Florida speech

I considered this profoundly cogent statement for a significant space of time – rolling over in my own imagination the deeper implications of each word, the thrust of the intent, synthesizing and deconstructing the meaning contained within with all the sense, sensibility and razor-sharp capabilities I have developed in my career as a novelist for observation and analysis, and finally, after a suitable period of cavernous, deeply examined thought, replied, “You know, Maddy, you’re probably right. Pass the salt please.”

Dinner at our home is, probably, the wrong place to discuss creativity.

In fact, in an odd way, it often seems to me the people least equipped to really assess the nature and quality of creativity in the arts – be it music, writing, painting, dance, film – what have you – are the artists themselves. While this is not to say that folks can’t analyze the construction of any plot, character, coda, still life or dialogue, describing what thought went into the presentation – the fact is, much of what the artist does is ultimately instinctual. We write it, paint it, film it – because it seems like the right thing to do at that moment in time. So, when you ask any artist why they came up with they did, I wonder just how accurate a reply one will get. In an odd way one needs to worry whether the artist’s expression of why they did whatever they did is, well, to be blunt, completely truthful.

But not a routine tattoo. Like one of those tribal arm bands that every high school, college and professional athlete seem to sport. No, my character is obsessively, evilly in love with a young woman who is at the core of the novel. So, he wants her name tattooed within a black heart. And he places this tattoo on the sole of his foot, where no one can see it, but he knows it is there, every time he grinds his step into the ground.

The second provocative act was to place him in a bar. Not a very nice bar, but one of those dark, dank and nasty places that occupy the area around Boston University and Fenway in the city that likes to call itself the Hub of the Universe. And, inside that bar, my bad guy starts to pick a fight. Except that right at the moment he’s about to take a swing at the bartender he’s arguing with, he realizes that the man behind the counter probably has access to a weapon. So, he backs down. Still, the notion of exchanging blows arouses him sexually, as well as stimulates him intellectually.

What I wanted to accomplish was to place this bad guy on an edge. Emotionally, he teeters on a precipice. And beside him, losing the same balance, fighting for equilibrium, is the reader.

You see, what I believe is critical in creating character is far less an understanding of what the person does, than it is an unsettled feeling about what they might do.

I have a theory of writing which I term The Sliced Eyeball theory. It goes a little like this:

Any writer worth their salt can describe a bad guy slicing some poor victim’s eyeball with a razor. First thing you do, is call up a helpful medical examiner, maybe google eyeball substances. Perhaps you find a copy of Luis Buneal’s and Salvador Dali’s surrealistic collaboration Un Chien Andalou. The film maker used a cow’s eye and a little bit of cinematic legerdemain to make it seem like it was human. So, with a little bit of research, you’re all set to write your eyeball slicing scene. You layer in a Friday the 13th or Texas Chainsaw Massacre – appropriate bad guy, combine them with either a helpless tied to the rails in front of the onrushing train type female, or else your James Bond wannabe detective slash good guy slash superspy who is busily managing to work his way through the ropes or handcuffs restricting him – you’ve all read this scene, seen this scene a zillion times… No big deal.

And, ultimately, not particularly compelling either.

All it becomes is something, for lack of a better term, gross.

A far more intriguing sequence imagines a character who thinks their eyeball is going to be sliced. And a character whom we, as readers, fully imagine is capable of slicing that eyeball. And we take these two and put them into a location where the equipment is, well, handy, but the outcome is far less certain. Remove the ropes and razor from the equation and put it into a psychological realm – where possibility replaces reality. Potential creates conflict – inwardly, so that each character, both good guy and bad guy need to make choices, need to operate on less the full knowledge and information, where every decision just might result in that eyeball being sliced.

Or not.

This, as one can imagine, is much more difficult to write.

