recovery from near-death experience

I thought I'd add some notes to this describing what happens to a writer when a big project goes down the tubes, or at least my version of it. I suppose that first of all there's a certain amount of rage to get past, rage at oneself, surely, and also at the people who are preventing the project (in this case the failed amnesia novel described in the previous posts) from going forward. One thinks, there must be some mistake here, maybe they just didn't get it. And in fact, there are authors out there who are so prestigious and whose names are so golden on a book cover, that the things cannot be stopped by any human agency and go to press. Thus we have the familiar phenomenon of authors we've known and loved producing stinker after stinker.

I recall the rage; and I also recall after that immediately deciding that the people who rejected the book as written were right. I think there's a good deal of pretty fair writing in it, but it's not a novel. It's a couple or three almost-novels. The main thing that's wrong with it, I think now, is that I was trying to combine things that simply didn't go together, and the result was that the characters lacked all agency. Stuff happened to them and they never actually made things happen, and in the kind of novel I get paid for that won't wash. Obviously, there is a type of really wonderful novel in which the characters are simply acted upon by forces (in Kafka, for example) but it turns out I'm not Kafka.

What happened after the disaster was that I immediately got back on the horse and started writing a novel to fulfill my contract with Holt. This is a thriller somewhat similar to The Good Son, but set in Mexico rather than Pakistan, and involves a couple of Americans driven by guilt and revenge, weird drug gangs, reverberations from the Vietnam War, kidnappings, explosions, and shamanic goings-on. I'm about 100 pp. into it now and it should be done by the end of the year. It will be, I expect, rather more in my usual line than the pathetic Failed Novel.

As to that, I recently came up with a plan to resurrect the good parts of the Failed Novel, and excise all the bad parts, and focus on the one strand that seems to have worked. It'll still be about an amnesiac, but he'll have agency. The whole book will be first person, and the character himself will travel through the world putting together the clues that will reveal his identity and how he came to develop global retrograde amnesia. The Bourne Identity meets Candide, so to speak. I think it's worth another shot.

Book Crash

Just to put a coda on this line of comment.

I finished the book I called Tuxedo Man in September, 2010, and it was not well received by my agent or my editor. They agreed that it didn't work as a novel because there were too many unresolved subplots and one of the main characters, a female neurologist was unsympathetic. After some thought I agreed that I had made errors and so I spent the next five and a half months rewriting. I got rid of the subplots, strengthened the main character, and tried to make the neurologist more attractive. Today I heard that I failed again and was advised that the book should be abandoned. Well, it happens. Quite often when an author with a run of successful books writes a stinker it gets published anyway, and the fans buy it anyway, and hope for the best next time. We decided not to do this, and I will just have to eat all that labor and chalk it up to experience.

As it happens, I just got an idea a week or so ago for a new novel and so I'll start on that in a little while. Then we'll see if the failed work was an aberration or if I've lost it, whatever the it is. Stay tuned.

Finished this book

I finished this book on September 3, 2010, and sent it off on September 8, after the usual reading over and fixes. I see that my original plan to keep a running record of writing it didn't work out too well. This is because what goes on in the writing process is not all that interesting, even for the writer. Also, if you read through all the problems a writer has in, say, devising a plot, and the ways in which he solved them, then there's no reason for you to read the book. Obviously, if you read the book cold, and enjoy it, it might be interesting to examine the sausage-making aspects of how it got written.

The title of the book will not, however be Tuxedo Man. The publisher has declared that it's not a good title from the marketing perspective. I don't know what this means, but it's their right to approve titles. I have actually picked very few of the titles of my books. I always suggest No Drums, No Trumpets, when they ask for suggestions, since my books rarely have drums or trumpets in them. I am actually thinks of a book that does have drums and trumpets in it, and maybe I will write it some day. Perhaps A Few Drums and Trumpets will be its title, I don't know.

I have to think up what to write next. Maybe I will bring back Jimmy Paz. The publisher would like me to write a book with angels and vampires in it, since these beings seem to sell a lot of books. Maybe I will do a Jimmy Paz with angels and vampires. Why not?

Writing Crash

I haven't posted here recently because Tuxedo Man crashed on me. This has happened on the last three books and I thought I was controlling it, but I wasn't. It's sort of like a stall in an airplane that turns into an uncontrolled spin. One day you're writing a novel, you have 350 or so pages and you think you're closing in on the finish and then you realize that all you have is pages. Maybe there's some interesting writing in there, some good characters, a few scenes that work, but it's not a novel. There's no narrative arc, there's no point, it's a bunch of almost- novels stuck together and it's not going to be possible to weave the threads together in a reasonable number of additional pages.

