‘Look, a few nuns five hundred years ago is one thing — one little girl is one thing. Two hundred million rotting citizens is another. The Book-of-the-Month-Club ladies don’t want a thing like this dumped right in their laps ... the reader likes a menace to keep its distance. The reading public and the movie-going public know little or nothing about biological weapons. And they don’t want to know any more. Scrap the whole idea, it’s terrible.’
‘All right all right... so then how’s this for an angle B. J.? The sex life of Siamese twins ...’
So this business of writing bestsellers is not as easy as it seems. Even after you get through all the operators, all the manipulation and intrigue, you still have to be very sure that you’ve really got something that you can sell.
Additional remarks on The Godfather: The writer knows his subject and his characters; the book took seven years to write. These are real-life characters with real-life counterparts. The singer is Frank Sinatra (Tony Bennett?). The Godfather is Carlo Gambino. The doctor... the lovable drank who has been written up in an article about Hollywood lushes. Not only is the reader getting inside information, he is getting real people and events. This is fact, fictionalized and presented in a palatable form with suspense and climaxes. You have to know the subject and the people to write it, and there’s a lot of hard work involved.
Frederick Forsyth conforms even more closely to the formula of fictionalized fact. He was a foreign correspondent, and he knows the subjects and the people he writes about. Information is carefully researched, the characters based on real-life counterparts he has interviewed and known. I recommend his books to anyone interested in writing fiction, whether he is trying to write a bestseller or not. The books are worth reading not just for the inside information on the subject of the book, but also for information on writing commercially, and organizing material The Day of the Jackal is inside information on the attempts to assassinate de Gaulle. The whole subject of assassination is stated in the most basic terms. Remember, de Gaulle had real pros gunning for him: ex-army officers with money and weapons they knew how to use, an underground army in fact. So the Jackal, a real pro who sets out to assassinate de Gaulle on contract, is also up against real pros. You couldn’t have gotten a real pro out of an American President.
De Gaulle, like all politicians, becomes his public newspaper image, and so his character is already in the area of journalism. You don’t need first-class writing for a stock character. The Jackal is a bit better than good: anonymous handsome golf-pro eyes that cloud over just before he kills someone. No one can read his thoughts, not even the writer. In the end we are in doubt as to his existence.
The suspense formula is like symbolic logic. So many days to count down. The Day when he has to hit the General. What he does every day. What the whole combined police, secret service and army does to find him and terminate. Balance moves.
Non-fiction is easier and more profitable.
Of course writing like Alive is even more trouble than well researched fiction like The Day of the Jackal. The writer has to get down to Uruguay and get the ghouls to talk to him to scoop the whole tasty good thing before someone else does.
There is a type of bestseller that requires no research at all if you have the stomach for it. The self-help book will transform your whole life. Your Erroneous Zones, Think and Grow Rich, Win Through Intimidation. You just sit down and write it if you’re the kind of person who can write something like that. Your Erroneous Zones. I really take off my hat to that title. It hits the reader right where he lives. And gooses him right up to the cash register. Well, those are no research books. Just windy old platitudes. There’s one bom every minute to buy it. He knows he doesn’t know anything so he makes the wishful assumption that someone else does who is now going to share it with him and 8,000,000 others. Get the title first then write the book.
There is also a class of minimal research. Six books out now on the Bermuda Triangle using the same sources. Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of Plants. A hot subject is prolonging life. Other books out of course. But a snappy title like Rubber Youth ... How to put out bum youth checks ... Reviewing all the angles on novocaine in Rumania, monkey glands in Mexico in the 30’s, aging theories, a month’s research, a good pushy agent, a few good breaks and you have a Number 1.
Fiction can be written up to the level of the writer’s ability. I don’t mean they aren’t carefully planned. I mean, the writer is not pulling punches and writing down to the public. Bely knew a lot about sharks. It was his hobby so he sits down and writes it straight. Like I say, up to the level of the writer’s ability. You don’t sit down and concoct a bestseller. I’ve tried. Either the story runs away with you and gets out of hand and you write what you have to write, or else you strike lucky and get a subject the public wants anyway.