As an aside, this is precisely what makes Thomas Harris’ great character Hannibal Lecter so memorable. We might be frightened by his propensity for cannibalism (human flesh tastes so good with a fine, chilled Chardonnay…) but it is his capacity for imagining the truly demonic that unsettles us. And that he does this imagining in a truly intelligent, often amusing, frequently attractive fashion – well that is why we turn every page to find out just what will he think of next…

As a further aside, in case anyone was wondering, the answer is Yes. I do like to mention Hannibal the Cannibal whenever I address groups of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. After all, he is one of your own…

Anyway, I don’t want to claim that my character in The Wrong Man is any where near the equal of Hannibal Lecter. What I wanted to describe was a person another character describes as “a psychopath in training.” But what he is, is unpredictable and predictable, both, which may seem like a contradiction to many people, but any writer of fiction knows is not. We know him, and yet, we do not know him. We anticipate what he will do with all the certainty that our own experience brings to the equation, while at the same moment discover twists in his personality that take us in unexpected directions. In a way, this is precisely the way we look at ourselves.

And less everyone think I am only speaking about thrillers I would direct your attention to – say The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal and re-imagine the battle of Waterloo through young Fabrizio’s eyes. Or perhaps the moment when Boo Radley saves Jem and Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. Spend some time considering the emotional pit that Raskolnikov discovers in Crime and Punishment. It isn’t hard to see how every sliver of guilt slices into his psyche. As readers, caught up in the story, we instinctively know every direction Dostoyevsky will take us – and yet, at the very same time they ring unique.

Let me pause for a moment and remind everyone listening that I have just managed to put myself and my own writing in a category shared by Thomas Harris – not unreasonable – and Harper Lee, Stendhal and Dostoevsky. Maybe just a bit of a stretch there.

Of course, if you’re going to write books populated by remorseless psychopaths, it generally helps if you have a dollop of their traits reverberating around inside of you, to call upon when necessary.

Not all their traits, mind you. Just a selective few. One’s that the writer can summon up, like a necromancer stirring a boiling cauldron of spells, when needed.

But, considering this conference is all about creativity, I suppose I ought to at least make a stab at trying to delineate where these traits come from and how one stores them in their writer-ly wine and plot cellar.

Usually, when called upon to speak about my craft, I almost invariably tell stories from my days as a newspaper reporter. The implication is that witnessing varieties of really awful realities on a daily basis is all the education one needs to become a novelist.

In my career as a reporter, I sat across from serial killers, interviewed numerous multiple murderers, watched almost every type of violent criminal in trial or on the street. I went to innumerable crime scenes, flipped through dozens of glossy photographs, carefully perused detailed reports, spoke with survivors of horrendous moments, listened to people re-tell incidents that seemed surreal in their depravity. Guns, knives, razors, hatchets, various body parts, bombs, bricks and even once a sword. All sorts of adventures in what, for lack of a better way, one can call the dark side of human existence. Seen someone who’s been killed at close range with a 12 gauge? Check. Seen that. How about machine-gunned in a swimming pool? Yup. That, too. Well, have you ever talked with someone, say a young woman, who was tied up, tossed in the trunk of a car, driven to the Everglades and… The answer is yes, but let’s not really go into that particular one.

Suffice it to say, that I have had an education in evil.

But that doesn’t make one into a writer.

It just lends itself to nightmares.

Similarly, being a member of a dysfunctional family won’t turn one into Tolstoy. Witnessing a revolution won’t render one into Pasternack. Even getting through Harvard Law School won’t necessarily allow one to become Scott Turow.

The great jazz musician, Miles Davis, when asked a question more or less on the subject of his craft and what this conference is about, replied: “Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.”

Intriguing comment.

And, damn difficult, too, if you think about it in concrete terms.

But a sentiment that I think is applicable to the world of writing.

So, I will tell a story, that I think informs my writing.

