For nearly two years, from September of 1996 to April of 1998, the construction of this manuscript was my whole life. I was 25 at its inception, and just turning 27 when I finally called it complete. During that time-what many consider to be the prime "hanging out" years of their lives-I swore off practically every form of social activity, worked a straight job during the day (my first), and wrote through the night until I could no longer see the computer screen.

Why did I do it? And what's it about? As recently as last year those were still tough questions for me to answer, but with age comes perspective (wisdom is still far, far off, I assure you).

 

Part 1: Entering The Cave

It was the summer of 1996, and I'd only been writing The Life Of Bryan for less than a year. I already knew that the very act of writing was unearthing parts of my soul that music never had. At long last, I'd found a medium in which I could create from scratch, and I was hooked. But I'd just quit Dweezil's band Z, and was busy being whiplashed trying to make it as a purely freelance musician with the Keneally gig as the centerpoint of my budding career. Financially it wasn't working; I was collecting debt by the hundreds every month. Neither was I too thrilled about having my schedule subject to the every whim of L.A.'s singer/songwriter coterie. I'd foreseen a glamorous life of free enterprise, and instead I was on call 24/7, chasing fifty dollar bills down the street.

Then the roof really caved in. Keneally took a year-long gig with Steve Vai and, despite my best efforts, I was unable to join them (the story of which is well documented in Acts 15 and 16 of The Life Of Bryan). Financially I was destitute; musically I was abandoned. When the fog of depression lifted, I decided I wanted to write a novel. This would be something no one could take away from me. I would be in control.

And what would I write about? Well, me, of course. "Autobiographical fiction" was an increasingly popular genre, I was told. God knew I had a lot of stuff to get off my chest. I could use some of the wilder stories from my adolescence, spin them even more fantastic, and make a hell of a coming-of-age story out of it. Just my actual age alone would make it interesting; most first-time authors are around 40.

Under the encouraging yet honestly critical tutelage of former editor and published novelist Martha C. Lawrence-and inspired by Anne Lamott's excellent book on writing, Bird By Bird-I quickly whipped out the first three chapters and sent them off for her comments. Keep going, she said. Whatever you do, keep going.

I was only able to keep going for another couple of weeks. Keneally called with an offer of a tour in November and December. Nationwide, opening for Steve Vai, decent money. One week to prepare. I was in no position to say no, nor did I want to. I set the novel aside and ran off to join the circus.

This tour, immortalized in what I consider to be the peak of The Life Of Bryan (Act 21: The Alternate Reality), absolutely destroyed me both physically and mentally. I laid on a couch for nine days in January of 1997 before setting up the grand plan for the year: get a job (which I did, at SWR), blow off freelance gigs, and write the damned novel until it's done.

By February, it was all in place. I told my friends not to call me. I turned down gigs for the first time in my life. My "list of things to do" became strangely short. I pocketed a small but steady paycheck every week.

And the pages began to pile up.

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Part 2: First Draft

My schedule got really weird. I started off by getting home, taking an hour to relax, and then writing from 8:00 PM to 11:00 PM every night. But soon I wasn't fresh enough at 8:00, so I began napping from 7:00 to 9:00 and writing from 10:00 to 1:00 AM. It started rotating on me; soon I was sleeping from 8:00 to 10:00 and writing from 11:00 to 2:00 AM, or doing a 9:00 to 11:00 nap and writing until 3:30 AM. Finally I started going to sleep early and waking up at 3:45 AM, writing until 7:30 AM, and then showering at 8:00 before heading off to work. There I found myself loopy more than once, staggering around the halls of SWR and fighting off head rushes worthy of narcoleptic status.

It was a completely different kind of writing than The Life Of Bryan material. I could only get six or seven pages done in a night. Sentences were parsed over again and again. Roget's Thesaurus was never far from arm's reach, as I painfully discovered that I used a fairly limited vocabulary to say what I meant. Concepts like dialogue, character development and plot movement were new and unfamiliar to me, producing varying results. But as I submitted chapter after chapter to Martha, her directive was the same: Keep going. It's working. You can-and will-revise it later.

I soon settled into a deep writing groove. My productivity increased with each passing week. On one magical night, I produced over twenty high-quality pages of work. I remember that moment like it was yesterday; I went outside at 3:00 that morning, sipping on hot chocolate and staring up at the moon, more satisfied than perhaps I'd ever been. The degree to which I didn't miss my social life was striking.

By June I had twenty-two chapters and 300 pages stacked up on the side of my desk. It was then that Martha raised a red flag-first novels tend not to get published when they're 800 pages long. I'd always intended to focus on the period between years eleven and twenty-two-eleven years, coincidentally-but I needed a plan to bring the thing home. It involved a fictional, dramatic, psychotic twist, but I thought I could pull it off. After all, how could all this great work I was doing not be going somewhere?

Problems arose. One of my main characters-the female lead-wasn't cooperating. I couldn't bring her to life, and when I did, she wasn't exactly likeable. Subplots were spinning out of control, and my inability to say anything in less than ten pages was killing me. The action was more exciting, but the overall message was muddled. Martha implored me to finish the "shitty first draft" (as Anne Lamott called it) no matter what.and then my computer contracted the MonkeyB virus, which wiped out my entire hard drive. My backup floppy disks were also infected, but thank heaven they were curable. I lost three weeks to failed attempts at saving the machine, and the eventual reformatting thereafter.

I finally crawled over the finish line in September of 1997, with a manuscript well over 650 pages long. I really didn't know what I had until I read the whole thing. The answer: a shitty first draft, to be sure.

 

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Part 3: Get Me Rewrite

They say books aren't written-they're rewritten. When I submitted the whole thing to Martha, I knew I'd have to fix some of it, but the sea of red ink shocked me. This thing wasn't even close to being done.

There were fifty-three chapters to read through, and I read them all again.and again.and again. The first five were atrocious, shockingly so. Weeks were spent just fixing the writing quality of those sixty pages. But as I read on, I noticed the form steadily improving. By Chapter 20, there were fewer and fewer revisions, and I allowed myself to think I just might hit my self-imposed completion deadline of 12/31/97.

Still, I saw all my bad tendencies sprinkled throughout the text. Even though I was on the lookout for repeated words and phrases, I found some clichés I'd used thirty times. Some parts read slow, some fast, some in between.I couldn't tell. After nearly a whole year of reading and writing and revising, the impact was completely lost. What was good or bad became secondary to what was "correct." I frantically worked more and more late hours, doing my best to trim the fat but not knowing where to cut without sacrificing something I couldn't live without.

After three revisions, I finally called it done on December 26, 1997. I couldn't even look at it anymore, and put it aside for two months.

When I picked it up again, I was astonished at how well it read. I really had worked out 99% of the text-and-grammar gremlins, and the paragraphs flowed like water. The story moved pretty quickly for 652 pages, and I thought it might be ready for an official submission. Still, to be safe, I made seven copies and sent them to my closest friends and confidants for feedback.

Reaction was all over the map. One rave, two great but fix this-and-that's, two good-but-rework-the-ending's, one dislike, one offended. (Some of the material was not suitable for children.) Martha fell right in the middle. She liked the writing itself but didn't buy the ending, and like me, she had an issue with the main female character. I went at it again, taking another three months to rework the climactic scene, stripping out a subplot here and there, adding some background to make certain parts more believable.but it still clocked in at 626 pages, and that was just the best I could do. Anything more was going to require a major reworking that I didn't have the stomach for. Martha and I read it again and came to the same conclusion: start submitting it and see what happens.

 

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Part 4: .And For What?

Los Angeles being what it is, it wasn't too difficult to get the right connection for coverage at the major talent agencies. I knew someone at ICM, and a friend of mine had a contact at William Morris. The ICM response came first.and it was devastating. A sample:

Although the actual writing is not particularly bad, eleven is a magic number is an ill-conceived and misguided coming of age novel that fails to impress.suffers from a poorly developed plot.none of the characters are properly delineated.it's hard to make sex seem dull, but Beller somehow manages to do so.a weak and amateurish effort..

I tried to shake it off with a brave face to Martha, and she gamely described the reviewer as "repressed," but I wasn't ready for that level of rejection. It took a week for me to recover.

The William Morris coverage came two weeks later, and though it wasn't nearly as vicious, some of the criticism was familiar:

Although this story is written with passion and exuberance, it's not enough to overcome the fractured, unbalanced structure and very distracting, intrusive (and occasionally bizarre) subplots that completely swamp the main plot.the book is also too long, and could be told much better in about half as much space. With much tighter editing and more focused plot development of Alex's [the female lead] character, this could be an interesting, offbeat love story.the writer exhibits a passion for the material, but the effort goes in too many directions..

Some of my worst fears were now confirmed in a far less vituperative (and therefore more difficult to dismiss) fashion. I didn't know how to begin addressing them. Even if I did, I was utterly without energy and drive to take up the task. I got exhausted just thinking about it.

