(Ralph
McInerny is the Michael P. Grace chair of philosophy at Notre
Dame, where he has taught for 50 years. He has published hundreds
of scholarly essays and books, along with short stories, novels
and several mystery series. The most well-known of his mysteries
are his Father Dowling books. In the following edited excerpt
from his just-published memoir I Alone Have Escaped To Tell
You: My Life and Pastimes (University of Notre Dame Press),
he discusses the beginning of his fiction-writing career.)
* * *
At the University of Minnesota and then at Laval Université,
at first single and then married, I continued to write. During
the months that I was writing my dissertation I was also at work
on a novel. Since I never throw anything away, I cannot rewrite
such things in memory and lament the loss of something precious.
It is penitential for me to even page through those early efforts.
There was another novel written in Omaha, and yet another when
we moved to South Bend, Indiana, in August 1955. I sat at the
dining room table in my bathing trunks because of the ungodly
heat and wrote a novel. Over the years I would occasionally write
a short story and mail it in, my preferred target being The
New Yorker. It would come back, in Thurber's phrase, like
a serve in tennis. What I remember about those years was how episodic
my efforts were. After I sent off a story, I would wait as if
for news of the Nobel Prize. Rejection was cushioned by no work
in progress. I was not serious.
On January 16, 1964, I decided to get serious. We had moved
into the house on Portage Avenue in South Bend and were overextended.
Getting through the month was depressingly reminiscent of days
we thought we had left behind forever. I took on teaching a couple
courses at Indiana University in South Bend, adding those to my
daily chores at Notre Dame, but this was peanuts. I remembered
the copy of Writer's Digest I had bought in the Los Angeles
train station in 1946. I decided that I would write for commercial
markets, not just sporadically, but determinedly, every day, and
keep at it for a year, after which if I had not sold anything
I would admit to myself that I was not really a writer.
And so it began. In the basement was a workbench, unlikely to
serve its original purpose for me. It became my desk. It was L-shaped.
I plunked my typewriter on the short leg of the L and, standing,
began. Every night, after we had put the kids to bed and spent
some time together, I would go downstairs and write from 10 until
about 2 in the morning. The markets I was chiefly interested in
were Redbook, Ladies' Home Journal, Good
Housekeeping. Their initial price for a story was a thousand
dollars. I sent stories out, but I was always ready with others
when they came back. In April I began to get messages on the rejection
slips and then a letter from an editor at Redbook, Sandra
Earl, telling me "close but no cigar," and urging me to keep trying.
Those early times at my converted workbench were, I came to
see, my apprenticeship. For someone who aspired to write fiction
I was almost totally ignorant of how a story is made. The slick
magazines operated on the Edgar Allan Poe principle that a story
aims at a single effect. No sideshows, nothing that does not contribute
to the point of the story. I would sometimes be asked what paragraph
three on page seven was meant to do, would read it, find it lovely
writing, of course, but also find it effectively idle in the story.
Out it went. I was learning that one writes for a reader. Writing
is too often described as self-expression. But writing is the
art of making a story that will engage and hold and satisfy the
interest of the reader. Lint from one's navel seldom has this
effect. I typed a slogan and pinned it over my typewriter. Nobody
Owes You A Reading.
What I thought were stories piled up on the workbench. Most
went into the mail. With time I began to see why they were rejected.
They weren't stories. And what is a story? An attractive or at
least intriguing character faces a crucial choice. The story is
the account of his making it, solving his problem, resolving a
dilemma. His efforts worsen rather than ease his situation. Eventually
he arrives at the dark moment when all seems lost. Then, by his
own efforts, plausibly but surprisingly, he succeeds. Story's
over. A variation on this is the villain whose pursuit of his
evil goal triumphs over one obstacle after another until, just
as ultimate success seems assured, surprisingly but plausibly,
he goes down in flames.
Is this formula fiction? Well, you can find this account of
imaginative portrayals of human agents in Aristotle's Poetics.
The structure I have just sketched is of course the plot, what
gives a narrative a beginning, a middle and an end, in Aristotle's
pithy phrase. Or, in Peter De Vries's version, a beginning, a
muddle, and an end. Plot is not everything, but it is the soul
of the story.
I sold my first story before the year was out to Redbook,
a story called "The First Farewell." It was based on my daughters
Cathy and Mary's going to school in Louvain. The themes of the
stories I wrote for the magazines were domestic -- the kids going
to camp, recitals, trouble at school. All I had to do was look
around my house and see the germs of stories.
I began publishing under a pseudonym, Ernan Mackey, an anagram
on my family name. Why? To keep my fiction separate from my academic
career. At the beginning I felt more divided than I did later
between two non-overlapping kinds of writing. I went to New York
and met the editors with whom I had been corresponding. Sandy
Earl took me around the Redbook offices and showed me
the reports the fiction department prepared and explained the
politicking involved in getting a story accepted. She, I now realized,
was my champion there. I watched the receptionist, who served
as the first reader of unsolicited manuscripts, draw pages from
a manila envelope, read a few lines, let the pages drop back and
set it aside for rejection. She took these from what was called
the slush pile. It was from that pile that I myself had been plucked.
How easily it might not have happened. As often as not, that woman
did not have to read more than a few lines to tell whether it
was a story or not, and if it was, whether it would be of interest
to Redbook's readers. Once taken up by an editor, one
sent things directly to her. But it was unnerving to see how narrow
the gateway was. All that has changed long since. Few magazines
will even open unsolicited manuscripts; the open sesame now is
through an agent.
I don't think it's harder to get published now, only different.
When I began it was common to complain about the number of magazines
that had folded. Why, in the good old days . . . All true, no
doubt, but so what? There were still plenty of magazines around.
As I have come to realize, learning how to sell stories to those
magazines forced me to learn the craft of writing. When I did,
I managed to redeem most of those non-stories that had piled up
beside my typewriter and had been the cause of lots of wasted
postage. Now I could read them with a craftsman's eye and as often
as not find the story I had ruined and bring it out of the misshaped
marble and redeem it.
I was lucky, of course. Every published writer is the beneficiary
of luck. But the luck has to have something to work with. Among
my good fortune was the fact that editors began to treat me as
if they were my aunts. There were no male editors in the magazine's
fiction departments. On one of my visits to New York, three or
four editors from different magazines sat me down in the Algonquin,
plied me with manhattans and discussed my career. It was now three
years since my big resolution. I was selling stories regularly.
One year I sold more stories to Redbook than anyone else
ever had, using several pen names. It was the consensus of the
group that I was ready for more. I needed an agent.
Reprinted by permission of the University of Notre Dame Press.
(April 2006)