It predates my time as a reporter and comes from teenage years which I spent in a prison in New Hampshire which more customarily goes by the name of the Phillips Exeter Academy. My wife often argues that I learned more about the every day uses and abuses of psychopathology in those four really freezing cold, bitter years, but I don’t want to dignify them with that sort of observation. I like to think that as far as the school is concerned, I managed to avoid learning just about anything. Certainly anything academic. Like algebra or Latin or American History or the periodic table of elements. Useful stuff. I do not think the alumni office considers me in a positive light. In fact, my major contribution to the social life of the school was this: When I arrived there, there were eight rules that a student could be kicked out for. I was directly responsible for the ninth rule.

I take some pride in that.

If anyone is overcome by curiosity as to what that 9th rule was, please see me later.

But if I did learn anything at that place it came from other sources.

This story I call The Bucket of Revenge.

I lived, in those years, in a dormitory named after a distinguished former principal named Harlan Page Amen, whose stern, Calvinist visage was immortalized in a portrait that hung in the common room. Amen Hall – it has a slightly evangelical sound to it, doesn’t it? – had several design features which were notable. One of these was that all the doors to the rooms opened inwardly.

And, with enough time, it is not hard to imagine all sorts of mischief that can be created out of that single, notable point of architecture. For example, on the night of a fire drill, a clever student might just take some piano wire and running from door handle to door handle zigzagging up and down the corridor, manage to make it impossible for anyone to open their door. Thus, when the fire alarm drill was sounded, accompanied by a single yell of This is not a drill! Well, one can imagine the chaos. But that is another tale, for some other location.

But remember that inward swinging door.

We had, in Amen Hall, one truly obnoxious, extraordinarily mean spirited and bullying fellow. I believe he went on to a career high in the Wall Street world, where he was a Bush Pioneer or some such. Anyway, this guy did not get along with my friend David, who was an artsy type, given to French symbolist poetry and Chicago blues. And so, one evening, when David was down the corridor studying, this irritating fellow set a trap. A bucket of water, carefully balanced in the space between the inward opening door and the lintel, so that when David returned to his room, history paper and notes and library books in arms, and stepped inside, the bucket delivered its entire wet message all over him and all over his due the next day’s work. Insulting and ruinous.

David, of course, instantly knew who had done this. We all did, despite many insincere denials issued with appropriate giggles and smirks. But David resisted the temptation to take a swing at the obnoxious young Republican.

Like any good Sicilian, he waited. He let days go past.

A secondary design element in Amen Hall was the Butt Room. The school, in an effort to discourage smoking (this being an earlier, more innocent era, when Marlboro Men ruled the airwaves) only allowed smoking in a dingy basement room next to the heating system. Few windows. A couple of stiff wooden chairs and a scarred table. A coke machine that dispensed dime bottles. A constant smell of oil and sweat. Too hot. Too cold. Filthy. A place that any adult would instantly have recognized did nothing except fester disease and anarchy. We, of course, loved it.

So, one day David comes to me and our mutual friend Marty (now a world renowned internist at the University of Minnesota) and asks us if we wouldn’t arrange to have the obnoxious tormentor seated with his back to the Butt Room door at precisely 5 pm that afternoon.

Why? Asks us.

I will sneak in and dump water on his head, says David.

It took us all of two seconds to agree. We saw justice. We saw equal treatment under the law. An almost constitutional sense of fair play. All would be made even.

And, after all, this guy had been tormenting all of us for months…

We did as we were asked. Not hard. The boy in question liked poker and getting him into the right chair, concentrating on his cards at 5 pm was a relatively simple matter. The only thing that might have made it perfect would have been Marty dealing him Aces and eights.

And he hardly noticed that we kept checking our wristwatches.

At the stroke of 5 pm, David pounced. I can still recall the flash of David’s arrival. He was barefoot, to muffle his approach, and he wore an ankle-length yellow rain slicker to ward off the inevitable back splash and a black ski mask pulled down over his face like any self-respecting bank robber or Ninja assassin would. He swept in like a bird of prey, bucket in hand, and delivered it in one single motion, slamming it down on the tormentor’s head, as Marty and I jumped back to avoid the spillage.

All to plan.

Perfection.