A Word to the Wise Guy
After teaching a class in Creative Writing a few years back, my own creative powers fell to an all-time low. I really had a case of writer’s block, and my idealistic young assistant complained that I simply sat around the loft doing absolutely nothing — which was true. This gave me to think (as the French say): Can creative writing be taught? And am I being punished by the Muses for impiety and gross indiscretion in revealing the secrets to a totally unreceptive audience — like you start giving away hundred-dollar bills and nobody wants them... I also discovered that the image of ‘William Burroughs’ in my students’ minds had little relation to the facts. They were disappointed because I wore a coat and tie to class; they had expected me to appear stark naked with a strap-on, I presume. In all, a disheartening experience.
‘Creative Writing’ — what does that mean? I would have liked to put them all off the career of writing. Be a plumber instead — (I felt like screaming) — and have your fucking king-size fridge full of Vienna sausages, chilled aquavit and Malvern spring water, and look at your color TV with remote-control switch and cuddle a .30-.30 on your lap, waiting for the deer season when all sensible citizens will be in their cellars with sandbags stacked around them. Or be a doctor for chrissakes — once you make the big-time as the best ass-hole doctor what can be got, you don’t have to worry like next year there won’t be no ass-holes to operate on. But next year maybe no ass-holes will buy my books ...
All right, maybe two, three people in the class can’t be dissuaded. My advice is get a good agent and a good tax accountant if you ever make any money, and remember, you can’t eat fame. And you can’t write unless you want to write, and you can’t want to unless you feel like it. Say you’re a doctor with a nice practice. You don’t feel so well today — family troubles and other things you can’t quite put a name to — and you just feel fucking terrible, as you slip a chlorophyll tablet in your mouth to cover three quick drinks — (that old bitch would spread it all over Palm Beach, ‘My dear he was drunk ...’) Well you can still carry on and what the hell, quarter-grain of morphine for each patient; no matter what is wrong with them, they will feel better immediately and prize me as the best of croakers. And if I get any sass from the Narcs, I’ll just tell ‘em, ‘Well I’m off to work in the Bahrein Islands so you take over my practice and shove it up your ass.’ I mean, even if you don’t feel like practicing medicine, you can still do it. Same way with law; you don’t feel like trying a case, all you gotta do is get a continuance and lay up smoking weed in Martha’s Vineyard for a month.
In these other professions you can always cover for not feeling like doing it, but writing you didn’t feel like doing ain’t worth shit. The profession has many advantages; sure, you can ride out on a white shark to a villa in the Bahamas, or you can spend twenty years teaching English in the Berlitz School, writing the Great Book that nobody can read. James Joyce wrote some of the greatest prose in the language — The Dead, Dubliners — but could he stop there and write exquisite stories about unhappy Irish Catholics from then on out? If so, they would have rewarded him with the Nobel Prize. Now nobody ever tells a doctor, ‘Lissen Doc, your ass operations is the g
reatest, many grateful queens is getting fucked again, but you gotta do something new —’ Of course he doesn’t have to; it’s the same old ass. But a writer has to do something new, or he has to standardize a product — one or the other. Like I could standardize the queer Peter-Pan wild-boy product, and put it out year after year like the Tarzan series; or I could write a Finnegans Wake. So, I get this idea about a private eye and the Cities of the Red Night... Quien sabe?
