Character Before Career
Three words on a wall that took me thirty years to hear
I was in software sales. I am still in software sales. I published my first novel anyway, and the motto on the wall turned out to be the instruction.
The school was The Stony Brook School, on the North Shore of Long Island. The motto was three words long.
Character Before Career.
At seventeen I thought it was something they printed on things. Letterhead. A banner in the gym. The kind of phrase that exists so a school has something to put underneath its crest.
I had a plan instead. Most seventeen-year-olds do. Mine had the reassuring quality of being entirely reasonable. Get the grades. Get into the school. Get the job. Stay the course, a good phrase I had heard often and never once internalized.
No one ever mentions that a good plan and a life are not the same object.
The gap
What came next was thirty years. Not a dramatic thirty years. A career. A marriage to Jeanette. Four sons, and the arithmetic that arrives with four sons, which is mostly bumps, bruises, laughter, and time.
There were no pages. That is the part I want to be honest about, because it is the part people skip when they tell this kind of story. I was not quietly working on a novel in a drawer for three decades. I spent three decades not writing one.
Years later, when Searching for Sarah was published, I put a line from Maya Angelou at the front of it. It is about the agony of carrying an untold story inside you.
I chose that line for the people in the book. It took me a while to notice I had also chosen it for myself.
What I am not going to tell you
I am not going to tell you it is never too late.
That is a poster. Posters make you feel something for about nine seconds, and then you go back to your day and nothing has changed. Unless you are one of my pups, I have zero interest in making you feel something for nine seconds.
Here is what actually happened.
It was a typical Saturday in Largo, Florida. A rainy August afternoon in 2015. My wife and I came home from shopping and put the groceries away.
She went in for a nap with our pups in tow. I grabbed my iPad and the TV remote and planted myself on the sofa. Clicked on the television, flipped through the channels, landed on golf.
As I sat there, images began swirling in my mind’s eye like a YouTube video. A complete story arc. I have always had an active imagination. I had never once felt compelled to document it.
This time was different.
I opened Word on my iPad and started writing down what I was seeing. Before I knew it I was three chapters into my first novel, which I would eventually call Last Exit to Montauk, after a sign I had passed on my way to work in the early nineties, nearly twenty-five years earlier.
Even back then I thought that sign would make a great title someday. Maybe for a Woody Allen or a Mel Brooks movie.
Little did I know I would use it for my debut.
Here is the thing people tend not to mention, or admit. When writing a novel is not on the dream board, or even in the conversation, and you are suddenly spending all your free time between 9:30 at night, when your wife turns in, and the wee hours of the morning, it may cause marital challenges.
My wife would later tell me it felt like I was cheating on her, only it was not with another person. It was with a concept.
It reminded me of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, obsessed with sculpting that mountain out of his mashed potatoes. Only my delicious side dish was an 800-page manuscript in dire need of editing and, ideally, a good writers’ group.
Six weeks later, after drawing on my adolescence and whatever my imagination handed me, I typed the final words.
The floodgates opened that day and they have not closed since. More than forty manuscripts in development. I have accepted my role as a storyteller. So has my wife, thankfully.
What I can tell you is what made it stick, because starting is common and finishing is not. Three things did the work, and none of them are inspiring.
Tuesday evenings. Every Tuesday, from 6:00 to 8:30 PM, I sit down with the Pinellas Writers and Authors Group and read my pages out loud to people who will tell me the truth. Some call it sharpening the ax. Reading your work to other people is the cheapest editorial tool in existence, and sometimes the most brutal, if you are thin skinned.
Second, my editor and publisher, Janet Fix. She has a particular gift. She finds the sentence I actually meant, usually buried three lines underneath the one I wrote. Every writer needs a person who cares about them a great deal and is completely unmoved by them.
Third, I did not quit.
I kept at it. I cannot tell you how many times I deleted dozens of pages at a clip because I did not like where the story was heading, or because what was happening did not fit the narrative. It still happens. Chapters ripped out and replaced. Their only remnant is dust on the keyboard.
What the motto actually means
Here is the part I did not understand at seventeen.
I thought Character Before Career was an ethics instruction. Be a decent person, and then go be a psychologist or a lawyer. Sound advice. Slightly boring. Very easy to nod at and forget.
It turns out to also be a craft instruction.
Character before career. Character before plot. Character before genre, before market, before the shape of the thing you are supposed to be writing this year.
Get the person right and the story will tell you where it goes. Get the person wrong and no amount of structure will rescue it, and readers will feel the wrongness long before they can name it.
Every novel I have written is about somebody standing at that exact intersection. I did not notice this until recently, which I suppose is the point.
In The Captain and the Queen, a boy has a plan for his senior year. Football in the fall, basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring, then college. A solid plan.
Then a headmaster stands up at assembly and tells the room to search for their purpose, to get outside their comfort zones, to let this be the year of their renaissance. The boy sits in class afterward arguing with himself about it. Then he tries out for the school play. Nothing on his roadmap asked him to do that.
I wrote that scene about a fictional seventeen-year-old. I understand now that I was also filing a very late report on my own.
In Fury in Her Eyes, a young man works out that a camera is a way of speaking. Pictures are your friends, he is told. They connect the human spirit.
And in Death in Utopia there is a man who became an investigator for one reason: a sister he lost, years earlier, in New York City. That is not a career decision. That is a character decision that eventually took the shape of a career.
I did not plan any of it. It turns out that when you write five books you find out what your subject is, whether or not you asked. Mine has been the same subject the entire time. A sign posted at the entrance of my prep school. Painted on the walls at Stony Brook when I was seventeen and not paying attention.
If you are the one carrying something
Some of you reading this have a thing you set down.
A manuscript. An instrument. A degree. A business. A language you were halfway to speaking. You know the one. You thought of it in the first paragraph.
I am not going to tell you to pick it back up. You are an adult and you have seen your own calendar.
But I will tell you this. Do not wait to tell your story. Do not wait to follow the thing that keeps circling back. There is no such thing as the right time, and you cannot wait for permission. It is not a package from Amazon, arriving on your doorstep exactly when you need it.
Permission is a thing you issue to yourself on an unremarkable rainy Saturday afternoon, after putting away the groceries, picking up your iPad with no plan whatsoever for what happens next.
The plan was never the point.
Character first. The career second, if it comes at all. Mine came thirty years later and I would not trade the order.
So tell me. What is the thing you set down? Not what you intend to do about it. Just what it is. I read every comment, and I answer them.
