I am a writer, though my lifetime of writing has not earned me as much as a year working at Dairy Queen. I always knew I was going to be a writer, and that I would have to go through a period of "paying my dues." I just didn't think it would take so long. Perhaps my naivete was fortunate, because if I had it to do all over again I think I would go with my childhood ambition: to be an ichthyologist. Study little fishies.

All writers are doomed by their initial piddling success - as any driving instructor will tell you, it’s hard to unlearn bad habits. In my case I won a contest, the Independent Press-Telegram Scary Story Contest, and although they never actually printed my story (a grudge I still nourish at my breast) I did get fifty dollars out of it. A boy's first pay! It was not unreasonable to expect that it would lead to greater things, that I was a teenage prodigy on the ladder to literary stardom. In fact, that money was the biggest sum I would make from any single manuscript until I was forty.

Why does anyone still write? If one is to believe the much-reported news that literature is in its last feeble throes, then even the most prosperous of us are nothing more than ghost-dancing aborigines. Like the extinct denizens of Easter Island, who chopped down their last tree and then turned on each other, many writers have already resorted to cannibalism, taking jobs with advertising, television, and the Internet, where they raid the cooling body of literature for bloody morsels to be converted into a less alarming product, one odorless and compact, like the food pills envisioned by futurists of the '50s. For the rest of us, the last True Believers, it is obviously a dismal life - more crackpot hobby than profession - underpaid and unsung, generating huge quantities of product that will be haphazardly sifted through the way heaps of oyster shells are picked over for stray pearls. No matter how painfully wrought, the rest is landfill. Most writers are amateurs, and I mean that only in the sense that we work for nothing, sacrificing life's more practical rewards for this voluntary sweatshop of the soul.

But, you may ask, isn't that part of the romance? Think of Henry Miller prostituting his wife in Paris; think of Poe dying in a Baltimore gutter. All very appealing at first, yes, but no one wants to live in a garret forever. Forget your "artistic expression;” like gambling addicts, we live in hope of a jackpot. Most of us can't even get mileage out of "I am a Writer" because the question that invariably follows is, "Have I read anything you've written?" To which we can only mumble incomprehensibly and change the subject. I wonder how many frustrated freelancers actually partake of that "delight in the English language" that is so often attributed to us - that'll carry you about a year before you start wanting some results.

What keeps the unpublished writer writing is the same thing that keeps Jehovah's Witnesses pounding on doors: blind faith.

Strengthening my conviction that I was born to write, I was accepted to a college that put more emphasis on essays than SATs--St. John's, in New Mexico--and floundered for a year before dropping out. I had misunderstood the place, and they didn't understand me either: I was a writer, not some stuffy historian. My heroes were Salinger and Saul Bellow, Kerouac and Vonnegut and all the other gods of fiction. I didn’t mind reading the Great Books, but I wanted to write some, too. Before long I was working as a janitor in Santa Fe, living the writing life in a tiny, unheated room on Agua Fria Street, adjacent to a liquor store that sold tamales out of a crock-pot. Meanwhile my best friend from high school was upgrading from the University of Chicago to Yale, and would soon land prestigious jobs in advertising, then television - a typical '80s success story. We would see who made the wiser choice.

At college I had purchased a manual typewriter, an old Royal with the heft of a car battery, and it was huddled over this massive instrument that I experienced my first sense of literary failure. Not even noble failure--thinking it would be a fast buck, I tried submitting pulpy short stories to Easy Rider and Gallery, but apparently even these lowbrow magazines had standards I could not meet. They swatted me like a gnat

Struggling writers cannot help but envy the more prosperous of our number - not just the Stephen Kings and J.K. Rowlings, but also the less visible ones, the pluggers, who with Sammy Glick-like intensity supply hundreds of publications with minor articles on every subject. Who actually make a living. To those of us who never see a check, it can be mystifying and disheartening, no matter how many times we are assured, "You will be published."

Hitchhiking once, I met a motivational speaker--a man who choreographed ninjas, flaming batons and bikinied go-go dancers for the purpose of galvanizing jaded salesmen--who banished my writing problems with one word: "Volume." His cure-all solution to freelancing was to send the same article to fifty publications at a time. Be active, not reactive! It seemed sensible, and I assured him I would do it.