Except for one critical detail.

The bucket was not filled with water.

Let me leave to your imaginations what was in the bucket. Suffice it to say, it was stuffs readily available to any 17-year-old prep school student.

So, why is this tale relevant?

First: The law of unintended consequences.

All novels work on a few basic principles. As a writer, you take these characters that have stewed and fermented in your imagination – people that you have come to know and appreciate to the point that when you sit down at your typewriter (old days) or computer (modern world) they are seated right beside you – and you place them into circumstances where who they are, who they imagined themselves to be, and who they hoped they were are all elements that are immediately called into question. The good author sets all sorts of different forces – some physical, some psychological, some political – all to work, so that a concoction of conflict is created. Out of this volcanic mix comes something unexpected.

It can be a revelation about heart or soul. It can be a discovery about the real capacities one did not know they possessed. It can be about the real limits of existence, or the depths we are willing to travel. It can be about the adventure that fear presents to us. Many possible things.

Let us return then to The Bucket of Revenge.

There are many novelistic forces at work in this little tale. Obviously, one is revenge, which always seems like such a reasonable course of action until it actually manifests itself, at which point we discover that it says far more about who we are than the person against whom we are seeking retribution. We always imagine that revenge – as the Sicilians said, a dish best served cold – will be satisfying. But I would suggest that its appeal is more sharply limited than we anticipate. But the element of the story of the bucket and David and the obnoxious fellow that I would draw attention to is not the simple act of revenge. What really fueled that moment? Many powerful themes. Certainly, there was the first fairly puerile act by the obnoxious guy – maybe he went on to a cabinet level position in the Bush administration – but ultimately, that was mere hijinks. But it was preceded by all sorts of behaviors that were far more profound in their implications and violated many of the unwritten rules of prep school behavior, including the Cardinal Rule: Don’t get others into trouble unnecessarily because they are generally capable of getting themselves into trouble without any assistance from any outside source.

So, the bad guy here arrived at that moment with his own flaws intact.

But David, who right up the moment he swooped in was the good guy, enlisted his two friends in that nearly nuclear response. And therein lies the real impact in the act. He betrayed us. He counted upon our assuming that what he was going to do was commensurate with what had been done to him. He played upon our teenage senses of justice and fair play to set up his target. He relied on our past experience with this fellow to compensate for his escalation of slime and humiliation.

In other words: We were the one’s being lied to.

And in the end what do you suppose the outcome of The Bucket of Revenge was? The obnoxious target was the recipient of all sorts of sympathy from his dorm mates – even many whom he had teased, baited and tormented in the past – because he’d been subjected to a shock that outweighed his past transgressions. Regardless of how great a jerk he had been (and trust me, he was a real jerk) his status and reputation improved. He made new friends. His life became less isolated. He never had a problem finding people to sit with in the dining hall from that point onwards. And David? Well, he didn’t exactly lose Mary and I as friends, but he diminished our relationship. We never fully trusted him again in any context – especially that critical one where it was clear that to survive in that school one really needed people to share all the torments and turmoil that went along with being there.

So, the real victim of The Bucket of Revenge was our friendship.

And, while there is no bucket in my novel The Wrong Man every moment that took place all those years earlier finds its way into my story about love, obsession, madness and murder. Just transformed by the writer’s imagination.

One of the single most important things for any writer to understand, as they design plot, character and story is what the costs of action truly are. It is what gives depth and substance to the stories we tell. If this sounds like a layer of morality, then perhaps it is, but it is also a layer of psychology. Because, in all good writing, there is a price paid. And understanding that price should inform every page, indeed every sentence, we write.

This is where we find the seeds of creativity.

I’m going to read something that I wish I’d written. It is from Norman Maclean’s extraordinary work Young Men and Fire. I often cite this work when called upon to address groups because I consider it to be one of the finest opening paragraphs in modern literature. While it comes from a work of non-fiction, it has a novelist’s sensibility and quality of observation. While it lives in the world of journalism, it is constructed with a Dickensian rhythm.

