I’m going to try to reconstruct this post, wiped away as though it never existed when I decided to ponder and revisit it, thinking a draft was saved (he said, the passive voice used).   Only the title was saved, as if to mock me.   Another reminder, boys and girls:  when writing on a computer, save your work often!

I had three big ideas for books to write over the course of my life, all of them misguided.  I point out at the start that nobody ever needs to write a book, really, although many people often think:  somebody should write a book about this. Sometimes they do and the book moves, informs, enlightens or entertains readers.  Other times, eh.  Few books change lives, though many who write books probably start off believing their’s will.

The first book I attempted to write was called Me Ne Frego [1], the story of an idealistic narrator’s inevitably losing battle against a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the unreasonable person of Minnie Frego.  The reader knows how the story ends long before the naive, somewhat sympathetic narrator does.  It’s part of what makes the manuscript so hard for me to read now, more than twenty years after posing as the tough guy narrator.   The manuscript served as my thesis for an MA in Creative Writing, so there’s that.   The letter I got from the one publisher I sent a sample to informed me that, although nicely written, it was not suitable for their house because the main character had not undergone the kind of dramatic personal transformation that apparently drives every great tale.

About twenty years later I had another big idea:  Bird Wins [2].   The idea was given to me by a literary agent, actually, although the title and the subject matter were mine.   In Bird Wins the occasionally droll narrator observes countless one-sided battles between powerless people and a soul-crushing bureaucracy, embodied in the people for whom our hero carries a bucket into which, after  lifting their long robes, they relieve themselves.  These thousand mini-tragedies are set against the backdrop of the narrator’s mother’s slow death from cancer.  I was told by the literary agent I’d regaled with some of the interlocking stories that it was a natural.  “If you write the pitch just the way you told it to me now, I can sell it,” she said confidently, flashing a winning smile.   I believed her, though my attempt to recreate it was nowhere near as engaging as what I’d improvised for her and her son.  Nothing came of it in the end but a few disjointed chapters.

In the decades in between I periodically worked on a manuscript I unfortunately called Get Outta Here, Melz, taking the surname of my fictional alter-ego from an old friend who not long ago died of a rare and vicious disease.   At that time he was alive and well, as far as I knew.  In that story there is no relentless, soul-crushing bureaucracy for the narrator to fight a losing battle against, but, in a refreshing change of pace, Benedict Melzer is eventually chased by a torch-wielding mob of his former closest friends who form a posse in the mistaken belief that he has seduced and run off with one of their teenaged daughters.  They find a seemingly incriminating correspondence between the self-righteously noble Benedict and the, at one time, slightly infatuated girl, but their suspicions could not have been further from the truth.  The last letter the girl writes to BM, coldly denouncing him as a hopeless, pathetic, self-important idiot, which the readers see, is not found by his former friends among the papers.  At the time they take off after him, the girl is in another state with a young man and Melz is far away, alone, on the run from himself and his life.  It was intended as a comedy of errors, although, ideally, a comedy is funny.  I never made much progress with the book, though thinking about it now, and the unfortunately named BM’s all-consuming, impractical, slightly mad belief in the supreme importance of spontaneity and creativity, I find it tricky to escape the psychic ripples of it as a certain alienated desperation dogs me like a hellhound in the uncomfortable silence of just about everybody I know.

As I jotted uncharitably in my former gratefulness journal the other day:

My first two attempts to write a book, Me Ne Frego and Bird Wins, were ass-backwards, spectacularly unmarketable efforts.  Each featured a brave, unquestionably earnest narrator describing a detailed crucifixion, gesticulating stoically from his crude cross as the life dripped from his body.

Another equally compelling book could be written from the POV of a precocious child dying of dysentery in a toxic slum in Lahore.  The world has billions of such books, unwritten by the losers of a billion small, infinitely brutal, rigged games.

The books the world wants, and it’s hard to blame them, are stories of a remarkable individual’s miraculous triumph over the relentless machine that grinds us all down at varying speeds.  The paying world goes, by and large, for moving triumphs or dramatic, fully justifiable revenge stories, a Hollywood ending.  The world, where the scales are so often false and weighted, loves the rousing story of an honest count, against all the odds, or failing that, a good ass-whupping.  Stories by those on the wrong end of the ass-whupping do not sell as well as the other kind, as any marketing expert will tell you.

NOTES:

[1] “I don’t give a rat’s ass!” an Italian expression of contempt and bravado famously used by Benito Mussolini.

[2] named for the unbeatable tic-tac-toe playing chicken in the Chinatown Arcade on Mott Street, (the bird always went first, so you figure it out…) may she rest in peace.