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Feature

My Year as a Clown

IPPY-winning author shares his story

Guest Feature by Robert Steven Williams

I walked away from a senior executive career in the music business to write fiction at age 40. I read a ton. I took workshops. I attended conferences. I got into Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Squaw Valley. I got to spend time with some great writers. I hung out a couple of times in Oxford with Barry Hannah. I was in California with James Houston. But it was at one particular workshop where we were discussing Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet that what was happening hit me.

For those unfamiliar with this book, here’s a short synopsis: A student in the early 20th century sends Rilke his poems and asks if he’s any good. The kid needs to know because there’s a job in his Dad’s factory and he doesn’t want to blow that opportunity if he doesn’t have the goods. Rilke responds by saying the kid is asking the wrong question. Was writing as necessary to this kid as breathing? If it wasn’t, Rilke said, take the job with Dad.

Many people are in love with the idea of writing: a few hours in the morning, then off to fight the bulls in Pamplona or fish with Castro. The reality of the writer’s life is very different. It’s hard, and if it isn’t life or death for you, then it’s probably not a profession to pursue.

You could say that writing is an affliction, something I have to do because I have no choice. No rational person walks away from a lucrative career to pursue something as risky as writing at 40 unless they are out of their minds, a cocky-son-of-a-bitch, or because writing is what they have to do regardless of the consequences. In my case, it was a combination of the three.

Having said that, if I’d known in 1998 that it would take until 2013 to get a novel published, I’m not sure I would have had the guts to walk away from my career. I went into this believing that I’d bang something out and be on my way within three years.

And yet, it was in year three that I met Joy Johannessen, the editor for My Year as a Clown. I had no idea at the time that she’d worked with Alice Sebold on a manuscript that became The Lovely Bones, or that she was the editor for one of my favorite writers, Amy Bloom. Joy saw something in my writing back then, and that gave me the encouragement to keep going.

Why was I so confident? I’d taken the plunge in 1998 because I’d had a lot of success, and I figured if I could dedicate myself full-time to writing a novel, I’d succeed. I was the first kid in my family to go to college. I graduated from Harvard Business School with honors. I’d even co-authored a bestselling business book my first year out of grad school. I had no clue that writing a novel would be harder than graduating from business school, but for me, it was.

After my divorce in 2003, I spent a couple of years in the dumps. Leaving the corporate world to write was one of the reasons I got divorced. During those difficult years I did a lot of writing, but it didn’t amount to much. And then someone suggested that I read Julian Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. In that book, it says to treat your inner artist kindly. I decided to treat my inner artist with great literature. I audited a Shakespeare course at a local university. I read John Updike’s Rabbit series. I then dug into the first two of Richard Ford’s the Sportswriter series (the third book hadn’t come out yet). Following the lives of Harry Angstrom and Frank Bascombe inspired me to draw from my experience as a single guy after many years of marriage.

My Year as a Clown began with the title. I have no idea how it came, it was just there and I knew immediately it was perfect. It also provided the book’s structure: a year in the life of Chuck Morgan, where day one is the spectacular and brutal breakup of his marriage and day 365 is the conclusion of his wandering in the wilderness. But it wasn’t until draft three that I came up with defining the chapters by days. Nor was it originally written in first person, present tense.

Some feel writing in first person is easy, but I found it difficult. Getting the voice just right and consistent takes patience and diligence because it’s so easy to slip out of voice. Using the first person point of view also poses unique challenges—injecting another view is difficult—you must think carefully how and when to do it (dialogue, letters, and emails are good vehicles). My favorite aspect of this choice is the indirect opportunities an unreliable narrator presents. It’s a wonderful literary device when used properly.

A big source of material came from friends, family, even acquaintances. They told me their stories of betrayal, heartbreak and disappointment; but what was most interesting was that I only heard these tales after my divorce. I guess I was more approachable then and misery truly does love company. Another great gift from my divorce was the opportunity to reconnect with people in a more meaningful way. All of these experiences and stories were funneled into Chuck’s world.

But let me be clear, I wrote a novel, not a memoir. Nothing in the book happened in my life in the way it was told, and yet everything I wrote was honest and emotionally true. 

Working with an editor is an intimate affair. You’ve got to trust their judgment, but they also have to get your vision and understand your style. There are infinite choices to be made. It’s not like math where there’s no debate on 2 +2, so you better have an editor that your compatible with, otherwise it’s going to be tough going.

I liken editors to music producers—they can make or break a project. A producer can dramatically impact an album, and so can an editor on a book. Joy elevated my game in an organic way. She knows who I am and what I’m trying to accomplish. She’s also very good at what she does and we have a great working relationship. But that didn’t mean the process was easy. Editing with Joy was a challenge because she forced me to dig even deeper into my characters to make the story hum.

I was amazed at how much she asked me to take away from the manuscript. I ended up cutting several scenes that I’d labored over for many, many days and weeks, sometimes longer—I cut several scenes that took months to write. As just demonstrated, I also trimmed sentences and paragraphs. Some words are weeds and need to be pulled from a sentence.

We added one new scene to sharpen Chuck’s journey. There were a few places that also needed more emotional heft. The editing took a couple of months of focused work. We both prefer to work in analog, meaning she isn’t editing on screen through track-changes but works with ink on hard copy. This worked for me because I needed to get my hands dirty. It was important to type each change on the computer versus hitting an accept button: that way I viscerally felt each word cut or added.

Perhaps harder than writing the book was having to craft the cover blurb and marketing pitches. I had some help from people that do this for a living, but at the end of the day each word that represents the book, inside or out, is a reflection on you, so be involved. 

 

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Robert Steven Williams is the author of My Year as a Clown, a novel which won a silver IPPY in the Popular Fiction category. Learn more about Robert and his book at www.robertstevenwilliams.com/stories/novels/my-year-as-a-clown. 

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