* * * THE FAILURE OF FORMULAS
Some time ago I attended a seminar for Christian writers. It was in a big hotel down south and hotels always make me uncomfortable because the bedding is so fluffy and the television swivels, and who makes coffee in the bathroom? But I felt that I needed to be at this seminar. I was wondering how, exactly, to write a book for a Christian market, a book that people would actually read. I had written a book several years before, but it didn't sell. It was a road-trip narrative about me, a friend, and God, and how we traveled across the country in a Volkswagen van, smoking pipes and picking fights with truckers. God wasn't actually a character in the book the way my friend and I were; God more or less played Himself, up in heaven, sending down puzzling wisdom and answers to prayer every hundred miles or so.
But even though the story had God in it, which I believed made it prime for Christian bookstores, sales were less than holy. The book limped along for about a year and then, suddenly, died. God led the publisher to take the book out of print about the same time sales dipped into negative figures. The publisher called and asked if I wanted to buy a few thousand copies for myself twelve cents each and I ended up buying four. I believe the rest the books were sold to convenience-store distributors who shelved them next to three-dollar romance novels at the back of the potato-chip aisle.
The only positive thing that happened in all this was that for the next year or so I received enjoyable and sultry e-mails from women who had recently begun to consider themselves spiritual. And while I certainly enjoyed the correspondence and still keep touch with many of these women today, the career path was not respectable as I would have liked. I have always wanted to be sophisticated Christian writer and not somebody who has books on the close-out aisle at Plaid Pantry. That is why I signed up for this seminar, the one I was telling you about that was in the hotel with the bathroom/cafés.
I arrived the evening before, and so the morning of the seminar I woke up very early, about six, and I couldn't fall back to sleep. I opened the curtains and watched planes land at the Memphis airport for an hour or so, trying to guide them in with my mind and that sort of thing. And then I went into the bathroom and sat down and had some coffee and read the paper. After an hour started getting dressed, and the whole time I was ironing my clothes I was wondering whether this would be the weekend would be discovered, whether this would be the start of a long career writing adventurous, life-changing books for my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ. I sat on the edge of the bed in my suit and tie and watched television for an hour. Katie Couric was interviewing a fellow who had written a book about how Donald Rumsfeld was actually the Antichrist and I confess, I practiced answering all her questions, knowing that I, too, would some day be interviewed by Katie Couric:
You really make Mr. Rumsfeld out to be a monster, Mr. Miller. This seems unfounded. How did you come to these conclusions?
I had him followed by a private detective, a high-tech guy found at Radio Shack. Everything in the book is documented, Miss Couric. Or may I call you Katie? Or may I just call you?
When the interview was over I turned the television off and lay back on the fluffy bed and stared at the bedside clock, trying to speed up time with my mind, but time went on as usual and so I fell asleep for exactly nine minutes and then woke up and tried not to blink till about twenty minutes to eight, which when I headed downstairs. In the lobby I asked the man at the front desk which room the seminar was in. I leaned against the desk as the concierge, a twenty-something fellow with a goatee, searched for a room schedule among his papers. "Capturing literature for the glory of God?" the man asked suspiciously, reading the name of the seminar from a sheet of paper, looking up me as if to ask whether or not this was the seminar I was interested in and also, perhaps, why God was trying to "capture literature for His glory." "That's the one," I said to him. "Interesting name for a conference, isn't it?" he said, looking at me with smile.
"We can't have literature running around doing anything wants now, can we?" I told him.
"I don't suppose so," he said after a long and uncomfortable pause.
"And where will we be capturing said literature?" I asked. By this I was asking what room we were in. He looked at me, puzzled. "What room are we in?" I clarified.
"Oh," he said as he looked back at the sheet. "You are in conference room 210, which is just down the hall across from the restrooms."
"Perfect," I said, adding that if he saw people in the lobby reading pagan literature to please notify me.
"Certainly," he said to me, confused, but kind of standing at attention all the same.
