SERMONETTE: FANATICISM VS. DILETTANTISM

One of the most powerful motivational speeches blasted out of my car speakers the other day. I was driving my teenage son to school, and, as usual, he’d plugged his iPhone into the dashboard.

I thought he’d selected the wrong track from his wall-to-wall hip-hop playlist. A deeply resonant black voice launched into a story about a young man seeking out a “guru” to learn how to make a lot of money.

I glanced sideways. My son was actually listening, so I listened also. Oh, well. Whatever this guy was getting worked up about, it couldn’t be as distasteful as the nasty hip-hop lyrics I’m forced to endure. (My son swears he hears only to the background music.)

The secular sermon was a bit belabored, with a lot of repetitive phrasing and cadences, slow to reach its predictable crescendo. But when the guy finally got there, I found myself unexpectedly galvanized by the simplicity and force of his message.

Spoiler Alert: Before I write any more, you might prefer to give it a listen. The motivational speaker is Eric Thomas (about whom I know nothing), and you can find his “rant” with a web search of “How Bad Do You Want It?” Or use this link.

Now that you’re warned, I’ll cut to the chase. The young man meets the guru at the beach and is walked out into the water till their heads are barely above the waves. Suddenly the guru pushes the young man’s head under water and holds it there for… well, for  a heckuva long time in the story:

“He had him held down, just before my man was about to pass out, he raised him up. He said: ‘I got a question for you.’ He told the guy, he said: ‘When you want to succeed as bad as you wanna breathe, then you will be successful.’”

That’s it, the moral of the story. It’s not enough, according to Eric Thomas, to just “kind of want to succeed.” You have to want it as much as a drowning man wants to breathe. Anything less won’t cut it.

And, you know, that really resonates with me—and with many thousands of others, including my usually blasé  son. I suspect because it’s true.

A wise man—a guru of sorts—told me once a deceptively simple thing--that life is a crisis. A continuing crisis, in which, by our choices, we define ourselves moment by moment, day by day.

Sounds kinda like “Introduction to Existentialism”? Could be.

The trouble is, we seldom perceive this ongoing crisis. Except when we get the big, obvious theatrical clues. Then it's inescapable.

Like at the final hand at the poker table, when all the chips get pushed to the center and it’s showdown time.

Or in the opera’s last act, when the trumpets sound and the timpani rumble and the Fat Lady gets ready to sing.

 

Or when we are plunged beneath the weaves and have to fight upward for oxygen.

The trick is to see the crisis when no one else around you does—and to respond with extraordinary effort under seemingly ordinary circumstances.

But Eric Thomas says it better:

“You gotta go days without – LISTEN TO ME! You gotta want to be successful so bad that you forget to eat... I never forget, I went, 50 Cent was doing his movie, I did a little research on 50, and 50 said that when he wasn’t doing the movie, he was doing the soundtrack. And they said: ‘When do you sleep, 50?’ and 50 said: ‘Sleep? Sleep is for those people who are broke. I don’t sleep.’ See I got an opportunity to make my dream become a reality. Don’t cry to quit. You already in pain, you already hurt. Get a reward from it. Don’t go to sleep until you succeed.”

WORLD’S MOST PROLIFIC NOVELIST

In a previous post (“Art as a Job,” Thursday, February 28, 2013),  I did a quick survey of some of the world’s most prolific novelists. Shelf-fillers Georges Simenon and John Creasey came in for honorable mentions, along with Isaac Asimov and R. L. Stine.

Somehow I missed the Guinness-certified record holder for most published titles, a Brazilian pulpmeister known as Ryoki Inoue. In fact, according to a 1986 Wall Street Journal profile,“When the Guinness Book of World Records recently affirmed Mr. Inoue's No. 1 ranking in titles published, the award certificate was already 15 books out-of-date by the time it arrived from England.”

How fast can Inoue write (yes, he’s still at it)? Again to quote the Journal, “He has churned out complete chapters during trips to the bathroom; a whole book while having his truck worked on in a garage; a novel and its sequel in an afternoon on the beach.”

Ryoki Inoue

When the WSJ story was published in 1996, Inoue had published 1,039 books—under his own name and 39 pseudonyms. “Mr. Inoue writes books faster than 10 Brazilian pulp presses combined are able to publish them. ‘Brazil hasn't yet developed the capacity to absorb me,’ says the pipe-smoking 49-year-old author, whose father was Japanese and mother was Portuguese.”

