Picasso at play.

A few days ago I completed the first draft of what, should life operate according to plan (which of course it never does), my seventh novel. As with most books that I finish, it came without fanfare or celebration, and of course I immediately began revising from the first page onwards. But this isn't by any stretch of the imagination my seventh novel. Having lost count over the years, I would put this somewhere in the high twenties. Before my first novel was ever published, I wrote twelve of them in as many years. Back then I assumed, wrongly of course, that entering into a writing career was a simple matter: you wrote a book, you sent it out, someone published it. Fortunately, I had a mentor at the time, the late John Morressy, who when I first met him had already published two academic comedies reminiscent of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim, as well as a number of short stories in magazines such as Esquire. He was one of my college professors, and once I'd graduated, and afterwards went on for my M.A., I reconnected with him.

Though he felt that my first attempt at a novel was hardly publishable, he did encourage me to keep working, predicting that I'd be in print within five years, though he was off by seven. He suggested that I get an agent. After many fruitless months of querying nearly every agent in New York, I found one willing to take me on. He worked out of an apartment in Forest Hills, Queens, which was not quite what I was banking on, assuming that a real agent would work out of a brownstone or a spacious high-ceilinged apartment near Columbia, when he was not lunching with Saul Bellow or having a Martini with Aaron Asher or Alfred Knopf. But he took me on, and after five publishers turned down what was by then my third (and, in retrospect, profoundly unworthy) attempt at a novel, let me go. After that I managed on my own to develop relationships of a kind with editors at Viking and Little, Brown, but never wrote the kind of novel either thought would be successful for their imprint.

And then I moved to England, where I managed to get two agents over the course of a month or so—one to represent my scripts, the other for my novels.

But I digress (and I should mention that the agent in Forest Hills eventually moved to a posher address and is now my agent once again. Plus ça change...). Completing a book for me is neither a cause for celebration nor the leading edge of the kind of postpartum depression Orwell wrote about in one of his essays. Writing for me is a continuum: whether I'm writing a book or a screenplay, it's all part of the same process of putting words on paper. I've written very nearly daily for over thirty years, and I would no sooner stop writing than I would cease breathing. It's what I do, there's always room for improvement, and if I didn't do it I'm not sure how I'd pass the hours.

In fact, I do know. For a while, early on, I taught English at my old private school in Westchester County, NY. Teaching is of course the refuge of the writer; the guaranteed, albeit meager, income; the place where you get your summers off. But as a teacher I felt I was somehow shortchanging my students.Though I enjoyed coming in every day and spending time with my students (some of whom remain in regular touch with me), and I was blessed with some truly brilliant ones (and others not so brilliant, but who kept me entertained by their witty excuses for not having done the work expected of them), part of me always wanted to be home writing.

Every day, after classes were over, I’d go home and write twenty-five pages. It didn’t matter how good or bad they were. Twenty-five pages were completed every day. And when a manuscript was completed, I’d start a new one the next day. What this gave me was both a sense of discipline and a sense of enjoyment. It was, in an odd way, fun, and to this day when I write I still the find the process strangely delightful.

I’m always baffled when writers speak of the pain of writing, of the struggle and the daily battles, as though their right hands were in a constant state of conflict with their left. Picasso once said, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” In fact, as he grew older, he found that in many ways he could recapture the wonder, the curiosity and the sheer exuberant abandon of childhood. Picasso loved the concept of playing, whether trying out as many different mediums in his art or putting on disguises to amuse his children. There is, in his art, a true sense of joy that comes from experimenting, of playing, of looking at things from all the wrong (i.e. right) angles. This is a valuable notion. The idea that an artist must suffer, though undoubtedly valid for some in the past, flies directly in the idea of art as a form of play.

So the book is done and now comes the best part of it, the six or eight months of revisions (most of which time should and probably will be taken up with screenwriting, a somewhat more profitable career than teaching). As usual, I’m a book ahead of myself. I’ve got one out to publishers (my first in over ten years), this one finished, and I’ve already begun researching and compiling notes for my next one.

I’m not getting older; I’m just having more fun.