How could this happen? This is my twenty-second novel. I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. Well, seasoned pilots fly airplanes into terrain, and I suppose its a similar thing, composed of slackened attention, routine and over-confidence. If you read a lot of popular fiction you may have noticed that the later novels of successful popular writers tend to be baggier than the early ones, sometimes twice or three times as large. I suspect that what happened to me happened to them too. You get to page 400 and you find you have twenty unresolved threads, and it's so interesting and you've invested so much time in getting all those subplots in there that it's unbearable to go back and pare it all away so you keep writing, 500, 600, 800 pages! And then you run out of steam and ship the damned thing off.

Unfortunately, or fortunately I have an editor who doesn't tolerate this. I'm contracted to write one thriller novel and not four half-thrillers so I decided I had to rip the whole thing apart and start over. Here's the reason I got into this fix. When I first started to write thrillers twenty-five years ago I first wrote out the plot in a synopsis, maybe five single-spaced pages, the basic story of the book. Then I wrote a detailed chapter outline telling what had to be written in each chapter, which is really important to the kind of book I do, with parallel plot-lines that all have to intersect to advance the tension and suspense that are essential to the thriller genre. Then, finally, before I started each chapter I wrote out the scenes and character interactions that had to occur in that chapter. Only then did I start on the actual text.

Now it turns out that in order to have a lively book with real breathing characters in it, you can't push this method too far, because as strange as it is to say it, characters make demands. They 'want' to do stuff that you hadn't thought of beforehand and you have to indulge them up to a point. (But not beyond that. We've all read books with fascinating characters and plots that when they conclude make us say, "What the . . .!") So toward the end of a good thriller you get twists that you didn't write down at the outset. That's fine, because if the author didn't know what was going to happen, it's pretty sure that the reader won't know either, which makes for a certain excitement.

But in my last two books, Forgery of Venus and The Good Son, I didn't do any of this. I just sat down and started to write, bareback, as it were, just keeping the plot-lines in my head as I write and following my fancy. And I have to say, this was a terrific feeling, sort of like surfing on the creative wave. Writing the thriller became actually thrilling. Because writing thrillers off a tight outline is, I have to say, a lot more like assembly line work than most people imagine, even if the thrillers are not formulaic, as I don't think mine are. So, a sort of interior rebellion--there are themes you can't really handle in the thriller genre and I suppose a part of me wants to deal with them, hence the mini-partial-novels that popped up like fungus within my thriller structures.

Anyway, lesson learned. For the past few weeks I have been writing an outline for this book and targeting vast swathes for excision. My sense is that the writing should go a lot faster now, and that I won't have to do a massive revision when I finally turn it in. I should say that there are many writers who don't outline, who just write away, let it all gush out and then cut, paste and rewrite. That's perfectly okay, but it's clearly not my native mode. I suppose the moral is to be the writer you are, not some other kind: fewer thrills, better book, or at least that's my hope.

Next: crash recovery

Writing Crash

I haven't posted here recently because Tuxedo Man crashed on me. This has happened on the last three books and I thought I was controlling it, but I wasn't. It's sort of like a stall in an airplane that turns into an uncontrolled spin. One day you're writing a novel, you have 350 or so pages and you think you're closing in on the finish and then you realize that all you have is pages. Maybe there's some interesting writing in there, some good characters, a few scenes that work, but it's not a novel. There's no narrative arc, there's no point, it's a bunch of almost- novels stuck together and it's not going to be possible to weave the threads together in a reasonable number of additional pages.

How could this happen? This is my twenty-second novel. I'm supposed to know what I'm doing. Well, seasoned pilots fly airplanes into terrain, and I suppose its a similar thing, composed of slackened attention, routine and over-confidence. If you read a lot of popular fiction you may have noticed that the later novels of successful popular writers tend to be baggier than the early ones, sometimes twice or three times as large. I suspect that what happened to me happened to them too. You get to page 400 and you find you have twenty unresolved threads, and it's so interesting and you've invested so much time in getting all those subplots in there that it's unbearable to go back and pare it all away so you keep writing, 500, 600, 800 pages! And then you run out of steam and ship the damned thing off.

Unfortunately, or fortunately I have an editor who doesn't tolerate this. I'm contracted to write one thriller novel and not four half-thrillers so I decided I had to rip the whole thing apart and start over. Here's the reason I got into this fix. When I first started to write thrillers twenty-five years ago I first wrote out the plot in a synopsis, maybe five single-spaced pages, the basic story of the book. Then I wrote a detailed chapter outline telling what had to be written in each chapter, which is really important to the kind of book I do, with parallel plot-lines that all have to intersect to advance the tension and suspense that are essential to the thriller genre. Then, finally, before I started each chapter I wrote out the scenes and character interactions that had to occur in that chapter. Only then did I start on the actual text.

