We only work with legends

So a good friend calls up and starts talking about this book project he's got out at a publisher. And of course the unwritten rules is that even among friends, you don't talk too much about the project itself, because you don't want to jinx it, so he's talking about the editor...

Him: He's great. A real editor. A throwback type who really edits.
Me: Uh-huh.
Him: You know what I mean. Really helps improve the book. Understands what writing is all about.
Me: Uh-huh.
Him: A legend. Old school. An editor's editor.
Me: Wait a second. Who are we talking about?
Him: Xxxxxxx.
Me: Xxxxxxx?!? Are you kidding? . . . I've never seen him sober.
Him: I rest my case.

Then again, Xxxxxxx has never seen me sober, so maybe I'm old school, too.

Finally, we start to get serious . . .

I won't go into a big tirade about Afghanistan/Al Qaeda, since the few people who might actually read it already know pretty much what's going on. But the administration finally seems to have gotten serious, or almost serious, or almost-almost serious, about dealing with Al Qaeda there - and in Pakistan.

At least they've finally formally said it's OK to operate there.

Actually, they're just belatedly recognizing (part of) the reality. In truth, parts of the Pakistan army have been at war with America for several years. They've been firing on Americans for quite a while now.

Here's a story that actually has the balls to say what's going on there - first thing I've seen in the MSM that acknowledges that Pakistanis are attacking Americans:

Right at the Edge

By DEXTER FILKINS

Published: September 7, 2008

The Taliban and Al Qaeda have established a haven in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border. This is where the war on terror will be fought – and possibly lost.

Click here to read.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07pakistan-t.html?ex=1378526400&en=d7b4e7009f1bf45c&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Filkins' article will seem pretty pessimistic. There are a lot of people who will tell you he's not pessimistic enough.

It's funny: when I first started working on Leopards Kill - which was about two, maybe three years before it came out - I thought it would be old news by the time it was published, because surely we'd have woken up . . . more and more, it looks like a dark prophecy.

The difference between fact & fiction

So Fred calls and tells me his next book is featuring Jack Pilgrim, my character from Leopards Kill.
"You can't do that," I tell him.
"Why not?"
"For one thing, he's not your character."
"So?"
"And for another thing, you write non-fiction."
There's a pause in the conversation. Then he says, "Wanna talk about the Mets?"

First Team



Is this thing on???

At least my nose is in focus . . .

First Team, fiction & reality . . .

More on reality and fiction, and where you draw the line:

Most of Soul of the Assassin is set in Bologna, Italy. It takes place in the city center – and it really is the city center, though we had to fictionalize a few things, including some of the buildings where the action takes place. One interior in particular had to be changed around . . . well, it’s actually more or less the same, just re-purposed. And repainted.

It’s kind of cool to look at real buildings and imagine your characters moving through them. That’s one of the things that makes books different for writers than readers. There’s a scene in one of the Deep Black books where Charlie and Lia are in an elevator talking. Or not talking, which is a problem for them. It’s an emotional scene, and I’m sure readers focus on what’s going on between them.

But for me, the scene is all about that elevator, which I rode up and down in for a week while researching the book.

Damn thing made me so claustrophobic, I started taking the stairs.

A bullshit tour de force . . .

Speaking of mixing fiction with fantasy . . .

(Margaret B. Jones was really Margaret Seltzer. Everything she says in this interview is completely made up, as was her “memoir.”)

Real life/real fiction

People sometimes ask how real the books are write are, meaning I guess whether the things that are described in them really happened. I usually have a lot of trouble answering because there are always many real things in the book, and it’s hard to explain exactly where the line is sometimes.

In the First Team books, for example, the lead character – Bob Ferguson – is based on a real person. Obviously, he finds himself in somewhat different situations, and this is a work of fiction, not reality. But when I’m working on the book, I see Ferg – the real Ferg – in my head.

My memory of the real Ferg pretty much guides what the character does. There are plot necessities and the like, but his attitude toward life and the rest are spot on.

Or at least I think they are.

I don’t know if that information is useful at all to the reader. Larry Bond and I once had a semi-long discussion on the relationship between real and not real characters. His take, if I’m remembering it right, was that he really didn’t want to know. He preferred to think it was all made up – it was almost as if that made the spell we fall under when we read a good yarn that much better.

