The Problems with Writing an Autobiographical Novel

by Kurt Schmidt

Shortly after returning from a one-year vagabond trip through Europe at the age of twenty-seven, I embarked on a challenge that would be a more daunting achievement than the foreign odyssey or the engineering degree I’d earned four years earlier. I had decided to become a writer and possibly publish a novel. But if I wanted to write full-time, I’d need to replenish my savings.

I found an industrial engineering job at a Honeywell manufacturing plant located in old brick buildings along the Merrimack River in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and a modern apartment in Stoneham with another Honeywell engineer named Frank. Then I enrolled in a “Writing and Publishing” course, which was held in a Harvard University classroom one evening each week. The teacher, “Mrs. Horawitz,” was middle-aged and pear-shaped and candid about how few people ever made a living at writing. She said she’d started writing when her psychiatric practice became too depressing, seeing only the problems of humanity, seeing only the worst of life. Her husband was a doctor who provided the family support. She could afford to write short stories for women’s magazines. She said writing was fun, but the pay was lousy.

I didn’t care about the obstacles. She knew all about point of view, building a story toward a climax, and that John O’Hara’s stories were models for good dialogue. She had us read an O’Hara book called Assembly. She said an almost perfectly constructed novel was Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny, and she advised the class to read it. What I didn’t like about her class were assignments to write about mundane events, like describing a waiter or waitress in a restaurant.

When I asked Mrs. Horawitz how you could know what went on in the minds of people you’d never met, she said the key to writing fiction was being able to use your imagination. A fictional character might blend the physical characteristics of an anonymous person with the emotional characteristics of an intimate acquaintance.

When Mrs. Horawitz returned my writing, she said she thought I would become a writer. She asked what country I came from. I said I came from the United States, born in New Jersey. She thought I had an accent. What could Mrs. Horawitz be hearing? Maybe she was Jewish and heard ghost accents from those with German surnames. She was friendlier with me after she knew I was born in New Jersey. She said I should visit her on Cape Cod next summer, show her my writing, meet her daughter. Maybe Mrs. Horawitz was a matchmaker too.

…

That October, after a year as a reluctant mechanical engineer, I gave my notice at work. Suddenly I was sitting in my bedroom at a writing table while my housemates drove off to work each day. Each short story I wrote sounded stupid. I spent more time at the bedroom window staring down the hill at a real estate office on the other side of Montvale Avenue. I thought if this experiment were to fail, it shouldn’t be because I was spinning my wheels on short stories. I should write a novel. If I failed, at least I’d fail trying something big.

 My grandfather had given me his old IBM Selectric typewriter. I loved turning it on and hearing the hum of it. I loved the clack of the keys. The hard part was rolling a blank piece of paper into it and staring at the paper. Looking at a white piece of paper for a long time led to a catatonic state.

What should I write about? What should I name my protagonist? What point of view should I use?

I got up and paced the floor until I stopped in front of my bedroom window. I didn’t know what good it did to stare outside. There weren’t any answers in the trees or down the hill at the real estate office. On top of my bureau were six novels that my girlfriend had lent me for inspiration — some Steinbeck, Hemingway, and a book by J.D. Salinger. The Catcher in the Rye. Even as I began reading Catcher, I knew something was wrong. This book was written from the first person point of view, using teen slang. Was slang legal in a novel? It was just the voice of this kid Holden Caulfield — what was happening in Holden’s head. It was a simple style, not as complicated as The Caine Mutiny.

I put an old envelope in Catcher to mark my place. I went back to my typewriter and turned it on again. I decided my protagonist was Charlie. I began writing.

Last week they threw me out of Annapolis. Made me resign. The whole thing made me sick, because the Naval Academy had been an opportunity to make something out of myself, a chance to see the world — places like Barcelona. Now that it’s all over, I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do.

The nightmare began about nine months ago…

I was still clacking the keys when my housemates returned. I wanted to say I’d had an epiphany but stifled the thought. They’d be bored. Industrial engineers talked about sports, not epiphanies.

The next morning I woke up early. Compelling ideas crackled in my head. I thought I was feeling what Michelangelo must have felt when he created the statue of David hundreds of years ago — that there was some inexplicable force guiding me. Maybe it was what some felt on drugs — a high that could take a person to unpredictable places. It was a magic exhilaration I’d never felt before. I began writing about moments of anxiety my two roommates and I had experienced just before the upperclassmen would begin hazing the new stowaways.

My wives and I were sitting around our room a couple hours before the first supper, trying to act calm. But sometimes you can’t help being nervous. Ted, who was trying to play it real cool, was advising Bo and me that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, F.D.R.”

Some Youngsters, third classmen, in the room across the hall, were laughing and shouting about all the crazy things they did on their first summer cruise, like getting drunk in every Mediterranean port from Athens to Barcelona and finding millions of sexy European women.

Finally it was time. And once the shit started hitting the fan, I was too harassed to worry about anything else.

It had been ten years since plebe year at the wonderland of Annapolis, and I doubted I could remember all the details. I walked to the window and stared out, trying to remember. Where was that internal microphone that would feed me the memories? I was startled suddenly at my recollection of pain and fear, like valuables stored in a bank vault for a long time and now being examined again. I returned to the typewriter. I was creating a unique world — my own world of thoughts and words.

Wouldn’t it be funny? Holden Caulfield goes to Annapolis. If Holden felt despair at prep school, just wait until he arrived at a place where insane upperclassmen were breathing fire right in his face.

I hoped I wasn’t making the fantasy mistake — that is, confusing fantasy with reality. Falling in love with the fantasy of being a writer meant that, sooner or later, the mustard was going to hit the fan and plaster my life with Grey Poupon.

But my heart told me this love of words was no mistake, that I’d found the road that was meant for me. Words could describe a civilization — either the one you knew, or one from your imagination. I wondered whether my Annapolis exposé about the inhumanity of plebe hazing might cause trouble.

But I remembered what an infamous philosopher once said, “Life is trouble, only death is not.”  I begin typing again and slide into a reverie of troublesome memories.

…

After six rocky years in which life kept intervening and thirteen publishers rejected my manuscript, Annapolis Misfit was published finally as a young adult novel by Crown Publishers. The book had good reviews from organizations like Publishers Weekly, Kirkuus Reviews, Booklist, and the American Library Association. Two local newspapers interviewed me, took photographs of me on my front steps (one with my hound dog), and produced in-depth write-ups of my road to publication. I felt overjoyed at accomplishing this goal but disappointed with the lousy compensation that Mrs. Horawitz had predicted. I knew I had to find a better way to earn a living as a writer. By the time I was married and my wife and I had a son, I had established a well-paid career as a software technical writer with two hi-tech companies. But there was never anything as exciting in that career as seeing my name on the cover of a hard-bound novel.

But I’m retired now and writing mostly memoirs. It makes more sense to write the truth than to hide behind the veneer of “autobiographical novel.” In fact, my chapbook memoir Birth of a Risk-Taker was recently published and allowed me to recapture all the early adventures with our son. What a blast.

BIO

Kurt Schmidt is the author of the novel, Annapolis Misfit, (Crown Publishers) and chapbook memoir, Birth of a Risk-Taker, (Bottlecap Press). As cancer survivor with PTSD, he overcame anxiety to fly in a small plane piloted by his newly-licensed son, who previously crashed a dirt bike and Mazda Miata at various race tracks and now races a Porsche and flies his own plane (hopefully crashing neither). Their flight story appeared in The Boston Globe and the Rock Salt Journal and can be viewed among others at www.kurtgschmidt.com. Other nonfiction has appeared in The Mersey Review, The Examined Life Journal, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere.