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17
Stay hungry so your
determination will not fl ag.
In the Stephen King short story, “All That You Love Will
Be Carried Away,” a traveling salesman pulls into a Motel
6 to commit suicide. Life on the road, the isolation of it,
has caught up with him.
The only thing keeping him from eating a bullet is
his odd journal, a collection of bathroom graffi ti he has
kept over the years. He thinks people will consider him
crazy if they fi nd the journal. He had once wanted to
write a book about it.
You’ll have to read the story, from the collection Ev-
erything’s Eventual, to fi nd out what happens. But it’s one
of King’s best, with a haunting subtextual question: What
do we do when we see that which we love carried away?
I’ve thought about this recently after some musings
by a few of my novelist friends who are being dropped
by their publishers for lack of sales. Or others who can’t
seem to land a new contract despite well-reviewed, award-
winning novels.
Most writers think getting published is the key to
the Kingdom. We have arrived in a literary Valhalla to
take our place among the gods of print. Odin, looking
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like James Patterson, welcomes us with pints of mead
and promises of immortality.
It’s all an illusion, of course. There is no Valhalla.
It’s more like a dusty Barnes & Noble. And whatever
shelf space we have can dry up in an instant. As General
George S. Patton once put it, “All glory is fl eeting.”
I think my most joyful writing actually came before
I was published. Partly it was ignorance—I didn’t know
how much I didn’t know, and was just having fun put-
ting down a story, letting it fl ow.
So happy was I that I wrote in my journal that I
would always write, even if I never got published. Even
if I had to print out copies at Kinko’s and force them
on my family at Thanksgiving and on perfect strangers
outside Safeway.
Well, I did get published and it turned into a career,
but that does not mean it’s all roses, or that it might
not go away sometime. No writer is fully immune from
such thoughts.
So the question becomes what to do if it happens, if
the publishers’ doors slam?
I hope I would respond like one of my favorite writers,
Preston Sturges. He was a blazing comet of success in the
early 1940s, writing one great fi lm comedy after another.
He considered the possibility that all he had might be
taken away and said, “When the last dime is gone, I’ll sit
on the curb with a pencil and a ten-cent notebook, and
start the whole thing all over again.”
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Try to keep that attitude, no matter where your writ-
ing goes. If you get published, don’t rest and think you’ve
got it made. If the well dries up, don’t stop.
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