"We'll see," he told me. "A lot of people secretly want to fail. They just can't do what it takes."
"I will. I'll do it," I said.
"Maybe. I'll be watching for your byline. We'll see."
I didn’t do it.

Years elapsed, years in which I moved to the East Coast and got a job as a parking attendant, but I never gave up the idea that I was a writer. I just stopped doing it. I was like the novelist in Camus' The Plague, who dreams that someday a publisher will pick up his book and cry, "Hats off!"--meanwhile, there is no book. I took up with a woman, now my wife, and the two of us rambled to Oregon by way of Europe, eventually settling just north of the California border. I had already infected her with my Peter Pan Syndrome, my artistic pie-in-the-sky, so she was primed to believe that the forests of the West would bear golden fruit.

The Lord smote us down.

Ah, it was good while it lasted: We had the A-frame cabin by the river, the circular hooded fireplace, the deer in the driveway, the long evenings of deep conversation. Then at dawn she would go off to her teaching job and I would be left in the woods, staring at a blank sheet of paper, listening to the sound of our savings trickling away. It was put up or shut up time, and I was impotent. Then it occurred to me that I need not offer myself up to editorial scorn--I could be the editor! Yes, that was the trick: Start my own alternative newspaper. Publish my own material, my own illustrations, and offer a forum to all the similarly frustrated artists and writers in Southern Oregon. It would even be lucrative; after determining advertising rates in some of the local papers, I found that I could undercut every one and still make a handsome profit. Thus was born The Dark Horse.

I rented a cheap little office, bought a business permit, installed a phone, set up my drafting table and got to work. It seemed sensible that if I intended to approach people for advertising I would have to provide a demonstration copy, complete with sample ads. I would also want to distribute some as an invitation to future contributors. An army of one, I quickly assembled a four-page, two-color tabloid with a couple of extraneous names in the credits just so it wasn't obviously a one-man job. This all cost about $2000--something like half our remaining savings. But my paper looked good; very good.

Then I hit the streets. Or, more accurately, the streets hit me--like an anvil in a Roadrunner cartoon. I had made one very basic mistake: The role of print advertising in the life of a small business was not clear to me. I thought that I would be offering a valued service, whereas the local proprietors quickly made it understood that they had no interest in propping up my little project, the implication being that I was asking for their sponsorship in some harebrained scheme--Good Lord, the very same rejection I had hoped to escape!

I didn't sell a penny's worth of space; The Dark Horse broke its leg going out the gate. More distressing in a way was that for all the sample papers I distributed, all the calls for contributors, I only received one submission: a semi-literate horror story that borrowed freely from the movie Gremlins. Where were the voiceless hordes? The hungry poets? There was no return envelope so I tossed the story away, but I can't help wondering now if I didn't crush someone's fragile ego--if I am not among the hated as well as the haters.

Oh, you are hated. You editors, you publishers, you agents. We hate you as the serfs hated the Czar, as the peasants of France hated Marie Antoinette, but unlike those unwashed masses we do not have the coherence of a mob; every one of us is, necessarily, alone. That being the nature of a writer. We can't see you, but we must suffer your rule, as defined by the ratio of celebrity bios to Cormac McCarthy novels on the New York Times Bestseller List. The whole of media is our slush pile.

But it is not all bitterness. Between rejections we are rather touchingly wistful, believers in magic, childlike mediums, offering up our precious words to thin air and repeating the superstitious rituals we have learned in the hope of communicating with mythic beings. Skeptical friends and acquaintances sit at the table, and we find ourselves rattling unseen chains - "Esquire happens to be considering one of my articles" - just to save face. The Writer's Market is our Necronomicon.
"If I were a writer..." begins the facile advice of many editors in that book, and we who yearn for a password into their sanctum lean forward in hushed expectation, only to read, "I would learn how to write a good proposal, have my work professionally edited, select an appropriate publisher and study the market." Or simply, "I would get an agent."

So much becomes clear. Now we know where the emphasis lies. Not in dredging up the most deeply-felt prose revelations, not in words that pierce the reader's heart like ethereal quills, but rather in determining where the ice is thickest between "Study what sells" and "Avoid the trite and boring"--the modern-day Riddle of the Sphinx.

