The Book Stacks

Hello everyone! We have a special guest on The Book Stacks today. Camille Marchetta, author of The River, By Moonlight (which will be reviewed on this site) has joined us to talk about her writing experiences.

I hope you’ll join me in welcoming her.

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This is my first guest post, ever, and honestly I’m not quite sure how to go about it, especially since the parameters Jaime gave me were pretty broad. But there’s nothing like a new adventure, so I’m going to plunge in, do my best, tell you how I came to be a television writer, a producer, a novelist, and what I learned along the way. And when you get to the end of the piece, I really hope you’ll post a comment because I’d like to know how you think I’ve done.

For as long as I can remember, I wanted to write. Before I could even read (according to my mother), I would sit at my little doll’s table, home to my father’s old Underwood typewriter, and pound away, pretending to write a story. So why did it take me until my mid-thirties to become a produced and published writer? Lots of reasons, but chief among them was lack of confidence.

When I was eight, I began a novel, but abandoned it after a few chapters. I wrote articles for the high school newspaper, stories for the college magazine. I entered contests and won prizes. I took a writing course at the New School in New York City and came away with a story I submitted to one or two magazines, but the rejection letters, even the nice ones, discouraged me. I ignored invitations to send another story because I didn’t have another to send.

Of course I should have sat down to write one, but I didn’t. I thought I just wasn’t good enough to get published. Instead of writing, I began reading biographies of writers, hoping to discover the secret of success. Hemingway wrote standing up, I learned. Faulkner wrote drunk. Edith Wharton wrote in the morning. Thomas Wolfe wrote endlessly and left it to his editor to whip his work into shape. There didn’t seem to be just one way to become the writer I dreamed of being.

The obvious lesson was that nothing mattered but writing, just sitting down, and doing it. But somehow I didn’t get it. Not then.

After college, I wanted to work at a magazine, as an editorial assistant, but the pay was so low that instead I taught myself speedwriting, got hired as a secretary at a television company, and bounced around from job to job for a while.

Then, with a friend I went to London, and since, in addition to a writer, I had always wanted to be an ex-patriot (because of Wharton, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, the two were linked in my mind), I got a job at a theatrical and literary agency, as a secretary to start with, and finally as an agent.

It was the best thing that could have happened to me. For eight years I worked with writers, and saw at first hand the insecurities that afflicted them all, even the most successful. I witnessed the many failures they had, before and even after the triumphs.

Finally, I learned the lesson I had previously missed: all doubts have to be ignored; writing is all that matters, day by day, page by page.

Mustering my courage, I began a screenplay. I went to Los Angeles, found an agent, scrounged for work for two years, and then was fortunate enough to land a job on staff at DALLAS at the very start, so I had the good luck (and great fun) to be there as it climbed to #1 in the ratings. My career as a television writer was off and running.

I wrote the pilot for the SCRUPLES series. I worked on NURSE and FALCON CREST, both as writer and producer. Most importantly, as it turned out, I did the “bible�? and wrote or co-wrote stories for thirty episodes of DYNASTY the year it finally soared past DALLAS to the top of the chart. I say “most importantly�? because the story outlines were about 30 pages each, so that at the end of the season I had a volume of 900 pages of dense prose. Could I write a novel? You bet!

The result of that burst of confidence was Lovers and Friends (published by Arbor House, a William Morrow imprint, in 1989). That led to my working with Ivana Trump on two best-selling novels for Simon & Schuster. After that came The Wives of Frankie Ferraro (St. Martin’s Press, 1998); and now, The River, By Moonlight (self-published in August, 2007).

A dramatist friend once said to me something like, “so and so does such and such, whereas Shakespeare and I . . .�? Shakespeare and I. The audacity of that! I longed to have that big an ego, that kind of confidence. But even he didn’t have it all the time. And if there are writers out there who aren’t sometimes inhibited by self-doubt, I’ve never met them. The writers I know who achieve any kind of success are the ones who pick up a pen, sit at a typewriter, a computer; shut out, shout down, the fears, the doubts; the writers who write.

Camille Marchetta