The Rum Diary

Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Giovanni Ribisi

Dear Mr. Soderstrum:

I love your column and want to be a writer. Do you have any advice for me?

-name withheld-

Dear name withheld:

My first words of advice are simple: don’t. Do anything else under the sun. Be a lawyer. Park airplanes. Make drinks for nubile co-eds who think Oscar Wilde is something you treat with penicillin. It is a lonely, painful profession. At times, trying to find just the right words will be as trying as passing a ten pound kidney stone. You will spend hours sitting at your desk, discovering a thousand new ways to avoid doing any real work. When you finally do get down to business, write a few lines, your family and friends will not read you. There will be a Surreal Life marathon on. Belly button lint to be picked. Toe jam to be puzzled about. Anything but your efforts, unless they think some fictional character in one of your stories is really them, and you will never hear the end of it.

Okay, you’re not listening to me. My next piece of advice is: read. Read everything you can. Notice how the great writers turn a phrase. The pacing. The style. The flow of the language. The words themselves. The great Hunter S. Thompson consumed, (along with his liquor and drugs), the works of the beat writers like William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. While working as a copy boy for Time magazine he rewrote word for word, sentence for sentence, paragraph by paragraph, chapter by chapter, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to understand their style. In high school, I filled notebooks with Hunter’s words. Letter after letter, as if somehow, some way, some of his genius would rubbed off on me.

While you are doing this, write. Everyday write. Find the time. We live in the era of the Internet which, if you don’t know, is a series of tubes. You can set up your own blog. If your Aunt Sally can have one devoted to Bible verses, her garden, and fun things to do with yarn and Popsicle sticks, you can have one yourself. No one has to know who you are. Just write. You will never know how many times I have had someone say they would love to do what I do. Here is the dirty, little secret. Most people quit. A day. A week. A month. They quit. Most blogs end up being less than three entries. If you survive this, there comes a moment when you will say everything you think you have to say. There appears to be nothing left in the tank. If you pay attention, you will find your favorite writers and journalists often plowing the same ground over and over again. Most pastors only have eight sermons in them. Most movie reviewers sound like low-rent Roger Eberts. Even MacGyver cannot escape the formula and methods some writers seem glued to. Still, if you guy your way through, then, and only then, you will find your own voice. Most people want to be writers but never ask why anyone would want to read their words. When you able to present yourself on paper, then and only then will you be able to keep an audience.

You have done all of the above. Now here is the hardest part. Get ready for the rejection. You are going to get rejected more than a hare-lipped, hefty hooker at the Playboy mansion. Poet Sylvia Plath was informed by one publisher, of her work “There certainly isn't enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” The great Rudyard Kipling was informed by the editor of the San Francisco Examiner that, “I’m sorry Mr. Kipling, but you just don’t know how to use the English language.” John Grisham burned through sixteen literary agents and numerous flush letters before he got A Time To Kill published. Gone With The Wind was rejected 36 times before a publishing house gave it a chance. J.K. Rowling could not find anyone to publish her Harry Potter book and the only reason a small London press decided to go with it is because the eight-year-old daughter of the CEO had picked it up and begged her daddy to give it a chance. Lord of the Flies worked its way through over 20 firms. One of the greatest sci-fi novels ever, Frank Herbert’s Dune, was rejected nearly 20 times. Watership Down, 26 times. Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston Seagull, an amazing 140 times. John Kennedy Toole was rejected so many times that he killed himself. His book, A Confederacy of Dunces, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Ray Bradbury, Dr. Seuss, Alex Haley, Judy Blume, Marcel Proust, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Isaac Asimov, George Orwell, William Faulkner, EE Cummings, Irving Stone, Jack Kerouac, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and D.H. Lawrence all were rejected numerous times when they started out.

It took Hunter S. Thompson almost forty years to get his first fictional novel, The Rum Diary, published, and another decade of effort by Johnny Depp to get the thing brought to the big screen. In 1959, a 22-year-old Hunter, who had been fired by a small New York newspaper, journeyed down to San Juan, Puerto Rico to find work as a sportswriter for an ill-fated paper. While there, he tried to get on at the larger San Juan Star, edited by novelist William J. Kennedy. Even though Kennedy refused to hire him, Thompson hung out with and befriended several of the newspaper’s reporters hoping that eventually they would help him get employed there. Instead, the genesis of The Rum Diary was born. It was the story of Paul Kemp, a journalist, and is clearly a semi-autobiographical work. The newspaper that Kemp works for is on the verge of collapse. The reporters, particularly Kemp, are often out of control, given to drunkenness, violence and debauchery. As Kemp drinks himself silly, he becomes obsessed with a woman named Chenault, the fiancée of another reporter (Amber Heard). It is typical Thompson and shows a lot of the promise of what would become Dr. Gonzo. When the young journalist tried to shop it, he was rejected half a dozen times before Hunter put it in a drawer and forgot about it. Financial reasons made him unearth it years later.

The Rum Diary shows all the promise of greatness that would become Hunter S. Thompson, but he was not quite there yet. Sometimes rejection is good because it helps you see the room for improvement. Hunter S. Thompson’s calling was not fictional stories like his heroes, but rather a new style of journalism that changed reporting, that made the reporter himself a part of the story. He might have made it as a half-assed novelist but rejection helped him find his true path.

I hope that helps. Doubt it will, but I tried. Good luck.

Trevor Soderstrum

Verdict: A Near Miss