Open Letter to Publisher X

Edi­tor Y:

In today’s trend-oriented pub­lish­ing cli­mate, you need to either be the celebrity-of-the-moment or you need to have a bul­let­proof plan to plug into what’s hot, what’s guar­an­teed, what there’s already an audi­ence for. And, sir/madam/etc., that you don’t already know my name from the tabloids should sug­gest that, while not infa­mous for killing or rap­ing or stalk­ing some­body, which is pretty much the stan­dard for lit­er­ary poten­tial, I know, I have nev­er­the­less, through a thor­ough though nec­es­sar­ily shal­low study, come up with a story idea that’s less of a gam­ble than 99% of the pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties you prob­a­bly have sit­ting on your desk right now.

I ask that, for the moment, you push all those other man­u­scripts to the side. So they’re time­less, are writ­ten in blood, are each sui­cide let­ters and love let­ters and ele­gies and his­to­ries and inno­va­tions? Surely that can’t mat­ter. Like any good writer, I under­stand the more impor­tant busi­ness aspects of these ven­tures into words and sto­ries, which is to say I’ve stud­ied your list of writ­ers, your ‘sta­ble’ as it were, and am fairly cer­tain I’m pitch­ing this to the right person.

Are those dol­lar signs in your eyes? Imag­ine what it must have been like to be that edi­tor who first found the man­u­script of The Da Vinci Code on his or her (etc.) desk. When the phone rang ten or twenty min­utes later, did that edi­tor angle his or her head to it like it were an arti­fact from some other real­ity, you think? As if, so close to this next, inevitable step in the evo­lu­tion of sto­ry­telling, the phone had become sud­denly antique, or foreign?

I say to you now: Take inven­tory of the items on your desk. Remem­ber this moment.

Among all the things The Da Vinci Code did right (prose, tim­ing, con­tro­versy, mar­ket­ing), the most impor­tant, per­haps, was that it sub­tly altered the read­ing expe­ri­ence: instead of engag­ing the audience’s emo­tional core, that res­o­nance in us which hums about being ‘human,’ and what an odd thing that finally is, Da Vinci Code chose to engage both the read­ers’ guts and their heads. Which is to say it was both a vis­ceral expe­ri­ence, like a roller-coaster, paced with ups and down and rever­sals and loops, and it was, if not quite New Yorker intel­lec­tual, nev­er­the­less aca­d­e­m­i­cally stim­u­lat­ing. Like, I would argue, a cross­word. Which of course requires participation.

This is what Dan Brown gave us, finally: where some books reach up from the pages and ask the reader to replace this mon­ster with our own, per­sonal mon­sters, Da Vinci Code pulls us face first into the pages by our need to solve puz­zles. Like those old sto­ries about rac­coon or mon­key traps, where all you have to do is place a shiny object in a small hole, we wrap our brains around these puz­zles, and refuse to let go. The effect of course is that we’re all stranded at the book­shelves, caught in this story, wait­ing for the pub­lisher, for you, to come through, col­lect our souls. And that’s what it’s about, right?

So, what I pro­pose here is to up the ante here. If Da Vinci Code was in fact anal­o­gous to a cross­word — and let’s face it, while addic­tive, the cross­word isn’t as pop­u­lar as it once was — then what do we have that’s even more pop­u­lar, more accessible?

Soduko.

You can’t walk into a book­store or stand in front of a mag­a­zine rack or open a news­pa­per these days with­out being con­fronted with soduko. Where does it come from? Who knows. From the angels, per­haps. The celes­tials. And, while its Amer­i­can cousin the archaic ‘cross­word’ serves to acti­vate dor­mant areas of the brain, requir­ing the player to go not just one step for the right answer, but per­haps three or four steps into an abstract, always-conditional chain of rea­son­ing, soduko makes no such demands. If the cross­word can be said to be a wak­ing exer­cise, then soduko, I think, could be called men­tal rest: it allows the player to essen­tially turn his/her/etc. brain off, and just coast on the hard logic of sim­ple num­bers. Instead of twenty-six options for each box, now, sud­denly, there’s just nine. And there’s not even the threat of a ‘mind’ or ‘evil intent’ behind the puz­zle any­more: soduko is machine gen­er­ated, right? To look at it from a dif­fer­ent angle, where there exists no com­puter pro­gram that can ‘solve’ cross­word after cross­word, as com­put­ers finally can’t have cul­tural intel­li­gence or under­stand all the sub­tleties of lan­guage, even your old 386 machine in the base­ment could process its way through a soduko puzzle.

So, is the Amer­i­can pub­lic con­sciously decid­ing to be machines, to turn off, to become, in essence, zombies?

