The Halfway to Hell Club

Thoughts on writing novels through late-middle age.

I turned 48 today.

Of those 48 years, I’ve written seriously for 20. I wrote in high school and college, but moving to San Francisco marked the beginning of what felt like the real work. A writing practice with genuine discipline. An eye on the novel as a great form, the one worth pursuing.

It’s a blessing to not know how much you don’t know when you start writing novels. For instance: You don’t know that you have to write a novel or two just to create the scaffolding in your brain capable of supporting a good novel in the future. You don’t know how far away you may be from writing a good novel, if you ever do.

The ignorance and the arrogance are just what you need. With them, you set out and create intricately rewarding failures. If you find your failure engaging, you may keep going.

It’s Not a Bridge Yet

A print of the Golden Gate Bridge hangs on my office wall at home. Or rather, the bridge becoming. The towers are up, the cables have been spun, and the dream of the road deck is underway. The bridge isn’t a bridge at all. It’s incomplete, useless, seemingly fragile even as it supports the weight of everything building it.

In the 20 years I’ve been writing, I’ve completed six novels, two novellas, three feature film scripts, and a couple TV pilots. A handful of people have read them. Many other attempts remain unfinished. Confessions from a Dark Wood was the only published book from the lot. Its publication was a happy accident and the generosity of many people helped it find its way in the world for a time.

Writing novels in your 20s and early 30s, you might harbor the private fantasy that it’s gonna happen for you. What that “it” amounts to is amorphous and apocryphal. But there’s this belief in a vague infinity of possibility.

Two things dawned on me in my mid-40s:

1) What you fail to realize is it’s happening as you’re doing it, and

2) You won’t get to do it forever.

This Isn’t About Publishing

Publishing culture might say that for a writer at 48, whatever’s going to happen has happened. (If not a stunning debut, if not a dark horse late bloomer, if not a National Book Award Finalist, if not among the “30 Under 30” and so on.) Understand this is entirely the domain of capitalism. I am not talking about career in this sense. Nor am I talking about the novelist’s desire to parlay media attention or a curated online personality into teaching or conference gigs.

I am talking about the novelist’s expiring ability to write the novel at all.

A theory, and I’d like time to prove me wrong: Novelists have forty good years in them. A forty-year window in which their best work might emerge. Perhaps the first ten or twenty are training. But the final twenty open onto all that has been paid for, all that might be possible.

I think about Don DeLillo. In 1985, the year White Noise was published, DeLillo turned 49. What followed: Libra (1988, age 52), Mao II (1991, age 55), and Underworld (1997, age 61). As The Paris Review’s “Art of Fiction No. 135” interview suggests, DeLillo began what became Underworld as far back as 1992. I would say that mountain of work between 1984/85 and 1997 casts its shadow over his past and future list.

Beyond the 40 working years, the ability to hold the whole of an exceptional novel in the mind may be elusive. The works diminish in their scope or vision, or serve more faithfully a private purpose such as a spiritual practice, or the habit of keeping the novelist alive and engaged with living. (Existing so long with one foot in the hall of mirrors is hard to kick.) As Rachel Kushner said:

“Writing is a way of living. It doesn’t quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It’s a way of being alive, for the writer.”

(Kushner’s masterpiece, The Flamethrowers was published in 2013 when she was 45.)

Working with the Net

The “Halfway to Hell Club” was a group of iron workers and other skilled tradesmen whose lives were saved by the safety net installed on the bridge during construction. As Al Zampa, one of the club’s members explained the origin of the club in a 1988 video: “Most of the iron workers go to Hell anyway, so we only went halfways.”

For the novelist, the first twenty years could be viewed as time spent weaving the net. It is not wasted. That net helps you keep working. Life may lay you out for a time, but there’s a difference between down and dead. If you quit with your clock running, know a time will come when it will be too late to return and finish the bridge, even if you want to.

That is Hell. Wanting to when you can’t, knowing you could have.

So I’ll wake up tomorrow thinking It is not too late at 48. In fact, prior to now, the best of what I am capable of imagining may not have even been possible.

To twenty more if I’m lucky.

END TRANSMISSION.

-ERR