Some Lessons Strewn Along the Path to Becoming a Writer that Might Help Others. But…Might Not…
An Introduction… Or…
1. On Giving Questionable Advice to a Sincere Inquiry
One of the great disadvantages of getting older and attaining some sort of probably undeserved prominence in the profession of words, is that I frequently get asked for writing advice.
Especially, the Big Question:
“How do I become a writer like you?”
I stare at the inquisitor, and this instantly goes through my head:
So, you want to become a writer?
You feel like you have something to say, and inside you there is the plot and characters and adequate prose skills to say it?
You want to become a writer like I am?
Flattering…
But…
Well, frankly I don’t want anyone to become a writer like me. The questioner should become a writer like themselves. While this sounds simplistic, it unfortunately is not. It requires a significant library of self-knowledge, the armor of self-confidence and a dollop of suck-it-in, take a deep breath, have no fear, charge up the hill, don’t look back, don’t look to the side, and don’t even look forward determination. One needs to be fully equipped with valuable heartfelt cliches: Keep your eye on the ball. Nose to the grindstone. That sort of hoary advice. My first agent once told me – after my first novel was summarily rejected by several large publishing houses – “Publishing is a hard road. The faint of heart fall by the wayside.” Accurate. Truthful. That said, I have learned that the initial crucial qualities necessary to become a writer are found in the answers to some mundane, but difficult questions.
Starting with:
Do you own the innate ability to sit by yourself alone in a room staring at a blank piece of paper, an empty notebook, or a vacant computer screen for hours, days, weeks, and months on end while all the many characters you have in your head shout commands, recommendations and desires – do this! Do that! Put me right here… no, that doesn’t work, how about over there…?
Followed by:
Can you not talk to anyone about all your doubts about what you are doing?
(We will exclude the two categories of folks you can talk to: 1) People who genuinely love you and will support your efforts with enthusiasm, even if they secretly believe you are certifiably crazy to even attempt to write a novel. 2) Your therapist, because he/she is probably clever enough to keep their mouths shut and their opinions to themselves. But not your priest. Let’s exclude him because even the friendliest, most empathetic priests like to give directions and more suggestions are precisely what you don’t need. Although admittedly prayer can’t hurt, and heavenly intervention is frequently welcome.)
And including:
Can you take every bit of advice you might get from your overly well-intentioned writing group or your wildly irritating know-it-all brother-in-law or your clearly nutcase right-wing neighbor who thinks the only real writer is the late Tom Clancy — and assess it for what it really is, which is probably utterly wrong, doesn’t connect to your plot, your characters or the direction your book is traveling and very likely sadly unhelpful. And can you cavalierly reject it all — while understanding that maybe, just maybe, all that advice just might have some small bit of a crucial idea lingering concealed inside lots of useless dreck and your job is to find it?
And finally:
Can you do all this without losing your mind, your friends, your family, and all hope?
If you can answer yes…
… Well, then you have a beginning.
But that is not how I generally answer the wannabe writer’s utterly sincere “how do I become a writer like you?” question.
I usually respond with the glib and undoubtedly out of left field reply:
“Join the Marines.”
This invariably draws a confused, and somewhat nervous look on the face of Mr. or Ms. I want to be a writer. So, I continue, usually speaking in a self-assured rush:
“Well, in addition to fighting many successful battles against a variety of enemies, the Marines have produced wonderful writers over the entirety of their existence. Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow and E.B. Sledge’s With the Old Breed on Peleliu and Okinawa were extraordinary works and were the basis for the HBO series The Pacific. The producers probably read William Manchester’s brilliant Goodbye, Darkness too. And Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War is a well-deserved classic of his experiences in Vietnam and Michael Norman’s These Good Men is also extraordinary in the same arena. But I’ve only scratched the Marine Corps surface with these titles. There’s Anthony Swofford’s Jarhead and Karl Marlantes’ deeply moving Matterhorn. And I still have my dog-eared copy of James Webb’s Fields of Fire that I eagerly read forty years ago. And I defy anyone to absorb Phil Klay’s Redeployment without being inspired…”
This soliloquy makes some would-be writers unhappy. I often add a slight practical admonition:
“The trick, or course, as any ex-marine will tell you, is, in order to write so evocatively and passionately about your experiences, you need to stay alive.”
This statement generates uncomfortable laughter – in the is he serious? vein.
I am.
There are legitimate alternatives to this, of course. If the United States Marine Corps is not a possibility, well, how about the Peace Corps? Or The U.S. Forest Service (see MacLean, Norman and A River Runs Through It). Or your local police force. Or the Fire Department (consider Dennis Smith’s heartfelt Report from Engine Company No. 82.). Teach for America? Good idea. A variation on the late and quite great Pat Conroy’s The Water is Wide. Emotional challenges can help, as well, and can prove to be a viable marine corps substitute: A messy divorce. An abusive spouse. A relentless bully. A racist parent. A battle with schizophrenia or some other mental breakdown. Or cancer. Or suicide. Or prep school (thank you, J.D. Salinger and John Knowles).
The point is: learn to translate. From what you see and experience in the world around you into prose. And prose into a story. Then a story into a book.
In my case, my real education – at least the largest part of my education that helped form me as a writer — stemmed from working on newspapers. There’s a cliché that every newspaper reporter has a novel in the bottom drawer of his desk. In my case, that novel wasn’t in the drawer of my desk. It was in my head. The question for me was how to pry it out.
