Honestly, I thought I was
going to end up writing porn.
What happened was more interesting
in several ways. It turned out that Gold Eagle, which was part of Harlequin,
which was at the time the largest single publisher of fiction in the world, had
come up against a small crisis because a writer (I never found out who) had
screwed up with getting a new men’s action‑adventure series going for them, and
they were now desperate to have three series books, the first of which had to
fit an already‑done cover, about a time‑traveling soldier who had to be named
Daniel Samson (marketing having decided that two Biblical names was what they
wanted; I’d’ve picked “Jehosophat Shalmaneser” if it had been up to me). Other
than that it needed to be about 60,000 words, soon, and it didn’t need to be
good as long as it was soon.
(If you don’t know what men’s
action‑adventure was—the genre is much smaller now and much more restrictive than
it was in 1990— this excerpt from the vaults will explain a bit more. My take is that it was
always a bit mis‑marketed, and that the actual readers, of whom I knew a few,
were not who the editors thought they were working for. That essay is aimed
mainly at collectors and buyers, to give them some idea of what they would be
buying and collecting, so be sure to resist the subliminal pressure, especially
my mentioning that you are feeling very sleepy, your eyelids are heavy, you
feel warm and safe, you are descending a long staircase, and you notice that
everything I say is a good idea).
I wrote what I called The
Guns of Time and Gold Eagle
eventually titled Wartide (a
single word could be in bigger letters) in eight days, typing from when I got
up in the morning to when I went over to the library to read research for the
next day’s work. 62,000 and change, eight days, done, with the warning that I
would need to revise it and have the second book by Christmas; Gold Eagle paid
the agent, who paid me, and I had some money to get me to Pittsburgh.
Now, I was not
particularly thrilled with the results, and one reason was that it was set in
the winter of 1943‑4 in the mountain campaign in Italy, very deliberately
because there weren’t many veterans of that campaign around even then (it had
never been large and it broke many men’s health). There was a lot I just didn’t
know, and speed‑reading was not an adequate substitute. But in a bar in
Missoula, I bumped into a guy who ran a historical firing range and did various
kinds of outfitting, so I was able to get a tiny bit of experience firing an
M1, trying to persuade a mule to do what I wanted it to do (which is like a
whole second Ph.D. in itself), and a few other things. Since I had decided the
next book would be set in the Mexican War, I also fired some black powder
weapons; time didn’t permit riding with authentic tack before I had to leave,
and I'm not sure how much a guy who would be just learning to ride could learn from that, but I at least got to look at Mexican-War-era horse hardware and photograph it.
I didn’t quite realize it
then—too busy and life was too crazy—but I had found one of the hidden benefits
of being a writer, in those good old days when traditional publishing was the
only game there was: you could go have adventures on the publisher’s dime. By
the following spring when I was working on Union Fires, the Dan Samson adventure set in the Civil War (my
title was Castle Thunder which
was just as melodramatic but had something to do with the story), I was in easy
driving range to Richmond, and could spend some time with Civil War re‑enactors.
Within a couple of years, for Mother of Storms, I would be spending a goodly part of the summer of
1992 driving and catching third‑class buses around Oaxaca and Chiapas trying to
get caught in a hurricane (I didn’t, but I did soak up a great deal of non‑tourist
southern Mexico). Then I started to do the books with Buzz Aldrin and found
myself on all kinds of marvelous back stage tours of various high‑end space and
defense facilities and a few seagoing adventures besides, and worked on Payback City (spending almost the whole first part of the
advance before the publisher stiffed me) which had me going out with arson
detectives in Detroit in the wee hours of the morning. For about seven or eight
years there, I traveled all over the place and did immense amounts of cool
stuff—a bit more if you count the last hurrah of going out and interviewing and
exploring the world of UFO cults centering on the San Luis Valley, and visiting
many interesting‑in‑many‑senses places on the Western Slope of Colorado, for Gaudeamus.
I saw rockets take off
from up close, handled some pretty bizarre weapons, talked to former spies and
current smugglers, spent some interesting time with people trying to gross me
out and more interesting time with people showing me things I’d never seen or
heard before.
A couple of years ago when
an editor was looking at perhaps bringing out a paper version of Payback
City after all these years (the
possibility fell through; maybe I'll do it via Metrocles House one of these days), she said, “I
feel like I know how to torch a building, how to smuggle explosives, and how to
look for an arsonist.”
That used to be pretty
common for an adventure story writer, and as you may have heard before from me,
I
consider knowing how things work and how they’re done to be central to any
adventure story. For decades, at least from a bit before World War One
until the 1990s, if you hadn’t been there, you went, and if you hadn’t done it,
you did (or as close as your physical condition would allow). If you had to
fake it, you found people who knew the real stuff and talked to them first hand
and ran it by them. (Occasionally still blowing it, I hasten to add).
This wasn’t particularly a
divide between the respected literary writers and the adventure fiction
writers; sure, Michener, Tom Clancy, Len Deighton, and Jean Auel were/are all
notoriously research‑happy, but Tom Wolfe apparently did immense amounts of
going out and seeing for The Bonfire of the Vanities, and was known as a reporter long before he turned
to fiction. And after all, the legendary George Plimpton got to be a legend by being the guy who had no business
being there, but was, and wrote about it. For that matter you don’t have to read
very far to realize that Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates have both tried
many of the things they write about.
