How I Became a Famous Novelist Read Online Free PDF

listening. I didn’t know it then, but it’s the perfect training for a writer. In the Arctic, I listened to the elders of the Gwich’in people. They’ve lived there for thousands of years. They know a thing or two. We’d all be in better shape if my grandchildren listened to a Gwich’in elder for a while, instead of Lindsay Loohoo and Dee-Jay Stupid Face, or whatever these rappers are calling themselves now.”
    Preston held out his arm and stopped Tinsley short. He crouched, and scooped something off the ground. The camera went in close and showed a newt, or a salamander or something. Some kind of terrified lizard, trembling on Preston’s palm.
    After a moment’s contemplation, Preston put it down. The newt was shaken for a second but then realized it got off easy and made a dash for the reeds.
    “Uh, Pete?”
    Hobart was staring at me.
    “We’ll miss Fireside Chat.”
    I’d like to believe I said something soothing, but I think what I did was sort of swat my hand. In any case, I missed what Tinsley asked next.
    “. . . Four Roses, Old Charter, Mud River, Jim Beam, Crooked Chinaman, Colonel’s Daughter,” Preston was saying. “I drank any kind of forgetting juice in a bottle. I kicked around from job to job. I was in a granite quarry for a while. On a lumberjack crew. One summer I tried to mine uranium. Spent awhile in a fish-gutting plant in Tacoma. Hell of a way to earn a dollar.
    “Then one morning I woke up in an alley in Minot, North Dakota in the snow. I rooted around in a trash can, hoping to find an old jacket. And I found a tattered copy of Of Mice and Men. Maybe from an angel’s hand. Maybe just a lazy schoolboy. But I read it. And John Steinbeck showed me there was stronger stuff than whiskey.”
    I leaped up and tossed the remote against the wall, where it smashed and the little batteries rolled out. First of all, it was obviously a lazy schoolboy. I am 100 percent certain a tattered copy of Of Mice and Men was not put there by an angel’s hand.
    Second, Of Mice and Men ? That stupid ninety-page eighth-grade-English Hallmark Special bullshit about the retarded guy who loves rabbits? You want me to believe that kept you off whiskey?!
    Hobart was looking at the broken remote. “Maybe we can change it manually.”
    The TV cut to Preston Brooks leading Tinsley into an airy, book-lined office with bay windows facing a still lake.
    “I call this the dance hall,” he said. “Because characters will appear, and introduce themselves and ask me to dance. The character always leads. I bow, accept, dance for a while.”
    Tinsley nodded sagely as though this were the wisest, truest thing anyone had ever said. Then she pointed at a vintage typewriter.
    “And you always work on a typewriter.”
    “My daughters tell me to get a computer. But they also told me we’d have eight years of Jimmy Carter, and magnet cars. So what do they know? I hate the damn things. A typewriter was good enough for Faulkner, and it’s good enough for me.”
    “Oh, come ON!” I shouted at the TV. Hobart was crouching over the broken remote.
    Preston nuzzled his cheek against the tongue of a horse that leaned over a picket fence. “A horse can tolerate anything except a liar. A horse knows a liar. Readers can tell a liar, too. If I put one false word, one lie, down on the page, readers would buck me as fast as a horse bucks a fool.”
    Then Tinsley began explaining the plot of Kindness to Birds. It was something to do with a convicted prisoner named Gabriel, who finds redemption during Hurricane Katrina. The video accompaniment to this was Preston, playing washboard in a zydeco band. Apparently he’d spent time in Louisiana “helping hurricane victims, and listening to their stories, and learning the rhythm of their language.”
    Tinsley explained that Preston was head of the creative writing program at Shenandoah College. And we watched as he declaimed from his book in front of a packed college lecture hall.
“Is they