2. How I got Started
When I graduated from Bard College in 1972 (once home to Herb Ritts, the late, deservedly famous photographer, Becker and Fagen of Steely Dan, Chevy Chase, the actor and so many others…) equipped with an English Lit degree, much encouragement from wonderful faculty who believed more in my story-telling skills than I did, hope and enthusiasm barely mitigated by a subterranean nasty sense of lurking reality, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I just didn’t know how.
I wasn’t much good at anything else. Professional sports were way beyond reach. Not big enough or fast enough or strong enough, despite my clumsy eagerness. I considered alternatives: Did the world really need another lawyer? I sadly very nearly flunked my 9th grade science class, which soured me on anything that had to do with chemicals and formulas, an important consideration for medicine as a profession. Architecture? Philosophy? Academics? I was incompetent at drawing a straight line, or thinking deeply about matters, and studying a single subject compulsively. So, forget all those. Not good with my hands, so construction was out. Race car driver? I often sped about in a little two-seat Triumph TR3 sportscar, but that wasn’t the same thing. Dog catcher? I liked dogs, but… well, I could find a good, handy reason not to pursue any of these worthy careers.
I also knew I didn’t know anything.
Not yet.
Well, perhaps that’s an exaggeration. I certainly knew a great deal about Hemingway, Dickens and Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Kazantzakis, was well acquainted with Shakespeare and Yeats and had a passing engagement with Borges and Cervantes, Mark Twain, and Tolstoy. But what I didn’t know was how I would perceive the way the world truly worked.
In other words, I was well-equipped for interpreting how others far more famous and accomplished than I would ever be had interpreted the world around them.
But being a writer means connecting electrically and enthusiastically to the present (even if one wants to write a book set in, say 1300 A.D. Better have a reliable, modern sensibility on hand because you will need it).
I briefly considered graduate school – but really that was simply more of the same that I’d just absorbed through four undergraduate years. And, even if those were wondrously fascinating years – roiled by Vietnam, Civil Rights, street demonstrations, tear gas, the only rock and roll that meant anything (Beatles, Stones, Grateful Dead. Jefferson Airplane, Cream, Led Zeppelin, Little Feat, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and many others), the sexual revolution (thank goodness for that), long hair, paisley and tie-dyed tee-shirts and bell-bottomed pants (foolish, to the max), some drugs, some beer, some heartbreak – I still knew little about what I would call the underbelly of life, which is where most good novels are found, milling about, waiting for someone to take note of them. (Like in the Marines or witnessing that messy divorce).
So: I asked myself a simple question:
Where could I learn about the world, write some stuff, and actually get paid for it?
One answer:
Newspapers.
I subsequently found myself at the Trenton Times in Trenton, New Jersey. Trenton is a blue-collar town, which wears its grit proudly. It is both the state capital and what the Mafia used to call an “open” city, meaning members of different mob families could conspire to make money together instead of merely killing each other. It had a large, aging, overcrowded and frightening maximum security state prison – I got to know Reuben “Hurricane” Carter well before he was made famous by Bob Dylan– and an infamous mental hospital which had a wonderfully eerie name: The Vroom Building. Also, a highly respected school for the deaf. Trenton, with its salt of the earth qualities – it sports a famous sign on the railroad bridge crossing the Delaware River from Pennsylvania: Trenton Makes, The World Takes — was perhaps twenty miles from the rarified air of Princeton (famous university, Albert Einstein and Toni Morrison and endless squads of graduating white folks destined for Wall Street and investment banking and/or easy time in federal penitentiaries). When I arrived at the newspaper – assigned to the night city desk (basically 7 p.m. until 3…4…5 a.m. depending on just what was happening) and enjoying the princely salary of $110 per week — it had a daily circulation of perhaps 50,000 readers and on Sundays crept towards 75,000. It also had a remarkable staff. My fellow reporters in the overly bright, cavernous Times newsroom – harshly lit so it always seemed like daytime — always grimy – newsprint and piles of stray trash from abandoned scrap paper everywhere — always loud, because the phones rang constantly and most editors learn swiftly that in order to get a point across on deadline, they better speak forcefully — went on to win multiple Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, write bestsellers, become crusading editorial chiefs at major newspapers, beloved editors, accomplished university professors and distinguished documentarians.
We out-did each other on a routine basis.
It was where I – and others – learned how to write direct sentences (a skill I might have lost) with an anxious boss lurking over my shoulder insisting “Now, now, hurry!”
I never loved Trenton the way I would come to love Miami (my next stint in the newspaper world). But Trenton had a way of providing a young and very naïve journalist with an interesting undergrad education. Not the sort of education one finds on a leafy, ivy-strewn college campus. I covered bloody riots and violent prison breaks, multiple murders, and hoity-toity town meetings where civilized discussions over dog-leash laws threatened to spill over into fist fights. It was where I stood beside my first dead body, alongside jaded homicide detectives. I was the first reporter allowed into the forensic wing of that state hospital for the criminally insane, where I looked down through iron bars at the deeply drugged, barely conscious form of one of New Jersey’s most notorious mass killers. Trenton was where I first heard some up-and-coming rocker from the Jersey shore perform. I was in the third row for the show that Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band gave in the stately Trenton War Memorial Auditorium — a venue that packed in an intimate 1800 people. I can still see him and the late Clarence Cleamons dancing on stage to the astonishing crescendo of Rosalita. Trenton was where I got to ask a New Jersey politician sentenced to prison for bribery and corruption if he was afraid that he would be raped when he went behind bars. (I have a picture of myself, note-book in hand, asking the pol that very question. I look energized and embracing a certain devil-may-care youthful rudeness. He looks, well, upset). Trenton was a wondrous mix of earthy and outrageous. All of us young writers reveled in it, at the same time we hoped there were bigger, better places and more important stories on our horizons.
