But Ben Fountain’s success was far from sudden. It made major regional best-seller lists, was named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews, and drew comparisons to Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Robert Stone, and John le Carré.īen Fountain’s rise sounds like a familiar story: the young man from the provinces suddenly takes the literary world by storm. The Times Book Review called it “heartbreaking.” It won the Hemingway Foundation/ PEN award. He put together a collection of short stories titled “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara,” and Ecco, a HarperCollins imprint, published it. A New York literary agent saw it and signed him up.

He got a short story published in Harper’s. Then came what he describes as his dark period, when he adjusted his expectations and started again. He decided it wasn’t very good, and he ended up putting it in a drawer. In his first year, Fountain sold two stories. When he finished that story, he went back to work and wrote another-and then another. It was sixty pages long and took him three months to write. I did not procrastinate.” His first story was about a stockbroker who uses inside information and crosses a moral line. “I figured out very early on that if I didn’t get my writing done I felt terrible. Then he would return to work for a few more hours. Then he would lie down on the floor for twenty minutes to rest his mind.

Every day, he would write until lunchtime. He sat down at his kitchen table at 7:30 A.M. He began his new life on a February morning-a Monday. And my parents were very proud of me-my dad was so proud of me. Nobody wants to waste their life, and I was doing well at the practice of law. “I felt like I’d stepped off a cliff and I didn’t know if the parachute was going to open. “I was tremendously apprehensive,” Fountain recalls. He had tried to write when he came home at night from work, but usually he was too tired to do much. His literary training consisted of a handful of creative-writing classes in college. The only thing Fountain had ever published was a law-review article. Illustration by Gerald Scarfeīen Fountain was an associate in the real-estate practice at the Dallas offices of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, just a few years out of law school, when he decided he wanted to write fiction. Picasso’s greatest works came early Cézanne’s came late.

Malcolm gladwell 2008