So, you want to write a novel. Join the crowd. It seems that every man, woman and child have a novel within them waiting to be released or written down. In the dark confines of a bottom drawer lie notes written or ideas drafted for some day when you have the time, money and chutzpa to type “Chapter One.” Novels are what grow out of a deep-seated need to bring order to the chaos of our lives. Given all that, how is it possible to write a novel for someone else?

That’s sort of what went on in my brain one day in the early 1990s when I got a call from a good friend who lived in Chicago. This friend had made a nice living writing books for and about millionaires in addition to his job as business reporter for one of Chicago’s four newspapers. He was calling to give me a heads up that a rich man would be calling, a man looking for a writer to write his novel.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You don’t hire somebody to write a novel.”

“When you’re as rich as this guy, money can buy anything. I gave him a copy of your last novel, and he liked it. He said you had the style he liked. Hear him out.”

True, I had written three novels published by Avon Books. And I had run creative writing seminars in which I tried the impossible task of teaching people how to write creatively.

The millionaire was a self-made real estate developer who owned several Chicago skyscrapers. It was at his office high atop one of those skyscrapers on Michigan Avenue that we met the first time, when he told me of the plot that came to him like a dream.

It involved Mikhail Gorbachev, the Pope, Lech Walesa and their contribution to the fall of communism.

“What do you think?” he asked as I smoked one of his expensive cigars and wondered where he got the socks he wore; they were the softest socks I’d ever seen. If I was rich enough, I could have socks that soft.

All I could think of was what to charge him. I was like those cartoon characters with dollar signs instead of eyes. In the writing classes I taught, I was keenly aware that the task is impossible. You can’t teach writing, but you can offer tricks and techniques that work sometimes but not always.

You write a novel by sitting down and sweating blood as you ponder what to say and how to say it. What is your one student, a millionaire whose socks set him apart from anyone I know. And I quickly learned that writing a novel for a real estate developer was as impossible as I suspected. He was under the impression that you write a novel like you build a skyscraper: you had a team that included a project supervisor, a public relations expert, various draftsmen and engineers.

So, he compiled a team that included a former Time Magazine bureau chief, a woman who wrote about dogs and a scholar of Judaica. Every couple of weeks I’d fly to Chicago and meet with these people to go over what I had written, a first draft.

Here’s the secret about novels. Writing a plot is easy, but what do you do in between plot points, in between the action? How do you fill those empty spaces with a narrative that moves along, layer upon layer of detail to show character? How do you do all that by committee? Well, you don’t.

I’d come back to Maine with a notebook full of stuff, but no matter what it was, it didn’t please the millionaire. I lasted a year. The rich man hired another writer, but the book, as far as I know, never saw the light of day.

Just as well.

Bob Kalish can be reached at bobkalish@gmail.com.