One reason why I felt it so deeply was because with this particular rejection, the rejection of what would become Çiron, I had been turned down by an editor (and publisher) who had accepted something already.
Walking through the chill spring slums, I thought about the differences between the kind of work I’d done for the book that had been accepted (so enthusiastically, too), and the kind for the book that had been turned down (so summarily). With Aptor, before each scene, each writing session at the writing table, or with my notebook, cross-legged on the daybed, I’d worked to picture as many details of that scene and its physicality as I could. Many of those scenes had begun as disturbingly vivid dreams, so that for a number of them — the waterfront, the jungle, the beach, the temple, and the morning light or the evening light that suffused them — already I had complete images in mind, in some cases unsettlingly so.
Others, though, I’d had to visualize from scratch.
Aptor had commanded high imaginative involvement throughout. I had not used all the results or even most of them. But having them when I needed them seemed to loan the work (for me) coherence and authority.
For Çiron, however, I’d taken some odd texts, hastily forced them into what I thought might do for a linear narrative, which I’d realized in the hour since the rejection was nowhere near linear enough. I had read over passages quickly and decided what might connect them to the next and wrote it out; but I’d put into it neither the time nor the intensity of thought and imagination I had put into the earlier book.
For a scene here or there I’d done a bit of the mental work. But the things that I’d felt (that I’d hoped…) had made Aptor lively, vivid, and given it momentum, were the things I’d failed to do in Çiron. Don had read it, felt how thin it was. Now, so did I — and I realized as well what the world’s reaction would be, as exemplified by Don and Ace Books.
I’m glad I saw this — with only a sentence from Wollheim to prompt me over the phone, a kindness granted my second book doubtless because he’d published my first, and probably because I was twenty. In those days, young writers starting to sell, when and if they found themselves in that position, often didn’t understand this.
It didn’t need to be another kind of written piece. It needed to be a better quality piece. The book didn’t need more sex. It didn’t need more violence. It didn’t need more action. It needed to be better organized from start to finish. It needed to be more richly imagined, first part to final. That meant I had to do the work, start to finish, I hadn’t done. Had I done it, that work would have suggested better organization because I would have seen the material more vividly along with its many incoherent lax spots. The missing or extraneous material would have stood out more clearly and provided me with a clearer view of how to fix it — delete, insert, rewrite, expand, replace, connect to something earlier or farther on, several of them or one, the choice hinging on the clarity and intensity of my apprehension of the whole book.
As I’d read and reread Aptor, during its composition, that’s how the details had come to me: in further specifics of landscape, characterization, psychology, dialogue, and incidents for the story.
This was the work I hadn’t done on Çiron.
I thought this, however, not because any of it had been mentioned in the workshops at Bread Loaf or in E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel or in Lajos Egris’s The Art of Dramatic Writing or in Orwell’s essays or even in Gertrude Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Lectures in America — books I’d read on writing that already had been, up till then, so helpful. Today I suspect five different writers, each going through some version of this, might go through it in five different ways and arrive at five different conclusions, all of which would accomplish much the same. What seemed most important, however, as I walked through the smells and confusion of our crowded neighborhood was: think about this seriously. Your life hangs on it. (That’s another year’s rent you don’t have now…!) You can’t fuck around….
It’s surprising how far that can take you — about anything.
Returning from my walk, past the East Side tenements, the fish store on Avenue C, turning into the dead end of East Fifth Street where we lived, walking over the broken pavement before the parking garage’s gaping door, by the plate-glass window edged in the flaking paint of the bodega next to it, set back, and up three steps, I thought: if I’m a writer and I want my pieces to place, I have to do that work.
This was not a case of writing the kind of pieces that would place. I could decide that pretty easily. I needed to write the quality of pieces that would place. It was neither the acceptance nor the rejection that had been so instructive, but the differences between them and what I knew now I might expect from each, and the information about my future in the world those differences comprised.
I knew what the two kinds of work felt like, behind my face, in my belly, along my arms, in my feet against the floor, my hands moving over the typewriter keys or across the notebook pages as I gripped my ballpoint, now that I could associate each with their different results.
If each had a shape, a shape I could grasp at in the world, even if those shapes were not entirely pensive, spatial, mental, or muscular, descriptions of their form or the content that could arrive to fill them out would always be incomplete — including this one. But now I had a nonverbal sense of what each was.
When Marilyn came home, we talked about what I might do. In my journal I’d already made notes on possible projects. One was the barest sketch for a trilogy of SF novels that would show what war was like in its effects on the country attacking, rather than the country invaded.
After several conversations with Marilyn, a few days later we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to visit some friends in Brooklyn Heights for brunch. Walking back, we talked about it more. When we got home, I sat down in front of the typewriter, typed out a title page for the entire project, and began the first of the three-volume series I had planned out with her, and began the work I needed to generate the material necessary to construct its first volume, in order to write the best book that, at that very immature age, I could manage.
Basically I’d decided that if I was going to write something of the highest quality I could achieve, it had best be about something I felt was important. And we were a country at war.
It was a lot of work — I’ve written about it several times. The middle volume was more work than I’d ever imagined it might be. Often, I was afraid the work would defeat me. There are places where I believe it did. But I also knew, by now, that if I didn’t do it, not only couldn’t I sell it, but I couldn’t live with myself either. By now I was afraid to avoid the work or to try for shortcuts.
The three books of The Fall of the Towers are not here. But they are still in print.
It’s worth repeating: the rejection of Çiron gave me the chance to compare two things I had written, not in terms of the differences between the surfaces of the texts, but rather the differences between the mental work I had done writing the accepted text and the mental work I had shirked writing the rejected one.
The writing of The Ballad of Beta-2 came along to interrupt the trilogy, during the time I’d thought, for a while, the second volume would stop me. I began it in the middle of that stalled second book. I wanted to write a short novel unconnected to the War of Toromon, so that I could give myself the feeling of starting and completing something. Soon I realized I had to stop (or more accurately realized I had already stopped) thinking about selling in order to attain and sustain the level I was reaching for — and always missing and going back in hope of pulling myself closer. Today I suspect even that conflict muddled the causes of the problems I was having.