Just after I had seen a
total eclipse from the deck of a ship at sea with Buzz Aldrin, he turned to me
with that sardonic lopsided grin that he probably could trademark, and said, “Now try to answer this
one: What was it like? I’ve
been trying to answer it for thirty years.”
The truth is, of course, that
I can’t—no writer can—but many readers love to see a good writer try to take
them to a place, time, and situation the writer knows that they are unlikely
ever to witness.
And this brings me around
to a sad change in publishing. During my grim hiatus, I probably could not have
successfully sold my memoirs if I’d been the lover of four presidents
simultaneously, and could not have typed a plot summary of The Cat in the
Hat in less than a month, and I
was away from things for quite a while.
When I came back,
publishing was to some extent going broke (an extent which your editor will lie
to you about), to a great extent unwilling to put much money into a book for
any purpose other than acquiring a celeb name, and to a tremendous extent not
interested in financing people to go out and have experiences (except for a few
who went to war—and even there, a surprising number of the journalists in Iraq
and Afghanistan have been freelancing, i.e. not on anyone’s dime, just hoping
that what they write will sell for enough soon enough to keep them going).
Probably most importantly,
tha interwbz had come along, and it was possible for anyone to find pictures
and information about just about any point on Earth or Mars.
And not least, publishers
had developed the tactic of drag‑out negotiating combined with inflexible
deadlines: i.e. they would commence negotiation on a book that might take a
year to write in January, with the delivery date in December; in June they
would still be haggling, so that the writer had lost half a year of working
time (and in traditional publishing, if you work on the book before the
contract is signed, you are simply a fool—this is one more advantage of the
indie world); the publisher would finally hand over the signing money (which
would not be enough to finance research anyway) in September, when it could
mostly go to pay down debt incurred while waiting for it, and still demand
that the book be delivered in December.
How
could anyone do that?
Many
writers nowadays never leave the desk. Say you’ve never been to Africa but you have
to do a first person description of crossing a bridge in
Lagos, where you
see someone go by in a boat, and part way over the okada driver wipes out, causing
a
loud argument that you can’t understand to break out around you, which
causes a brawl, during which you slip away to wait
for another ride. A scene with all that in it would run perhaps 1000‑2000
words, whether described by someone who had been there or described by
someone who grabbed the first few pictures, videos, and articles he could find
off the Web (my actual time:
four minutes). There is more than enough detail in that “research” to quickly
fill those couple thousand words; pause here and there and type a few sentences
to describe each thing, and you’re done in no time.
And
nowadays, that’s what publishers are willing to pay for—often that’s all publishers are willing to pay for. I’m far from the
only person encountering this; many good writers who used to run‑go‑see and
bring back whatever they could recall and express—sometimes well, sometimes
badly, but something they had seen and felt and tasted—are being told “You were
always so good at sounding like you’d been there. So sit‑read‑type. Just sound
like you were there. You don’t have the money or the time or any reason to
actually run‑go‑see, so just sound like it. If you have spare money, don’t
waste time when you could be writing, hire a research assistant to look that
stuff up for you so you can write faster.” (That last is not a line that I
heard—but I trust the person who told me that that’s what they told her). Many
younger writers are emphatically told that the “professional” way is internet
research (and naturally tend to believe it because we writers are a cowardly and
slothful lot—why else would we pick a job you can commute to in your jammies,
less than 50 feet from the fridge?) and that “it’s the writing that makes it
authentic.”
Except,
you know, they haven’t been there. And it’s not the writing that makes it authentic,
it’s the authenticity that makes the writing.
I
really, really wonder if perhaps this is one reason why in at least mystery,
sf, fantasy, horror, and spy fiction, more and more of the good young writers
just breaking in are from what used to be called “exotic” backgrounds (i.e.
outside the US, non‑white, either non‑English‑speaking or at least not‑Mid‑Atlantic‑Everybody‑Talk,
often from various strangely eventful childhoods). Because frankly, nobody is
so good that they can write the authentic without having been there,
consistently and convincingly, every time and without making odd little errors.
The publishers can toss blame around and try to convert the writer into the
fiction‑production‑technician at the remote Web‑to‑prose‑work‑station, but
where there is no experience, the phony ultimately will come leaking through.
You
might say the choice between run‑go‑see and sit‑read‑type writing is the
difference between, oh, say, Wife of the Gods and Tarzan of the Apes, or between The Cruel Sea and Horatio Hornblower. Some of us read because
we’re probably never going there, we’ll probably never stand anywhere similar,
but we want to ask What was it like?
But
the scary thing, of course, is that it isn’t just writers who can get on the
net, acquire fake knowledge, and feel like they’ve been there.
A woman calls her
husband on the cell phone and says, “Hey, be careful, the radio says there’s a
crazy man driving the wrong way on the freeway.”
“It’s
not just one guy driving the wrong way,” he says, “It’s everybody!”
In a world where more
and more depends on understanding how complicated this human tangle is—and
where more and more distant complexities entangle our lives—we all end up
writing our own knowledge base. And every year more of it is sit‑read‑type, and
less of it is run‑go‑see. Am I the only one who has a problem with this?
