By Jon Reiner
“The Esquire story is a great opportunity, but you really should think of this as a book.”
It was a charged observation from an old friend, even more so given that the old friend, Mitchell Waters, is also literary agent who’d come to call. He’d read an advance copy of my autobiographical feature story, The Man Who Couldn’t Eat, that would appear in the magazine the following month. Funny thing was, my Esquire editor, Mark Warren, had said the same thing. I didn’t need further convincing.
Having spent my adulthood writing novels that failed to get published, I knew that I was up to the challenge of completing a book, even though I’d be a rookie in this particular genre. I’d never written, or thought about, writing a memoir. Call it confidence, call it arrogance, call it cluelessness, call it what you will – I, and all writers, must have it, “it” being the quality necessary to face a blank page and fill it with story. It is the foundation of book writing, magazine writing, all writing. My “it” would surely see me through whatever was required to expand a single story all the way to book length. I’d had no reluctance to sell the book concept based solely on the magazine story and a first chapter. “Trust me” was the subtext of the proposal. Then, I received the contract from the publisher – “author agrees to deliver an 80,000 word manuscript in six months” – exactly what I had offered and agreed to in the pep rally of the conference room overlooking Rockefeller Center! I must have been dizzied by that heady atmosphere. What was I thinking?
The challenge I’d faced writing the Esquire story concerned how to throw so much away and still hold the narrative together. My 15,000-word first draft had to be reduced to 5,000 words (paper and ink cost money, and magazine advertising isn’t what is was when Mad Men sold the pages), so the art of storytelling was metered by the act of compression. I suffered the usual writer’s pain in having to scalp my own coiffed prose, but I couldn’t complain about the result. The published story was intense and hard as a diamond and well-received, nominated for a National Magazine Award and winning – ironically – the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for food writing. Getting scalped never felt so good. And from what I heard in the juiced conference room with the view, that was the mode of precision Simon & Schuster expected in the book version. Obscured by the cheers was an unspoken question: did I have it in me to mine that size of a jewel?
Lesson One: Get To It
Deadline pressure accelerated my thinking and led me to realize the first of two key lessons for the story-to-book process. One man’s panic is another man’s opportunity. All those years when I’d been frustrated by agents’ and editors’ failure to see the brilliance of my 100,000+ word manuscripts, I would have killed for this kind of an opportunity. Put it in perspective, brother. You’ve been graced with dumb luck and handed a great story (the basis of The Man Who Couldn’t Eat). You’ve been telling people for years at cocktail parties, little league games, car washes, that you’re a writer. A writer writes. In the words of John Berryman, “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.” The best writing is done on an empty stomach, right? You’ve got hunger in your wheelhouse. Get to it.
Lesson Two: Open The Valve
If the first lesson of the process was practically essential, the second was creatively liberating. Open up the narrative. The central theme of the magazine story – the existential crisis of food deprivation – contained acres of events, characters, experiences, and reflections for which there just wasn’t enough real estate in Esquire to tell. Simon & Schuster had more land. Immediately, I saw the three-month scope of the magazine story as just a section of a much longer narrative arc. I wrote an outline – a chore I normally detest – to chart the journey, but kept it simple: three parts, three chapters each. Once I began writing (eventually going to 11 chapters), the story hydrated. Watering the dynamic elements that always inspired me as a fiction writer – dialogue, character, description, setting, conflict, meditation – grew the story into a book. The word counter on my laptop screen showed 60,000, 70,000, 80,000, 85,000 and up. There wouldn’t be enough paper to hold the damn thing!
I delivered the manuscript on time and true to the proposal. Skilled editing directed me through three drafts. The reviews have been good and taken little notice that the book began its life on five glossy pages. My friends were right; the story really was a book.
About Jon Reiner
Jon Reiner is the author of the debut memoir The Man Who Couldn’t Eat, published by Simon & Schuster. The book is based on a story of the same title he wrote for Esquire which won the 2010 James Beard Foundation Award for Magazine Feature Writing, was nominated for a National Magazine Award, and was translated into multiple languages for international publication.
After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, in English and theater at Fairleigh Dickinson University and an M.A. in English at the University of Maryland, where he was an instructor of writing and literature, he worked for two decades as a creative executive for international corporations and arts organizations. Jon is a member of PEN American Center and is writing his next book, Chutes and Ladders, (read a post on nytimes.com) a memoir of finding work and meaning in an age of greed and unemployment. Jon lives in New York City with his wife and two children.
He is still learning how to cook.