It was July, and Keneally had back-to-back tours coming up. I resolved not to consider it again until I returned several months later.

 

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Part 5: Finale

It wasn't until late 1998 that I read eleven again, and it was quite revealing when I did. I'd actually been planning a major offensive-calling literary agents, writers, everyone I knew-but reading it with so much distance and perspective changed my mind. It truly wasn't ready. I could tell by the tenth chapter. And to fix it would require a guts-out, brick-by-brick overhaul. I wasn't ready to give up another year of my life, and even if I was, to spend it fixing a potentially unfixable literary problem was a debatable concept.

Until then, the novel had been stacked up neatly in the corner of my desk, where it had rested comfortably for over two years. That December, I got some storage boxes, gathered up the various drafts I had laying around-including the final-and packed it away in the closet. It was to be my "first novel," familiar shorthand to writers everywhere for a never-to-be-published work.

The top cover of the box that eleven now calls home

It may seem from reading this that I'm bitter about the experience, but I'm not. Quite the opposite. First, I emerged twenty times the writer I was beforehand. (You can even see the before-and-after difference in The Life Of Bryan, though I've never done anything as carefully edited as eleven.) Second, I got my life totally turned around during my solitary retreat; SWR had more of a use for me than I'd anticipated, which changed my life significantly. Third, it was fantastic therapy for the first "failure" of my life, the audition with Steve Vai. The work I did personally, by re-examining who I was and what I desired to be, led me to learn more about myself, who I was, and what I wanted from life.

Fourth, there was Martha. I realize now that, upon reading my initial three chapters back in 1996, she easily could have deemed them complete garbage and sent me off to discouragement. Instead, she guided me along in a style both nurturing and firm, never stunting my necessary growth as a writer but pushing me in certain directions when required. She's the closest thing I have to a guru, and gratitude is never enough for someone who enters your life and has that kind of effect on you. She often said that every character you write has a portion of you inside them. Mine had more than just portions, and when I saw and recognized them for what they were and what they represented, it unlocked a level of self-understanding I don't know how I managed without. Words simply fail my debt to her for helping me find the key.

In every respect I can think of, I was a different person for having gone through what I did to complete it-for the better. And I can always say that I did it. I had the discipline to sit down for almost two years and get the fucking thing done. I never, ever stop being proud of that.

Finally, from a writing standpoint, it exposed me for what I was: a columnist. You are what you read, and I was reading 10-15 columns a day in newspapers and on the web. How many novels had I read before I sat down to write my own? The number was embarrassingly low. Of course the long form threw me off-I was out of my element. What was The Life Of Bryan, anyway? A glorified column, that's what. So now I write short forms, and I'm very comfortable doing so.

Will I ever write another manuscript? Not while I'm working a full-time job, that's for sure. In some ways, I never physically recovered from two years of a sedentary lifestyle. Maybe some day, when I'm older, but not anytime soon.

And now for the big question: will I ever web publish it? Frankly, I don't know. Certainly not yet. I hadn't looked at those critiques in years, and it still stung something fierce when I typed them in. I'm well aware that many famous writers have faced rejection letters numbering in the hundreds, and that's all part of the process, but I'd rather run that gauntlet with a stronger piece of work than eleven. Besides, a lot of the material in the novel is covered here on this website in various forms, and in much more economic a fashion. As a matter of fact, writing this website was eleven's death knell, the driving of a stake through the heart of it. The material is no longer unique, so why do anything with it?

But if you've read this far, either you have way too much time on your hands, or you really care about what happened to this oft-mentioned and suddenly abandoned project. So I've decided to post the synopsis I wrote to accompany my official submissions. It's three pages, and I'm just going to shut up now and submit this to my webmistress while I still have the nerve. If you've already read this site, parts will ring familiar.

 

 

eleven is a magic number

a novel by
Bryan Beller

"How hard is it to do something that you want to do?" asks the gifted geek turned juvenile delinquent turned aspiring musician Michael Morris. Over the course of eleven years, Morris finds out just how tough life can be for a maniacally driven Gen-X anti-slacker in eleven is a magic number, an epic coming-of-age novel that is equal parts The Catcher In The Rye for its ribald humor and The World According To Garp for its jaggedly graphic plot turns.

