Anyone remember the late great sports columnist Jimmy Cannon? And his occasional column, “Nobody Asked Me, But . . .”, followed by collection of rants, kisses, and half-baked ideas hurled against sports figures for the enlightenment of his faithful readers. That was the day when letters to the editor were often signed, “Faithful Reader,” or in the case of the Daily News’s “Voice of the People,” by “Bronx Girls” after a letter informing all and sundry that “Brooklyn Boys Stink”, followed by “Brooklyn Boys” retorting that, well, you can imagine.
Nobody asked me why I started writing novels after a career of non-fiction, but . . .
I have always felt that a writer is a writer. Period. What sort of writer is pretty much an accident, the first thing that gets published which puts a writer on first base, which leads to a contract for second base, etc, more or less like a make-out session. In my case my first book was the story of the FBI’s ventures into popular entertainment, and popular entrainment’s embrace of the FBI, to their mutual profit although not always to mutual approval of the results. And it was a story, a story of how popular entertainment formulas, the detective formula and the domestic family formula, were too powerful as to shape the FBI’s image whether J. Edgar Hoover liked it or not. And sometimes he did not.
That put me on first base to pitch a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, where I found a story in Hoover’s idealization of the Washington DC of his youth and his fight to freeze frame that culture as America changed under his feet, civil rights, communism, the youth movement all seen as the enemies of America circa 1910. I didn’t use the word because I hadn’t heard of it until I was in therapy and found that I was trapped in latency. So was Hoover (and so is much of America, yours truly included). Biographies are sad stories no matter whether they are of winners or losers, because when a person dies, so does the world he tried to preserve, create, or resurrect.
That let me pitch a book about anticommunism – Hoover clung to the claim that he was the first anticommunist in the government, which was pretty much true. This time it was an ironic story. Anticommunists managed to turn themselves into heroes, then villains, then tiresome nags, sort of what Napoleon meant when he said that every hero in the end becomes a bore. By the time communism collapsed during the late1980s the only anticommunists left were, by a strange happenstance, Ronald Reagan, CIA Director William Casey, and a few of their supporters in the conservative press. Much of the rest of the country couldn’t figure out why Reagan was making such a fuss about something everyone had stopped worrying about decades ago.
I thought it was time for a history of the FBI and so I wrote one that I think now was amazingly prescient about the catastrophic collapse of the FBI’s reputation under Mueller and Comey. Unlike other writers at the time or later, I realized that the FBI had become an unwieldy conglomerate trying to police literally hundreds of laws Congress was throwing at it, at the same time it had become thoroughly politicized, but in an unexpected way: it had been so traumatized by post-Watergate investigations of Hoover’s secret wars on dissent that it now shied away from any politically sensitive investigations of the sort that should have let it discover and thwart the 9/11 plotters. Meanwhile mit had tried to mask the ineffectual relic it had become by glamorizing the heroics of the Hostage Rescuer Team, the “jackbooted thugs dropping from black helicopters” of right-wing paranoia, leading to bloody fiascoes at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and Wounded Knee. Comey’s pathetic efforts to make the Bureau look apolitical by being transparent with investigations that should have been kept confidential have turned the Bureau into one of the most despised institutions in the world of American politics, an opinion now shared by both parties.
All the time in these books, I have tried to answer that famous question from Lovers and Other Strangers, “What’s the story, Richie.” The challenge and the reward of writing histories and biographies is finding that story, within the tight constraints of verifiable witnesses, documents, and facts.
I got started on my first novel looking for those same challenges and rewards, this time within the tight constraints not of external facts, but of the characters and situations as they emerged from my imagination. As I said, writing is writing. But while a biography has to have a birth and a death, preferably related in that order, and a history has to touch the known bases of the period or event under investigation, a novel has to conform to readers’ expectations of what a novel is. (Everything I am going to say now relates to what is known as commercial fiction, and not to great, completely original novelists like Thomas Bernhard.) First, a novel has to have a romance, and the kind of romances I write are boy meets girl. The plot can consist of little more than that, as in Pride and Prejudice, boy meets girl, reader immediately sees that they are meant for each other, she doesn’t see it, instead sees that the boy is an unbearable ass, boy proves that he is no such thing, and, bang (after marriage). Something like that, meet cute, complications, then happy, happy, happy. But usually the romance is accompanied by some sort of a plot that develops suspense until the cards are laid on the table, the reveal. If you stray too far away from that, unless you happen to be Joseph Conrad, the novel probably won’t please many readers, and the since the purpose of a novel is to be entertaining (and make money), if it isn’t entertaining, it is a failure. Of course, if it doesn’t make money, it’s a failure, too.