I remember having a very good feeling that morning, walking down the big hall toward the conference room, once again believing I was on my way to becoming the next great spiritual writer, a sort of evangelical Depak Chopra crossed with Tom Clancy, or that guy who wrote Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or Ansel Adams, or whoever, just somebody famous. I had terrific ideas; I really did. I was going to write a story about a nun who takes over small third-world countries by causing their evil dictators to fall in love with her, leaving a trail of megachurches and democracy in her wake. The book was going to be called Sister Democracy, Show Some Leg!
I had another story about a guy whose father, a psychology professor at a prestigious university, raised his son in a maze, rewarding him when he crawled down dark hallways and disciplining him when he crawled down lit hallways, thus teaching him to do everything in life counterintuitively. In the story, the kid grows up to be a kind of genius with an enormous following; people hanging on his every word. The book was going to be called Maze Boy: How One Man Brought Down the United States Postal Service! And if it were a Christian novel, and I could easily turn it into a Christian novel if the money was right, I was going to call it Maze Boy: How One Man, with God's Help, Brought Down the United States Postal Service!
* * *
I stocked up on bagels at the back of the conference room because I was the first one there. I chose a chair somewhere near the middle, and soon fellow writers began shuffling in, perhaps twenty or so over the next ten minutes. Everybody was being very quiet, looking over their notebooks, but I made small talk with a woman next to me about why we were there and where we had come from and what sort of books we liked to read. Some of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet will be at a Christian writers seminar, I'll tell you that right now. Very small people, though, mostly women, not the sort of folks you would imagine taking literature captive for the glory of God, but kind and others-centered nonetheless.
The lady sitting next to me was writing a wonderful series of Christian devotionals for girls who were taking ballet classes, and the lady on the other side of me was writing a series of devotionals you could read while drinking tea. When she told me this, a lady in front of us turned around and smiled because she was working on a series of devotionals you could read while drinking coffee. I told them their books sounded terrific, because it is true that some people like tea and some people like coffee, and for that matter, some people dance in ballets.
The ladies asked me what I was working on, and I told them about the nun in South America and described a specific scene in which the nun actually ponders whether or not she has fallen in love with a dictator named Pablo Hernandez-Juarez, and I had the ladies lean in as I told them the part where the nun is standing on a balcony overlooking a Pacific sunset, painfully considering whether she should go back inside to be with Pablo or whether she should scale the side of the dictator's castle, thus escaping to move on to the next country, the next dictator, and the next story of passion and liberation. You could tell the ladies really liked my story, and all three of them told me it was a terrific idea. I told them about how, in my mind, it was actually a musical, and I whistled a few bars from the love theme. I was going to tell them about the kid who grew up in a maze and brought down the United States Postal Service, but that's when the lady who was going to teach the seminar showed up.
She was also a small woman, but she knew her stuff. Three of her books had been published: a series of devotionals you could read while eating chocolate, a book about the hidden secrets of fulfillment found in end-times prophecy, and a book about how to make "big money" painting "small houses." Three different genres, she told us, but each one had been a success. She told us that there are, in fact, formulas for writing successful books, and that if we followed one of these formulas, we, too, could write books that end up on subcategory Christian or Catholic bestseller lists, not the monthly ones, but the annual ones, which also consider backlist titles and total sales, including sales to ministries and radio stations as promotional giveaways. Of course I was interested, and I elbowed the lady next to me and lifted my eyebrows.
"The first formula goes like this," our seminar instructor began, holding a finger in the air. "You begin with a crisis. This can be a global crisis, a community crisis, whatever kind of crisis you want. This isn't a problem, or a nuisance, mind you, this is a crisis. This must be something terrible that is going to happen to the world, to our country, to the church, or to the individual unless the reader does something about it. The reader must be taken to the point where they fear the consequences of this crisis. Second, there must be a clear enemy in the crisis, some group of people or some person or some philosophy that is causing the crisis. You must show examples of how these people are causing this crisis, simply because they are the enemy of all that is good. Third, you must spell out the ramifications of the crisis should it go unchecked, and also the glory and beauty of the crisis if dealt with. You must paint a picture of a war against evil forces that are trying to cause this crisis, and you must enlist the reader in this war, painting a very clear picture of the reader as the good guy in the war against the crisis. Fourth, and finally, you must spell out a three- to four-step plan of dealing with said crisis." And with this she took a breath. "Is that clear?" she asked, and as she delivered this last line, she more or less stood up straight, her petite frame putting out the confident vibe of a drill sergeant. I knew, then and there, that these were the women to take literature captive for the glory of God, that, in fact, standing before me was the archetype of my South American nun. But as excited as I was, I confess I began to wonder how I was going to work this formula into Sister of Democracy, Show Some Leg! or Maze Boy, How One Man Brought Down the United States Postal Service!