In Trenton I also received a harsh lesson about life and work that nearly stifled me, but which, when I look back, probably helped me, as painful as it was when it happened.
There was one editor who hated me.
I never knew exactly why. He just didn’t like me. Maybe my hair was too long. Maybe it was that I came from a family of accomplishment. Maybe he didn’t like the fast car I drove, or the cocky attitude I sometimes (unfortunately) adopted. He kept his reasons to himself.
And I was too young and far too stupid to realize that he might take his dislike to another level. Which he did, patiently waiting and eventually making sure I stumbled over an assignment – a truly nothing and relatively unimportant assignment. I should have recognized that the assignment wasn’t the real agenda. Making sure I screwed something up, was. But then, as I said, I was young and stupid and add in blissfully unwitting – right up to the moment he summarily fired me.
I never saw the trap he set for me.
He told me I was only capable of writing the weather ear.
The weather ear is the little box at the top of the front page that states, for example: Cloudy Today. Rainy Tomorrow.
I suppose – and this is a supposition cloaked in absolute sarcasm – that he hadn’t noticed my many front-page stories.
They made no difference. He was functioning out of some need that I was too naïve to recognize.
And to underscore that – and his hypocrisy – when I exited to the Trenton Times parking lot, a cardboard box of belongings in hand, ashamed, depressed, angry, frustrated and feeling very much as if I was a total failure and would never make it as a writer of any sort and very nearly in tears, he followed me out and privately offered to write me a nice recommendation for whatever subsequent newspaper job I might try to get. Clinging to what little integrity I had remaining, I told him no thanks. I believe I punctuated it with a disbelieving stare and an obscenity or two. Sotto voce of course.
I like to think that my subsequent career proved him wrong.
For many years, I bore a grudge. I wanted to find some sort of revenge. It took me some time to realize that what I was doing was the revenge. With every new book, I allowed myself the fantasy that he read it, grinding his teeth.
I’d like to report that that editor’s career took a nosedive. That he ended up alone and afraid, destitute, and unloved, struggling with some common disease, like alcoholism or something exotic, like beriberi. That wasn’t the case. He was elevated to a top position at the paper, then went on to head up marketing at an Atlantic City casino (presumably creating plans for how the casino could attract more customers and take the money that those customers couldn’t afford to lose.) Knowing him, I suspect he did quite well at that and made piles of money for the casino and himself.
That weather ear comment truly got refuted a couple of years after I was fired – when after a stint at the Miami News, I was at the Miami Herald, which was then one of the largest and arguably best newspapers in the entire USA. That editor’s assistant at the Trenton Times asked my executive editor who are your best reporter/writers? And he heard the reply, well Edna Buchanan (Pulitzer Prize winning crime reporter) and Carl Hiaasen (features and columnist who became both a bestselling author and an occasional fly-fishing partner both of whom occupied desks adjacent to my own) … and yours truly. It was reliably reported to me that when that assistant heard my name he visibly gulped.
Delightful. And an admittedly small-minded and petty reaction on my part. But satisfying, nevertheless.
And, looking back, I realized that I’d rather painfully learned an important raw lesson at a very young age from that obsessed editor: Life isn’t fair. And don’t expect it to be.
And that simple, decidedly obvious but often forgotten quality is an element I’ve eagerly installed on many pages and often beats within the soul of my characters and their stories. If those characters want to succeed in my novels, they are going to have to pay a price. But a far better lesson I took away from being humiliated and fired was this:
Adversity can be many things and cloaked in many disguises:
A hurdle.
A challenge.
A threat.
But overcoming it can be a catapult to better things.
And there is nothing like a harsh failure to become your engine.
An engine I’ve used throughout much of my fictions.
Maybe not the most psychologically sophisticated lessons to learn, but valuable ones.
I suspect, in a way, I should be grateful to that editor who fired me, because what he unwittingly did was set me up to head towards where I got my graduate school education in writing. I think he thought – for whatever nasty and petty reason he concealed – that he was tossing a grenade into my aspirations. Instead, he launched me in the best possible direction.
South. Towards Miami.
That city was where the stories I covered as a reporter took root within me and where I took the first strides necessary to turn myself from reporter into the writer I became.
Being in Miami was where I learned another of the most critical lessons on the path to becoming a novelist:
Think of the world you see every day, on every assignment, in every conversation, in every relationship, as a stage play exclusively being performed for your benefit.
Stage play? Like actors and sets and sometimes singing and dancing and sometimes showing anger and occasionally despair. Like in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and “Stella!” What are you saying? I don’t get it. Exactly, what do you mean by a stage play?
