst moments, I'd even rather be gutting halibut in the reeking hold of an Alaskan fishing trawler or, God help me, assisting space aliens with those proctological examinations that they seem intent on giving to hapless, abducted Americans from every walk of life.
But understand: Writing fiction is also intellectually and emotionally satisfying — and great fun. If a writer isn't having fun when he's working, the stories that he produces are never going to be a pleasure to read. No one will buy them, and his public career, at least, will soon end.
For me, that is the secret to a successful, prolific career as a writer: Have fun, entertain yourself with your work, make yourself laugh and cry with your own stories, make yourself shiver in suspense along with your characters. If you can do that, then you will most likely find a large audience; but even if a large audience is never found, you'll have a happy life. I don't measure success by the number of copies sold but by the delight that I get from the process and the finished work.
Oh, yes, from time to time, a rare disturbed individual with a public forum does measure my success by what I earn — and gets really steamed about it. The fact that people take pleasure in my work becomes an intolerable personal affront to this odd duck, and he (or she) periodically produces long paragraphs of execrable syntax in support of the proposition that the world is going to hell simply because I am in it and doing all right for myself. (I'm not talking here of genuine critics; critics are a different group, and ninety percent of them like what I do; the other ten percent manage to dislike it without implying either that I have deadly body odor or that I'm an undiscovered serial killer.) Although the work of brilliant medical researchers is routinely reported on page twenty-three, if at all, and although millions of acts of courage and gratuitous kindness go unreported every day, one of these crusaders nevertheless fills astounding amounts of newspaper space with claims, ipse dixit, that I am the literary Antichrist.
I'm not the only target of such stuff, of course; every successful writer is stalked by such weird fauna on occasion. In our house, being a charitable bunch, we kindly refer to these folks as "spiteful malcontents" or "humorless scum." (In more enlightened centuries than ours, they were correctly seen as being possessed by demons and were dealt with accordingly.)
My point — have faith; one exists — is that writing for the sheer love of it is even a defense against unprovoked assaults by the spawn of Satan. What these occasional ink-stained stalkers never understand is that even if they were to get their wish, even if no publisher on earth would issue my work, I'd be compelled to write, to make my little books with staples and electrician's tape if necessary — and give them copies to annoy them. There is no escape from me. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
MOST LITERARY AGENTS ADVISE YOUNG WRITERS TO AVOID WRITING short stories. Spending time on short fiction is widely considered dumb, unproductive, self-destructive, the sure sign of a hopeless amateur, and a reliable indicator that the writer is the progeny of a marriage between first cousins.