Told in (coincidentally) eleven parts, eleven opens in the affluent suburb of Westfield, New Jersey, with the pre-pubescent Michael--a supreme nerd who inspires cries of "ewww" from his female classmates--awkwardly planting a kiss on the lips of a voluptuous eighteen-year-old named Kim Falcone, his favorite and final baby-sitter. Her unexpected response sends him into a delicious, months-long escape from his daily school yard fate of "constant humiliation at the hands of athletically gifted eleven-year- olds."

But when Kim's visits eventually cease, Michael is left with only a perfect grade point average, an overbearing family, an uncanny talent for music, and a bar-mitzvah party where he realizes that his life's current course is one he can no longer tolerate. Using his gun-toting, foul-mouthed, hard-living Uncle Phil as a role model, Michael systematically sets out to deconstruct his public persona by falling in with the roughest crowd his Westfield school has to offer--the burnouts. Before long, the street-unsmart Michael finds himself on a collision course with Derrick Robinson, Westfield's version of Sugar Ray Leonard. Only after he barely survives the public spectacle of a violent hallway fight does the burnout crowd take Michael in as one of their own.

As Michael's new version of himself comes to fruition, his teenage life begins to spin out of control. The burnouts' constant need for drugs and drug suppliers land him in one unenviable situation after another. Money is lost, car windows are shattered, kids are busted, and not even the eternal buzz can help him forget that, at the age of seventeen, he's still technically a virgin, and his only love interest is a distant girl he fooled around with years ago in summer camp--the blue-blooded Alexandra Stevenson, a self-described "stepchild of the American Revolution." As long as Michael is bound to Westfield's burnout culture, girls like Alex--not to mention goals as lofty as a permanent escape from suburbia--are unattainable.

With that in mind, Michael shifts gears once more, using his natural gift for music to gain acceptance to the world-renowned Back Bay College of Music in Boston. But before he can leave town, there are accounts to settle. Thanks to Michael's burnout exploits, a switchblade-carrying drug dealer named Winston Hurtt has him for a marked man. And upon turning eighteen, Michael is compelled to seek a reunion with the baby-sitter whose affections initially set him on the course to near self-destruction. By the time he finally makes it out of town, he's not so much leaving as he is fleeing.

Back Bay College of Music offers Michael a chance at redemption. Garnering his musical talent, his chutzpah, and his loyal yet mediocre roommate Lance LaCosta, Michael manages to recruit Back Bay superstar Tommy Dickens into his band and together they conquer the mercilessly competitive music school scene.

So why does something still feel wrong? Maybe it's because Alex, Michael's long lost lust, has confessed to working for a high-priced escort service in order to gain financial independence from her dysfunctional parents. Or perhaps it's because Michael keeps receiving threatening phone calls from an anonymous voice from his past. It might even be those horrifying baby-sitter flashbacks he can't seem to chase from his memory.

Michael seeks refuge in a visit to Los Angeles, where his vulgar yet charming Uncle Phil has settled after years of apparently criminal activity in New York City. Phil steadfastly refuses to discuss details of his mysterious past with his curious nephew, but he does take Michael to his favorite place for rest and relaxation--the Beverly Hills Gun Club. Michael's LA vacation gives him one last chance to contemplate his post-college plans in peace, because upon his return to Boston the order he's worked so hard to achieve quickly begins to unravel.

Tommy Dickens, Morris's Back Bay meal ticket, lands a gig with the most famous instrumental guitarist in the business and abandons him to head for LA. Not only that, but Michael's reunion with Alexandra Stevenson--an unqualified romantic and intimate triumph--ends almost as soon as it begins, as she too leaves for LA the very next morning. Once again Michael is left wanting. The long summer of his final semester is a descent back into drunkenness and excess, inebriation being the only manner in which he can deal with the pressure to break free of the comfortable collegiate world he must soon leave. Lance wants him to commit to his ho-hum band, his parents want him to play bar-mitzvahs, and Alex wants him to move to LA, period. A return to the suburban hell of his youth looking more and more likely, Morris is about to snap when he finally gets the dream-come-true break he's been waiting for.

Ironically, the road to final escape from suburbia--Michael's goal from the very beginning--leads him right back to where he started: Westfield, New Jersey. In the midst of a family celebration dinner in his honor, Michael is forced--violently--to confront his darkest fears. If he gets out alive, he promises to unlock his secrets. But whose checkered past is coming to bear on the Morris family--Michael's or Uncle Phil's?

Within the answer are Michael's final steps toward manhood, as his past gives his present meaning, his family gives his choices validation, and his newfound faith gives his life purpose. All that's left is for him to tell the story. For Michael Morris, it's a promise worth keeping.