"Now, there is another recipe!" she said, which gave me hope that there might be a more compatible formula for one of my stories. "First," she began, "you must paint a picture of great personal misery. You must tell the reader of a time when you failed at something, when you had no control over a situation or dynamic. Second, you must talk about where you are now, and how you have control over that situation or dynamic, and how wonderful and fulfilling it is to have control. Third, you must give the reader a three- to four-step plan for getting from the misery and lack of control to the joy and control you currently have."
As wonderful as I thought this formula was, and I confess that I thought it was wonderful, once again I felt that it was going to be difficult for me to wrap a story around one of these recipes. I thought perhaps there would be another formula, perhaps one with guns or a midnight parachute drop into a small African village, but there wasn't. It turns out there were only two formulas. Our instructor went on to tell us that during the next two days, for eight hours each day, we were going to walk step-by-step through these two magical formulas, and by the end of our time we were going to have them mastered; that, essentially, we would be able to approach any topic and hook the reader from the very first paragraph.
I sat and listened attentively, taking copious notes, learning to look for the misery that is hiding beneath the surface of life, the misery that many people will not feel until you tell them it is there, and to identify the joy we now feel because the misery has been overcome by taking three steps, and how these three steps are very easy and can be taken by anybody who has fifteen dollars to spend on my book.
When it came time for lunch, I let the room empty out except for our seminar instructor, and feeling defeated and confused because I didn't believe these formulas were necessarily compatible with my stories, I approached her and asked about how I might fit one of these formulas into a book about a nun with a machete. She looked over my shoulder into the empty room, tilted her head, then looked back into my eyes and asked whether I realized this was a nonfiction rather than a fiction seminar. At the time, I confess, I didn't know the difference between fiction and nonfiction, so I slyly inquired about the delineation. "What," I began, "do you feel is the largest difference between a work of fiction and a work of nonfiction?" And again she looked at me, confused. "Well," she said, "I suppose a nonfiction book would be true, and a fiction book would be made up."
"For example ...," I said, motioning with my hand for an example.
"Well," she began, looking at the floor and smiling before looking back at me, kind of sighing as she spoke, "a novel, a story like the one you are talking about, would be considered a fiction book. But a self-help book, the sort of book we are discussing at this seminar, would be considered nonfiction, because we aren't really making up stories so much as we are trying to offer advice."
"I see," I said, kind of looking at the ceiling.
"I get it," I said, looking back at the floor.
"Indeed," I said, looking back at my instructor.
"Does that help?" she asked, smiling and putting her hand on my arm.
"It does," I said. "It helps a great deal. I like to get people's perspective on fiction and nonfiction. I find the various opinions intriguing."
"I am sure you do," she said to me after a long and uncomfortable pause.
I ate lunch at the Denny's across the street from the hotel, feeling the entire trip to Memphis had been a mistake. And then remembered a little song, something about making lemons from lemon tree, and I realized that what I needed to do was write nonfiction book, something that helped people who were miserable become happy. Only mine would be a Christian self-help book, and I would start each reading with Scripture, then break down the formula the Scripture spoke of. I would call it Devotions You Can Read While Eating Ice Cream, Soy Ice Cream, and So On!
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SEARCHING FOR GOD KNOWS WHAT by DONALD MILLER Copyright © 2004 by Donald Miller. Excerpted by permission.
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