When we go to the theater, we are watching performers tell a story that is designed to speak directly and profoundly to our shared experiences, our own histories, our understanding of our surroundings. The play seeks to find a psychological commonality in both drama and comedy. Like a symphony, it desires to play chords within us so that at the same time we laugh or cry or sit fascinated, we identify with what is occurring on the stage and that is how it gets its message across. This is true for Sophocles, Shakespeare, or Stoppard. It is how we take that momentary recognition about what is unfolding before us and translate it into our own story at the same time we are being entertained. That act of translation is what a good writer develops. It may start out as innate – but every successful author I know continues to work hard at it. Like sharpening a knife blade to razor perfection.
When I arrived in Miami in the mid 1970’s, the Miami Vice world of drugs and flash and death was just taking root. Mariel and the boatlift were on the horizon. So was smoke over Liberty City and the MacDuffie riots and the infamous Time Magazine “Paradise Lost” cover. Gary Hart and Monkey Business were out there, waiting. So was Ted Bundy.
It was a place where the extraordinary was commonplace. There were moments everywhere. Moments of violence and cruelty. Moments of beauty and poetry.
It was a wonderful place to be a young reporter. Miami breathed stories. It was filled with the unusual, the bizarre, the corrupt, the terrifying, the good and the bad, the elegant and the awful. All the elements that I learned later would make up a good novel. I knew within days of my arrival in Miami that it was an exceptional place to study. An advanced degree in life. Both the light and the dark were constantly on display — which are the shades that all writers need to be able to see.
Here are three illustrations. They are, in part, about my failure to measure what was right in front of me when they occurred and I first witnessed them, but which contained truths that I later recognized and eagerly processed into my novels.
STORY #1: The Young Woman Who Chose Not to Be a Victim.
This story has haunted me for years.
I was covering the criminal courts in Miami for the Herald – an assignment I deeply loved. It did many things for me. One – it gave me independence. No editor was leaning over my shoulder telling me what to cover or what to write, so I was free to pick and choose the stories I would tell. Two – the world of the courthouse immersed me in daily contact with dedicated prosecutors and worldly detectives, brutal murderers, sociopathic drug dealers and assorted other evil folks and their determined defense attorneys. I went to crime scenes and medical examiners’ offices. I literally traveled from crime to crime, picking up all the psychological crumbs of good guys and bad guys that were littered along the way.
Many cases stood out. For many reasons. Unique character. Savagery. Forensic advances. Compelling personal stories.
This story quietly included much of those.
At first glance, it was a typical South Florida misadventure, routine for that era. Blood-soaked. Terrible.
A young woman and her fiancé, both from the Midwest, came to Miami on a pre-marriage vacation. Typical sun and fun seekers. Instead, they were carjacked, trussed up, thrown in the car trunk, and driven to the Upper Keys by a pair of low-life killers. They all ended up in an empty and abandoned spot not far from where the tangled tropical swamp forest of the Everglades reaches down towards the clear azure waters of the Gulf. The young man was robbed and shot to death. The young woman was beaten and raped and left to die alone beneath the unrelenting South Florida sunshine. The two killers didn’t get far before they were caught, driving a stolen car with rental plates, and police found the young woman barely alive and rushed her to a hospital. Against the odds, she lived.
As a crime, it was awful. Despicable. It was the type of crime that demanded words like “brutal” and “savage” which never captured even an iota of the truth about that event.
In many locations, in many newspapers or on the evening news, it would have screamed. Not in Miami, not then, in the early 1980s. It was the most ordinary violence. Just another typically evil occurrence in a world daily filled with them. At the newspaper, we’d become somewhat jaded to them all.
A year or so after their arrests, the two killers were put on trial in Miami, facing first-degree murder charges and looking at the death penalty in a courtroom with an excessively religious, very Old Testament eye-for-an-eye judge famous throughout the Metro Justice Building for cheerfully sending convicted people to Death Row with a quote or two from the Bible.
They were an unremarkable pair. Just a couple of men who didn’t care much about their lives or other’s lives. Swarthy, bad tattoos and motorcycles. Mud-crawling psychopaths. Their inevitable convictions and sentences would barely gain six column inches on page B-3 of the Herald because we were inundated with crimes, and each one seemed worse than the one we covered the day before.
They weren’t what drew me to the story.
It was the young woman who survived.
She had traveled back to Miami from her parents’ home in the heartland to testify against the two killers. Her father accompanied her.
I spoke with the two of them at length in the hallway outside the judge’s chambers. She had testified – in explicit, excruciating detail – about what happened to her. Every awful second. Her voice never faltered. Direct. Composed. Determined.
What I remember to this day is her smile. The cliché is “angelic.” In this situation it was categorically true. She was very pretty, filled with youth that danced through her eyes. The way she brushed her deep, brown hair back from her forehead seemed musical. It seemed the most profound contradiction: she was young, filled with hope, vibrant and beautiful. What had happened to her was beyond ugly. It should have crippled her. It didn’t. She never stumbled, never hesitated, as she recited her nightmare from the witness stand to the jury, or when she underwent cross-examination by two defense attorneys. Nor did she when she spoke to me. Honesty dripped from every word. The re-telling seemed a catharsis, a way of expunging demon memory.
I went back to the Herald newsroom that evening and spoke with the city editor – a man I respected deeply, not only for his skill with words, but his ability to sense a story that would rivet readers of the next edition. But on this occasion, he was reluctant. “Just another terrible story,” he said. “A couple of losers and an unlucky couple. And none are even from Florida. Nothing local, except the crime. So, what makes it special?”