The first sentence:

“In 1949 The smokejumpers were not far from their origins as parachute jumpers turned stunt performers dropping from the wings of planes at county fairs just for the hell of it plus a few dollars, less hospital expenses.”

The second sentence:

By this time, they were also sure they were the best firefighters in the United States Forest Service…”

And the final sentence:

“They were still so young they hadn’t learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy…”

What a wondrous, pitch perfect line.

The reason I read this paragraph is because I believe it displays something fundamental about the creative process. In a few short words, the author circumscribes the entire emotional context of his story. What Maclean does is let you know the stakes of the story he is going to tell, right at the start. Whatever flows from that point onwards has all the weight of emotion firmly on its shoulders. He goes far beyond merely stepping up, as an author, and saying Hey look at this, I think it’s interesting! Instead, what he does it let the reader know that something larger is playing out on the side of the Mann Gulch. It will be about hubris, about dedication, about man and nature and about the sense of tragedy that we all face one day or the next.

So, now a final story of my own, equally illustrative about the creative process.

A few years ago, when my father closed in on 80 years old, I realized that many folks, including biographers and documentary film makers had spent hours interviewing him about things he did in his legal career and in the government (back in the days when we sort of trusted our government to try to do the right thing for everyone, instead of just a few…). But there was a part of his life that he had never been called upon to discuss. At the age of 20, he and his crew had been shot down over Italy and he spent nearly 1000 days in a German POW camp. So, I began to ask him about that time. And, what I heard was about deprivation and fear and anxiety all coupled with this unsettled sense that they had been forgotten and that the most important moments of their lives, which might end at any second, were being frittered away in equal parts of boredom and terror. And, as we spoke, and as he finally acknowledged how formative those days in captivity were for him, I got to thinking, because it is one thing to be a son, and another to be a writer. And so, I asked him: In POW camp were there ever any crimes? And he responded, A few. Mostly petty theft. The Germans allowed us to discipline ourselves with quasi courts martial and such…

He said that and I saw, right then, right there: A murder. A Black flier – the only one in the camp – unjustly accused.

The next day I wrote: He had just awakened from the dream when the tunnel coming out from beneath hut 109 collapsed. It was just before dawn, and it had been raining hard off and on since midnight. It was the same dream as always, a dream about what had happened to him two years earlier, as close to being as real in the dream as real was, until the very end. In the dream he didn’t see the convoy. In the dream, he didn’t suggest turning and attacking. In the dream, they didn’t get shot down. And in the dream, no one died.

My father said something about his life years earlier. It resonated, and I imagined Tommy Hart, the protagonist of my novel Hart’s War. And in a few short words, I tell you what you will need to keep in mind throughout the next zillion pages: He lived while others died…

And therein lies a debt that needs to be paid.

This is the best thing about writing what folks call thrillers. I know that the simple things we take for granted in our day-to-day life – even if they occur within a POW camp – can be called into question. And if we are to find meaning in the words on a page, that meaning stems from the payment of that debt.

So, let me say this: In order to write books, even thrillers like I do, you don’t need to understand the criminal mind, even if People Magazine thinks this is a really good thing.

All you need is to understand yourself.

Of course, it helps significantly if you’ve managed to surround yourself for much of your life with psychopaths. That’s just an added benefit.

I’d like to end with a quote from Ernest Hemingway. There is a little-known statute written in federal law that requires all writers to quote Hemingway when giving a speech, and I certainly wouldn’t want to commit a felony here in my final few moments.

Right before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954, he was asked a question about writing fiction versus history and journalism. And he replied: “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense…”

Pithy words, no?

I hope you all recall what I said about truth-telling at the start of this talk. Or, as the great philosopher Stephen Colbert, calls it truthiness.

Alas, that quotation actually comes from, of all people Tom Clancy. A uniquely terrible writer.

It just sounds a lot better if I give it to Hemingway.