You Can Date Boys When You're Forty: Dave Barry on Parenting and Other Topics He Knows Very Little About (15 page)
Authors: Dave Barry
FACT:
Eighty-six percent of all private jets are owned by poets.
Also it goes without saying that, as a poet, you will be a major international celebrity. You will have front-row seats for every concert and be whisked past the line of loser normal people into any exclusive restaurant or nightclub you want. Not to mention having casual sex with as many as four Kardashians
per day
.
If that sounds too unhygienic, you might want to consider becoming a novelist. This is a little harder than writing poetry or children’s books, but not much. The two big decisions you have to make are:
Will it be a women’s novel or a men’s novel?
Will there be vampires?
Once you have answered these questions, all you have to do is come up with characters and a plot that contains a Beginning, a Middle and a Surprise Ending. Use this table for reference:
ELEMENTS OF A NOVEL
*
Women’s Novel | Men’s Novel |
MAIN CHARACTER | |
Female. Strikingly beautiful. Highly intelligent. Sensitive. Has many feelings. Millions and millions of feelings. Very attractive to men. Also very attractive to women. Also very attractive to vampires if there are any in the plot. Just generally an extremely attractive person. | Male. Masculine. Ruggedly handsome. Brave. Manly. Highly intelligent. Fearless. A renegade and a loner; dislikes authority. Courageous. Strong and very good at fighting, but reluctant to use violence. Understood to possess—although this is never explicitly stated—a huge penis. |
OTHER PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS | |
|
|
BEGINNING | |
We are gradually introduced to the world of the main character. We slowly begin to understand, through her innermost thoughts and her conversations with other female characters, that, because of some mysterious traumatic incident that occurred in the past, she has deeply conflicted feelings about her complex relationships with her mother, sister, daughter and/or estranged childhood friend. We also are introduced to one or more males to whom the main character is attracted but about whom she has many deeply ambivalent feelings that result in much conflicted thinking going on for pages and pages. | The main character is thrust into a situation where he encounters some wrongdoing being done and, through no fault of his own, must reluctantly beat the living shit out of some henchpersons. This results in a string of mysterious clues that cause the main character to realize that there is an evil plot afoot involving worldwide nuclear destruction or serial killing or sex pervert basement torturing with soldering irons or the president of the United States being a Communist robot or some other hideous evil plot that the main character must courageously try to uncover single-handedly against impossible odds. |
MIDDLE | |
Through continued conversations with other female characters, as well as additional lengthy passages of innermost thoughts, we gradually learn more about the complex feelings and relationships of the main character, getting glimpses—but only glimpses—of the mysterious traumatic past incident that is causing her to have so much emotional complexity in her life. At the same time she gradually becomes involved in a deeper and more complex relationship with one or more of the male characters, yet she is unable to commit herself fully to him or them because of so many sensitive innermost ambivalent feelings swarming around inside her like minnows in a bait bucket. | The main character, bravely pursuing the truth, finds his path blocked time and again by henchpersons out of whom he has no choice but to reluctantly beat the living shit. This draws the attention of high-ranking police, military or government officials who naturally get everything completely wrong and focus their suspicions on the main character. They assign, to investigate him, the tough yet beautiful gazomba woman. She and the main character take an instant dislike to each other and soon have amazing sex lasting several days thanks to the awesome power of the unstated but clearly understood Yule log in his undershorts. | s.
SURPRISE ENDING | |
As the main character’s feelings reach a raging fever pitch of ambivalence, she has a climactic emotional conversation or encounter involving her mother, sister, daughter or estranged childhood friend, and we finally, after many hundreds of pages, discover the mysterious traumatic past event has caused so much internal conflict and relationship complexity. It turns out to be: a shocking surprise. By finally getting it out into the open, the main character is able to confront it and have many additional pages of conversations and thoughts and feelings about it. In the end she is able, at last, to accept herself as the highly attractive woman she is and to admit the love she feels for one or more of the male characters and possibly allow him to suck out her blood. The book ends here because of the danger that some actual action is about to occur. | The main character and the woman (who has of course fallen in love with him) become ensnared in a hopeless plot predicament from which escape is absolutely, completely one hundred percent impossible, so they are definitely going to die. They respond by having sex of a caliber that would kill a rhinoceros. Then they escape in a very clever and brave way and proceed to an action-packed climax in which the main character, against impossible odds, reluctantly kills a minimum of 135 people en route to discovering the incredible shocking truth, which is: something totally unexpected. With the plot now resolved, the main character and the woman again engage in lovemaking so powerful that it alters worldwide bird migration patterns, although she knows in her heart that he will never settle down with one woman because of his renegade loner lifestyle and massive unstated pelvic salami. |
Promoting Your Book
The surest way to make your book a bestseller is to get my wife to read it. If she likes it, she
will
make it a bestseller. She has done this repeatedly. Remember a book called
The Kite Runner
? That was my wife. Of the ten million copies of that book sold, at least 9.8 million were purchased by people who were directly ordered to do so by my wife. Not only did she make everybody in her vast international network of book-reading women friends buy it, she also would walk up to complete strangers in bookstores and say: “Have you read
The Kite Runner
? It’s a
great
book!” Then she would basically hover around them until they had no choice but to buy
The Kite Runner
, even if they already owned it or, for that matter, even if they owned the bookstore.
Remember the US Airways flight that hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger landed in the Hudson River after both engines died, and the passengers all miraculously survived? If my wife had been on the flight, when she and the other passengers were standing on the plane wings waiting for the rescue boats, she would have taken the opportunity to tell them that they needed to buy
The Kite Runner
.
Other books that my wife has, by relentlessly hectoring innocent bystanders, personally turned into bestsellers include
The Bridges of Madison County
,
Room
and
The
Language of Flowers
.
Now to answer your questions:
No, my wife has never made any of
my
books into bestsellers.Yes, I am her husband.
Unlike, say, the author of
The Kite Runner
.No, I am not bitter.
Really! I’m fine with it!
Shut up.
But you cannot rely entirely on my wife to promote your book for you. You will also have to do some promoting yourself. One effective technique, especially for first-time authors, is to march into bookstores and inform the staff, in a loud yet irritated voice, that they don’t have enough copies of your book, and don’t have it displayed prominently enough, and clearly are not doing an adequate job of informing customers about it. Bookstore employees really appreciate receiving this kind of helpful input from authors and will definitely pay special attention to your books after you leave.
The Book Tour
As a bestselling author, you will be sent out on a book tour, which is a multi-city trip starting out in New York City and ending in death.
Ha-ha! I’m exaggerating of course.
FACT:
Only eight percent of book tours are fatal to the author.
Nevertheless, book tours can be grueling because you go from city to city appearing on TV and radio shows where you will be interviewed by perky on-air personalities who have not read your book and sincerely do not give a shit about it. If they were interested in books, they would never have gotten into radio or TV in the first place. So it’s up to you, the author, to “carry the ball” during these interviews, and it can be hard work, as we see in this classic author-interview transcript from the early days of radio:
Host:
Our next guest is Herman Melville, who has written a book called
Moby-Duck
.
Melville:
Dick.
Host:
I beg your pardon?
Melville:
It’s
Dick
.
Host:
What is?
Melville:
The book title. It’s
Moby-Dick
.
Host:
Dick?
Melville:
Yes. It’s the name of a whale, which is a major character in the book.
Host:
So this
Dick
is a talking whale?
Melville:
No, the whale is essentially a symbol—of fate, of chaos, of uncertainty, of the vast uncontrollable and unknowable forces of the universe, against which man is powerless.
Host:
I see. (
Pause.
) So there’s no duck?
So book tours are not easy. But you still should do them because there is no better way to “get the word out” about your book than to appear on TV, especially a major national show such as
The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
,
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
,
Dancing with the Stars
or
Mad Men
. You should go on as many of these shows as your schedule allows.
How to Get on a Major Television Show
It’s extremely easy. These shows always need guests and they’re especially eager to have authors who are promoting books. So you don’t need an appointment or anything. Simply show up at the TV studio about fifteen minutes before the show starts and let the security people know you are available to be a guest. They will take it from there.
I myself have used this technique countles siqusecurs times to get on national TV shows. Here’s a photograph of me taken on the set of the
Today
Show
, where I am attempting to explain my book to four TV personalities who—this is clear from their expressions—have no idea who I am or what the hell I am doing there:
