This is the nonfiction story of one man's quest to publish a fiction novel:

I'm a pessimistic person by nature.  I always assume the Eagles (my hometown football team) are going to lose, and that way, I never get my hopes up, and subsequently never get my hopes dashed.

And unfortunately, the Eagles pretty much always lose.

And I knew, I just knew that someone was getting an offer on the house in before us.  The realtor waited so long, and the price was so good.

But the house had been on the market for 52 days. What were the odds that someone would put in a bid the exact same day as us?

Pretty good, apparently.  Just like I always expect the Eagles to lose, and they always prove me right, I expected to not get this house, and unfortunately, I was right.

During all that chaos -- the multiple attempts to fax, the multiple attempts to e-mail, the meetings, the redos, the everything -- someone else put in an offer on the house, and that offer was accepted.

Oh sweet rejection.  It hurts when it's a book you're trying to publish, and it hurts when it's a house you're trying to buy.  And it doesn't hurt any less when you expect the negative thing to occur.

But not all hope is lost.  I've still got that article floating out there.  Will it be written, will it be published?

Who knows?  The wait continues…

What have I been doing since my last post?

Waiting.

A guy from a literary publication contacted me, saying he read an article about me in Rosebud (see chapter 20 for details) and wanted to report the article in his own magazine.

How cool is that?  After running around the apartment, arms flailing, blood pumping, I sat at my computer to see what he needed. 

I filled out a bio like he asked me to, answered some questions like he asked me to, and then…

Waited.

It's been two weeks since I e-mailed him the answers and I haven't heard back.  Is my story going to be in the next publication?  Who knows.  All I can do is wait.

And last Saturday, the day before my first wedding anniversary, my wife and I went looking for houses.  We found one, we liked it, we went to see it again.

We decided to put an offer on it. 

So we print out all the documents and spend the evening signing them.  One after another after another.  Boom boom boom.

I get to work extra early so I can fax everything over to the realtor in time for her to get the offer in by 10.  I stick the papers into the machine, I type the number.

Nothing.

I try again.

Nothing.

I pitifully ask for help.

The fax machine is not my friend.

But fortunately we have another, so I try that sucker.  And wouldn't you know it, that one doesn't work either.  It's an epidemic.

But that's okay, because we can scan the documents and turn them into PDFs and e-mail them over.

If only the person who has access to the fancy printer would get in to work already.

Minutes tick by.  I keep trying to fax.  It keeps not working.  More minutes go by.

And hour goes by.

And finally she's here, and zip, we go straight to the machine.  It reads the documents hungrily.  We've got ourselves a PDF.

Oh wait, it's too large to e-mail.

We rescan.  Three smaller piles worth.  Three new files.

Oh, these'll go through the invisible e-mail wires, but veeeeeeeery slowly.  So I wait, and I wait, and I see the little "sending" icon on my computer, and I wait.

And I know that every minute that goes by an offer could be coming in from someone else.

But finally the realtor has all the documents!  But she has a meeting to go to.

"I'll send this right after lunch."

Uh, my stomach is killing me.  That other offer could be coming in right now.  The house could be disappearing from our grasp.

But "right after lunch" comes around, and I think the offer is in, and I know we aren't going to get an answer back right away (and if we did it'd probably be an answer we didn't want) but I'm still anxious anyway.

Waiting.

And then the phone rings at 5:00. Boy howdy am I nervous.

But for no reason, because there's no answer yet, because she hasn't even put in the offer yet.  There's a line on one of the forms that got cut off, so I have to rewrite my initials and send it through again.

So I do that.  But no, we BOTH need to initial.  So I forge Kristina's three letters and send it through again.

Okay, that's it, she's good to go.  The offer is in.

And now?

We wait.

And I know in that time another offer has come in.  I just know it.  How could it not have?

But even so…

…we wait. 

I could have an article printed about me in a literary magazine, and I could be the proud owner of a lovely new home in Levittown, Pennsylvania.

I could.  After the wait.   

To reverse my point from last week, is more in-depth description always better?  To fill you in, we worked on a little writing exercise where you had to describe a hot day without using the word hot.  The idea is that it creates more of an atmosphere for the reader.

But is that always a good thing?  For instance, is it more useful for the reader if we write, “he stared in bewilderment” or even simply “he stared bewildered,” then it is to write, “his eyes blinked again and again and again, his jaw hanging down, cocked slightly to the left?”  Does the third one complicate matters more than they need to be?  Does it make something longer than is necessary?  

Sometimes is it better to write “she was shocked” than it is to write “she reeled back in her chair, palms stuck to the sides of her face, eyes as wide and shiny as a quarter?”

Those aren’t the best of examples, but you get my point.  It is better to straight out tell the reader, or is it always preferable to show them? What do you think?  

My dearest darlingest wife is a reading specialist in a high school, and she told me about an interesting exercise I thought I’d share with all of you.

What words can you think of to describe a hot day?

Sweaty
Sultry
Sauna
Simmering
Searing
Humid
Heat
Burn
Blaze
Fire

What other ones can you think of?  Plenty, right?

Now, can you describe a hot day without using any of those words?

Perhaps you’ll describe a group of kids playing in the street as a fire hydrant sprays them with water.  Or a dog lying outside, panting tongue dragging across the high grass.  What about a boy leaning in to lick an ice cream cone and finding that his treat has melted almost instantly?

Would you create the idea of an image shimmering over black concrete, or have the very blackness of that tar seeming to bubble off and evaporate?  

What would you do?  You would paint a picture, you would invent a scene, you would create that all important tone: atmosphere.     

You could write, “the day was hot.”  Or you could create a whole world for your reader.

Why don’t you do that now?  In as many words as you want, craft a scene of a hot day, without using any synonyms for the word hot.  Post it as a comment. Leave your name if you’d like.  And your age.  And anything else you want to tell us about yourself.  Create your ideal hot world, and let’s see how inventive you can be.  

I can’t wait to discover what you can do.  I bet it’ll be hot.  

A group of people were talking at work the other day about real estate.  It went something like this:

Consultant: Yeah, we have a condo in Manhattan, it's one bedroom, 400 square feet, and it's worth $500,000.

VP: But it's not like that everywhere in the country.  My dad's place in Atlanta has a river running through the house, and the property is acres upon acres, and they have horse stables and who knows what else, and it just cost them $1 million.

Me: $1 million.  Wow.  Was that before or after Water for Elephants?

VP: Oh, after.  Very much after.  

The VP of my office is Clara Pitts, formally Clara Gruen, step-daughter of Sara Gruen, author of Water for Elephants.

Water for Elephants is Sara's third published work, but the first to get any real attention.  And boy did it get attention.  It's still high on the bestseller list and was just voted Stephen King's sixth favorite book of the year.  Almost immediately after publishing, big name movie stars and big time movie companies were interested in optioning the story.  The New York Times asked Sara to write a column in their prestigious newspaper.  And then, she got a massive - I don't want to divulge the details - but massive deal where she'd get paid an extremely large sum of money for her next three books.

And BOOM, just like that, she's a famous author.  From near obscurity to super-stardom, with her picture even appearing in the pop culture bible Entertainment Weekly.

A similar course was just charted by another female writer, this a stripper turned screenwriter with the stage name Diablo Cody. She wrote the movie Juno, which is a critic's darling and well, that's really it.  It's a comedy about a pregnant girl, and a similar themed movie - Knocked Up - earned more money in its first day of release than Juno has earned in three weeks.  But does that matter?  Apparently not.  Because she's the newest columnist for the aforementioned Entertainment Weekly, and she just got millions of dollars for the rights to her next script.  Why did I italicize the word rights?  Because she doesn't have a next script.  Just like with Sara Guren, it's money based on good faith.  "Whenever you write something, we want it, and we're willing to pay you in advance for it."

Now that's a lot of pressure.  The damn thing better deliver.  But that's the life of a successful author.  And it can happen that fast.

From animal lover or stripper to superstar writer. From middle-class to millionaire.  It can happen that fast.  

I want a house with a river through it.  I want to write for Entertainment Weekly.  I guess I better hurry up and write my play about food for pregnant hippopotamuses.

But on a separate note, can we give props to the female writers our there?  None of this 80 cents on the dollar compared to men with the same job nonsense for them!  You go girl!  Huh, what's that?  I'm a guy, so I can't say 'you go girl'?"  Well that's just sexist and hurtful.   

*Addition* - Since this entry, Juno has gone on to gross $51.7 million and counting.  Maybe this blog is a nice form of advertising.  Huh?  Huh?  No?  Fine. 

Just so you know, dark emo crybaby Matt didn't last too long.  The tears dried up quickly, leaving crooked little cracked crevices under the eyes.  And a little lotion fixed those too.  Cleared them right up, leaving a smooth facade on the fleshy basin.  So we're all good.  All better.  But two quick thanks are in order.

Thank goodness for all you people and your kind encouraging words.

And thank goodness for my incredible, loving wife.  When I was so down, so distraught, so devastated with the agent’s words, she said the exact right thing.

“Matt, your book is real artsy, and as he said at the conference, he’s looking for a book that can become a movie blockbuster.  He’s looking for the money.  Your book is still good.  Your book can still get published.”

And as much as my self-destructive tendencies want me to believe that’s poppycock, the optimistic sap in me wants to know that’s true.  And why shouldn’t I?  What’s wrong with a little well-meaning delusion?

So let’s keep this train rollin’, baby.  I’ve still got Running Electricity I can try to sell.  I’ve still got my Les Miz story I can tune up.  I’ve still got plenty of ideas for more novels, and even short stories – and that’s where Kristina thinks I should focus my energy.  She keeps pushing me to try to get short stories published.  She thinks it’s easier, and helps create a name for yourself.  And as always, she’s probably right.

Plus, I’ve always got this blog, and you wonderful people.  And I’ve always got your encouraging words, pushing me on.

So let’s forget stupid miserable Matt.  Nobody likes him anyway.  Let’s get some damn stories published.   

Remember the grand plan we had?  While waiting to hear back from an agent, I was supposed to fill you in on all the things I learned at my recent trip to a writer’s conference?  Well, turns out we’re not going to have time for that, because my new agent buddy already got back to me.

On November 30, my father’s 59th birthday, he rejected me.   

Matthew
It was nice meeting you at MC3 and I appreciate the look at your novel.
Unfortunately, the writing didn’t work for me.  But I still think you are on the right track with the subject matter.
Good luck.
Adam

I just received this, and I have to say it hurts.  Did he not like the main character?  Was it the plot that didn’t grab him?  No, it was something more fundamental than that.  It was the actual writing.

Could there be a worse blow to a writer’s ego?  I really thought I had something special with this one.  I was going to adopt the writing style for all my future works.  My wife in her first note when reading it over wrote, “this is so poetic!”  But perhaps she was just protecting my fragile psyche, and perhaps I was just delusional.  An agent didn’t reject the plot, he rejected the writing.  Ouch.

I wrote back and thanked him for getting back to me, and asked him for some short advice on what he disliked about the writing.  And maybe he’ll reply.  But I doubt it.  He’s busy with clients, and real potential clients.  He doesn’t owe me anything.  He doesn’t need to waste time on me.  In all likelihood, I’ll never know his issue with it.

And sure, there are countless stories of books that were rejected hundreds if not thousands of times before going on to get published, to become bestsellers, to win Pulitzer Prizes.  

And sure, there are books that speak to some people, and books that don’t.  And while this guy could dislike the writing, another agent could be moved by it.  But that doesn’t really help me right now, as I’m reeling from the blow.  That doesn’t change my gut reaction – that my time and efforts were for naught, and that my wife’s gift of the Writer’s Market book has been rendered pointless.   

I mean, what happens when a writer gets told he can’t write?  How does he pick himself up after that?  Can that dust ever be brushed off?  

Is the horse even still there to get back on, or did he kick me off in a fit of agitation and just take off, disappearing deep into the woods, lost forever?  Right now, I don’t know.

I really don’t know.     

By the way, this is a bit ironic, isn't it?  In my first post after asking if good writing can be taught, I get an F in the class.   Buuurn.

“Most people assume that writing is an innate talent, rather than a skill that can be taught.”

 

That quote can be found in an article written by Jason Breslow for the Chronicle of Higher Education.  It’s from a creative-writing professor at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College named Joshua Henkin.  Do you agree with it?

 

If you do, why do you think that would be?  And why, Breslow asks and Henkin writes, “is writing the only art form that gets singled out? No one complains when a person decides to take music or sculpting lessons, for instance.”

