Writing Fiction

LA faces meltdown as Hollywood strike bites

Most readers of this blog are pure freelancers, willing to sell their work for whatever they're offered. But we should support the Hollywood writers' strike even though, as this Guardian story puts it, LA faces meltdown as Hollywood strike bites. Excerpt:

The 11-week writers' dispute is turning nasty as it slowly but surely strangles artistic and economic activity beneath the iconic Hollywood sign.

The writers, an unlikely vanguard for a revival in America's trade union movement, are demanding a say in future internet distribution deals and a percentage of any revenues gained when their work is streamed or downloaded.

Crucially, they have the support of the actors, whose refusal to cross the Globes' picketline ensures a no-show from nominees including the British contenders Keira Knightley, James McAvoy, Julie Christie and Helena Bonham Carter.

On the opposite side are the producers and studios such as Disney, Fox, Paramount and Warner Bros. Wary of being locked into a deal on hugely unpredictable new media, they are blaming the writers for intransigence.

'It feels like the nerdiest, ugliest, meanest kids in the high school are trying to cancel the prom,' said Ben Silverman, entertainment chief of NBC.

Mr. Silverman wouldn't even be the entertainment chief of a daycare center if not for those nerdy, ugly, mean kids. Writers have always been objects of contempt in Hollywood, but the whole operation depends on them. Without a script, the glamorous actors have nothing to say, the directors have nothing to direct, the producers have nothing to produce, and no one makes any money.

Just once, I did some work for a producer on spec. She blew off my treatment as "not having that magic," and I got not a penny for my efforts. Well, that was my tuition fee, and fortunately I could still pay my rent. But never again will I take on such a commission without a signed contract.

A sad, good day in Canada

We Canadians lost Oscar Peterson last month. And today the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcast Oscar Peterson—Simply the Best: The Tribute Concert.

The concert will be on the CBC website for a year, but the sooner you hear it, the better.

The Writer as Outsider

Michael Taylor posted a great comment to my remarks about David Stacton:

I am a heterosexual who is interested in Queer Theory. It seems to me, as a student of creative writing that my particular bent is social and anthropological. I'm simply trying to understand what your view is on homosexuality. Why reference the murder? I don't mean to sound trite, Stacton is a great writer in my opinion and I respect your expert opinion and obvious respect for the author. It is difficult to communicate good fiction with so poor data on sexuality, our customs, culture, and other social ways. In a very real way, queerness is very misused and misrepresented in writing by heterosexual writers like me.

I thought quite a bit before mentioning the possibility of a specifically homosexual murder as the cause of Stacton's death, and I didn't offer it as a titillating bit of gossip. Stacton's sexuality probably helped make him a fine writer by making him an outsider.

Until a few months ago, I had no clue about Stacton's sexuality. I knew almost nothing about him except for a biographical item in a reference book on American authors, and that had told me almost nothing. Since his death I've sometimes mentioned him to other writers, but they were as ignorant of Stacton's life as I was. Even in his days of fame, he was almost as mysterious as B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and many other powerful novels.

The man who's planning to publish some of Stacton's novels was kind enough to send me some materials I'd never seen, and that's where I learned not just that he was gay, but flamboyantly so—flying in drag to a job as a teacher of creative writing, for which he dressed soberly in jacket and tie, then flying home in a cowboy outfit. And this was in the 1950s and 60s, when such behaviour could get you beaten up or even killed.

Exactly nothing of this is evident in his novels. He has gay characters, but their gayness is just part of what they are, like the straight characters. Unlike many American male writers of his generation, he does show some entertaining insights into the way women think: I still recall his throwaway line, "Wives consider their husbands' friends the unshaven underworld." Try finding that kind of observation in Norman Mailer!

So Stacton's gayness, and how it might have led to his untimely death, interest me for just one reason: Gayness made him an outsider, and being an outsider made him a writer.

You don't have to be gay to be a good writer. You just have to consider yourself as not quite belonging to your society. In Stacton's generation, born in the 1920s, it helped to be Jewish or black or communist or just some kind of crank...combine two or three of these qualities, and you couldn't lose.