Or take the entertainment business; today you may be the Top of the Pops, the rage of the café society ... like Dwight Fisk, who did those horrible double-entendre numbers back in the Thirties — ‘That’s the man who pinched me in the Astor, just below the mezzanine, and for several days your mother wasn’t seen; so now my little heart you know where you got your start, from a pinch just below the mezzanine’ — who in the fuck wants to hear that noise anymore? But you won’t see any doctor, lawyer, engineer, architect who’s got to be world champion at his profession or else stand on a comer selling ties with his brains knocked out. No atomic physicist has to worry, people will always want to kill other people on a mass scale. Sure, he’s got the fridge full of sausages and spring water, just like the plumber. Nothing can happen to him; grants, scholarships, a rainbow to his grave and a tombstone that glows in the dark.
Artists do however have a degree of freedom. A writer has little power, but he does have freedom, at least in the West, Mr. Yevtushenko. Think very carefully about this. Do you want to be merely the spokesman for accomplished power movers? The more power, the less freedom. A politician has almost no freedom at all. I am frequently asked, ‘What would you do if you were President? What would you do if you were the dictator of America? What would you do if you had a billion dollars?’ In the words of my friend Ahmed Jacoubi, ‘This question is not personal opinion.’ A prior question must be asked: ‘How did you get to be the President, a dictator, a billionaire?’ The answers to these questions will condition what you will do. For one is not magically teleported into these positions; one gets there by a series of discrete steps, each step hedged with conditions and prices.
To take a microcosmic example: my humble ambition to be Commissioner of Sewers for St. Louis, and my boyish dread of what I would do when I occupied this position. These dreams were outlined in an essay I wrote for Harper’s in response to the question, ‘When did you stop wanting to be President?’ I imagined a soft sinecure, crooked sewer-piping deals, my house full of languid vicious young men described in the press as ‘no more than lackeys to his majesty the Sultan of Sewers.’ I supposed my position would be secured by the dirt I had on the Governor, and that I’d spend my afternoons in wild orgies or sitting around smoking the Sheriff’s reefer and luxuriating in the stink from raptured sewage lines for miles around.
But why should I have been appointed Commissioner of Sewers in the first place? The duties are nominal; no skill is required. I am not appointed on my knowledge of sewers or my ability to do the job. Why, then? Well, perhaps I have worked for the Party for a number of years; I am due for a payoff. However, I must also have something to give in return. Perhaps I can sway some votes, which action on my part is contingent on my receiving some payoff? Or perhaps they expect me to take the rap for the piping deal. If so I will have to watch my step and the use of my signature. Perhaps they expect a contribution to the campaign fund, which I am in a position to swing, having access to people of wealth. One thing is sure — they expect something from me in return.
How an under-the-counter deal in cheap piping involves contractors, auditors, and a whole battery of fixes, fixers, and cover-ups, all of which have to be paid in favors and cash. So my house is not full of languid vicious young men — it is full of cigar-smoking bourbon-swilling fat-assed politicians and fixers. I have something on the Governor? I’d better be very damn careful he doesn’t have something on me. The Commissioner, like Caesar’s wife, must be above suspicion; certainly above the suspicion of sex orgies and drug use. I would have been out of my mind to compromise myself with the Sheriff. Sure, I can call on him to fix a parking ticket, but I’d better keep my hands off his confiscated marijuana unless others in higher positions are also involved. And even if I could wangle a few special police to guard the sewers against communistic sabotage, they would not be handsome youths. More likely I would be stuck with the Sheriff’s retarded brother-in-law who can’t make the grade as a night watchman, and with two or three other wash-outs from police and guard positions.
So if I can’t do what I want as Commissioner of Sewers, still less can I do what I want as President of the United States. I will disband the Army and the Navy and channel the entire Defense budget into setting up sexual adjustment centers, will I? I’ll legalize marijuana? Annul the Oriental Exclusion Act? Abolish income tax for artists and put the burden of taxation onto the very rich? I should live so long.
I think that Richard Nixon will go down in history as a true folk hero, who struck a vital blow to the whole diseased concept of the revered image and gave the American virtue of irreverence and skepticism back to the people.