 

Excellent point.  And there’s more in here if you’re interested.

 

“Writing is unique, [Henkin] argues, because unlike other art forms, people do it everyday, in e-mail messages, diary entries, and memoranda, for example.”  Says Henkin himself: "In a typical person's life, there's nothing that approximates violin playing or sculpture, but writing is so close to what we do every day that it seems within our grasp.”

 

And he goes on to say, "When we actually set our minds to it, when we discover that it's not so easily reached, we decide that it's a gift and therefore not teachable."

 

But then he throws us a twist.  First, Breslow writes, “but good writing has tangible attributes that can and should be taught.”  And then Henkin’s own words read, “the teaching of writing is not chimerical…it is not smoke and mirrors, and it seems to me that, on balance, it has been a considerable force for the good."

 

I may have done barely any actual writing in a blog about writing as an art form, but I found this article fascinating.  Can writing be taught, or is it an innate skill?  Can you compare it to driving a car, where just about everyone can learn how to accomplish it with the right time and environment, or is it more like playing a sport, where someone can improve with practice, but if he or she isn’t born with the talent, he or she can never hope to achieve success? 

 

I’d like to get your opinion.  I know this blog is founded on trying to teach you some fundamentals of writing a novel, but do you need to have a natural-born gift for writing in order to take advantage of my advice? 

 

What do you think?

So let me fill you in on what exactly went down in my agent meeting.

We had five minutes to meet with an agent, but the person slated to go before me never showed, so I got some extra time. Lucky me.

Most people spent their five minutes pitching a book, but I didn't want a tuna steak, I wanted to learn how to fish, so to speak. So instead of just pitching him one of my books and hoping for the best, I asked if I could briefly describe the three that I thought were the most sellable, and wanted him to let me know if he thought there was a market for any of them. He obliged.

So I went to work describing Angel of Life and The Fall of Paris. Then I got to Running Electricity, and led with, "The main character suffers from a neurological condition that makes him associate colors with people."

"Wait, let me stop you there," he said.

"Uh, okay."

"Is this a real condition?"

"Oh yeah, it's called synethesia, and the colors can work for people, numbers, whatever. Some people who have it know their phone number as red blue green - orange blue whatever."

A head nod. A wave of his hand. "Go on."

So I finish, and he leans in and says, "Okay, so you're obviously very creative, I love your imagination, but here's the thing. The first two books, they could be anything. Are you making everything up? I don't know. But this synethesia thing, that really catches my eye. That gets me excited."

He asked me if I had heard of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and talked about how it's just a mystery, and a mundane one at that - it's about a dead dog - but that it has a great hook, and that hook is that the narrator has Autism. He told me that when he heard that, he thought, "now that's a six figure deal."

He said my other books sound like everything else. "Yeah, the one takes place in Hell, and that's different and that's cool, but it still sounds like other things. I've never heard of another book with synethsia. So I would view those first two books as practice for you. They were stepping stones to hone your craft and build your imagination."

And then someone came to tell us our time was up, and before I stood, I said, "So you're saying the synethesia is the pitch?"

"Absolutely." And then he shook my hand and said, "And you can send me that book. Since I'm requesting it, you can send it to me," and he handed me his card. And that was that.

So I'm going to send it. I've printed the first three chapters and I'm going to send it to him. And while we wait for a response, I'll spend the next few posts relaying cool tips I learned at the conference. You guys in?

“Okay, Matthew is it?  You’re next.  Go right ahead.  And good luck!”

 

And so I took a deep breath, stepped through large brown double doors, and met with a book agent.

 

Wait, what?

 

That’s right.  My lovely bride told me I had to leave work at 1:30 on Friday for a surprise.  And what was that surprise?  A weekend-long writer’s conference that started with a Q&A session with Frank McCourt, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Angela’s Ashes, and ended with a meeting with a book agent. 

 

We were given five-minute time slots to meet with our agent, but because the person slated to go before me never showed, I got extra time with the slickster.  But even more time can often be too little time, and before I knew it, our session had ended, and he was telling me I could send him my latest book, and he was handing me his card, and then I was whisked away, replaced by another aspiring author, and I was left standing in the hallway, wondering what my next move should be.