Here in Canada, our outsider-writers are often Asians, blacks, women, gays, aboriginals...and it also helps just to be Canadian, living next door to the huge dysfunctional family whose parties keep us awake all night. The Americans define themselves as insiders, so that automatically makes us outsiders. (Most Americans, of course, don't consider themselves insiders at all, which is why so many good writers are Americans.)

And this is why being an outsider is so good for you if you want to be a writer: Outsiders don't take much for granted. They walk down the street as if they expected to be pointed out, denounced, and then beaten unconscious. They look more carefully at the people around them. They notice the habits, the rituals, the tone of voice of the insiders. They see what works and what doesn't, and they learn about what goes on in everyone's head.

In The Great Gatsby, the outsider Nick Carraway watches the outsider Jay Gatz try to become an insider by winning back the ultra-insider Daisy Buchanan. If Nick had been part of the Buchanans' class, he wouldn't have noticed anything worth mentioning about the failed love affair. He'd probably have gone on and on about Tom Buchanan's polo ponies.

The basic plot of all fiction, meanwhile, is of someone who is an outsider trying to gain (or regain) insider status. The outsider has been kicked out of Eden, and now has to struggle in the desert to find a new home. So if you're not an outsider, you're not going to know how your characters feel, why it hurts to be an outsider, and what they'll do to become an insider—even if it kills them.

David Stacton's gift was to show us that even an Egyptian Pharaoh, or a Republican presidential candidate, could be an outsider. If we recognize what a gift he offered us, we will be better writers.

Historical Fiction with Real People

A reader wrote the other day:
I have an opportunity to develop a work of fiction that has a basis in fact. One of the primary characters is a long-dead United States president. Do you have any advice or can you recommend any guidelines for fictionalizing events and circumstances relative to such a figure? I have no idea what sort of leeway (if any) that I may have.

The short answer is that you have all the leeway you want to take.

The long answer, however, is a lot longer.

I'm going to take a particular writer of historical fiction, one you've probably never heard of. But in the late 1950s and 1960s, David Stacton was a widely read, respectfully reviewed author. He was also astoundingly prolific. After starting with detective and soft-porn novels under pseudonyms, Stacton switched to historical fiction unlike anything people had read before. Just off the top of my head, I can think of a number of titles:

On a Balcony (about the Pharaoh Ikhnaton)
The Judges of the Secret Court (about John Wilkes Booth's assassination of Lincoln)
Segaki (medieval Japan)
Tom Fool (about Wendell Wilkie's run against FDR in the 1940 presidential campaign)
People of the Book (about the Hundred Years' War)
A Signal Victory (a Spanish renegade fights with the Maya against the conquistadors)
A Dancer in Darkness (a retelling of the Duchess of Malfi tale)
Sir William; or, A Lesson in Love (Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton)

And on and on. Stacton wrote in a witty and philosophical style, a bit detached from his characters, but with a knack for oddly persuasive details (Gonzalo Guerrero, the renegade, has his lower lip pierced to hold a jade labret; when the labret's out, he enjoys running his tongue in and out of the hole as an aid to thought).

I mention Stacton because almost all his novels had historical figures as either the protagonists or important characters in his stories. But while Gonzalo Guerrero certainly existed, we know very little about him. Stacton could therefore develop his character any way he chose. We know a lot more about Wendell Willkie, but Stacton invites us into Willkie's mind, where the character becomes very different from the "real" Willkie.

In other words, Stacton was using the sketchy outlines of historical figures as a way to dramatize his own points, his own view of the world. This can lead to the sin of "presentism"—judging our ancestors by our own moral and political standards—but Stacton avoided that. His characters are living in their own present, by values that make sense to them. We may look at them ironically because we know more about them than they know about themselves. But we can see that in Stacton's view, we're equally ironic.

Every historical novel is a kind of thought experiment: If we look at someone living in the 17th century, or ancient Egypt, does their experience of life contrast with ours? Do they grapple with the same questions? Do they plead their cases before the judges of the secret court, as Stacton says we all do?

