Introduction

by Howard Junker

I stole the title for this collection from my daughter’s favorite author, Roald Dahl. It appears in a collection of his short stories, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, and it is not at all out of place, because Dahl conceives of his bildungsroman as a fabulous story: he became a writer because of a lucky break! What was most fabulous about this break, he admits, is that “in this century... just about every single writer who has finally become successful...has started out in some other job....”

Dahl was describing, of course, the trajectory of writers before the triumph of writers’ workshops, before the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing came to be seen as a “terminal degree,” that is, a potential meal ticket. In the old days, Dahl knew, writers cut their teeth on journalism, advertising, or some other sub-literary genre; he includes teaching, medicine, and the law as other potential starter careers. No one learned to write in a classroom; you taught yourself the craft as best you could, by imitation, if not else, and you did so not in a privileged circumstance, but in the midst of an on-going life.

Dahl, nonetheless, does trace his vocational trail back to his schooldays, specifically, back to the formative experience of being beaten as a schoolboy. How being brutalized as an eight-year-old helped Dahl become a writer he does not explain, but it goes without saying that almost no one becomes a writer who has not suffered, who does not long to construct an alternative history, to repair past damages, either with a vengeance or not.

An early experience with deprivation and oppression (and even with evil) may be necessary, Dahl suggests, but it is not sufficient. To his suffering, his schooldays also added inspiration, in the form of the Saturday morning lectures given by the “blessed beautiful Mrs. O’Connor with her whacky clothes and her grey hair flying in all directions.” It was her task to keep a study hall filled with a hundred pre-teen boys supervised until lunch, until, that is, the masters had returned from the pub. And she did so with fervent talks about the One Hundred Landmarks of English Literature. “What marvelous exciting fun it was!” Dahl recalls. Yes, fun, the essential feeling with which every writer should begin: a passionate involvement with the writers of the past, a love affair with literature.

Dahl’s actual lucky break came during World War II. A fighter pilot, he was shot down in North Africa—no, that was not his lucky break—and, after he recovered and flew several more perilous missions, he was assigned to the British Embassy in Washington as an assistant air attaché—no, that was still not his lucky break. His third day on duty, C.S. Forester, “the best teller of tales about the sea since Joseph Conrad,” walked into his office and asked for an interview: Wouldn’t an account of Dahl’s wartime adventures interest readers of the Saturday Evening Post and arouse their support for the defense of Britain?

Forester did not make much of an attempt to do an interview over lunch, but, since both men enjoyed their food and wine and their conversation, Dahl did feel some sense of obligation. Over coffee, he apologized for not having supplied much material. He offered to go home that night and type up some notes; perhaps these would help Forester write his for-the-war-effort article. Two weeks later Forester sent Dahl a letter with a check for $900—the Post had decided to publish Dahl’s notes!

So it was as easy as that. (Forester even set Dahl up with his own agent!) And it may still be that easy to become a writer, granted talent, inspiration, hard work, and etc.

In this collection, twenty contemporary writers tell twenty different stories. None of them is as dramatic as William Carlos

Williams, who claimed his epiphany was a heart attack—instead of slogging through late adolescence as a jock, he fainted one day after practice and was diagnosed with a rheumatic condition, which constrained him to being bookish.

And if you were hoping to be handed a road map to fame and fortune, too bad as well. These accounts are much too idiosyncratic for a quick hit of self-help. But therein lies their charm and their ultimate value. If there are several ways to skin a cat, there are at least as many to set oneself up as a writer. Success, however defined—three years on the bestseller list; getting tenure—may or may not come. But becoming a writer, taking that giant, wonderful, paradigm-smashing step, can be accomplished, it seems, from any and every angle.

Some writers, like Blair Fuller and Peter Booth Wiley, suggest there was a genetic element involved, the born-poet syndrome. Others, like Bill Berkson and Justin Chin, feel they had to break away, to renounce their patrimony, in order to find the space and freedom to write. Some, like Jewelle Gomez and Forrest Hamer, had their subject matter in mind long before they could imagine the possibility of putting it all into words. Others, taking Dahl one step further, claim it really was just an accident, however happy, that pointed them in the right direction: Ginu Kamani goes so far as to suggest that her creative spirits were first nurtured by disco music, strange as that may seem. And, staking a claim for the great guild tradition of the apprentice and the master—what’s lately called mentoring, Philip Levine details his arduous passage as a graduate student at Stanford, working under the stern critic/poet Yvor Winters.

In the end, of course, becoming a writer is the least of it. Hard as it might be to get published the first time—if that’s what it means to become a writer—being a writer, making one’s life as a writer—is even harder. But perhaps that story, well beyond the territory of lucky breaks, should be the subject of another volume.

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Howard Junker is the editor of ZYZZYVA.