And that question was where I failed.
I couldn’t explain to the editor what I saw.
What made it special was that smile.
That smile reflected the extraordinary inner strength it took to leave behind the place where she was safe and attempting to recover to return to the city where the unspeakable had happened to her and point her finger at the men who had delivered that nightmare.
I just couldn’t articulate all that. I couldn’t explain that she alone had turned something that few could survive into a lesson for many others. Our heroes are usually drawn from the typical. They are what we expect: Soldiers who brave the enemy. First responders who ignore flames. Policemen who face down gun-wielding threats. Sailors who battle overwhelming seas. But she went far beyond all of them.
Over the years, I’ve witnessed many acts of integrity and bravery.
But none as powerful as that young woman’s.
I got a small story into the paper. It went deep inside and to me shouted inadequate. I managed to get nothing into words that captured what she had accomplished. That was my job, and my responsibility. There aren’t any medals for what she achieved, but there should be.
I’ve remembered that young woman’s smile for years. Unforgettable.
But truly what I recalled was the fortitude that it took, for her to rise, take a witness stand, place her hand on the Bible and tell a jury of strangers the truth, reciting the facts of the worst moments anyone could imagine. Then to follow that moment by repeating words fearlessly to a young reporter with a notepad.
She deserved to have her act of bravery on the front page.
I should have persuaded that editor that there was no story in the next day’s paper nearly as important. She refused to be a victim, to let all that had happened ruin her future. This was a poem that would sing to many.
It was what I should have captured. I didn’t. I regret it.
But I saw it. And for years, I remembered it.
So, decades later, when I had a character on the page in front of me confronting a similar evil, what I pictured was that young woman, and what I installed in my character was what she displayed all those many years ago.
And, parenthetically, in case you were wondering, those two bottom dwellers were duly convicted thanks to her testimony and sentenced to die in the electric chair. I don’t know that they ever arrived in that small death chamber and felt the fear caused by leather straps tightening around their legs, arms, and heads as they were locked into the device nicknamed Ol’ Sparky.’ Maybe. Maybe not. The justice system gears grind slowly and often inefficiently. And maybe they changed some, post-crime, post-arrest, and post-conviction, found Jesus or Allah, or turned to education and improved themselves, became better people and after years could argue that they no longer deserved to die at the state’s hands. Maybe no one does. That is a question for students of the law and philosophers of justice. But they did suffer one lousy fate: their stories were miniscule. Microscopic. They became nobodies. And they became truly irrelevant. But the young woman they harmed did not. The day she told the jury what happened to her and told me the same she laid claim to an astonishing significance. I hope she had a satisfying life, not plagued by the history of that one awful day. I hope that the people who surrounded her understood her bravery and shared in it, and celebrated it the same way I did, when I used it in a novel. Her smile remains alive, at least in my memory. And will always.
STORY #2: “I Didn’t Do it…”
When I recall this story, I am ashamed.
But it was extremely valuable.
The first thing I remember is the Miami summer heat.
It is alive. Like a vine, it crawls around your body. Like a virus, it slides into your core. Like a weight, it presses on your head, your shoulders and chest, and invades every muscle.
The dust in the front of the small cinderblock house seemed to cling to every step I took, slowing me like deep sand on a beach or thick mud beside a farmer’s field.
It was where my interview waited for me.
Never underestimate the heat in Miami. It is an unfriendly companion many months of the year. It always seemed particularly cruel, almost vicious, sadistic, in the parts of the city that were predominately occupied by Black folks: Overtown and Liberty City. The part of the city where air conditioning was a luxury, and the sun was blistering. Soon enough, these neighborhoods would become the locations for terrible riots and dominate news cycles for days. Smoke from burned out buildings would linger in the still city air for hours. But that was a different story than the story I was seeking that day.
The day before, I had received a call from a young public defender I knew.
“I have a client charged with assault and robbery and he’s innocent. The case against him is unbelievably flimsy – a single eyewitness out on the street and his identification was shaky…”
“What about the assault?” I asked.
“A night watchman. Knocked unconscious from behind. Never saw what hit him.”
“And that eyewitness?”
“He thought he recognized my client running down the street. It was night. Not much light.”
“Did the police recover any of the stolen items?”
“Not in my client’s possession.”
And then the kicker. The public defender paused and added:
“My guy – he’s an all-city football player. He’s on the honor roll at his high school. He’s got a chance for a scholarship. Lives in a stable home being raised by his grandparents. Nice kid. But if he gets convicted…”
He was describing a young man at the cliched crossroads. A conviction would put him on a trail very difficult to step off.
The public defender then played the trump card.
“… And he didn’t confess when the cops questioned him. Hours in holding. Hours in a room with detectives. And he never wavered. Never broke down. Just kept saying he didn’t commit the crime, no matter how hard they questioned him…”
Another pause, then:
“You know how rare that is? Guys confess all the time. Sometimes to crimes they didn’t commit, just to get the questioning to stop.”
I knew that was true.
And I knew how intimidating “questioning” could be. Veteran detectives are extremely psychologically skilled. They can pull cords within the most practiced criminals The best detectives can even elicit incriminating statements from the mouths of true sociopaths. Most young people – especially Black, Hispanic, or other ethnic minorities – have little chance and are worn down swiftly and effectively – often because when they sit in that seat in a small room, they know they are guilty. And I also knew how occasionally “questioning” spilled over into threats and physical responses.
