Also consider The Dead Poets Society, where the obedient doctor’s son shoots himself. The unorthodox teacher is exiled, and the quiet, watchful student is left to testify to both lessons.

  In Cuckoo’s Nest the narrator is mute through much of the book, only watching, then escaping the asylum to tell the tale. Rhett Butler exits the messy lives of the O’Hara clan, returning to Charleston. The witnessing Anne Welles in Dolls, so placid and eager to learn, abandons New York for the New England she was trying so hard to escape—at least in the movie. And Nick Carraway leaves the land of Long Island for his own childhood Midwest.

  And don’t imagine I’d ever pass up such a crowd-pleasing structure. Fight Club might appear to have only two main characters, Tyler and the narrator. But the good-boy narrator still commits suicide. And the bad-boy rebel is still executed. And both acts integrate the two to create the third, the wise witness left to tell us what happened.

  The lesson? Don’t be too passive. And don’t be too pushy. Watch and learn from the extremes of other people. That’s our favorite American sermon. And boy howdy does it sell books!

  The second sure-shot formula is somewhat more…delicate…to discuss.

  Americans are nothing if not voyeuristic. A nation of peeping Toms, we particularly love seeing the misery of other people. Especially if our ogling makes us think we’re doing a good deed. And we need to believe that our increased awareness isn’t just turning human misery into entertainment, but actually improving the lot of humankind.

  Years back, my editor put me in touch with an editor at Harper’s magazine. That’s what a good editor does: try to hook you up with people like Bill Buford and Alice Turner who might offer you reporting assignments or buy your short work, thus increasing your visibility and growing your readership. Thus my editor introduced me to Charis Conn, who edited the “Sojourns” section of Harper’s. As a faithful member of the Cacophony Society, I was always urban spelunking and Santa Rampaging, and any of these harebrained stunts seemed like good fodder for her section.

  At one of our first pitch sessions, Conn warned me, “No redemptions.” Very sternly, she explained that a new chief editor had been hired, and his edict was that no story in the magazine could offer a redemptive ending. I assumed the chief editor to be a cynical curmudgeon. Now my guess is that he was just a savvy judge of what so many Americans want to read.

  Take The Grapes of Wrath. The Joad family loses their farm. They struggle to migrate west. The oldest generation dies on the journey and are buried ignominiously. They starve and find abuse at the hands of lawmen and deceptive labor brokers. The family falls apart and the next generation is born dead and dropped into a river, not even buried but cast adrift to shame the world.

  It’s the case made by Horace McCoy in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? People are comforted by the misery of other people. And in the late 1960s and the 1970s, with the Vietnam War and Watergate and stagflation and the oil embargo, Americans leaned toward quest stories with a loser ending. I’ve heard it called “Romantic Fatalism.” In movies like Rocky and Saturday Night Fever, Midnight Cowboy and The Bad News Bears, people set out confidently toward a goal. They work hard, do their best. And they still lose.

  People love to see others suffer and lose. Perhaps this trend toward losers explains the horror vogue in the same period. From Rosemary’s Baby to The Omen, The Sentinel, Burnt Offerings, and The Stepford Wives, we watched innocent people abused and destroyed by sinister forces beyond their awareness.

  The formula varies in small ways, but it remains a pornography of someone else’s suffering.

  Compare 1976’s film Carrie with 2009’s Precious. In both an overweight girl (Carrie is fat in the book) in high school lives with an abusive mother. Both girls suffer torment from their classmates. Both have been abandoned by their fathers. Both are bullied into eating—Carrie White’s mother telling her to eat and that the pimples caused by cake are God’s way of chastising her—Precious’s mother just telling her to eat, period.

  The biggest difference between the two stories is that Carrie White practices a special power that allows her to eventually slaughter her tormenters. Including her mother. And the stress of doing so causes Carrie’s heart to fail.

  As for Precious…She’s impregnated by her father, twice, gives birth to a Down syndrome daughter, is beaten by her mother, taunted, infected with HIV, she’s humiliated and vomits fried chicken in a trash can, but her special power? She learns to read.

