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Whose novel is it anyway? You Heard It Here First. (Well, Second.)By Rick Horowitz Four score and seven years ago, I sat down to write a book. I'd never written a book before, but somehow I felt it was something I should do. Perhaps it was my parents' expectations -- I was their only son, and they were new to the neighborhood, and they had great hopes for me. By the time I was old enough to read, in fact, they had mapped out a comprehensive plan for my future they called "Get Richard Earning A Townhouse," or "GREAT" for short. I was precocious even then, and I told them that capitalizing the "A" between "Earning" and "Townhouse" just to get a good acronym was really pushing things. But when it came to plotting my future success, I soon discovered, there was no stopping them. They wanted me to write a book, and get a big book contract -- or maybe it was the other way around. And if I had any time left over between writing my book and signing my big book contract and doing interviews and posing for publicity shots, they wanted me to go to a prestigious college. The prestigiouser the better, they said. (Parents can be so embarrassing sometimes.) I remember when they first told me about "GREAT" -- it was a bright, cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. "What's with the clocks?" I asked them. "Mind your manners," my father said. That was totally like him! I grew up knowing I was destined for big things, and even just hanging out on the street corner with my best friends Tom and Huckleberry, I realized that I had a certain creative spark that distinguished me from the rest of the boys. "I'll bet you want to whitewash Aunt Polly's fence," said Tom to me one afternoon. "Well, you cain't." No problem, I replied -- my creative spark was keeping me much too busy for anything as boring as whitewashing a fence. "Well," said Huckleberry, "I'll bet you'd do all sorts of creative sparkin' on a raft." No dice, I replied, and I told them about my motion sickness. "Fasten your seat belts," said Huck with a grin. "It's gonna be a bumpy night." "Where are you from?" said Tom. "Planet Loser?" His cologne smelled like cedar shavings. Time passed, and I found a book packager. I hadn't even realized that there were such things as book packagers. Of course, I hadn't realized there were such things as 17-year-old novelists either until the book packager told me about them. I knew this could be my big chance. "Show me the money," I said. "You'll never go hungry again," she replied, and handed me a check for $500,000. Her perfume smelled like cedar shavings. The book packager helped me figure out a plot for my book, and a few of the chapters, and even helped me come up with some of my characters. But the character I was the proudest of -- the young hero with the photographic memory who could remember everything he'd ever read but could never remember that he'd read it -- was all my own. And for the rest of it, I just sat at my computer hour after hour until the words came to me -- who knows how? Sometimes I wrote them down exactly the way I saw them in my mind, and other times I changed them around a little to be even more creative. When I was finally finished, I turned in the manuscript, and for one brief shining moment, it looked like all my parents' dreams for me were about to come true. But then -- well, you know the rest of the story. The whole thing came crashing down. No book. No big contract. Maybe even no movie deal. I honestly don't know why everybody's being so hostile all of a sudden. They're acting like I didn't play by the rules or something, but that's their problem. I'm looking ahead, and I know there's "GREAT"-ness in me yet. The world breaks us all. Afterward, some are stronger at the broken places. Anyhow, that's the way I see it. Posted
5/3/06. Get fresh -- and original! -- commentary from syndicated
columnist Rick Horowitz twice every week.
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Rick Horowitz
