Andre. This time I got sixteen thousand.â
âSixteen? Thatâs my salary, and Iâm having a hard time in Haverhill. Can you make it on sixteen in Boston?â
âWell, Andre,â he said, like a man holding a full house in five card stud, âI think I can make it on sixteen thousand dollars.â
âYouâre wonderful,â I said. âYouâre the only writer I know, your age, who isnât always worrying about money, talking about money: mortgages and cars and second cars and boats ââ
âI donât really think those guys want all that stuff.â
âIf they gave you a hun dred thousand you wouldnât buy a damned thing, would you? Youâd live in the same place and write every day and you wouldnât change a thing , would you.â
âI donât want money,â he said. âI just want readers.â
1988
S ELLING S TORIES
W E SHORT STORY writers are spared some of the major temptations: we donât make money for ourselves or anybody else, so the people who make money from writers leave us alone. No one gives us large advances on stories we havenât written. I have never envied a writer who makes a lot of money, because the causal combination of money and writing frightens me. The act of writing alone is all I can muster the courage to face in the morning; if my livelihood and the expectations of publishers depended on it, I doubt that I could do it at all. So, like the poets, short story writers live in a safer world. There is no one to sell out to, there is no one to hurry a manuscript for; our only debt is to ourselves, and to those stories that speak to us from wherever they live until we write them. And every writer has stories that only he can give birth to and, until he does, they float like bodiless spirits crying to be born. I have been teaching fiction writing to very young students for ten years, and I am still saddened when one of them leaves a story unborn, before I can hear it all; and, like a nuance of death, I can feel that story and its people drifting away forever.
But thatâs a different matter, and has to do with confronting oneself at the writing desk, where there are always temptations. When all that is done and the story is in the mail, we donât have to worry about much until someone decides to publish it. Then, with some magazines, we have to do a bit of thinking. Iâm forty-one, so Iâve done a lot of thinking, but I still donât have many answers. Except one: I prefer to publish in quarterlies. That is not the whole truth. I would like to publish in Harperâs and Atlantic Monthly , but I never have, simply because I havenât written anything they liked enough to publish.
For reasons Iâve forgotten, I used to want to publish in Esquire , and there was a time when I mailed stories by special delivery to their fiction editor. Because he had read a story of mine in Northwest Review and written to me and said from now on, send everything directly to me. His assistant, a woman I never met but whom I liked anyway, wrote, saying that if the story in Northwest Review was one she had rejected, she would apologetically and happily walk through Central Park alone at midnight. This stirred in me memories of one of the sweetest and saddest images of my boyhood: a World War II movie â was it So Proudly We Hail ? â about nurses or WACs or whatever on an island in the Pacific. Near the end of the movie, one of the girls puts a hand grenade between her breasts, walks into the jungle, and when the Japanese soldiers come out of the brush and surround her, she pulls the pin. That might have been Lana Turner. I wrote the kind woman at Esquire , told her she had indeed rejected the story that her boss liked, but Northwest Review had taken it and paid for it with a check for ten dollars from the state of Oregon, and she should not walk through that park even at high noon.
But after
âSixteen? Thatâs my salary, and Iâm having a hard time in Haverhill. Can you make it on sixteen in Boston?â
âWell, Andre,â he said, like a man holding a full house in five card stud, âI think I can make it on sixteen thousand dollars.â
âYouâre wonderful,â I said. âYouâre the only writer I know, your age, who isnât always worrying about money, talking about money: mortgages and cars and second cars and boats ââ
âI donât really think those guys want all that stuff.â
âIf they gave you a hun dred thousand you wouldnât buy a damned thing, would you? Youâd live in the same place and write every day and you wouldnât change a thing , would you.â
âI donât want money,â he said. âI just want readers.â
1988
S ELLING S TORIES
W E SHORT STORY writers are spared some of the major temptations: we donât make money for ourselves or anybody else, so the people who make money from writers leave us alone. No one gives us large advances on stories we havenât written. I have never envied a writer who makes a lot of money, because the causal combination of money and writing frightens me. The act of writing alone is all I can muster the courage to face in the morning; if my livelihood and the expectations of publishers depended on it, I doubt that I could do it at all. So, like the poets, short story writers live in a safer world. There is no one to sell out to, there is no one to hurry a manuscript for; our only debt is to ourselves, and to those stories that speak to us from wherever they live until we write them. And every writer has stories that only he can give birth to and, until he does, they float like bodiless spirits crying to be born. I have been teaching fiction writing to very young students for ten years, and I am still saddened when one of them leaves a story unborn, before I can hear it all; and, like a nuance of death, I can feel that story and its people drifting away forever.
But thatâs a different matter, and has to do with confronting oneself at the writing desk, where there are always temptations. When all that is done and the story is in the mail, we donât have to worry about much until someone decides to publish it. Then, with some magazines, we have to do a bit of thinking. Iâm forty-one, so Iâve done a lot of thinking, but I still donât have many answers. Except one: I prefer to publish in quarterlies. That is not the whole truth. I would like to publish in Harperâs and Atlantic Monthly , but I never have, simply because I havenât written anything they liked enough to publish.
For reasons Iâve forgotten, I used to want to publish in Esquire , and there was a time when I mailed stories by special delivery to their fiction editor. Because he had read a story of mine in Northwest Review and written to me and said from now on, send everything directly to me. His assistant, a woman I never met but whom I liked anyway, wrote, saying that if the story in Northwest Review was one she had rejected, she would apologetically and happily walk through Central Park alone at midnight. This stirred in me memories of one of the sweetest and saddest images of my boyhood: a World War II movie â was it So Proudly We Hail ? â about nurses or WACs or whatever on an island in the Pacific. Near the end of the movie, one of the girls puts a hand grenade between her breasts, walks into the jungle, and when the Japanese soldiers come out of the brush and surround her, she pulls the pin. That might have been Lana Turner. I wrote the kind woman at Esquire , told her she had indeed rejected the story that her boss liked, but Northwest Review had taken it and paid for it with a check for ten dollars from the state of Oregon, and she should not walk through that park even at high noon.
But after
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