This case seemed genuinely different.
“So, what are you looking for?” I asked the public defender.
“A story in the Herald would go a long way towards saving this kid. He’s got a future,” the public defender said confidently. “Go talk to him. You’ll see for yourself.”
One of the things I learned in the world of crime:
Just about everyone is guilty.
It might not be provable to a jury. Defense lawyers are skilled. Public defenders like the one that called me are exceptionally capable. But someone being arrested and charged when they were genuinely innocent – a rarity. Happens. But not often. But when it does, it instantly reflects the totality of the problems not only inherent within the justice system, but in racial inequality and the social dilemmas that are epidemic in the USA. Poor versus rich.
In other words:
A good story.
The kind of story that would land on the front page and be the topic of conversation at breakfast tables the next day.
The teenager met me at the door. The young public defender was behind him, as was his grandmother. I was led into a most modest house – especially by the oversized standards that Miami has, where every home seemed to aspire to be Tony Montana’s mansion in Scarface. There was a picture of Jesus on one wall. Some framed family photographs. A threadbare couch and chairs. An ancient wall air conditioner labored to pump out some cool breeze. Unsuccessfully. A television set was in the corner. The first thing the young man said was:
“I didn’t do it.”
“So, why do you think that witness picked you out.”
“White guy. And we all look the same,” he said. Just the first edge of anger. But an anger based in truth.
Then the teenager started to pull out documents and pictures. A pee-wee football team where he starred. His All-City certification from the prior year’s high school season. His grade transcripts, showing a few A’s and B’s and some C’s. Just enough to raise him to the “honor roll” at his inner-city high school. He also displayed his ACT score that would qualify him for a scholarship. Some written recommendations from teachers. A testimonial from his coach. From the side of the room, the grandmother sat quietly. Every time the teenager hesitated, the public defender reminded him of some other positive statement and that picture or paper was dutifully produced.
In all this time, the young man seemed to grow the oddest combination – half-bored with listing his achievements, half-angry that he needed to do so. Sullen. Not expressive. Almost as if he was put off by having to answer my questions. I asked him where he was the night in question.
“Hanging with friends,” he said.
At one a.m.? Sure.
“They’ll testify to that,” said his attorney.
Not much of an alibi, I thought. Maybe those “friends” were along on the robbery and just not seen by the witness.
The interview went on a little longer. I could see his restlessness.
I stood up.
“You going to write it up?” he asked.
Angry. And demanding.
“I’ll see what my editor says,” I replied.
That was an excuse.
The teenager’s eyes flashed. It was almost as if I could smell a small scent of growing rage in the stifling room.
“He told me you would. I’m innocent.” He gestured at the public defender.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said. Non-committal.
The words: White reporter. Suit and tie. Privileged and Establishment. Black teenager. Poverty and Anger were never spoken, throughout the interview. But they were echoing in every question I asked and every response he made.
The white-black tensions in Miami back then were everywhere.
And they dominated that small room where we spoke.
Resentment made sense.
I went back to my car. He followed me out. He didn’t say anything, but I could see frustration and fury lurking behind his eyes. I gave him a wave and drove off.
My first thought.
He’s lying. He did it.
My second thought:
No, he didn’t.
And a third thought:
I’m not sure. One way or the other.
The case was – just as the public defender said – flimsy to the extreme. The pictures and documents that the teenager displayed demonstrated a simple truth: He did have an opportunity. A conviction, even a plea to a lesser, would derail that. And what I saw as I returned to the Herald offices was that I was trapped between perceptions. History, guilt, and uncertainty passed beneath the wheels of the car.
At my desk, I called the prosecutor assigned the case.
The prosecutor – almost a carbon copy of the young public defender — readily conceded how shaky the case was. “But the detectives are sure. That’s why he’s charged. No evidence, really, but they’re sure he’s the guy.”
They’re always sure, I thought. Until they’re not.
I hung up and went to the city editor.
“Got the story?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Kid is innocent?”
“Maybe. Probably. Good chance he won’t be convicted.”
“That’s a rarity.”
“No kidding.”
We both knew the value in the story. It wasn’t exactly ‘good news’ but it would be seen as promoting fairness in the newspaper to a community that didn’t believe we could ever be fair.
Just as in that teenager’s house, the words Black and White weren’t spoken. But they resonated.
“Write it as straight forward as you can,” he said.
I did.
Like I thought, it went on the front page.
But I went to bed that night thinking I’d done something wrong. Or I’d done something right. Doubts on both counts filled me.
The story had precisely the impact both the public defender, the prosecutor and I knew it would have. It torpedoed the case. They offered the teenager a plea to a significantly lesser charge. He turned it down. He was right to do that because they subsequently dropped the charges against him before a jury could be seated. A single shaky eyewitness and little forensic evidence simply wasn’t enough for a conviction.
And remember: no confession.
Not even the slightest admission of guilt.
A complete unicorn unlikelihood.
That young man walked out of the courthouse free. Smiling. The luckiest of teenagers.
I knew that the story I wrote had an out-sized impact on the case. And that bothered me. I tried to dismiss my concerns. I justified it to myself by believing I’d helped a young man dodge the sort of bullet that would derail his life before it had even started. Thanks to me, he had a chance at a future. I told myself that was a reward I should respect.