To do this, we may sometimes have to play fast and loose with historical facts: Maybe we need to put our hero in a different location from where historians say he was on a given date. Or we need to give him a more plausible motivation for his actions. (Real people are the only ones allowed to do crazy, unmotivated things.)

That's OK, as long as you're not totally twisting historic fact—and even that's OK if you're writing alternate history, with FDR and Stalin fighting an alien invasion in the 1940s.

But the point I'm finally making is that you are using your characters, not the other way around. If you're thinking of writing about a former US president, he has to dramatize your vision of the world—both as it is now and as it was in his time. You may use lots of historical factoids, but they're really just window-dressing. The key question for you is this: How do I make this person in history provide "anecdotal evidence" for my view of the world?

I can't mention Stacton without telling you more about him. He died in 1968, reportedly of a stroke, while doing research in Denmark for another novel. (More likely it was a covered-up murder by a homosexual prostitute.) He was 42, and I still recall the shock I felt at hearing of his death. Two or three magazines provided obituaries, and then he disappeared. It's hard to find his books even in good second-hand bookstores.

As a historical character himself, then, David Stacton offers an ironic model for writers of historical fiction: As perceptive as he was, as elegant a writer as he was, he nevertheless vanished from our literary history. He left no disciples; as I found out the hard way, his style was inimitable.

But I can offer this small consolation: A few of us do remember David Stacton and the impact of his fiction, and I gather that a small publisher plans to bring some of his novels back into print. I look forward to their appearance, and I'll let you know when they're published.

Writing in Longhand

A commenter recently mentioned that she'd been writing in longhand, and that certainly struck a chord with me. For a computer-addicted writer, I've written an awful lot in my awful longhand.

I had the good fortune, back in 1966, to marry a gorgeous woman who couldn't stand the peck-peck-peck of my typewriter—especially after our kids arrived, and silence in the evening was the whole purpose of getting through the day.

Far from being a career-stopper or a marriage-breaker, this was an advantage. While my wife sat and read in the den, I parked myself at the kitchen table with a loose-leaf binder and a ballpoint pen. I would scribble silently for an hour or two (or fifteen minutes, on bad days), and we'd stagger off to bed.

That looseleaf binder went with me to some of the most boring faculty meetings in Canadian academic history, and to my daughters' music lessons, and on holidays. I'd fill page after page, and revise passages with a quick horizontal slash through any line that wasn't earning its keep.

This was of course still the typewriter age; in those days, to change a page of typescript was big deal. But it was dead easy to cut and rewrite in longhand.

Better yet, I'd wait until my wife was out of the house. Then I'd fire up my IBM Selectric (with a way-cool correcting tape!) and transcribe my scrawls into clean typescript, revising as I went along.

It might seem cumbersome, but this was the procedure I followed for four or five of my published novels—and in those days I was publishing a novel every 18 months or so.

Computers of course transformed writing in many ways, but I still do a lot of writing in longhand. I don't have a laptop, and if I did, my wife would veto any idea of taking it on holidays. And I must admit that a couple of weeks of computer detox every summer is actually good for me.

That's why I still recommend toting a notebook of some kind around with you. With a laptop you may not have working batteries, or wireless, or an electrical outlet. With a notebook, all you need is a pen or pencil. If your dentist is running behind schedule, you can read some ancient magazine in the waiting room, or pull out your notebook and scribble some ideas for the next chapter (or describe your dentist's waiting room).

Some French novelist was famous for being unable to write unless dressed in a suit and tie, and writing on his preferred blue paper. Some modern writers can't write unless they've got the latest ultra-powerful computer, preferably a laptop so thin you could shave with it.

Well, I suggest you try out a binder with some filler paper. Write on every other line so you'll have room for changes, and don't worry about word counts or spell checking. Just get the story down on paper, and worry later about the printout.

Banished Words

It wouldn't be a new year without Lake Superior State University's list of banished words.

I don't always agree with them, but they remind me to think carefully before using a popular new expression. It may already be a cliché.

Of course, if you're trying to establish that one of your characters thinks and speaks in clichés, these are the terms to use.