Now it turns out that in order to have a lively book with real breathing characters in it, you can't push this method too far, because as strange as it is to say it, characters make demands. They 'want' to do stuff that you hadn't thought of beforehand and you have to indulge them up to a point. (But not beyond that. We've all read books with fascinating characters and plots that when they conclude make us say, "What the . . .!") So toward the end of a good thriller you get twists that you didn't write down at the outset. That's fine, because if the author didn't know what was going to happen, it's pretty sure that the reader won't know either, which makes for a certain excitement.

But in my last two books, Forgery of Venus and The Good Son, I didn't do any of this. I just sat down and started to write, bareback, as it were, just keeping the plot-lines in my head as I write and following my fancy. And I have to say, this was a terrific feeling, sort of like surfing on the creative wave. Writing the thriller became actually thrilling. Because writing thrillers off a tight outline is, I have to say, a lot more like assembly line work than most people imagine, even if the thrillers are not formulaic, as I don't think mine are. So, a sort of interior rebellion--there are themes you can't really handle in the thriller genre and I suppose a part of me wants to deal with them, hence the mini-partial-novels that popped up like fungus within my thriller structures.

Anyway, lesson learned. For the past few weeks I have been writing an outline for this book and targeting vast swathes for excision. My sense is that the writing should go a lot faster now, and that I won't have to do a massive revision when I finally turn it in. I should say that there are many writers who don't outline, who just write away, let it all gush out and then cut, paste and rewrite. That's perfectly okay, but it's clearly not my native mode. I suppose the moral is to be the writer you are, not some other kind: fewer thrills, better book, or at least that's my hope.

Next: crash recovery

Tuxedo Man: A Writing Journal: Part Four

Genre novels are the potato chips of the literary world. Readers buy them for the same reason noshers pick up a package of chips: they seek a particular and familiar experience with strong simple flavors and with just enough difference between successive bites (or novels) to maintain interest. This has, of course, nothing to do with literary quality. The writing in some genre novels is as fresh and brilliant as the work of any literary novelist. But structurally, in general, genre novels provide affirmation; literary novels provide challenge, asking and answering the deeper questions of our common life, illuminating society, morality, and relationship. On the other hand, you can take the genre form and use it as a container for anything you like. It's also true that genre tends to sell better, and so if you want to make a decent living writing fiction, genre is the obvious, if somewhat shameful, choice.

I write genre, but I'm also interested in ideas, and also in the possibilities of an expanded idea of genre. The late, wonderfully gifted, mystery writer Nicolas Freeling wrote a book of essays in which he contended that much of literature had to do with some crime or other: much of Shakespeare, for example, as well as Dickens, Hawthorne, and Dostoevsky, are tales of betrayal, fraud or murder. Crime gives a writer a ready-made plot, which few can resist. And readers like it.

The risk, of course, is that you will write a book that is not as popular as plain vanilla genre nor visible to the refined literary world because it's genre, hence trash. You just have to learn to live with this.

So there are two sets of ideas that interest me, and which I've tried I've explored in the novels. The first is about the underlying nature of reality. In the West, most people think this is an answered question. Science has nailed this down: it's all particles and the laws governing particles, the Universe is made of dead matter, we are biological machines, and if you don't like it, tough. It's Reality. Even people in our culture who retain some religious belief tend to accept this without really thinking about it. Most American religion seems to me to be social and tribal, or a branch of the self-help movement. It typically does not challenge the prevailing ontological consensus.

Which has a few problems. If you say that nothing is Real unless it can be analyzed, observed, and verified according to the rules of science, then it's hard for you the explain (1) why something like ninety per cent of the mass-energy in the universe is completely unobservable, the so-called dark matter; and (2) why at least two things that almost all normal humans believe are the very foundations of reality resist observation in this way: love and pain. I'm not a professional philosopher and so can't formulate sustainable arguments against the prevailing view, but my sense is that in the present age the wheels are starting to come off the Enlightenment. There's stuff we can't explain and many are starting to suspect are beyond explanation by human means. (Those interested in this line of thought should take a look at John Horgan's The End of Science.)