Some six months later, I got a call from a Miami detective.
“You remember that teenager you wrote about? The one that walked?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“Well, he’s in interrogation now. Same kind of crime. Same M.O. exactly. Only this time he had a semi-automatic and he shot the watchman. We’ve got him and his two buddies…”
The alibi witnesses from six months earlier.
“… And we’ve got them with the stuff they stole and the gun they used.”
I didn’t know what to say.
The detective did.
“He won’t be walking away from this one.”
Then he added, cynically:
“I guess you’re not going to write this story up.”
I didn’t.
But for years I thought about that teenager. I tried to sort through my misgivings. And I examined the trap that race puts us in. All sorts of elements on display.
And I used it.
Those same words: “I didn’t do it…” became the cornerstone of a novel. A book that blended race and misguided perceptions and guilt and murder together into a concoction of mystery. The sort of story that landed on bestseller lists and had Hollywood come calling.
So, I suppose, I owe a good deal to what I heard that oppressively hot day in Miami. It just doesn’t feel like a debt I want to carry.
STORY #3: Someone Who Wouldn’t Use What They’d Been Taught.
This is a shorter courtroom tale. But it contained a moment where I saw one thing, and then later realized it was another, very different thing. This discovery of a misreading of a situation and a misunderstanding of motivation are qualities that energize many of my – and many other author’s — books. You can find it is many of my characters, from the most famous to the most obscure. I frequently think that mistakes we see and mistakes we ourselves make become part of the fuel for subsequent fiction.
In the Metro Justice Building in Miami, where the state of Florida’s criminal trials take place, some of the older courtrooms have this odd behind opaque panels offset lighting, which gives the room a weak, yellowish glare and makes what was already verging on the surreal appear even more so. The glow could make witnesses on the stand seem pale and sickly, weakening their testimony and make defendants project to a jury with even more hang-dog guilt. It is almost eerie. Not in an Edgar Allen Poe or Stephen King sense. More something out of 1950’s science fiction. Otherworldly.
This was not a special case.
A murder. First-degree. Stemming from a domestic dispute.
In the over-heated world of Miami crime, nothing particularly special. The victim knew her killer. A jilted lover, he’d arrived at her apartment angry and carrying a gun, with distinctly bad intentions. An eyewitness saw him fleeing the apartment they once shared. Close-up and unmistakable. Cops found the killer with the weapon not long after the murder. Open and shut. In fact, it should have resulted in a plea, but the defendant had demanded a trial. The hope was that his court-appointed attorney could make some inroads in the state’s case, just enough to gain a second-degree conviction. Big difference between first and second. First was felony murder. Second, under Florida law, allowed for heat of the moment, rash decisions. First held a mandatory 25-year prison term and always had the specter of the death penalty lurking over it. Second, even with a “life sentence,” meant the convicted person would be eligible for parole some 20 years down the line. So, it wasn’t unusual for the accused to try to make a play for that lower quality of murder when it wasn’t initially offered up by an over-worked prosecutor with a half-dozen more complicated cases on his desk, too much paperwork and too many scheduled court appearances. And, like everything in the justice system, this was a gamble that sometimes worked. Sometimes didn’t. But well worth trying.
But it wasn’t the crime that got me to the courtroom.
It was the eyewitness.
A neighbor.
A friend of the victim.
And completely deaf.
She didn’t hear the angry voices. She didn’t hear the tumult, shouts, screams, broken glass, and the blows from their fight. She didn’t hear the gunshot. But what she saw was the killer, fleeing.
Gun in hand.
Close-up recognition. Unmistakable.
She was the state’s main witness.
Prosecutors probably had enough to convict the defendant with the forensics and the police capture. But she was a rare element. Unshakable. Determined. Unerringly accurate.
A perfect witness – save for one detail.
Her deafness.
And that was why I was in the courtroom.
When she took the stand, it would be different.
There was an ASL interpreter there to assist. But the woman disdained much of the interpreter’s assistance. She wore bulky, visible, mostly useless aids in both ears, striving to hear the words spoken by the attorneys and the judge. The only times she turned to the ASL person was those moments when she was in doubt about what she’d been asked. I could see her intensity as she read lips as much as possible.
But even with her disability, her determination was crystalline.
She glared at the defendant as she placed her hand on the Bible. The Bailiff spoke the familiar words, “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?” She read his lips easily.
But when she had to respond, “I do,” it was the first time her voice sounded in the courtroom.
The sound was unique.
Unmodulated. Scratchy. Like nails across a blackboard.
The prosecutor rose and started to lead her through the events of the murder night and what she’d witnessed.
Only occasionally did she glance at the ASL interpreter for help.
Instead, she faced the killer with an unrelenting scowl.
“Is the man you saw that night in the courtroom?”
“Yes! There!”
And she pointed. Without hesitation.
She then directed her testimony towards the men and women of the jury – just as she’d been instructed to, and like every good witness.
But every word she spoke seemed like a battle.
It was as if each word was being ripped reluctantly from some harsh rough spot within, scraped and dragged. Screeched and hoarse. Loud one instant, then barely audible the next, as she tried to control her emotions and the noises coming through her lips.
It was an incredible performance.
