Wrote this in September 2008 when I was editor of the East Hampton Press. Since then, added another novel (Thomas Jefferson, Rachel & Me) to the list of masterpieces ignored by agents and publishers (at least until a big agency inquired about its film rights in early August):


Long ago, a boss of mine used to talk about his old days in the newspaper business. He had once covered the continent of Africa. How did he do it? “A little bit goes a long way,” he said.

You can’t uncover every story; and you can’t get all the way to the bottom of every story you do uncover. But a tidbit of news, with some good quotes and some background, is all you need to produce good copy and cover the bases.

That kind of superficiality, he added, ruined people who wanted to write fiction, which had been a once-upon-a-time plan of mine. Reporters who have learned and internalized the tricks of the trade can’t pull off a short story or a novel. They are either blocked entirely or they produce plodding crud.

I didn’t like hearing this. I believed one day I’d write another novel and become the new Fitzgerald, Hemingway or Tom Wolfe. (I knew I was not clever enough to be the new Faulkner; I didn’t realize then I wasn’t quite clever enough to be any of those other three guys either.)

I had won some awards for fiction writing in my school years. I’d produced a novel, too, which my high school English teacher thought was pretty good. Called “The Sinking of the Moon,” it was a variation on the theme, “How I spent my summer vacation”—in Bridgehampton, 17 years old, madly in love with a pretty red-headed girl, worried about the girl I’d left behind at school in New England, and having a lot of trouble managing life at home with my father and stepmother.

My English teacher told me he had no doubt I’d become “an important American writer” one day, I think just because the manic pace at which I churned out pages in my free time amazed him. And I figured if Francoise Sagan could publish a hit at age 17, I could do it too. It was never published, despite encouraging words from a publisher.

I was counting on my next book to make me a household name, whenever I happened to write it. That all depended on when inspiration struck and I felt the urge once more to sit at a keyboard spewing out pages.

Meanwhile, I covered the Southampton Town Board, Zoning Board, Planning Board, Board of Trustees, police and wrote a feature a week for about three years. Then my boss sent me off to Westhampton Beach to be editor of another paper he owned. I was 27. I lasted about two years and escaped by going off to the Columbia School of Journalism and getting married. After that, I went to work in the city for Flying magazine.

I had given that job about 18 months when long-awaited inspiration struck. Missing the much faster pace and more engaging world of community newspapers, I dreamed up a story about a corrupt little town on an island and a young guy who showed up one day to run the local newspaper. I wrote it while I was at work and on the train I took home up the Hudson. There were several mysteries involved, including a murder. There was also, our intrepid young editor learned, a local economy based on, gasp, sex for hire.

And the mysteries didn’t stop there. There was also a healthy dose of personal intrigue included in the mix, having to do with a long-lost father figure who had taught our hero how to fly as a kid. For reasons not exactly clear to me so many years later, the book was called “Poontown,” I blush to admit.

An agent liked it. Gloria Jones of Sagaponack, James Jones’s widow, read it, too, and tried to interest Doubleday in it. She told me she thought she’d nearly succeeded in getting an editor behind it but “marketing said no.”

Sigh. I had walked away from the boring city magazine gig by that time and my wife and I had headed back to eastern Long Island, where I signed on as managing editor of The Southampton Press, my old alma mater. After two years at that job, I was made the editor. Then, after some 14 years at the helm, it was time for literary inspiration to strike once more—either because or in spite of the fact that I had gone through the thrills and chills of open heart surgery.

I began writing a book that I would eventually give the title of “The Consequences of Longing,” about a pilot who has the terrible misfortune of losing his job because of a heart condition. He winds up becoming obsessed with the first girl he ever loved—even though, as he discovers later, she’s dead. I spent years on it, working whenever I could put together a few minutes of precious spare time, trying to make it perfect, to polish it until every word, sentence and paragraph was exactly right.

“The third time’s the charm,” I told myself. For all that, I got some nice rejection letters through an agent, but no takers.

And now I’m thinking I’m pretty much out of steam with this novel stuff. I know, I know: getting books published is more about persistence, productivity and imperviousness to rejection—and knowing the market—than it is about ephemeral things like talent and skill. In the vast scheme of things, those two elements are fairly commonplace; the nose-to-the-grindstone and commitment traits are a bit more rare.

As for this news business, the proof is in the pudding, I suppose, and I’d have to say that at long last I am convinced. Getting a handle on the skills needed to write news is bound to ruin any instincts a person might have for writing fiction.