After putting The Dark Horse out of its misery, I began sending movie reviews willy-nilly to one of the two newspapers in the area, choosing the one that had done my printing, thereby abetting my costly fiasco. It was nothing but an expression of hostility--your critic sucks--so I was shocked to find my headline on the review page the following week: Howard the Dud: Tar and Feathers.

The other reviewer quit (for reasons that would shortly become clear), and I found myself in the seat of small-town arts critic at fifteen to twenty dollars a pop. Not just movies, but local plays as well, including some performed by the prestigious Oregon Shakespearean Festival. Soon I was also doing features reporting--Snow driving: Ashland's wild winter sport--and had begun recording unpaid reviews for the local public radio station, just to increase my exposure. There was talk of taking my reviews to television, if only I could get movie clips, and of broadcasting my radio bits up in Eugene. I was treated as a powerful presence in the community, attending private showings of new films and getting the best table at an area cabaret.

But all the time my girlfriend and I were partying with the local elite, our food stamps were being revoked because I wasn't making enough effort to find real work--in my best month as arts czar I earned $240. Her teaching pay at a local private school amounted to less than minimum wage. Nobody was offering me a permanent position at the newspaper, even though I had virtually taken over editing the weekend magazine, and my applications in the service sector (the only positions I am ever qualified for) went unanswered. I understood--it was an apprenticeship--but one trip to the dentist and we would be destitute. Still...it wasn't about money. Of that I was sure.

One day, Mickey Spillane passed through town, and the job of interviewing him fell to me:

"How many books have you written?" I asked him.
"People always ask me that, but I don't know," he replied, laughing. "I never think about it. Once I get paid, that's it. That's why I write. Otherwise I'd be doing something else."
"Do you have any advice for aspiring writers?"
He was emphatic: "Don't! I usually try to discourage people, because they're never going to make it, and I hate to see them waste their time."

What must it be like for the professional writer? Not one of these small fry who are forced to shill their work at under-attended book signings, but the really comfortable ones who can survive a weak book on the strength of name alone. Who no longer have to be concerned with the maddening minutiae that are the bane of lesser authors: the cover letters and SASEs, the appeals to agents and fruitless scrutiny of the mailbox. Who can grandly stride above the siren calls of writing workshops, writing manuals, subsidy publishers, fee-charging editors and the whole new industry of writing-related software. Who can work.

Yes, we hate them, too. Not all of them, and not all of the time. Only the ones who don't exercise their power for good, who make a career out of writing the same book again and again, meekly collecting their loot, refusing to ever break new ground and challenge the publishing establishment--or their loyal readers. Captains of the sinking ship of literature, they use their authority to commandeer the lifeboats, leaving the rest of us to go down with the S.S. Midlist.

Our ship came in. My girlfriend was hired to teach overseas by the Department of Defense--instantly quadrupling her salary. We got married and moved to Teagu, Korea. It was not hard to give up the meager trappings of our psuedo-life in Oregon--we were sure this job would usher in an age of rich opportunity for both of us, free of the petty worries that had stifled us in the past. Little did I know that my two years of freelance newspapering would later assume the proportions of lost Eden.

I immediately began planning a novel, a great Saul Bellow-like satire about an international assassin, and devoted an entire year's worth of writing to the project before I realized it was hopeless crap. This was the first of three novels I would abandon, but during the intervening slumps I churned out several dozen short stories and travel articles that I began submitting to magazines--my first efforts in this respect since being spurned by Easy Rider. It was one of these that caught the attention of Playboy:

Dear Mr. Greatshell:

Mr. Golson passed your article on to me; I'm his
assistant. I loved your article. It is wonderful, funny
and strikes just the right tone for PLAYBOY, as
well as being very interesting.

BUT...the summer Olympics starts in August and
we are currently working on our November issue.
Needless to say this piece would not work unless
the Olympics were going on at our release time. Try
us again with something else. And thanks for your
interest.

P.S. I'm still laughing about your line: strays don't
go to the pound but by the pound.

