Write the Damn Book By Laura J. Oliver

Twenty-three years before Tom Clancy would die of congestive heart failure at the age of 66, and at the height of his skyrocketing publishing career, he agreed to address the Maryland Writers’ Association. He peered into the darkened auditorium that evening from behind huge, 1980s-style glasses, as unpublished writers, and I was one of them, listened for words of wisdom, our longing, a palpable energy. We wanted Clancy to share his formula for success, his mojo–his secret for having gone from the obscurity of an ordinary insurance salesman, to the fame and fortune that came with the publication of “The Hunt for Red October.”

He had wanted to write a book for a long time, Clancy explained, but he continued to sell insurance. He had had a great idea for years, but had continued to sell insurance.  “What I did,” Clancy said, “was waste all that time.” The big glasses turned my way. “All that time, I could have been enjoying the success I have now. All the years I could have been a best-selling author with a book translated into 20 languages, I spent selling insurance.” 

I’m sorry, I mouthed helplessly. Stop looking at me.

And Clancy didn’t know, as he berated himself for lost time and opportunity that night, that he would not live to be an old man. Nor did we know that some of us who sat listening would be gone too soon as well. Beth died in an airport on her birthday. Carolyn is gone now, too.

“You probably have ideas for a memoir or novel,” he said. “So, what are you waiting for? Write the damn book.” 

Memory is fallible, but the message is verbatim, and here’s what I know. By “you” he meant us. And by “book” he meant all of it—stop waiting to be happy, to be rescued, to be fixed. 

Life is the book you are writing, so write what wants to be written and do it now. 

Raising kids? Write the damn book.

Selling stocks? Teaching? Repairing cars? Write the damn book.

I can hear Clancy saying from wherever he is at this moment, what he said that night about our excuses.

“Cry me a river. Just write the damn book.” 

So, in the years that followed, I wrote, but not because I thought I had been forestalling fame, but because he was right about time. 

Everything has an expiration date. No matter what we do to preserve our planet’s diverse species, find renewable sources of power, and end reality television… in 4.5 billion years, our star will run out of hydrogen. At that moment, she will balloon towards the planet, dry our oceans, blow off our magnetic field, and in a last violent expenditure of energy, carry us back into the embrace of her collapse. 

So, no matter what we do, this fragile planet that so graciously carries us around the sun once every 365 days will not exist someday. And I can’t quite take this in—that all the love, all the longing, the ancient mountain ranges thrust skyward as continents crashed– won’t exist forever. 

These are facts I recognize intellectually—like I recognize my great grandchildren will not know my name, that the dog I so love must one day die–but these are facts I can’t make sense of emotionally. So, I write.

Not that I think writing will preserve anything, but because writers are observers, always trying to make sense of the incomprehensible. You should be careful around us. We’re always taking notes. 

I wrote The Story Within to reach out to the people I will never meet. To put my work on a shelf, in a bookstore, between two covers, while the opportunity still exists. The world of publishing is changing at an alarming rate. I don’t know how long bookstores are even going to be around.

So I have to confess: for years I’d visit my book at Barnes and Noble—I’d take its picture like it was one of my children—as if it too, had left home to find its destiny, to make its fortune in the world. 

I hope it outlives me. I hope it inspires some good stories to be written—maybe yours—because our stories are the gravity that holds everything with mass together. They shine like facets from a single jewel. Our stories are what connect us. 

And maybe, in my heart of hearts, I do think sharing them will preserve something of this world. Maybe in ways we can’t understand (yet), our stories will save us. 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.