 

Remember my dilemma with the Cooke Agency, and how to respond to them in a way that garnered me the appropriate information without annoying them?  I’m in a similar situation again.

 

“You can send me that one.  And because I asked for it, you can send it directly to me.”

 

That’s what he had said, but what exactly does that mean?  Send him my whole manuscript?  Send him the first three chapters?  Send him a formal query letter? 

 

Should I send it (whatever it is) via e-mail?  Snail mail?  A carrier pigeon?  What is my next move?

 

On the one hand, I think it’d be nice to send him a quick e-mail explaining who I am and that I am seeking more clarification in order to make his job as easy as possible.  On the other hand, that in itself is making his job harder, and it’s also creating an extra step that involves me sitting around waiting for a return correspondence.    

 

So I think the best thing to do is give him the first three chapters of my book, with a note explaining that, if he liked what he read, I’d be happy to send along the rest.  But do I do it via e-mail to save me money on printing and mailing?  Maybe, but there’s a good chance he won’t open an e-mail with an attachment from an address he doesn’t recognize.  So should I print the pages out and mail it to him and hope for the best?  Do I really have any other choice?

 

His website doesn’t clarify, which leaves me here with this dilemma.  This is a great opportunity, and I do not want to blow it.  Again. 

Last week, I mentioned a discrepancy in how a novel writer and a film writer pen their masterpieces.  This week, I'd like to discuss something they can both agree on.

For the most part, you should constantly change the texture of your prose.

Not drastically, mind you.  The general style should stay the same throughout a book, unless you're doing something incredibly clever with the point-of-view.  What I mean is, make sure every single sentence doesn't feel the same.  Example:

He woke up with a start.  His stomach was empty, his bladder full.  He stood from the bed.  He moved gently down the hall.  He lifted the toilet seat.  His stomach grumbled and he watched a yellow stream spit into the bowl.  He winced as the flushing sound filled the room.  He returned to his bed and went back to sleep.

You want to make sure there's a poetic non-pattern to your writing.  Change it up a bit.  Keep the reader guessing, not just about the plot, but about the structure of the sentences.  Example:

His eyes snapped open suddenly.  Lying on his back, he stared up, seeing nothing, seeing just blackness be on, where a ceiling should be.  What had woken him?  A sound?  An unwanted presence?  The realization hit him a moment later: he needed to pee.  Standing quietly, he pushed his feet into soft slippers and shuffled half-asleep down the hall, brushing his hand against the wall.  When he finally came to the doorway, he stepped in, flicking the switch and wincing at the shriek of light.  He shuffled toward the bowl and filled it with a yellow liquid.  Then he flushed, reabsorbed the room in solid black, and returned to his bed, where he fell happily on to the sheets and closed his eyes, replacing one darkness with another, feeling his conscious slowly drift away.     

Cormac McCarthy, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Road, would take that a step further.  I've never spoken with him, obviously, but from reading his works, I'd say he would suggest writing some long sentences broken up by some very short ones.  Somtimes sentences that aren't even full sentences, like the one you just read.  He'll write things like, "The man walked up to the horse and placed a hand on its head and stroked it softly and moved to its side and jumped up and jumped on and tightened his feet around its body and kicked softly and started forward down the path."  Then he'll follow that up with something like, "Hot sun on his face."  He certainly writes much better than I do, but the point is this: a constant flux in sentence length and structure will create a truly poetic flow for your writing, and will both delight and surprise the reader in every paragraph.

 
 

I saw something interesting over the Labor Day weekend.

I was watching a documentary on the film Magnolia, and it's writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson quoted a hero of his. His hands waving flamboyantly as he spoke, acting out what his words inferred, he compared writing to ironing clothes: You do one part, and then you redo the trail end of that part, but move a little further along.  Then you go over the end again, and move further still.

I loved this analogy, because it describes what I did with Running Electricity.  I felt bad doing it this way, because Stephen King's memoir seems to strongly disagree with it.  Stevie prefers to write everything, put the manuscript in a drawer for months while he works on something else, and then return to it fresh, and review what he's done then.  

