Fiction Scribe

by Chris Miller

Apocrypha – Writings or statements of questionable authorship or authenticity.

About a month after we’d started dating, I took her over to my parents’ condo for “heads up� introductions. On the coffee table was a copy of my dad’s latest book, “Biblical Faith and Fathering: Why We Call God Father.� Excitedly she picked it up. “Did you write this!?�

“Why yes,� said my dad, inflating just a little. “Yes, I am the author.� He pointed to his name on the jacket. “Are you familiar with it?� You could tell he was pleased, that she’d already scored points. Because mostly the only people who read my dad’s books are his editor over at Paulist Press, Theology students and students who accidentally take Religious Studies as an elective, my mom and professional colleagues, among whom he is very well respected.

“Yes, I most certainly am,� she said. “I recognized it immediately.�

“Really?� said my dad, beaming. “So few laypeople know my work.�

“I just found two dollars in it!� she said, fanning the pages.

See, this was before Canada’s peso-like toonie—back when we still had a two-dollar bill. And I’d been using one of those old orange bills as a bookmark in the copy of “Biblical Faith and Fathering: Why We Call God Father� that lay beneath a pile of paperbacks beside my bed on an antique trundle sewing machine. And she, who has a sharp eye for currency, had spotted it peeking out from between the pages just that morning, and replaced it with a Kleenex.

Writing is fraught with disillusionment. But my dad recovered from her provincial review and continued to refine and publish his understandings of the Bible as a canon depicting the evolution of monotheism and Christianity, attempting to diffuse the nutsiness that the Literal Word of God approach has bestowed upon humanity, which is to say, breathe some historical context, social relevance and sanity into the whole Fundamentalist mess. So that a decade later, at eighty, he’s still honing his legacy.

But to me, history is just bad fiction—fiction that claims to be based on a true story or some real event in order to garner credibility and interest. The kind of fiction ghostwriters write for dumb celebrities. And to me, religion is just bad poetry—poetry that takes itself way too seriously. The kind of poetry people write upon failing to get laid.

So I find the Bible and my father’s scholarly tomes on it eyelid-flutteringly to almost tongue-swallowingly dull. But I have learned one important thing from them that can help us as writers: the Bible is the most apocryphal and successful anthology ever compiled. (Although it cannot compete with the Koran, in which a single author managed to pass off his entire manuscript as God’s.)

We’ve all read where someone’s plagiarized and submitted some famous dead author’s literary masterpiece in order to laugh at the pea-brained editorial comments returned with publishing’s gatekeepers’ inevitable rejections. But why not take a lesson from the Bible and try the opposite approach? I mean, which would you rather people read—your name or your words? If you are like me and many of the Bible’s authors, you will choose your words.

So next time you submit something to “The New Yorker� or “Pedestal� or some other prestigious snooty venue, try using Dean Kuntz or Dan Brown or Steven King, or, if you are a good writer, Alice Munro or David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen as your pen name. Be modest. Say in your cover letter that you wish to remain anonymous, that your real name is a nom de plume, but then “accidentally� leave something like “© 2007 Neil Gaiman – all rights reserved� along with some canned agent waiver/security type garbage atop your document. Perhaps create for yourself a gmail or hotmail account under your adopted name for submitting to editors who don’t open attached documents.

If you can’t write, maybe choose a political figure like George Bush or a pop icon like Britney Spears. Use your imagination: “discover� the work of someone recently, or even long, deceased. You can streamline bio writing and enhance your credibility by cutting and pasting excerpts from whomever’s you choose’s Wikepedia page. But keep it simple, almost banal. Let your reputation speak for you. And if you’re really serious about getting published, but are uncomfortable with apocryphal submitting, you can always change your name, the way my mother did.