Far from being disheartened, I was thrilled by the encouragement offered by this note--Playboy loved me!--and immediately set to writing another article in the same style. When a small envelope arrived with the familiar rabbit logo embossed in the corner, I opened it with shaking hands. This time the note came from G. Barry Golson, Executive Editor. It read:

Dear Mr. Greatshell:

Thank you for your piece "Babes in Thailand". I
enjoyed this piece very much--you have a terrific
humorous tone--and I thought it was time to do a
travel piece about Bangkok. Unfortunately, my
fellow editors in Chicago disagreed with me, feel-
ing that Bangkok is a sex story whose time has
passed.

I will keep your name on file in case something
else comes up. I appreciate you thinking of us
and I very much enjoyed your work.

And that was it.
Never again would I receive anything from them to suggest that my work had been touched by human hands. Apparently Mr. Golson left Playboy soon after this, and his replacement quickly put to rest any ideas of a writer/editor relationship that I might have nurtured. In years to come I would obsessively fondle these two little scraps of validation--hopeful footprints in a desert of impersonal rejection slips. It occurs to me now that they might have been a mistake of some kind, or perhaps the result of intended malice: Did Mr. Golson leave Playboy under a cloud, and were these notes to me actually some scheme to punish his successor? Perhaps he sent encouragement to dozens of the worst writers he could turn up, then blew town.

At any rate, for years after that I sweated in exile, living from one mailing to the next, uncertain whether my strength lay in fiction, non-fiction, or illustrated children's books, since all of these had resulted in a blizzard of coolly-worded form letters. Not only from major and minor publishers but, more shamefully, from agents as well. Rejected by agents--there is the modern equivalent to torn apart by dogs.

Not that there weren’t flickers of light from time to time; proof that one's work had not simply been crammed into its return envelope. Any struggling writer is appreciative of personal attention, and even noncommittal words like "original and idiosyncratic" go a long way toward softening the blow of a rejection, especially if we suspect that the rest of the time our stuff never gets past the buffer zone of callow, preppy readers--publishing's first line of defense, or so we fear. We can imagine these fashionable Apprentice-aspirers blithely tossing aside our manuscripts and chirping, "Unsolicited--ew!"

On the flip side, publishers can be heard to bemoan the quality of material they receive, mountains of crap, and the lack of professionalism exhibited by so many of the crap’s authors: us. Yes, after laboring unacknowledged in some dim corner for weeks, months, or years, then financing the entire mailing process, we are childishly impatient, if not stark staring mad, and scarcely able to compose a stick-up note, much less a professional-sounding query letter. But just as Smith in 1984 is told that his complicity is not enough--he must love Big Brother--the writer is advised to "enjoy the publishing game."

I find myself dwelling on the short, unsatisfactory life of John Kennedy Toole, author of the Pulitzer-Prizewinning novel, Confederacy of Dunces. Having been artistically enriched by a miserable life, he struggled to find a publisher for his book about it, and finally attracted the attention of an editor at Simon and Schuster. But nothing came of it. The editor demanded revision after revision, dangling the carrot in front of Toole for so long that the troubled author finally killed himself in despair, after which his novel was promptly forgotten. Only an appeal by Toole's mother to literary maven Walker Percy saved Confederacy of Dunces from oblivion.

This is, of course, the oldest story in the world. Genius generally goes unrecognized; history is rife with examples of persecuted visionaries. Writers like myself--that is to say, real writers (yes! Yes! Why deny it?)--tend to take a pathetic amount of comfort in that fact, as if obscurity were a precondition for brilliance. We hover in limbo like the undead, glorying in our own posthumous renown but unable to reap its rewards.

Well, my friend went from advertising to network television, writing and producing a string of failed shows, for which he was paid millions of dollars. I finally found an agent and sold my first novel, but sales haven’t been spectacular, and now it’s hard to get my agent on the phone. In my darker moments I am envious of my friend. Not of the TV business itself, but of the big house, the money, the Lexus, the freedom to fail and get rich from it. Then I return to work on my latest book and think, Ground floor, here we come. Apparently the flame is still lit, the curse still in force. The slush-pile beckons.

My friend and I both have sons, and I wonder at times if mine will perceive any nobility in Dad's doubt-wracked pursuit. Would he rather have the Jacuzzi or will he admire the busted-up idealist I may become? Could it be that he will choose to pick up the torch himself?

Look! Look at the little fishies, I’ll tell him. Aren’t they interesting?