So, what is entertaining? A love affair between an attractive young woman and man is usually entertaining. “Young” is elastic, but if the characters don’t qualify as young, the affair will lack freshness, might verge on the creepy. Suspense is entertaining but it has to be suspense about something important. Getting killed is important. Saving the world is important. And the outcome of a love affair is important. But most things aren’t important. So, it’s hard to say ahead of writing if something is going to be important enough to create entertaining suspense. But humor is always entertaining. And if writing something cracks the writer up chances are it will crack up the reader, too. Let us hope. So, as the love affair unfolds, and as the plot thickens, there should be laughs: wisecracks are good; ridiculous situations are good; catastrophes that don’t kill anybody can be funny.
Okay. Those are some of the rules I’ve come across. Another is don’t use words that end with “ly.” Maybe Hemingway said that, or should have. I started writing The Mystery of the Trinity not knowing how a novel worked. And I didn’t know I didn’t know. Actually, I started out wanting to write a book of theology about the Trinity! Double !! A sort of guide to “The Trinity for Complete Idiots.” (Might be some money in that.) (Probably not.) (On the other hand, who knows?) (I’ve got to think about that.)
I got sidetracked. Where was I? So, I was about 25,000 words into when I lost interest in it which raised the question of whether anyone else would be interested in it. (Answer: No.) So, I decided to put the different ideas in different characters and let them argue it out. Again, same question, same answer. So, I thought, let’s forget about the Trinity (except as a title, which I liked. Mysterioso.) And turn it into a novel. Problem. No idea how a novel worked, although I had been reading and teaching them for, let us say, a while. So, I bought one of those black and yellow guides for complete idiots, in this case for fiction writing, and found, to my surprise, a plot seemed to be called for. What an idea!! No kidding.
I wanted to write a formula thriller, make that a religious thriller – I already had a head start on that — and it would be about the Catholic Church, since readers have been shown to be willing to believe any kind of conspiracy involving bishops, monks, cardinals, and popes. And since I was personally involved in the controversy over the abandonment of the Latin Mass and effort to preserve it, specifically one church in New Orleans with a charismatic traditionalist priest, I might as well have him bumped off – by the Cardinal of New York. Okay. But there had to be a motive beyond a dispute over liturgy. That made me think of the murder of Bishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador. Hmm. Could the Cardinal who whacked the New Orleans priest have had something to do with that. Why not? Then I had an idea about using the Grace family of New York, probably the richest Catholic family in the country, and, believe it or not, the head of the Grace corporation (lawyers made me change it to the Carroll Corporation, had had a son when she was only 16 – another subplot – and that son was spending the summer in a monastery on Mount Athos in Greece, a place that had and does fascinate me. And there was one monastery that had broken away from the other Mount Athos monasteries that was at war with the monk who led Mount Athos, and that monk was bent on repairing the split between the Roman and Greek branches of Catholicism. The bad monks would have none of that. Another plot.
Things were really cooking, and I was adopting some of the ideas from the Idiot’s Guide, namely writing in short 1000-2000-word scenes, something alien to me as an historian and biographer, who like the rest thought in terms of 10,000 + word chapters. But my major concern, as the complications piled up and the subplots multiplied, was how to pull it all together, even whether it could all be pulled together. I shouldn’t have worried.
It turns out the characters worked it out for themselves. I just had to write it down. Andy Martin wrote a book a few years ago called Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me. It’s quite a revelation of how a novel comes together. Lee Child started his twentieth Jack Reacher thriller by writing a scene set on a pig farm in the middle of the country. He added scene after scene, not really connected, and he was past halfway through before he had any idea what had happened, and it was another stretch of writing before he had an idea who had done it and still more writing before he had figured out why they had done it. The high tension of waiting for the book to come together stimulated his imagination in a way that he had no control over and had not foreseen. Same thing happened to me. That’s the thrill of writing novels. Watching a bridge build itself across an abyss while you walk across it from the first paragraph to the final reveal. It’s fun.