I don't like to do that.  Call me impatient, but I like to see the fruits of my labor immediately.  Sometimes I write something and I think, "Oh, that's great," and I want to reread it to make sure it is, in fact, great, and I like to, at that moment, try to perfect it.  Is that ridiculous and arrogant?  Will I dillute the writing by going over it too many times, and thereby taking out the original oomph of surprise and creativity?  I don't know.

It is how an Academy Award nominated scriptwriter works, but not one of the best selling book authors of all time.  So which is the right way?  Perhaps their isn't ONE right way.  Perhaps it's whatever works best for each person.

Or perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson would have won his Oscar if he followed Uncle Steve's philosophy.

Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a lollipop, the world may never know.

But please tell me your thoughts on the subject. I'm dying to hear from you, instead of simply living on this blog through my voice all the time.

Well, ladies and gentlemen of the blogosphere, a lot has happened since we last spoke (I use the term "spoke" loosely, of course, considering this is pretty much a one-way conversation, with me being the blaggermouth, unless you comment at the end of the post).

Anyway, a lot has happened, and to make it easier on you, let's see if I can cram it all into one paragraph:

(Deep typing breath) Something major occurred since getting married.  Something besides going on my honeymoon to Italy and Greece.  Something besides searching for a house with which to start a life with my beautiful new bride.  Something besides getting promoted to Corporate Communications Manager at work.  Something besides preparing for my new mother-in-law's surprise 50th birthday party.  Something even besides starting my search for an agent for one of my earliest books.  Something major occurred since then, and it happened yesterday morning.

I finished my latest book.

Okay, so it took two paragraphs.  But only because I thought it was more dramatic that way.  You know, as if to say that writing a book was more important than getting married or searching for a house.

But yes, I finished my fifth book.  Before getting a chance to send out a single query letter for The Fall of Paris, I wrote the 473 page Running Electricity (working title), and I'm going to forget about that Frenchy nonsense and immediately start focusing on this for my literary future.

Running Electricity follows three people, all with deep insecurities, and it's about overcoming those insecurities.  There's also a subplot involving a bank robber with his own insecurities, and the four merge during a heist with a unique, nail-biting twist.  That sounds sort of odd, perhaps even a bit clichéd, but somehow, at least in my odd silly warped little mind, it works.  

Sprinkled with just a touch of something surreal (to say more would be to give too much away), this book is my first true success at combining pop art with literary art.  Something exciting with something artful.  The writing is filled with action, suspense, sports, and a love triangle, among many other elements, and it's all wrapped in a tight literary package overflowing with vibrant, transcendent prose.

Throughout writing this book, I actually took on a new technique.  I wrote a passage for the story, and then went back and filled in that passage with lush descriptions of things, thereby combining the page-turning story with an enjoyable writing style.  I think this new technique actually worked very well, and would suggest others try it as well.  I was able to focus on one important aspect (the story) and then focus on the other (strong, innovative writing), and the end result is a flawless combination of both.  Again, that's in my opinion, so take it with a grain of literary salt.

But I really do think the writing is innovative.  I did something unique with the characters voices, sort of blending third and first person, and I did a lot to incorporate the surroundings and various settings in a manner that I hope will feel fresh.  

I hope this, because I've heard that with each book, a writer gets better.  That's certainly visible with J.K. Rowling - just compare the first Harry Potter to the seventh - and I believe that's also visible with me.  Just as I've said after finishing other works, and will not say here as well, I think this is by far my strongest, by far my most mature.  All the characters' actions make sense, and are grounded in deep reasons.  They all have powerful feelings that get fleshed out as the tale goes on.  They all participate in their own, interesting stories, and each character's path influences another in some profound way.  It also has by far the happiest, most uplifting, most inspirational ending I've ever written, and it's not a cheat.  It's earned.  And through it, the goal is to help the reader overcome any insecurities he or she might have.  

It really is the most like a true professional piece of fiction I've ever written.  I feel as if I got all my practice runs out of the way, and this is the first real novel I've concocted.  This is it.  This is the one.

Now it's just time to get started on that query letter.

Oh, and find a house, enjoy married life, and not lose my cool over my new work responsibilities.  But whatevs, I can do it.

After all, I am a novelist.  And can't we do anything?   

 

 

This world is all about countdowns.

How many weeks until the iPhone?

How many days until the last Harry Potter?

How many seconds until the bomb goes off in the latest action movie?