What these lacunae do is open up some interesting fictional space. Magical realism is an established literary genre, and fantasy (vampires, magicians and the like) is an established subliterary genre, but what I tried to do is suggest that even a realistic novel can throw some light on this ontological question. Maybe the psyche is real in just the way electromagnetism is real, and maybe it has capacities and qualities that we've ignored since the Enlightenment gave us power over a big part of nature? Anyway, it amuses me, and I hope it amuses some readers.

The second idea is deracination. The world now is characterized by vast movements of peoples. This means that the person stranded in a foreign nation and culture is a much more common phenomenon than heretofore. Also more common is the person of mixed inheritance, one of whom, for example, is the President of the U.S. Deracination sets up all kinds of psychic tensions and releases a lot of creativity and causes a lot of pain. These are all interesting to the novelist. If you read my stuff you see that many of the major characters are deracinated in some way, cut off from their natal culture or mixed in some way.

It's not easy to introduce ideas like this in novels, especially genre novels, which tend to be idea-free, like potato chips. You want to avoid the didactic, but you also can't afford to lose the reader. It's something of a struggle.

Next: more about memory

Tuxedo Man: A Writing Journal: Part Three

Edith Wharton described writing a novel thus: "The beginning—a ride through spring woods. The middle—the Gobi desert. The end—a night with a lover."

Right on, Edith. I've been on the desert a while on this one. I'm writing it without an outline. My advice is that if you're writing a novel, use an outline.

I used to myself, when I was younger and smarter. When I first started writing novels, I was doing legal thrillers. I wrote fifteen of them, all published under the name of Robert K. Tanenbaum (A long story. Those interested can check out http://www.sanfranmag.com/story/case-missing-ghost) and the thing about legal thrillers is that you sort of have the basic story delivered to you, or at least the bare bones of it. There's a crime, and a bad guy, and the intrepid lawyer or DA makes sure that the bad guy goes to jail. The reality, of course, is that "legal thriller" is an oxymoron. The actual course of processing a criminal from arrest to verdict is typically long and extremely tedious; thrills are few. To make a novel out of such material the writers has therefore to create a real plot. The plot is what makes the story matter. The plot of Crime and Punishment , for example, is not the story of some dumb kid who committed murder and robbery and got caught, but the development of Raskolnikov's character, and how he evolves from frantic nihilism to awareness, remorse and redemption.

The way to make a dull legal story interesting is by adding moral complexity. The guy the cops caught didn't do it, and the hero has to figure this out. The hero has a boss who's corrupt, and the hero has to foil his wicked schemes. The hero has rivals who want to do him in. The hero is tempted to fudge in order to get a conviction—will he succumb? On occasion I threw in some preposterous violence--criminal elements try to get rid of the hero, and so on, or focused on cop stuff, guns and explosions. I watch TV too; such nonsense is expected in popular genres, like a glass of water in a restaurant.

I also introduced a major subplot—the hero's wife works as a private investigator, and the hero has to deal with her quasi-legal schemes—and built that part into a long-running domestic comedy, the various discontents of marriage, the couple have kids, the kids get into trouble, and so on. This is rarely done in crime genre, because the tradition is to have the hero a lone wolf, or she-wolf, so there can be romantic liaisons, always a cheap way to generate thrills.

In any case, the plots I used were complex, and after I had the central criminal justice story laid out, I spent a lot of time thinking through how the various plots and subplots were going to unroll and what was going to happen to the half dozen major characters and the fifteen or twenty minor characters as the novel progressed. I wrote out a five-page single spaced synopsis based on this thinking, and after that I did a chapter by chapter outline, describing what was going to happen in every scene. The good thing about this technique is that if you want something to happen in chapter 14 that needs to be set up in chapters 4 and 8, then you're sure that all the threads are in place. It's remarkably the case, however, that if you create living characters they will "want" to do something other than what you've planned out for them, so, within limits, you have to make your plotting somewhat flexible, and here you often get the liveliest and most thrilling events. If the author didn't know what was going to happen, odds on the reader won't either.

I retained this method of close plotting and outlining for the first four books I wrote under my own name. As a result, they got printed with only light editing. The structure and flow of the published book were exactly as in the first draft. This had also been the case with the legal thrillers, so I happily assumed that I would always breeze through the editing process. On the next book, however, (Forgery of Venus) I didn't do that. I just wrote a scene that was based on something that actually happened to me in my youth, and then another scene and another. The result was a disaster that took six months to repair. I'd actually written two separate novels that didn't mesh together and were each weak and incomplete. And then I did exactly the same thing on The Good Son.

I'd really like to know what's going on. I'd like to know why I changed a process that produced perfectly acceptable novels and started to use one that required heavy editing and lots more work. If I figure it out I'll let you know, probably after the night with a lover part.

Next: ideas in novels