a guy can’t access them without straining his maleness.
Although it is more natural for a female author to produce chick lit, the question is: Is it proper to exploit relatives for the purpose of producing a book? The answer: absolutely. One can’t work a gold mine without disturbing the terrain, creating a certain amount of detritus. If your mother didn’t want to have a daughter who uses her as the basis of a story character with the disposition of a tarantula, she should have taken proper measures to prevent conception.
However, it is prudent to change all names to protect the guilty.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This is the story of your life (sorry, Dear Me has been taken as a title) and should include the parts you would prefer not to be made public. These will make you look human, a quality attractive to your readers. These will make you look human, a quality attractive to your readers.
Should you change the names of persons in your life with whom you have had intimate or illicit relations? Never! Being sued for libel is the hallmark of a successful autobiography. As long as you don’t have any assets that can be seized by the court, the litigant will soon abandon seeking redress for your having publicly identified him (or her) as a sexual deviant with a lively interest in whips, chains, and power tools.
Autobiographies are often ghostwritten, especially for celebrities who, for one reason or another, haven’t learned how to compose whole sentences. You can earn good money as a ghostwriter, and of course the bedsheet is a lot cheaper than having to buy clothes.
TRAVEL
People like to read about voyages of discovery to exotic lands beyond East Toronto. Unfortunately, exotic lands are dwindling in number as more natives get cable. It is hard to spin an exciting narrative out of an encounter with a fearsome-looking African who is chatting on a cellphone.
Thus it is prudent to research how much has already been published about your destination. Mount Everest, for example, has been climbed to death. You don’t want to learn this after you have already booked the Sherpa guides (who, of course, now also have an agent).
Second, the travel writer needs to have a camera, especially if the project is an article for National Geographic. The camera should be as small as possible. Reason: in some sheltered parts of the world the natives see the camera as a devilish device for extracting their souls. Being strung up with your own camera strap is an ugly way to go, even if the photos have good detail.
As for financial reward, the market for your travel writing may be limited to your community newspaper, but your trip to Fiji will be tax-deductible.
HISTORY
To succeed in this genre of writing you need to have a good working relationship with the past. This may be why history is more popular with readers than with writers. Yes, history takes work. It involves substance. Legal substance. History requires research, a task that can propel a person into the library stacks where he ages quickly. In severe cases he is never seen again.
Writing history also means getting intimate with footnotes, each having to be numbered by hand because your computer balks at words with a dinky digit riding on their tails.1
1. Like that.
Footnotes have a special attraction for non-fiction authors with a fondness for the appendix (footnote fetish), as well as for Latin abbreviations (ibid., op. cit., etc.) that only irritate the reader who has been looking forward to turning the page. The writer should use footnotes only as required to acknowledge the sources of his facts, should his history happen to include any.
By far the most popular type of history is that of a war, preferably a world war. The First and Second World Wars have been pretty well done to death, unfortunately, but new wars are breaking out all the time — some of them with the potential of becoming World War III and the end of civilization as we know it. Which could, of course, affect sales of your history book.
MEDICAL
You really do need to have your M.D. to author a bestselling book for people eager to ignore their own doctor’s advice. Luckily, there are several universities that will grant the degree after completion of a correspondence course in heart surgery.
One of the most popular medical subjects today is sado-masochism, as a fun way of abusing the body without having to be drafted into the National Hockey League. Until recently, there was some stigma to being identified as a latter-day Marquis de Sade, but today there are numerous clubs for people who enjoy screaming in a social atmosphere. Researching this material may require some expenditure for gear popularized by the Spanish Inquisition, but should be tax-deductible if accompanied by degrading photos.
PERSONAL ESSAY
Montaigne is credited with having created this introverted literary form as a clever way of avoiding hard work. He could afford to, having been born rich. So, unless you expect to inherit a château in a lush part of France, depending on the sale of a book of essays may be an early symptom of dementia.
Like the diary form associated with Samuel Pepys, it’s a case of “Don’t give up your day job.”
However, you do have the role model of America’s most cherished essayist, Henry David Thoreau. Living in a simple cabin on Walden Pond, Thoreau didn’t entertain much other than the ducks. His livelihood depended mostly on doing yardwork for Ralph Waldo Emerson, another essayist. Such was the Golden Era of Essayists in America before they all joined the staff of Time magazine and forgot about writing earthy homilies like: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
Thoreau wrote most of his best stuff in his journal. This assured him posthumous fame, which isn’t as rewarding as being somebody while you are still alive.
SCREENPLAY
Here dwelleth the Big Bucks. Film producers spare no expense to obtain a screenplay for the film director to ignore once shooting starts. The screenwriter must shed all sensitivity and feel comfortable selling his soul to the highest bidder. He is, after all, relieved of responsibility for the final product, left to merely wince as the credits roll by on a violated screen.
This raises the question: Is it possible to maintain complete artistic integrity and still afford to buy food?
Instead of pondering this question, the smart screenwriter must find satisfaction in being part of the process of elimination — he must have the integrity of a turd.
It is now possible to take a university course in screenwriting and study models drawn from the kind of movies that are no longer being made. Any college course that doesn’t have calculus as a prerequisite is bound to boost a writer’s self-esteem if he avoids writing the final exam.
Also, there is a good chance you will form a relationship with a classmate, an affair that ends unhappily when the classmate turns out to be bisexual, thus providing you with dramatic scenes that would have been inconceivable had you taken a correspondence course.
STAGE PLAY
This form of creative writing worked quite well for Shakespeare, and there is no reason why you shouldn’t follow in his footsteps — if you have a really long stride.
The main drawback to writing stage plays is that they nearly always involve spoken words. A screenplay can be successful with a minimum