The secret of Inoue’s prodigious output? Prodigious work. The  same secret practiced on a daily basis by all phenomenally successful writers.

Inoue reckons the creative process as “98% sweat, 1% talent and 1% luck." He has been known to finish a 200-page story—bang-bang westerns are his favorites—at a single sitting. (I assume  brief breaks, unless he’s catheterized.)

Isaac Asimov

I mentioned in that earlier post that the late Isaac Asimov could write about as fast as he typed, which for him was 80 words a minute. Inoue may write even faster. According to one testimonial on his website, “Many people cannot read at the same speed that he writes.”

He is singlehandedly feeding hundreds of thousands of Brazilian readers--with a literary diet heavily weighted toward Westerns. A favorite by-line is "Tex Taylor." On his travels, Inoue, himself, has not been much farther into the American west than the West Side of Newark, NJ.

I'm reminded of Karl May--“a [German] adventure writer from the late nineteenth century

Karl May

whom most Americans have never heard of but whose stories of the American West are to this day better known to Germans than the works of Thomas Mann. His books have sold more than a hundred million copies.” ("Whydo cowboys and Indians so captivate the country?" by Rivka Galchen. New Yorker, April 9, 2012 

Among Karl May's hordes of youthful admirers were two boys destined to change the world--Adolf Hitler and Albert Einstein.

A GOOD WRITER WHO KEEPS GETTING BETTER

Photo Credit: Marion Ettlinger

I’ve been a fan of T. Jefferson Parker since his 1985 best-selling debut splash with Laguna Heat. A fan and an admirer at the way he has steadily carved out his own distinctive niche in the SoCal mystery scene.

But I’ve had issues with Jeff, too—mainly teeth-grinding jealousy. See, I grew up in Laguna Beach (several decades before he arrived) and always figured I’d write the definitive Laguna mystery… someday. So much for fatuous daydreams. Jeff beat me to it—and kept right on going, while I’ve suffered from chronic novel-writing interruptus.

Yesterday at Vroman’s Bookstore  in Pasadena I got a chance to say hello to Jeff again and congratulate him on his latest, his twentieth mystery novel, The Famous and the Dead. As trumpeted on the book’s jacket, the novel represents “The explosive conclusion to T. Jefferson Parker’s New York Times bestselling Charlie Hood series.”

In the more considered judgment of Jeff’s editor, The Famous and the Dead “might just be perfect.” This, at least, was the emailed verdict Jeff received in lieu of the editor’s customary pages of detailed notes on ways the story might be improved.

“What do you think?” the editor’s email ended, after apologizing for not finding any flaws in the work.

“Well, maybe so,” Jeff emailed back after thinking it over. He’d been braced for his usual intensive rewrite, but realized that, like the editor, he couldn’t think of any way to make the book better. “For what it is,” he told us at Vroman’s in his unassuming way, “I think it’s about as good as it can be.”

It’s never easy to write a good novel, let alone a “perfect” one. And the ending of this one was a particular challenge, he said, since The Famous and the Dead was the finale of the six-book series. There were more than a few loose ends, both accidental and deliberate, from the five previous Hood books, Jeff said. More significantly, like J.K. Rowling reaching closure on her magical saga with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Jeff faced the daunting task of giving each of his main characters an appropriate final scene or curtain call. He also wanted to make sure each character got what he or she “deserved.”

Endings are always a big challenge, Jeff said. “I don’t like ambiguous endings. Like when people say, ‘Well, what do you think happened?’ To me those are always kind of a copout.”

The novelist’s challenge is to satisfy all story tendencies and meet all reader expectations, so that the coda, when it arrives, resounds with finality and inevitability. Like that old song lyric, “That’s all there is, there ain’t no more.” Or, in the more elegant words of Robert Frost: “The end implicit in the beginning but not foreknown.”

Before Jeff got around to signing copies, I asked him if he felt a sense of loss after saying goodbye to characters who’d been with him so long. I was thinking of Dickens who reportedly was almost inconsolable after closing the book on Copperfield; or theatrical wrap parties where actors celebrate a long and successful run, then go their separate ways like a family dispersed.

“Yes,” Jeff said. “I do miss Charlie Hood [and the others]. I mean, they’d been my daily companions for six books and six years of my life.”

The good news is, especially for any who have not yet sampled the Charlie Hood series, T. Jefferson Parker’s whole rowdy cast of characters is waiting to gather again for your reading pleasure. It starts with L.A. Outlaws.