Mike conceals his writer’s block with stored manuscripts

Mike Noonan conceals a severe writing crisis behind the dependable appearance of an annual novel, using manuscripts written in earlier years and stored in a Fidelity Union safe-deposit box to keep his publishing schedule intact. The strategy sustains his public career for a time, but the reserve is finite: as boxes disappear and fresh work becomes harder to produce, the gap between the author readers think they know and the writer unable to write grows harder to hide.

The reserve behind the annual book

Mike explains his scheme against the publishing expectation that a successful novelist deliver a book every year. He had published annually since his first novel, Being Two, appeared in 1984, but in four of those ten years he wrote two books, publishing one and putting the other away. The extra manuscript was not initially a response to writer’s block; he recalls thinking of the practice as saving up nuts and says he was having fun. In retrospect, that habit gave him a stock of finished work to draw on when writing became impossible.

The public pattern made the concealment plausible. Each autumn brought a new Michael Noonan suspense novel, timed for late-summer reading and the holiday market, while readers and publishing colleagues could take the regular releases as evidence that he remained productive. Mike describes the contradiction bluntly: his computer had become an expensive Scrabble board, yet nobody suspected a block because a new book kept appearing. The annual schedule was therefore not proof that he was writing continuously; it was a performance maintained by work completed earlier.

The crisis and the safe-deposit box

By February 1995, after at least two promising ideas had failed, Mike could no longer deny that he was in serious trouble. In a large safe-deposit box at Fidelity Union, he had kept four cardboard manuscript boxes, labeled Promise, Threat, Darcy, and Top. Their stored contents offered a practical means to meet deadlines, but did not solve the problem that had stopped new work. The reserve could disguise the crisis only while manuscripts remained.

The concealment also depended on keeping the people who might recognize the danger at a distance. Around Valentine’s Day, his agent, Harold Oblowski, called because Mike’s latest manuscript was overdue: it was already past mid-February, although Harold usually received it by January. Mike feared that an honest account would prompt Harold to rush to Derry and try to pull him out of his fugue. Instead, he claimed that the timing was a coincidence and that he had just finished the new book. Harold accepted the reassurance, congratulated him, and later sent flowers. Mike took the manuscript from the safe-deposit box and sent it by FedEx.

Manuscripts as a narrowing timeline

The first described release from the reserve was All the Way from the Top. Mike chose it simply because it lay closest to the front of the box. Published in November in time for Christmas, it was dedicated to his late wife, Johanna, and reached number eleven on the Times bestseller list. Its commercial success made the deception look successful from the outside; Mike, too, briefly found comfort in the thought that things might improve and that he had been wise to save his work.

The next year, Mike delivered Threatening Behavior, written in the fall of 1991 and remembered as one of Johanna’s favorites. By March 1997, he was driving through wet snow to send Darcy’s Admirer, still telling people who asked about his work that he was writing plenty. The succession of titles records both the efficacy and the limit of his method: manuscripts that had once been surplus became substitutes for work he could no longer reliably produce.

After Harold read Darcy and called it Mike’s best work, Mike tentatively raised the possibility of taking a year off. Harold immediately asked whether he was all right, the question Mike most disliked. Mike reassured him that he was fine and only considering easing off. The exchange exposes the strain beneath the polished output: even a successful manuscript could not make the question of how it had been produced disappear.

The last box and its cost

Two days before Christmas 1997, Mike returned to Fidelity Union with the bank manager, Mr. Quinlan. Their familiar exchange about Quinlan’s wife being a fan had become a repeated ritual that Mike privately called Banker's Communion. Behind the routine, however, the storage box had nearly emptied. Only Promise remained, scrawled across its top in thick black letters; Mike could barely remember what its story was about. He took the manuscript, a time-traveler from the eighties, and shut the box on little more than dust.

The last delivery involved another act of managed presentation. Mike placed notes to Harold and his editor, Debra Weinstock, inside the manuscript box. They introduced the book as Helen’s Promise, praised it, and explained any roughness as the result of extra hours spent finishing it quickly. Mike then stood for almost an hour among late Christmas mailers before handing the unpublished manuscript to a clerk. He read nearly fifty pages of Nelson DeMille’s The Charm School while he waited. The book he entrusted to the clerk was not evidence of a recovered ability to write: it was the final remaining manuscript from his stored supply.

The scheme thus carries Mike through repeated publication deadlines but ends with the resource that sustained it exhausted. Its cost is not simply that the box is empty. Each successful shipment reinforces the appearance that nothing is wrong, while postponing an honest reckoning with the writing crisis. The annual novel becomes less a sign of continuing creative ease than a measure of how long Mike can keep the crisis concealed.