Looking for the Write Stuff

Ever since she was in junior high school, Carol Heckathorn had aspired to be a famous author.

In the four decades since she had churned out dozens of books and submitted letters to hundreds of agents and publishers with the hope of getting her words in print. With every book came a steady stream of rejection letters.

It was frustrating, but she always was able to bounce back and try again, and again, and again. She tried different genres: murder mysteries (“Death Watch on Madison Avenue”), love stories (“Passion on Madison Avenue”), adventure tales (“The Search for the Hidden Treasure on Madison Avenue”), even humor (“A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Madison Avenue”). Nothing worked.

It’s true that Carol had a tendency to set all her novels on Madison Avenue in New York City. That’s because her other dream was to be a stockbroker, but she couldn’t even balance her checkbook let alone advise someone on investments that would determine their financial future. So she settled on being a famous author, or actually, an author who would be famous if just one of these publishers would publish one of her books. She considered it a Catch-22 situation.

Carol took writing classes, read books about how to write books and went to writers conferences hoping to network with people who could help her get published. That didn’t work either.

She made ends meet by working a series of low-paying jobs. She even tried standing outside the local Walmart holding a sign that said “Will write your biography for food.” She came to realize that most people who patronize Walmart aren’t looking for their life stories to be in print, except for the one man who claimed he was reincarnated from Abraham Lincoln and would mutter over and over, “I can’t go to the movies. Do you know what happens when you go to the theater?”

Then one day her friend, Ilene, said to her, “Maybe you’re trying too hard. Maybe those big novels aren’t for you. Why don’t you start out writing something shorter and simpler to see if you can get it published?”

Carol thought it was sound advice. Long complicated novels took a lot of time to write, and the competition to get such works published was fierce. Maybe something less ambitious would increase her likelihood of someone publishing her work. And, she figured, once that first work was on the market then it would be only a matter of time before the door to greater success would swing wide open for her.

She thought it over, studied her options, weighed the alternatives and made her decision: She would write the Great American Pamphlet.

A pamphlet, she reasoned, would be simple to write, and there were all kinds of places where it could be made available to the public: doctors’ offices, those racks in the foyers of grocery stores, rest stops along the interstate.

First, she had to decide what she wanted to write about. She would drive around town and look at the various pamphlets on display. Carol mulled over her struggle to find her “pamphlet voice” and came up with what seemed like a logical idea. She would write a pamphlet about how to write a pamphlet.

Over the coming weeks Carol created her pamphlet. She called it “How to Write a Pamphlet.” She designed the layout, wrote the content and picked the pictures to go with it. When she was done she sent it off to the printer.

You can imagine her excitement – or maybe you can’t imagine her excitement – when she picked up her box of 1,000 copies of “How to Write a Pamphlet.” Over the next couple of days she went around town putting her pamphlets on display.

Carol possessed an active imagination. She envisioned herself being interviewed on the local TV station about her pamphlet, doing a pamphlet signing at the local Barnes and Noble, and seeing her pamphlet transitioned into a made-for-TV infomercial.

She expected that it would be only a matter of time before someone in the publishing business, or maybe a friend of someone in the publishing business, or even someone who did the gardening for someone who had a friend in the publishing business, would pick up one of her pamphlets, recognize her talent and contact her about a more ambitious project.

Months later that still hadn’t happened, but in the meantime, she’s been working on her next project. It’s a science fiction novel. She’s calling it “Zombies on Madison Avenue.”