What My Last Book Taught Me

by Mark Fink

The Summer I Got a Life, though my second book to be published (Westside Books, November 2009), was, in fact, the first novel I ever wrote.  When I embarked on writing Summer I had been writing professionally for over twenty years. I wrote and produced television comedy, a very specific craft driven by the insatiable demand of the medium and the enormous time pressure of making air dates.  The job description was pretty simple: get up every day and, no matter how you’re feeling or what’s going on in your life, be funny.  After scores of scripts putting words into the mouths of some pretty famous people, I learned how to do it. I could write funny…for television.  But would my humor work in a novel?

After allowing plenty of time for procrastination, trepidation, and a slew of other foreboding words ending in -ion, I wrote my first two pages.  A strange thing happened: I didn’t hear any laughter. None. There was no studio audience telling me where the jokes were, no raucous writers’ room providing the seal of approval. I was flying blind, led only by my instincts.

The first thing I had to learn, and quickly, was that writing a novel is quite another animal.  In television, if there aren’t three good laughs on the first page, an agent, or producer isn’t going to turn to page two.  I truly believe that Attention Deficit Disorder started in the television business and then mutated to society in general. I also believe that readers, even teen readers, are more focused and smarter than television agents.

The advantage of writing a book was the gift of time.  Instead of writing to fit a 23-minute format, I had a canvas of 200+ pages. I realized I could gradually develop my story and characters without the pressure of writing laugh-out-loud jokes on every page. The early reaction to The Summer I Got a Life has told me I still have a few of those, but the refreshing thing is that most of the funny comes from a whole other place.  While certain situations and juxtapositions still create humor, a good deal of what’s funny in the book is character driven.  I found that I could delve more deeply into the characters and discover new things about them every chapter.  My protagonist, Andy Crenshaw, is a bright kid with a very specific point of view.  Like a young Woody Allen, Andy’s humor is based on his observations about the world.  His love interest, Laura, also has a unique sense of humor shaped by a traumatic life experience and an amazing resiliency she acquired. The character of crazy Aunt Karen was also fun to develop, not only for mining humor, but also for her fresh and honest take on life.

Another thing I learned writing this novel was that I could approach story and plotting in a new way.  Because of production demands, a TV episode is meticulously outlined, scene-by-scene, and a writer rarely strays from the charted course. With a novel, while it’s nice to know where you’ll end up, you can afford to take some detours and get lost along the way. The great writer E.L. Doctorow once said: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night.  You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

The most important thing writing The Summer I Got a Life taught me was patience.  Novels are marathons, not sprints, and a writer must adjust his gait accordingly. This book also reaffirmed what I always knew: The best humor comes from a place of truth, especially when that truth sheds light on the human condition.

There are days I miss writing for television.  I miss the social aspect of it and I miss the instantaneous feedback.  It’s just not the same reading novel excerpts to my dog.  He’s such a snob.