Tilting at Fame

How to be a well-known, unread author

ON Reading the Sales Figures for Some of the Most Highly Acclaimed Novels of 1985

1. Choose the proper subject:

Growing up in Brooklyn.

Growing up in the South.

Growing up on a farm.

Growing up.

A happy marriage.

The breakup of a marriage.

A happy second marriage.

The breakup of a second marriage.

High-school adventures.

College adventures.

Graduate-school adventures.

2. Attend a graduate school with an arts program and a widely published faculty. People like Raymond Carver, Frederick Barthelme, Mary Robison. If not them, someone who has studied with them. Apprentice yourself. Become a disciple.

3. Write stories until your professor drops the name of someone who works in publishing. If his name is Gordon Lish, send your manuscript to this person.

4. When the editor asks if you have a novel in the drawer, say yes and write one. Make it short. Remember, Barry Hannah's latest book was only 101 pages. Nancy Lemann's debut was 143. Try to get it down to two figures.

5. Collect blurbs from your professors. Arrange for Jill Krementz to do your jacket photograph. State in your author

t blurb that you live on a farm in upstate New York with your wife, your baby daughter, Ophelia, two dogs, and a cat. Dedicate the book to the memory of your parents—even if they're still alive.

6.Wait for the reviews. They will be favorable beyond your wildest dreams. Everyone from the reviewer in the Village Voice (himself the author of two novels and a collection of short stories) to the book columnist for the Sacramento Bee will rave about your "promise." Your book will be displayed in store windows, on the table by the door. People will say they've "seen" it. Your mother will order ten copies.

7.Get a job teaching writing. Apply for grants, preferably from the Guggenheim Foundation or the National Endowment for the Humanities. Go to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Spend a few weeks at Yaddo or the MacDowell Colony. Give interviews. Stress how many drafts you wrote. Explain that your work only appears to be autobiographical: on the deepest level, it's all made up.

8. Become a character. Give a reading and show up drunk. Pick up an undergraduate poet at the reception afterward. Slug an assistant professor in the nose. Make friends with two other writers and identify yourselves as a group. Storm out of a symposium on "the contemporary literary scene. ' ' Appear at benefits for PEN and Solidarnosc. Write blurbs for other writers' books. Introduce other writers at readings. Review other writers' books. Recommend other writers for grants. Become a guest lecturer in the writing program of Penn State. Go to Rome as a fellow of the American Academy. Travel to Yugoslavia as a guest of UNESCO. Get your name on a masthead. Sign a petition protesting the imprisonment of Turkish novelists, and make sure it appears in the letters column of The New York Review of Books.

9. Remember to write another book every few years. It doesn't have to be good.

10. Congratulations! You're a Famous American Writer.

James Atlas