Paying dues

Charles Bukowski wrote a story once about the time he realised he was a writer. He was young, weird, unpublished and rejected by every magazine he sent his stuff to. He'd left home and was travelling round America taking low-paid jobs. He found himself sleeping rough in a park, spending the little bit of money he had on booze. He came round from one session to find a newspaper and a pencil by his side. He'd been scribbling a story in the margins.

Now amongst other things, Buk was a notorious self-mythologiser. Much of his claimed ten year period on the road actually seemed to have been spent at his parents' house. But the part about the newspaper rings true. Bukowski wrote throughout his life, wherever he was and however drunk, right up until he was days away from dying of cancer.

James Frey seemed to fancy himself as a bit of a tough-guy writer too, till he got busted for making up his booze and drugs memoir by Oprah. Maybe Bukowski would have been busted in this day and age, too, who knows. That doesn't really matter. The point about Frey is, he carried on, this time making sure everyone knew what he wrote was fiction.

There was an interesting piece about him in New York Magazine. He's set up a publishing agency, offering people the chance to develop young adult franchises of books and movies, paying very low fees for manuscripts [$250 initially] but with the chance to make some serious back-end money if things take off. One book he co-wrote is about to filmed by Steven Spielberg, so the scheme is not without precedent.

The journo spoke to someone in one of the [many] MA classes at Ivy League universities toured by Frey when he was offering the chance for the students to submit ideas. The students were all repulsed by the offer of course ['I felt like I had to take a shower'], but then most of them sent him something anyway.

'We were desperate to be published any way we could,' said one. 'We were spending $45,000 on tuition, some of us without financial aid, and many taking out loans that were lining us up to graduate six figures in debt. A deal like the one Frey was offering could potentially pay off our loans and provide an income for the next decade. Do a little commercial work under a pseudonym, sell the movie rights, and never have to suffer as a writer in New York. We wouldn’t even need day jobs.'

Invited to sympathise with someone who's willingly paid $45,000 to a college to sit around doing something they could do for nothing with a pencil and piece of paper, I found myself sympathising instead with James Frey for having to share a room with these people. They are victims of a system of course, that convinces them that giving $45,000 to a college that pays a lot less than that to a few writers to come along and talk to them once a week and 'read' their manuscripts is the way to get published, but they are victims of their own pretensions too. There was only one writer in the room, and he was the one offering the contract.

As Bukowski once said, this battlefield has a name, my friends....