  Important Note: To sell an extra hundred thousand books, depict a white person teaching a black person how to read. White people who love to read think everyone should love to read. Plus it flatters readers to show them a character who can’t read. It’s the ultimate way to make your reader feel superior and thus to sympathize with a character. Best of all, it validates reading as a pastime. Whether it’s the movie Fame or Driving Miss Daisy or The Color Purple, teaching a black person to read is a plot device that never, ever gets old.

  So if you were my student I’d tell you to make a sympathetic character suffer, then suffer more, then suffer worse, never make the reader feel complicit with the tormenters, then—the end. No redemption. People love those books.

  Then I’d tell you the opposite. Don’t perpetuate the status quo. Let Nick Carraway shout “You’re a bag of dicks!” at Tom and Daisy, and “Daisy slaughtered Myrtle!” Let Jay Gatsby leap from his pool and grab the gun. What is our preoccupation with defeat? Why do high-art narratives end poorly? Is it the destruction of the Greek comedies and the Christian church’s obsession with tragedy? If more writers strove for paradigm-busting resolutions, would there be less suicide and addiction among writers? And readers?

  Above all, I’d tell you, do not use death to resolve your story. Your reader must get out of bed tomorrow and go to work. Killing your main character—we’re not talking about a second-act sacrifice—is the cheapest form of resolution.

  A Postcard from the Tour

  Margaret Buschmann was my first. We did it on a Saturday when no one would be around. In a tiny first-floor office at the Freightliner Corporation where we both worked. There was a roll-down screen we could use as a backdrop, and Margaret brought her own camera. It was hot, a hot August afternoon. We’d always joked that if I ever sold a book we’d do it. So we snuck in when the building would be otherwise empty, and we did it.

  Margaret took my first author photo.

  The pushback was immediate. The year 1995 was still the ’80s as far as I was concerned so I wore a striped cotton turtleneck sweater. Picture Mort on the old Bazooka Bubble Gum comics. A thick, ribbed sweater that rolled up to my chin. And I wore it over a black hoodie sweatshirt so that the hood spilled out of the collar of the turtleneck. Did I mention the temperature? Once Margaret had arranged the lights I was sweating buckets. She kept looking at me and asking, “Are you sure you want to wear that?”

  My haircut, some version of the eighties infamous claw bangs, the sweat stuck the hair flat to my forehead so it needed regular fluffing. I told her I was fine. She said I didn’t look very relaxed. We argued.

  That rite of passage, the author photo, something I’d anticipated for so long, became an unhappy ordeal. On the book tour for the hardcover of Fight Club an interviewer looked at the photo on the dust jacket and asked, “What are you supposed to be? An astronaut?”

  A year later for the paperback, my publisher had asked for a different photo. This one a friend snapped in my garden with Canna ‘Pretoria’ blooming in the background. Instead of a turtleneck, the raised collar of a fleece jacket hid my secret, but we’ll come back to that.

  The author photo. As a rule it’s as banal as an actor’s headshot. But there are exceptions. Think of Truman Capote’s provocative photo used on Other Voices, Other Rooms. Looking like a male Lolita he reclines on a divan and fixes the camera with a come-hither look. That photo got more attention than the book itself.

  A friend, the author Joanna Rose, ran author events at Powell’s Books for years. She warned that a too-attractive photo would lead to years of meeting disappointed people. To illustrate, I once appeared at the Galway International Arts Festival. Backstage I glanced through a program guide. One photo left me breathless: a woman with fine, pale features and a wild halo of dark curls. It was the legendary poet Edna O’Brien. I couldn’t wait to meet her.

  A festival organizer whispered that O’Brien would not be appearing. She added that the photo used in the program had been taken in the 1950s. The real Edna O’Brien would be absent because, as the organizer put it, “She’s in London, finally getting her hernia fixed.”

  To search for images on the web is to risk getting sucked down a Sunset Boulevard rabbit hole—as in: “How could she breathe surrounded by so many Norma Desmonds?”

  Each image marks a specific time and place. The me with the wire-framed glasses and the ratty tweed blazer was taken in Cologne adjacent to a bridgehead. The one with long hair and a black silk T-shirt (Bill Blass from Ross Dress for Less, seven dollars) was taken by Chris Saunders, who showed up at a Manchester pub where I’d just completed a six-hour book signing. He asked for ten minutes, and my glower is because it was 2:00 a.m., and I was semi-soused and could hardly keep my eyes open and would have to repeat the whole dog-and-pony show the next night in Glasgow.

  The author photo is the “reality” that underscores the magic of the fictional work. For a person who does the “labor” of inventing and executing the make-believe, the photo is the staid, clear-eyed proof of their professionalism. It’s as if an adult version of our annual school photos, this posed, stylized us, will convince readers that writing is a real job. The photo is the equivalent of the actor taking his bow. A performer breaking character, even better, removing his wig or prosthetic nose and breaking the fourth wall to face the audience and prove his humanity. And by creating that contrast, prove his gift. Again, the “real” thing seems intended to highlight the quality of the preceding “fake” thing.

  “Yes,” the photo seems to insist, “all of the dragons and gorgons and whatnot came from the imagination of this fairly ordinary-looking person!” This photo so interchangeable with that of any realtor in the world.

  Perhaps that’s why the photos themselves are so unremarkable. No one wants to upstage his own imagination. Plus, of course, a single photo used for years, on many different books, is a branding device. We love our Emily Dickinson tote bags and John Grisham coffee mugs, and those images identify us to like-minded readers.

  Not to mention that the photos themselves become a commodity…On one book tour my schedule was dominated by appointments with a different photographer every half hour. I’d be shot by one while the next two or three waited. Each one had his own setups within a short walk. I asked one man what publication his photos were for. He shook his head. There was no specific magazine or newspaper for these photos. He said, “Getty Images is buying a lot of you right now.” Meaning, my publisher was sort of renting me by the half hour to speculative shutterbugs, all of whom hoped to get a few images they could sell to the world’s largest library of images. This was helping to underwrite the cost of the travel.

  For Vogue Homme I lay across broken mirrors on the oily concrete floor of a parking garage while a Russian art director stood next to the photographer repeating, “There! That’s the picture! That’s the picture!”

  In England, a photographer told me not to smile. We were working in the Brighton Corn Exchange, a huge, dim warehouse of a building. I kept smiling, and he kept telling me not to smile. At last I asked why.

  “Because,” he told me, “you look stupid when you smile.”

  Enough said. I stopped smiling.

  After the Chris Saunders picture in the Manchester pub, I cut my hair. That called for a new author photo so my sister snapped one of me, outside on her deck. If you see a few pine needles in the background, it’s the photo in question. This one lasted me for years. It’s as banal as banal gets. The archetypal author photo.

  Once I started writing comics and coloring books, the author “photo” became a drawing. Pure ego gratification. Once someone who draws superheroes draws your picture, you never want to go back to reality.

  Most recently, the Allan Amato photo was a happy medium: a wonderful image, but as staged and retouched as anything between the pages of Playboy.

  However, life is nothing if not branding and marketing. Packaging and repackaging. And last year my publisher asked for a new photograph. And something snapped.

  A friend suggested the photographer Adam Levey, who shoots a lot for Nike. An author photo and a police mug shot, they both struck me as cousins of the infamous “Faces of Meth.” I still had the 1995 black hoodie. I hold on to clothes forever. Halloween was coming, and stores were filled with fake tattoos. I shaved my head.

  For as long as I’ve been published I’ve tried to hide something. My neck. I have a long neck. That’s why the turtlenecks and stand-up collars. I gave up. I wondered why an author photo couldn’t be ugly. Search the web, and the best prison mug shots are a combination of menacing, tragic, and clownish.

  I covered half my neck, my face, and my shaved head with fake tattoos. Adam Levey put on Tom Waits and turned it up, loud. Edna O’Brien, I am not.

  Go figure, but the publisher loved it. A week later they didn’t like it. They say it might even hurt sales. We are currently in negotiations over a new-new jacket photo sans prison tats.

  So Why Bother?

  Tom would tell you that if you’re writing “in order to” achieve anything else, then you should not be writing. So if you’re writing in order to buy that big house, or win your father’s respect, or convince Zelda Sayre to marry you, forget it. There are easier, faster ways to achieve your real goal. But if you want to write because you love to read and write, consider the following payoffs.

  Why: Therapy

  Tom called his approach Dangerous Writing. His idea, as I understood it, was to use writing as a way to explore some unresolved, threatening aspect of your life. Everything you write is a sort of diary. No matter how it appears to diverge from your life, you’ve still chosen the topic and characters for a reason. In some masked way, whatever you write is still you expressing an aspect of yourself. You’re trapped.

  You don’t have to start with your worst secret. Just something you’re helpless to resolve. Case in point, I once had a neighbor. Chances are we’ve all had this neighbor. Day after day her music would blast; needless to say it was not Bauhaus or something decent, but it was loud. On the one sunny afternoon I chose to mow my lawn—with an electric lawn mower, please note—she would call the city and summon me to a city-mandated neighbor mediation session about the noise I’d made. Other neighbors warned me, she was a little troubled. A couple of times I’d stepped out of the shower to find her face framed in my bathroom window. She’d say hello as I reached for a towel. Spooky.

  She loved her house. It was a wonderful house in a great location, and she often told people she’d die there. I couldn’t afford to move. So I wrote Lullaby, a book about someone dominated by overwhelming memes and unwelcome music. The plot centered on a poem that killed people when read aloud. The problems I couldn’t resolve, I exaggerated. Spinning them out to the wildest possible scenario and ultimately resolving them, on paper at least. The process distracted me from the music next door. In fact, I fed off the annoyance. The irritation I felt, I used to fuel the book.

  Behavioral psychologists use a technique called “flooding.” Also called “prolonged exposure therapy.” If you’re terrified of spiders, for example, they might put you in a room filled with spiders. You panic at first, but the longer you remain there the less reactive you become. You acclimatize. Your emotions exhaust themselves. And writing Lullaby was my way to subject myself to flooding. By the time I submitted the book to my publisher the noise and music were still there, but I hardly noticed them anymore.

  The miracle occurred during my book tour. When I got home, the house next door was vacant. Neighbors reported that a moving van had arrived, and the music lover who’d planned to live there until death had moved.

  It’s spooky, but it works. Once you use a story or novel to explore and exaggerate and exhaust a personal issue, the issue itself seems to vanish. Magic it’s not. I’m not promising miracles. But your personal attachment to the topic or situation will keep you engaged and writing despite the lack of another reward, be it money or recognition. That’s my interpretation of Tom’s philosophy. Call it catharsis or not, use the writing as a tool to mentally resolve what you can’t resolve physically. Take your payday up front.

  Why: Harness Your Monkey Mind

  Do you remember a particular episode of the original Star Trek television series? It involved a robot picked up by the crew of the USS Enterprise. As a robot it looked more or less like a floating silver box with antennae, and its purpose was to identify flawed forms of life in the universe and to destroy them. In accord with its prime directive the robot was always chasing after crewmembers it deemed imperfect and vaporizing them with a laser, all the while repeating, “Sterilize! Must sterilize!”

  To remedy the crisis Captain Kirk asked the robot to compute pi down to its final digit. The task required the robot’s full faculties, thus distracting it. Scotty or whoever used the transporter to beam the preoccupied robot outside the ship’s hull, and they destroyed it with a photon torpedo. Massacre averted.

  We all have that annoying robot in our heads. Buddhists call it “the monkey mind” and it never rests. The monkey mind is always fretting and chattering, distracting us and driving us nuts. It can’t be silenced, so why not do what Captain Kirk did?