The title for this piece comes from one of my favorite movies, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN. It’s in the scene where the junior Dr. Frankenstein (played by the great Gene Wilder) discovers his infamous grandfather’s secret book, which holds the key to reanimating the dead. The title of that ominously dusty tome is so literal it’s funny:  HOW I DID IT.

If only it were that easy.

One thing I’ve learned from writing novels is that such a how-to manual is impossible. For fiction to be truly worthwhile, it must be the product of long reflection, painful experimentation, a lifetime of experience distilled into the best story anybody ever wrote – or so the author should believe.

There is no shortcut.

As a reader, I don’t want the literary equivalent of junk food; I want soul food. I want to know I’m reading the agony and the ecstasy of a true believer, whose purpose in life was to write that novel.

This applies whether a book is comedy or tragedy – it just has to be a labor of love and hard-earned skills. No matter the genre, every novel should stand alone, a monument to the author’s tortured psyche. If a book exists merely to fit a popular publishing niche, and its author has no ambition beyond repeating the generic tropes, it doesn’t deserve to be called a “novel.” Novel means original.

Maybe I’m crazy.

Times are hard, I know. For one thing, we live in an age of unprecedented distraction; there’s a constant parade of cheap thrills stealing our time and attention. We’re busy. Who has time to read a serious book anymore, much less write one?

Reading and writing are coping mechanisms invented for dealing with the humdrum of daily life, back when there were still such things as long, boring evenings. For most of us, such tedium has been eradicated by technology. How can books compete against the likes of Nintendo, Facebook, YouTube?

I’ll tell you how they compete:

They compete by being really cool books.

If you’re a reader, and I assume you are, you know what I mean. A good book beats all that other stuff hands down. No technology can replicate the experience of being caught up in a great read, because it’s happening inside your head! The trouble is finding a really good book.

Which leads me to my book ENORMITY…

(Wow – you could see that coming a mile off, couldn’t you? What Hannibal Lecter referred to as a “ham-handed segue.” Oh well.)

ENORMITY began life as a short story.

Having never written a novel before, I decided to start small, practicing my craft on shorter fiction. I was confident I could write stories because I had won a newspaper short-story competition as a teenager, but I didn’t know the first thing about selling my work. So I got a copy of the Writer’s Market from the library and began studying it.

I knew Stephen King had started with short stories, so I also dug out my copy of NIGHT SHIFT and looked at where his stories had first been published. Ah yes, perfect – Gallery Magazine. My first target. Now I just needed some stories of my own.

I wrote…and I wrote.

Day after day, week after week, month after month, I slaved away in my little garret – but it all felt forced. Faked. What was wrong? I was a young man with a mission; I was working by day and writing by night, living an authentic starving-artist lifestyle that should have guaranteed a steady output of literary gold.

I began to get desperate. What if I wasn’t cut out to be an author? Thinking it might be a way to make a quick-and-dirty sale, I tried writing a motorcycle story for Easy Rider Magazine – and was rejected. I quit.

Years went by. I got married and moved overseas. I started an underground newspaper and freelanced as a journalist. I constantly fiddled with fiction, but rarely bothered sending it out.

Then one day, I think some time in the mid-‘90s, I wrote a new short story.

It was called JOEY SHAPIRO BUSTS OUT, and was the tale of the sad-sack title character, a gawky young man who orders a bodybuilding gimmick advertised in an old comic book (“GAIN INCHES!”), which causes him to grow into a rampaging hulk. But Joey’s newfound size and strength do not make him happy – like his body, his troubles are magnified to absurd proportions. Furthermore, the magic dope is having awkward side effects; certain parts of him are actually shrinking. Meanwhile, romance blooms between Joey’s overbearing widowed mother and one of her tenants, the lovably crusty Mr. Lieber. In the end, Joey tragically takes his own life, wearing a sash that reads HERO OF THE BEACH. His sexless, sagging corpse looks like that of an old woman. It’s okay though, because Mr. Lieber and Joey’s mom are getting married!

I love a happy ending.

I sent the story to Gallery. A few months later I got a personal reply from the magazine’s executive editor, saying he found my style “very captivating,” but that Gallery no longer accepted fiction submissions. I turned my attention to Esquire and Playboy, only to find that they too had dropped fiction from their pages. What had happened to America since I’d been away? Deeply discouraged, I gave up on short stories.

Instead, I decided to focus on novels.

One of these was ENORMITY, and its first chapter is a rewrite of my JOEY SHAPIRO story. The rest is a riff on the accrued knowledge of all those years, torn apart and rebuilt and jump-started with a creative spark I could only hope I still possessed.

Turned out that the thing I needed to become a writer at long last was the very same thing that Dr. Frankenstein screamed for from his high platform:

“Life! Life! Give my creation…LIIIIIIIFE!”

Thanks for reading!

–W.G. Marshall