CHAPTER 1

Passion Married to a High Tolerance for Uncertainty

Featured Narrative: Ben Fountain, Writer

There is no arguing that Ben Fountain’s work has captured the kind of critical acclaim reserved for writers of great talent and achievement. Among the honors: a PEN/Hemingway Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and an O. Henry Prize. His novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was a National Book Award finalist and has been made into a movie directed by Ang Lee. He’s been called a genius in Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker article.¹ The accolades are many.

But his success was not overnight. It wasn’t even over a decade. A teenager when he first “conceived the notion of maybe trying to write,” Ben looked toward his future and instead chose law school. There were many lawyers in his family; it was a known path. And the prospect of succeeding at writing seemed so small. There was the hard work of it, yes, but there was the risk of investing himself in a pursuit that required more than diligence and effort. Writing demanded “some spark of talent,” Ben explains. And, the only way to know if you had it was to dive in, and, as he shares during our interview, “Nobody wants to waste their life.” So, law school, it was. And, initially, after he graduated and was practicing, he looked back on the notion to write as an “adolescent aspiration,” as something he would never do.

But then, five years into his legal career, the desire to write reached up from within. Except that Ben was no longer an adolescent. He was a man with a career and a marriage and a kid. But. “It wasn’t letting go of me,” Ben recalls, “and I finally realized I was never going to have any peace in myself if I didn’t make a serious attempt to do this kind of work.” So he talked with his trusted partner and emotional support, his wife. They made a plan: Her attorney’s salary would be their income and they’d get a nanny to come in to take care of their son. And Ben would write. Every day.

“It was really completely insane to do this,” Ben shares with me. “In one sense, I mean, totally irresponsible and a huge risk.” He was abandoning his income in favor of an altogether unknown, uncharted path. When he left the law firm and they told him he’d be back in six months, he couldn’t deny that as a real possibility. But despite thinking that he could never, would never, resign the law after his first child was born, Ben says, “The exact opposite happened.” He remembers looking at his son and thinking, “Maybe the best thing I can do is to be true to myself, or whole in myself.” It turned out that having a child was “the final push” to write, rather than the obstacle. It had convinced him.

But he was starting from scratch. At 30 years old, Ben was a beginner. Something he describes as “daunting, and somewhat humiliating and embarrassing.” Aside from a bit of writing during college and the summer before law school, he was “in first grade all over again.” He was learning to write. But at the outset, he first had to become a student of his own mind and discern how he would work. The years as an attorney taught him that he had the capacity for 16-hour days, but how would he apply that to writing? Would he immerse himself for several days with alternating time off? Or would he sit at the kitchen table each day, for hours? It would be a year and a half before he understood that he had to be at the kitchen table. He had structure and place and was building his stamina. He just needed the writing.

“Those first three or four years, pretty much everything I wrote, I was disgusted by,” Ben recalls. But he knew that if he was going to get to the other side, he had to continue. “I guess I just sensed instinctively the only way I would ever get to the point where I might write something decent, was by writing out all this bad stuff,” he says. It would be a decade before he could capture the essential emotional experience of whatever it was that he was trying to write, no longer, as he says, “skimming along the surface.” Save for some minor successes during that period, short stories intermittently and infrequently published in “small, obscure magazines,” Ben wrote with little acknowledgment or affirmation. After showing up and writing every day, for hours, with additional time stolen on weekends, he shares, “I turned forty and I had very little to show for the ten years of writing.”

I wonder: How did he keep showing up at that kitchen table? How did he continue on?

Certainly, at first glance, there is the extraordinary passion that drove and sustained Ben’s commitment to writing. To describe it as unwavering devotion would seem inadequate. His journey, in many ways, is a study in perseverance, determination, and fortitude, which could only be fueled by infinite desire. And if we looked no further or more deeply to understand his success, the portrait of a man setting out on a quest to fulfill this longing would be accurate. But it would not be complete. Because after we adjust to the clear, bright light of the fire to write, there is something else in Ben’s story that asks for our attention, something far less visible but equally powerful, something that not only kept him afloat as a writer, but alive.

For a long time, Ben felt suspended, having embarked but not arrived, assiduously working, “every once in a while writing a decent sentence or a decent paragraph,” and not knowing if his work would ever find a home in the world, if it would ever be met with critical reception. And it is not difficult to imagine that had he succumbed to the gnawing uncertainty that permeates this realm, a place defined by the absence of any hint or forecast of the future, we might never have read his work. But he didn’t merely tolerate the “psychological, societal and maybe even spiritual limbo” he found himself in. He created some of his best work within it.

“I think fantasy and delusion, you know, let’s not underestimate the power of that,” Ben is saying with dry humor. I’ve asked what he did during this period of limbo to make it easier or more difficult. I want to know how he sustained himself, how he kept writing, through the uncertainty and the unknown. Looking back, he thought that small successes would become larger, would become turning points. Getting a couple of short stories published in short succession was promising. Getting a first agent, even more so. “I’m like a camel crossing the desert, I can go a long way without a drink of water,” Ben says. Every triumph, however small, provided some confirmation that this was possible, that he had the talent. And, too, he began to understand “that a good deal of life is failure.” Putting his work out into the world and having it rejected was what he had chosen, and over time, he learned that he could withstand the rejections, that he was able to “take the hits and keep on going.”

There are those writers who meet success early, whether by talent or luck, but most, he says, endure a long haul. And for them and for him, “Eventually, it has to become about the work,” he explains. It is here, in the many years of living and working in the place of between, that something significant shifted for Ben in the way that he looked at himself and his work. And it was a change in perspective that was necessary, he tells me. Approaching his 40th birthday, he made a decision:

He was going to show up at the kitchen table. And just write.

Over and over again, Ben’s mettle would be tested. What he didn’t know during those years of limbo was that there would be no turning point, no momentum. Not then. In fact, the disappointments were bruising. His first agent dropped him after two years because he wasn’t developing fast enough. He completed a novel, five years in the making, and his second agent was unable to sell it. Ben told him, “Pull it in. Let’s just put it in the drawer.” As one decade rolled into two, 17 years after Ben left the law to write, he received his first book contract for a collection of short stories, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, and a novel. Brief Encounters received critical acclaim, and he was featured in Gladwell’s article. But six weeks after appearing in The New Yorker, his second novel, also with years invested and multiple rounds of revisions, was rejected. His editor said it wasn’t good enough, that he could do better. Ben says, “If I was tempted to think I was over the hump, that set me straight really quickly.” It would be 2012 before he would finally publish Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. That novel received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, and was a National Book Award finalist.

Reflecting on his path, Ben does not shy away from the fact that it was taxing. “It takes a psychological toll and an emotional toll. And I don’t think that that part of the experience is to be underestimated,” he says. Writing asked a lot of him. There were times when he was difficult to live with, times when he was frustrated. He recalls going “through these periods of existential crisis and angst,” and the support of his wife was essential. She “never, ever expressed doubt,” he says. Nor did she ever complain that he was bringing in so little income.

Looking back, he tells me that he doesn’t think his success should have happened any sooner. His writing simply wasn’t there yet, didn’t merit the attention. When his work got better, better things started happening. He has no complaints as to how things unfolded. If there is anything that he would do differently, it would be “to come to an appreciation, sooner than I did, of the virtue and pleasure in focusing on the work itself.” That required time. As I take in the whole of Ben’s journey, it strikes me that perhaps its essence is best captured in what happened after each of his first two novels was rejected. He tells me that on both occasions, he got up the next morning and thought, “Well, I still get to write.”

¹ Gladwell, M. 2008. “Late Bloomers.” The New Yorker, October 20.