Technology of Writing
When Anthony Burgess was teaching his course in creative writing, a student asked him: ‘Why should you be up there teaching writing and not me?’ A good question; and I wish I could give as definite an answer as can be given in regard to other subjects where the technology is more clearly defined. No one, unless he is himself an experienced pilot, asks why the pilot of an airliner should be in the cockpit and not him. The answer is that he knows how to fly the plane and you don’t. Nor would a student of quantum mechanics, engineering, or mathematics ask such a question; the teacher is there because he knows more about the subject than the student. To say he knows more presupposes that there is something definite to know, that a technology exists and can be taught to qualified students.
How many writers have taken courses in creative writing? Some of them certainly. James Jones for one, who took a course with some literary lady who had her students imitate the styles of well-known writers... write Hemingway for a month, Graham Greene for a month, and so forth. A good exercise I think. But there are certainly, I think, more writers who have not taken courses in writing than writers who have. How many pilots have taken courses in flying? All of them, we hope. How many physicists have taken courses in physics? All of them. Which brings us to the question I intend to raise in this course and to hopefully arrive at some answers. Is there a technology of writing? Can writing be taught?
As soon as we ask the question we realize that there is no simple yes-or-no answer, since there are many technologies of writing and a technique that is useful for one writer may be of no use to another. There is no way to write. So we will begin looking for answers, not the answer. A pilot must possess certain qualifications before he starts flying lessons. A degree of coordination, steady nerves, a certain level of intelligence. A student of physics must have a considerable aptitude for mathematics. The qualifications for a writer are not so definable. The ability to sit at a typewriter for many hours without distraction is certainly useful The ability to endure solitude is useful but not essential. An ability to empathize with others, to see and hear what is in their minds, is useful — but some very great writers like Beckett have only one character and need no others.
In general, the more observant a writer is, the more he will find to write about. I recommend an exercise I have practiced for years: when walking down any street, try to see everyone on the street before he sees you. You will find that if you see others first they will not see you, and that gives you time to observe, or file for future use. I learned this exercise from an old Mafia don in Columbus, Ohio. If a writer is seen first he won’t necessarily get shot, but he may miss a set or a character. Someone glimpsed in passing may be used as a character years later; some doorway or shop front may serve as a set. An absent-minded writer closes the doors of perception.
Genet said of a French writer who shall here be nameless: He does not have the c
ourage to be a writer. What courage does he refer to? The courage of the inner exploration, the cosmonaut of inner space. The writer cannot pull back from what he finds because it shocks or upsets him, or because he fears the disapproval of the reader. Allied to this courage are persistence and the ability to endure discouragement. Any writer must do a great deal of bad writing and he may not know how bad it is at the time. Writers are not always good critics of their own work. Sinclair Lewis said, ‘If you have just written something that you think is absolutely great and you can’t wait to show it to someone, tear it up, it’s terrible.’ I have certainly had the experience of writing something I thought was the greatest, and reading it over a few days later said, ‘My God tear it into very small pieces and put it in someone else’s garbage can.’ On the other hand, something that I did not think much of at the time may stand up very well on rereading. What I wish to point out is that the writer must be able to survive an uneven performance that would be disastrous in another profession. An actor or a musician must put on a certain level of performance, whereas a writer has time to edit and choose what he will eventually put out as the finished product.
I have never known a writer who was not at one time an avid reader. I believe it was T.S. Eliot who said that if a writer has a pretentious literary style, it is generally because he has not read enough books. Some knowledge of what has been done in writing is, I think, essential — just as a doctor or a lawyer must be conversant with the literature in his field. A full-time professional writer does not as a rule get much time to read, so it is well to get your reading in early.
To recapitulate qualifications which are useful but not essential: the ability to endure the physical discipline of writing, that is, to sit at a typewriter and write; the ability to persist and to absorb the discouragement of rejection and the even deadlier discouragement that comes from your own bad writing; insight into the motives of others; ability to think in concrete visual terms; a grounding in general reading. Now assume that the student has at least some of these qualifications. What can he be taught about writing?