Sonny Brewer

Introduction to Stories from the Blue Moon Café IV

“There’s your introduction to the next Blue Moon Café book,” Joe said to me.

He, Joe Formichella, and Suzanne Hudson and I sat in the kitchen at one of those old Formica-top tables with the aluminum strip around the edge.  The appropriate mismatched chairs were pulled up close, and we were eating a little of Suze’s homemade spaghetti, salad on the side.  The house belonged to Everett Capps.  He was in the living room watching something on television with a friend.  Just down the hill on the banks of Fish River, bullfrogs were singing up a rain.

Joe writes.  Suzanne writes.  Everett writes.  I write.  Four out of five people in the house called themselves writers.  We were talking about writers.  About books, and raw manuscripts and copyedits, about submissions and deadlines and how quickly a book can disappear from the Books-in-Print database.  We counted ourselves lucky to have books published, still available at your local bookstore, and not yet mulched back to paper pulp.

Suze lit a cigarette.  I’d already pushed back my plate.  This was not a nonsmoking house, but Joe and Suze waited until I twirled my last forkful of noodles before firing up.  Joe poured me a glass of red wine.  Something nice, not expensive, from one those really good vineyards in Argentina.

Some chatter went around the table about the New York Times article that reported there were more manuscripts submitted for publication in 2003 than there are people who claim to read books on a regular basis.  They always say that writers should never give up their day jobs, that about 5 percent of published authors actually make a living from writing.

“It’s not about the money,” Suzanne said.

“No kidding,” I said.  “Every day it seems I get a query about a manuscript or story from an unpublished lawyer, doctor, engineer, architect,” I said.  “People who’ve got the good jobs, drive the Hummers.  Good stable folk.  And they want to do this crazy thing that we do.”  They smoked, I sipped.  We got quiet and could hear the TV like it was on the counter by the bread box.

We fell into a round of talk about why so many people want to write a novel, about those who say they are going to write a book as if it’s easy as ordering at the drive-up.  The single most common misconception about writing good fiction is that it is easy to do.  “But it’s really hard work,” Suzanne said.  Joe and I both knew how many hours she had spent in solitude turning out the six hundred pages of her next novel, In the Dark of the Moon.

But, like playing the piano, you don’t just walk up to a Steinway in the corner of the room and bang out a concerto in a full bloom of excellence.  It takes skill and study and practice.  A lot of it.  And there is a big difference between arranging a subject and verb between a capital letter and a period and conjuring with words well chosen a life that stands up on a page and slaps the hell out of you.  The latter is worth sacrificing the trees to make the page.

Besides, why would somebody in the Rotary club want to wreck his life with all that writerly angst, ever pressing the back of a damp wrist tight to a wracked and wrinkled forehead looking for another clever turn of phrase, the kind of metaphors that will elicit “furiously original work” from the Dallas Morning News?

It’s not easy to write.

It’s easy to talk.

The coin of the realm for both writers and talkers is a word.  But, some easy talkers are bankrupt storytellers.

I broke the silence, easy talker that I am.  “I got a call today from a dentist.  He said he’d written a book.  He asked me if I’d read it and tell him what I think.”  I told Joe and Suze I was in a mood when he called.  As I talked to the dentist, I found myself thinking about John D. MacDonald’s introduction to Stephen King’s Night Shift, a collection of great short stories.

“MacDonald said in his intro that it really pissed him off when somebody came up to him and said they’d been thinking about writing themselves a novel.  He said he wanted to say, ‘Yeah, and I’ve been thinking about doing some brain surgery.’”

MacDonald’s incredulity was how anyone could have the audacity to think they could write a book instead of, say, watching television for a night or two.

Everett came in to get a beer from the refrigerator.  He lost his grip and dropped the slippery wet bottle back into the vegetable crisper drawer on top of its longneck mates.  Nothing shattered.  “I gotta invent a soft beer bottle,” he said.  Totally to himself.  And walked out of the room.  We watched him go, all grinning.

And then got serious again: Who the hell do these people with their unlicensed laptops think they are?

“So I asked the dentist calmly, ‘What makes you think you know how to write a novel?’ I wanted to know,” I said to Joe and Suzanne, “if he’d studied writing, if he’d stacked up ten thousand manuscript pages getting to the three hundred he wanted to call a book, maybe even why he wanted to write a book in the first place.”

“What’d he say,” Joe asked.  “You want some more wine?”  He nodded toward my empty glass.

“Sure,” I said, handing him my glass.  “He said that when he and his brother were little boys they used to write stories to each other, used to read to each other all the time, used to promise each other that someday they’d write a book together.  Then he told me that his brother died before they got around to it.  Then he told me he wrote the book for his brother.  ‘To keep my promise to him that we’d write a book.  I’m here and I can and he cannot.  So I wrote the book.’  And you know, guys,” I said, looking from Joe to Suze, “that’s as good a reason to write a book as there is.”

And the book may not be any good at all.  But it may so damn full of heart and honesty and longing that it is just, by God, fine.

“I hope to hell he brings the book to me,” I said.

“There’s your introduction…” Joe said.

He’s right.  What clicked for Joe, clicked for me at the same time.  Yes, it is very hard to write a good book.  Damn few people can do it.

And yet.

And yet there is sometimes an alchemical transformation of lead into gold that occurs in the crucible of one’s love for reading.  You don’t love to write if you don’t love to read.  You cannot write worth a whit if you don’t get as hungry to read as you do for good homemade spaghetti, if you don’t enjoy it as much as a glass of good pinot noir.  But if you do really love to read, and you think you want to write, something magic might happen.  It just might be that your urge to write fiction is accompanied by some talent.

And John D. MacDonald would be sorry if he ever yelled at you.

‘Cause you are the real deal.  You’ve got the audacity to face a blank page and come away with the upper hand.  One in a million.

And if my belly ain’t down in the dirt fielding the queries, how am I going to catch that little sparkle in your prose, grab you up, and see you backlit by the sun?

God, lay me low.  Keep me down there looking for the other half of Emerson’s man, who is half himself and half his expression.  I want to get my hands on the expression of the man.  (And if it’s good, it too will have been a sifting in the frothy dark waters of the soul of a writer.)

That’s the joy of putting together this anthology we like to call Stories from the Blue Moon Café.  To go panning for gold knee-deep in the inky sluice and come up with something that shines.  Bright.

For now, for this time, for these stories or essays or poems, we’ve found the men and women who read good stories and good books and decided they needed to do that too.  Promised themselves they could do it.  Would try really hard to write something fine.  The contributors to this collection have done it.  Or we think so.  If you’re in agreement, then we’ve got ourselves a book worth the trees that were felled, hauled, chipped, cooked, and pressed into the pages in your hand.