And in a way, of course, the characters in novels are all made up, even Ferg. The real person is not the fictional character, no matter how close the resemblance. The novelist has to remain completely in control of the fiction, something that never happens in real life. (Especially where Ferg was concerned.) There are always differences, no matter how tightly drawn the character is, points where reality fades and fiction takes over.

The real Ferg, for example, didn’t have cancer. (That part of the character comes from someone else, actually.) And I don’t think the real Ferg could dance as well as the fictional character can, though I can't quite recall ever seeing him dance.

Same guy, though. Plop the real Ferg down in Bologna, have him target a sniper who’s actually targeting him – basically everything that happens in Soul of the Assassin would happen in real life.

Well . . . I suspect the real Ferg would have figured out what was going on by the second chapter, ending the book far too soon . . .

Larry's right - better to think of it as all made up.

Reason 3 to write fiction


Jill Lepore recently wrote an excellent article in the New Yorker about some of the differences between fiction and nonfiction, highlighting the historical connections. Change the word "history" in her article to "nonfiction," and it's right along the lines of what I've been talking about.

The url:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/03/24/080324crat_atlarge_lepore

But the final word on why anyone writes fiction - or nonfiction for that matter - belongs to Samuel Johnson:

"No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money."

Reason 2 to write fiction: Entertainment

A second reason, among the many, to write fiction has to do with entertainment.

I’m old school maybe, but my concept of fiction is that its primary purpose is to entertain. That entertainment can happen on many different levels and in many different ways – Proust and Zane Gray both have entertainment value, though usually not for the same person.

Entertainment should not be the primary purpose of nonfiction. That may be even quaint notion these days, and it may certainly seem odd coming from someone who writes narrative nonfiction (which Rangers at Dieppe was), since by definition narrative nonfiction employs the strategies of fiction. But it goes back to my belief that nonfiction has to hew to the truth of the specific reality it deals with. If entertainment becomes more important than that reality, then it ceases to be nonfiction.

Leopards Kill was a pretty dark book through a lot of stretches, but I hope the story was entertaining to read throughout. If it had been nonfiction, I think readers would have come away with a very different experience, probably not one as hopeful, and I know not as clear cut.

(To be continued . . .)

Reason 1 to write fiction: The truth

A few weeks ago on his late-night talk show, Joey Reynolds and I had a friendly discussion about why I write fiction. It went something like this:

Joey: Why write fiction? Fiction sucks.
Me: Except for mine.
Joey: Well yeah. But other fiction sucks.

Having written nonfiction, it would be kind of crazy to attack it. (And since I was on his show promoting Rangers at Dieppe, a nonfiction book, it would have been really stupid, even at like three in the morning.) A good nonfiction story or book is a good story or a book.

But you can do things in fiction that are either impossible or very hard in nonfiction. Nonfiction requires a strict adherence to the truth of specific, surface things. The story is limited by what is in front of you.

Fiction lets you tell the truth in a much deeper way. If it’s a well-written book, it’s the only way to tell that story.

To use one of my books as an example, Leopards Kill talked about what was going on in Afghanistan several years before it was possible, let alone fashionable, to do so. (I wrote it two years before it was published; it’s only in the last few months that what is going on there has started to come out.) That book is about a lot of other things besides Afghanistan, but if I’d done a nonfiction book on that topic – as I’d once been considering – I wouldn’t have been able to say what I did there. Unless I distorted the surface reality to the point where it was no longer nonfiction.

(to be continued)

World War II novels

Norman Mailer's death will get a lot of people reading or rereading The Naked and the Dead, which is good. An even better novel from that war is James Jones' Thin Red Line. Jones is probably best known (if known at all) as the author whose book was the basis of From Here To Eternity. You might start there if you want to read his novels about the war in order.

And speaking of great books that were made into movies, one of the best fiction editors I've ever worked with manages to recommend Guns of Navarone every time I see him. That's Alistair MacClean's great book - a lot more suspenseful than the others . . . unless of course you've already seen the movie.

But it's worth reading even if you have. Same with the others.

Root causes

You: What's that mean?
Me: Which?
Y: Fiction is stranger than truth.
M: It means what it means.
Y: I thought truth was stranger than fiction.
M: That's exactly your problem.