Art from the Outskirts

Regular postings will return tomorrow. For now please enjoy this tasty treat from December 2, 2008 (with minor alterations)

Also featured at Waxing Poetically.

Ben Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. He decided to quit his job.

“I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. I could have had a good career. And my parents were very proud of me—my dad was so proud of me. . . . It was crazy.”

He began his new life on a February morning—a Monday. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He made a plan. Every day, he would write until lunchtime. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. He was a lawyer. He had discipline. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. So I always got my writing done. I treated it like a job. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another—and then another.

In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. He gained confidence. He wrote a novel. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He got a short story published in Harper’s. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. The reviews were sensational. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award. It was named a No. 1 Book Sense Pick. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.

Ben Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. He quit his job at Akin, Gump in 1988. For every story he published in those early years, he had at least thirty rejections. The novel that he put away in a drawer took him four years. The dark period lasted for the entire second half of the nineteen-nineties. His breakthrough with “Brief ” came in 2006, eighteen years after he first sat down to write at his kitchen table. The “young” writer from the provinces took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight. - Malcolm Gladwell in his New Yorker essay “Late Bloomers” October 20, 2008

I, like Mr. Fountain, received a calling so to speak a bit later in life than most my age. Like probably many of you, I had big dreams growing up. There were so many things I wanted to do, to be, to make. Early on at the age of eight or nine I wanted to make toys. Then, for a couple of years, I fiddled with the idea of broadcasting. Voice-over work became my passion’s fruit of choice, but that dream soon fizzled away with a teeny, little, nagging demon of voice modulation called puberty - suddenly my Mickey Mouse was turned to “Mickey Moose” before I could say “genitals.” So my sights turned to computers. I liked them, thought they were cool and I had a pretty awesome collection of video games in my bedroom, so it seemed the next logical step. Several years and a few flunked math courses later, that dream flew out of the window too. College came and in first two years or so, I decided to get a bit creative. My list of classes included TV Production 1 and 2, Ancient World Literature, Contemporary Poetry, History of Rock [Music], and Theatre but also Cultural Anthropology, Prehistoric Life and even a Quantum Physics course I’ve since forgotten the name of for good.

With my mind all ablaze with curiosity, I graduated from junior college in 2002 with a Plain Joe Liberal Arts Associates degree and absolutely no further clues as to what I wanted to do with my life. I took a year off, deejayed a bit, dated an Autism programming specialist, explored religion, and developed a screenplay. The year somehow morphed into a year and a half only for me to find that my college of choice had lost my transcripts. I re-sent them and was placed in my handicapped accessible dorm in the fall of 2005 during which time I hosted my own radio show, joined a poetry club, met the love of my life…. Oh yeah, and I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Management after flirting with the idea of getting an MBA in Marketing. I now stand (or sit due to my wheelchair) before you one and a half years into a career in freelance writing… I turn 28 this month.

I have money… not a lot but I have it. I moved back home to help myself with getting my career started. My lady and I are going strong and she knows there is a ring in her near future . Above all this, I’m very, very, happy!

Never give up!

(Read Gladwell’s full essay).

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