(Please note, Carolyn See actually has two children, not three, and she began her writing career at 30, not 43)

L.A. Confidential
By Susan Salter Reynolds
Susan Salter Reynolds is an assistant editor and book critic at the Los Angeles Times.
September 1, 2002
Los Angeles

Carolyn See recently had a bad date. Some bozo asked her why she didn't get more recognition from the literati in Los Angeles. "I am the literati in Los Angeles!" See told him, more amused than chagrined. This is important, because it is often hard to reconcile See's humility, empathy and patience with new writers with her hard-earned, extremely healthy ego.

If you are a writer, and you move to Los Angeles, you very soon learn to contact Carolyn See. She is one of the few Los Angeles authors who has achieved national prominence. She speaks for the rest of us here every time some Eastern-based conference organizer invites her to speak on a panel of "Western writers," or "women of the West," or "Los Angeles in contemporary fiction." Most of us are glad it's Carolyn See on those panels. She values what is most important about Southern California: its babble of voices.

"This is the hardest thing I've ever written," See tells me on the balcony of her immaculate apartment, referring to her latest book, Making a Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers (Random House, $23.95). "It was rant, rant, rant; pure crabbiness," she says of the book's first draft. The love of See's life, the writer John Espey, had died just months before she finished it. "I was so upset about John, the whole tone of it was angry," she says. "'You people who want to write,'" she thought after 25 years of teaching, "'I've had it with you.' There was one chapter that my editor insisted we cut because I was stark raving mad. It was a chapter in which I suggested that a writer should be a solid citizen - should be the one to make coffee and bring it to the civilian of the family each morning. ... Clearly, I was seething with rage. ... John was always the one who made the coffee in our house. ... I could never get any traction with my writerly whining!"

"Making a Literary Life" is a supremely practical book. It begins with invaluable advice to new writers: Never discuss your writing until you have actually written the book. There is nothing more boring than a writer struggling to write. Try to buy your own home, she advises, if only to make certain that your parents are not ashamed of you. "I learned these things by hard experience," she says, surrounded by portraits of herself by Southern California painters like Don Bacardi.

See's advice is tremendously uplifting and very funny. She makes each reader feel as if he or she might have something worth saying. But aren't some people simply more talented than others?

"I'm not saying that talent isn't a tremendous impasse," See says. "The question is, have you found the right material?" She insists that new writers mail at least one "charming note" a day to someone in the world of writing and publishing. This makes some of her students gag, she admits, but it is advice that she follows herself. Today's note went to a high school student in Santa Monica who wrote a book review for a local paper. "It was a review that Susan Sontag would have been proud of," she says.

"You must write about what you know," she says. "These characters in your life that you are given are the only material you have. Point of view is very important and it is constantly shifting.

"When I started, at 43, I had three children. This was a time when a writer had to sound like Hemingway or Fitzgerald to succeed. Now there is so much more room to move around in. It's not a competition. Who said you have to have a national reputation?"

See once gave a lecture in Ohio to a group of housewives. "'Can't you just tell us what is so important about reading and writing?' they asked me. 'My parents don't read and write, and they get along just fine.' I heard this again and again. There were three beautiful women in their 30s, ex-cheerleaders who married handsome dunderheads who were constantly out shooting deer. These women were so mad, beside themselves with rage. 'He'll never let me write,' they all said. Now they all write for major magazines about things like how to cook a large elk. You have to be able to write about what you want - to not alienate yourself from the ordinary."

As for New York, the all-powerful center of publishing, See offers a practical chapter on the writer's first trip to the big city. She suggests what to wear and where to stay, and gently recommends that you save enough cab fare for the ride back to the airport - another lesson learned the hard way. "Things are decentralizing," she says. "With computer publishing and other forms of artistic exchange, there are venues we never had before. My students are not hoping to write for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, or even Salon. There are so many more educated people in America that the term 'intellectual elite' just doesn't have the same cachet. You used to need a certain level of education to be an intellectual. Now there's a huge body of cultural knowledge available to everyone. A PhD guarantees nothing.

"Literary life in New York," she admits, "is a little more focused. Literary life out here in Los Angeles seems to have less malice in it. Everyone gets a ticket; everyone can give it a shot."

Copyright, Newday, Inc. 2002

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