The Write Stuff
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
November 4, 2002

Have you heard?” chortled my friend the literary agent. “Apparently, 81 percent of Americans feel they should write a book.” She wasn’t kidding. Eighty-one percent of the citizenry of the land of the free and the home of the brave think they have a book in them, according to a survey of 1,006 adult Americans commissioned by the Jenkins Group, a Michigan publishing-services firm. Having just established, in an earlier piece in these pages, that a staggering percentage of Americans are in fact functionally illiterate, I was astonished to discover that an even more staggering percentage saw themselves as pregnant with best sellers waiting to be born

PERHAPS I SHOULD NOT have been surprised, because I’ve met Carlos the doorman. Carlos presides, in green uniform and peaked cap, over the reception desk at one of New York City’s tonier addresses, the kind where all visitors have to be announced but there is no sign crassly telling them so. One day the person I was visiting happened to mention that I was an author. “Really?” Carlos beamed, his smile equal parts admiration and complicity. “I’m an author myself.” It turned out he’d been working sporadically on a tell-all, spare-no-one, bodice-ripping novel about the inhabitants of a fashionable apartment building on the West Side. “When I’m sittin’ here, helpin’ the residents with their problems, I’m not just no doorman,” he confessed. “I’m doin’ research!”

I assured him that his was just the titanic best seller the literary market is waiting for, so I thought better of giving him a quick primer on the libel laws. After all, this is the year that two New York nannies turned their thinly disguised experiences mentoring the mewling offspring of Park Avenue parents into a best seller and soon-to-be-a-major-motion-picture, “The Nanny Diaries.” If two nannies can mine their months of child-minding to such runaway success, who’s to say Carlos can’t find golden indiscretions amid the packages he signs for, the visitors he announces and the food deliveries he sends up every day? In fact, Jenkins estimates that 6 million Americans have actually written a manuscript. A grim statistic, when you realize that only 80,000 or so books get published each year. Thus the manuscript-writing multitudes are being met by the implacable resistance of a tiny troop of mainstream publishers churning out rejection slips. No wonder there’s a boom in independent publishing and self-publication. In our torpid economy, indeed, it’s just about the only growth industry left. As a budding novelist, Carlos has better chances than most. Jenkins noted that only about a quarter of Americans say they would, given the opportunity, write a work of fiction. The overwhelming majority see themselves writing nonfiction. Most spoke, with commendable altruism and complete lack of imagination, of writing books that would benefit others: inspirational self-help volumes, do-it-yourself guides or those hardy perennials, cookbooks. Those are, of course, the categories that sustain most American best-seller lists.

What explains this enthusiasm, not just for the printed word but for actually producing it? America, the land of the 113 cable-TV channels and three telephones per inhabitant, hardly strikes the typical foreign visitor as a haven for the Book. One explanation may be the computer revolution. The ether overflows with personal Web sites and Weblogs, whose number seems to double every couple of months, tech bust notwithstanding. What could be a more logical next step than a book? After all, many blogs (those group-grope Web postings that can attract bazillions of fans) enjoy a larger readership than most first novels.

This is a country whose people really believe that anyone can be president; what’s so different about the proposition that anyone can write a book, besides being cheaper? “I’ve read a lotta books sittin’ here,” Carlos told me. “And I said to myself, ‘Heck, I can do better’n that’.” Sad to say, he may be right. An awful lot of awful stuff is put out these days, some of it the stuff of best sellers. The question not asked by most of these prospective authors, though, is whether their book would be worth reading, whether it would add in some way to the sum total of humanity’s cultural heritage. The only question they believe they need to ask is that other great American question: will it sell?So it was the other day, when I asked Carlos, “How’s the book going?” He sat at his desk in a reverie, tapping his chin with a pencil, a faraway look in his eyes. “Oh, not bad so far, Mr. T,” he replied hastily. And then, as if to explain his abstraction, he added: “I was just thinking about the sequel.”