Well, Mr. BookSay has his own little countdown:

Just a little under six hours until he gets married.

334 minutes.

If I don't make it out on the other side, know that I've loved you all. 

And let my awful books be my lasting impression. 

In January 1999, a full year before the new millennium, a few ducks in a pond and a boy's question of "what, no f'n zito?" revolutionized television.

 

No, it wasn’t Apple and their iTunes, or Tivo and its ability to digitally record shows, that changed the face of TV as we know it.  It was a fat mobster and family man with a loud breathing problem.

 

Through ducks, horses, bears, and cats; dinners, conversations, singing, and lots and lots of conspiring; shootings, stranglings, beheadings, and one glorious car to the face; The Sopranos reinvented what it means to be a television show.

 

CSI wouldn’t exist right now.  Neither would LOST or Heroes.  Every serious, thought-provoking serialized drama with realistic violence and complex characters owes its digital life to The Sopranos.

And in a way, as I dedicate my career to wishing I could write like the authors of that show, so do I.

 

I was still a teenager when I sat down to see a then unknown James Gandolfini sitting across from Ray Liotta's wife in Goodfellas.  The show has always been about family, and I grew up with theirs.  Uncle Junior was my uncle too.  Jackie Jr. my screw-up cousin.  I matured as Meadow and A.J. did.  I mourned at the same wakes that they attended.  While some people shared their childhood with the Fonz, I have Paulie Walnuts.

 

And last night, it came to an end. 

 

This was a big moment in my life.  This was a big moment in TV’s life.  And now it’s over.  And now, I’m getting married and looking for houses and am ready to start a new life.  And now HBO, and TV as a whole, will have to move on with theirs. 

 

The Sopranos got me to reevaluate how to watch television, how to understand film, how to appreciate art.  And it turned HBO into a video art gallery, transforming it from a simple premium movie channel into an Emmy-award winning powerhouse with all the best shows, mini-series, and specials. 

 

It’s not TV.  It’s HBO.

 

That was their slogan.  That still is their slogan.  But as of this morning, that’s no longer the case.  As of this morning, it has all changed again.

 

But not without leaving us with one more ultimate topic for water-cooler banter.  Not without trumping LOST’s smoke monster and Jacob sighting to give us the biggest TIVO moment in DVR’s short history. 

 

Will there be a Sopranos movie?  No.  James Gandolfini has admitted to being finished with the character, and David Chase, the show's creator, swears the story is finished.  Plus, let's not forget that HBO is a pay channel, so the show only averages around 8 million viewers.  That’s not enough people to open a successful film. 

But that being said, the only piece of news that has been bigger than the end of The Sopranos is Paris Hilton’s attempt to emulate Tony Soprano and try to beat the law. 

 

What does this mean?  That even though only a few million Americans even have HBO, the end of this era was all anybody could talk about.  Every radio station I listened to this morning lead with a discussion of The Sopranos.  Every magazine and news program has interviewed the cast.  It is truly a cultural phenomenon.

 

And now it’s over. 

 

And what was it?  In the end, really, what was it?  Matthew Gilbert from the Boston Globe says about the finale: “It’s the kind of bold, artful touch we usually expect to find at the movies. Indeed, since its 1999 premiere, ‘The Sopranos’ gave series television a boost in stature that put it up there with the quintessential American art form, the movies.”

 

He’s not the only one to say that.  Most people will call The Sopranos an extended film before they call it a television show.  Most people want to compare its character arcs and camera movements to cinema.  But a stunning 18 Emmy’s later, what is it?

An extended film?  A cultural phenomenon?  A digital revolution.  A surrogate father? 

 

In its last second of life, as millions of people jumped off their couches screaming, “What, did the cable go out?” The Sopranos reminded us that it is simply a TV show.

 

But in so doing, it made sure we never forget that it is indeed a work of art.

And in those final moments, we learned that life for the Sopranos' family will go on.  People come into our lives and people leave it, and some people even have the power to change it.  Obstacles are faced, and some are overcome, and some, quite frankly, aren't.  But life still keeps going on.  It will for Tony and Camella.  And it will for me, they're adopted child.

Life will keep going on.

 

Here’s to you, David Chase and the gang, for reminding us of this.  And for giving us seven exceptional years of a bloody good time.