It doesn’t mat­ter. As long as those zom­bies or robots or what­ever still have wal­lets, I mean, and remem­ber in some dim way where the book­store is, or at least its URL.

So, my pitch: instead of attempt­ing to clone Da Vinci Code’s for­mula for suc­cess, its unprece­dented dom­i­na­tion of the mar­ket­place, of the read­er­ship, I pro­pose instead to one-up it. Instead of hav­ing an art-historian or sym­bol­o­gist adven­ture through a tan­gled plot of exotic loca­tions and daisy-chain rea­son­ing emblem­atic of the cross­word, My Soduko Novel (work­ing title) aims to have a slightly Asper­gic ele­men­tary school teacher become embroiled in an esca­lat­ing series of events which she barely scrapes through each time, by dint of her inborn and almost ‘mys­ti­cal’ abil­i­ties with num­bers. Inter­na­tional intrigue? Sure. Sex and blood? So long as it’s PG-13, def­i­nitely. How­ever, before you ask, no, I’m not sug­gest­ing we essen­tially lock Mrs. Lock­heed (ten­ta­tive name) in a Dun­geon & Dragons-esque ‘cam­paign,’ such that she’s merely stum­bling into room after room, each with a soduko-inspired key­pad she has to solve in order to open the door. That would be keep­ing the soduko dra­matic, instead of let­ting it, as Dan Brown mas­ter­fully did with the cross­word logic, become thematic.

So, not only is the dar­ing Mrs. Lock­heed (who will of course have her own per­sonal demons to bat­tle — she has, after all, been liv­ing with Asperger’s, which I think should make the book that much more mar­ketable, and dif­fi­cult to give a bad review) lec­tur­ing her var­i­ous and expend­able side­kicks on the his­tory and tra­di­tion not only of soduko but of ‘light’ num­ber the­ory in gen­eral, she’s also, her­self, some­thing of a vari­able in a larger, pos­si­bly meta­phys­i­cal game of soduko. The one that con­trols us all. But of course I can still take that another way, if mar­ket tests sug­gest the audi­ence would rather keep the story at the per­sonal level. If that’s the case, then it’ll be no prob­lem to seed some dim soduko flash­backs through­out the novel, slowly reveal­ing some trau­matic event at the core of Mrs. Lockheed’s life — an event which, in all like­li­hood, will involve num­bers and the death of some fam­ily mem­ber or close friend, itself sug­gest­ing that this Asperger’s which has allowed her to over­come all this inter­na­tional intrigue in proper, humor­ous fash­ion, is in fact a behav­ior she acquired as a result of that event. But then, and this is the tear­jerker end­ing, instead of giv­ing that up, alone in an air­port at the end of the novel she’ll honor her father’s (or brother’s, etc) mem­ory by tak­ing a chair well away from the dis­tract­ing crowds, and curl­ing her­self around another soduko game. Because, for her, it’s more than just num­bers, it’s com­mu­nion with some­thing higher. A reli­gious experience.

This is the point in the pitch where I of course ask if your phone has been ring­ing, or if you rec­og­nize your sta­pler, have become sus­pi­cious of your lamp. Or, your desk cal­en­dar — what are the days of the months, except some Roman soduko game, right? Num­bers per­me­ate our soci­ety at all lev­els, and the orga­ni­za­tion of those num­bers is some­thing we’re taught from dia­pers on. I pro­pose that it’s time, finally, for the world of fic­tion to cap­i­tal­ize on that.

And, if we’re lucky, by the time advance copies are out, I may even have con­fessed to some crime I prob­a­bly didn’t do. At the least I’ll have gen­er­ated a back­ground for myself that, while not iden­ti­cal with Mrs. Lockheed’s, will at least be sug­ges­tively con­gru­ent with it, thus sati­at­ing the public’s need for the ‘thread’ of real­ity woven through this story. I’ll become the non-fiction, I mean, by sug­gest­ing that, while not com­pletely fac­tual, this, My Soduko Novel (Tic Tac Toe?), it’s nev­er­the­less mod­eled on real events.

Call it mar­ket­ing if you want, but it’ll feel a lot more like tim­ing, I sus­pect. Like all good things.

Any­way, I look for­ward to your call, pro­vided you can still nav­i­gate the key­pad of your phone with­out becom­ing overly fas­ci­nated with the num­bers there. With the stories.

Thank you for your time,

‘Stephen Gra­ham Jones’

^{©Stephen Gra­ham Jones, 2006}

Posted: 09|19|06 at 3:26 pm. Filed under: Main, Misc..

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