The witness wanted to have her say. She wanted to tell what she saw. She wanted to stand up for her murdered friend. She wanted to do what was right, not just for herself and for society, but what she owed that friendship.
The words, however, were scorched and torn. Every sound she was determined to make seemed more scratched and wrung dry.
People born deaf have understandable difficulty regulating tones and giving shape to words if/when they try to speak. It is the sort of problem that hearing folk often fail to appreciate. Since we are born, we are sensitive to variations in tone and the nuances of sound. Take that away and it is easy to see the challenges faced by people who are hearing impaired.
The courtroom isn’t a place, however, where disability is welcomed. It would have been significantly easier for the woman witness to use that interpreter. To sign with her hands a description of everything she saw the night her friend died and have that interpreter speak on her behalf. That, however, wasn’t what she wanted.
Her accusations belonged to her and her alone.
Thankfully, her cross-examination was short. It made little sense for the defendant’s attorney to attack someone so positive – and who the lawyer could see had already won the jury’s admiration.
And mine, too.
That was the thrust of the story in the next day’s newspaper.
I carefully described just how painful her “voice” had resounded in the courtroom. I used every word I could find to capture the awkwardness of every sound she made.
Front page.
Like I suspected, a story that captured attention.
And I was totally taken aback when the prosecutor called me shortly after he’d won that first-degree murder conviction and told me how much his prize witness had detested every word I wrote.
She hated the description of her voice.
I stammered back the usual excuse to the prosecutor. What I wrote was completely accurate. He didn’t disagree. He just said she hated it.
I said I was sorry without apologizing.
And went on to the next story.
I just didn’t forget that moment. It stuck in my craw for years. It wasn’t that I wanted to please anyone, especially the witness. It wasn’t that it was inaccurate because it wasn’t. I had done nothing wrong.
It took me many years to realize the opposite.
Everything I’d done was wrong.
I hadn’t understood the strength it took for her to expose her disability and overcome prejudice to see justice done. I’d focused on the unique character of the moment and the near caterwauling cat-swung-by-a-tail noises she’d made. It made for compelling reading in the newspaper. But what I’d missed was the internal struggle and the determination she’d displayed. The story was never about the sound. And it wasn’t about the words she spoke from the witness stand under oath. The story was about overcoming. And that was the quality I hadn’t captured.
This failure festered within me for years. Decades.
But when I finally started to write a novel where I was going to demand that the main character overcome a significant disability to solve a crime, it was that woman that I recalled. Her determination and forcefulness and the grace that she’d displayed on that witness stand were precisely the qualities that I copied into my character.
I only wish that I’d seen it more accurately as a young reporter.
But if I had – and I wrote it for the Herald – would it have stayed with me and been recalled when I constructed my novel?
I’m not sure. Maybe yes. Maybe no. Never know the answer to that question.
3. What I Learned… And what I do with it.
I once heard a father testifying tearfully in his son’s murder trial. The teenager had secretly taken the man’s pistol from its case and used it to threaten another young man who’d been tormenting him in what was little more than a typical nasty juvenile moment. And the thing that was clear and inevitable to just about everyone except a stressed-out teenager subsequently took place, where that weapon discharged, and someone died. The father wore utter failure and total grief in every line of his face and despair in every word he spoke, claiming it was all truly his fault, not his son’s, because he should never have allowed access to that gun. He wanted to assume the blame and accept the punishment. He wanted to be put in prison. Not his son. This isn’t the way the justice system operates – although maybe sometimes it should. The assistant state’s attorney, having little sympathy for the father’s nightmare, idly asked him “Where did you get that gun?” and the father replied with the location of the gun shop where he’d purchased it for ‘self-defense”’and added that the dealer had eagerly sold him that Colt Python .357 Magnum because ‘”t was the Cadillac of handguns.”
It was indeed. A luxury vehicle on the road to evil.
I have, over the course of my writing career often put handguns into the willing grip of characters, both good guys and bad guys. Attentive readers (either everyone who opens the cover of a novel or the pathetically few remaining on the planet, I’m not sure which) know that I almost invariably use that model .357 and just as invariably refer to it in the same sedan-like terms that anguished father did. It is like a tic in my writing.
The point is:
I was listening.
And I stored away what I heard.
And in the three illustrative stories cited above:
I was watching closely.
And years later I remembered what I saw.
Things are rarely exact.
What one sees or what one hears or what one experiences rarely have a direct, one-to-one trade-off for the novelist. Sometimes yes. But just as often no. That “Cadillac” handgun doesn’t appear in a teenager’s hands in my novels. It could. It just hasn’t.
Just as I saw a deaf woman overcome her disability, that didn’t mean that I would automatically invent a deaf woman character when it came time to create a character with a disability. Indeed, in my book the character is an aging college professor, and the disability is a type of Frontal Temporal Lobe dementia.
But the sensibility is the same.
And the potential for that deaf woman character is still out there.
This is what I mean by using the theater of life as a writer.
We remember the line: “To be or not to be, that is the question…” easily. And I can cite many other examples.
But it is the context of Hamlet’s inquiry, the doubt and anguish he feels, the mystery of the life before him that is the music behind those words. And if you truly want to be a writer, it is listening to that music that will be the score to your work.
You need to become a translator.
Not of language. But of observation.
It makes little difference what sort of book you want to write. Thrillers? Love stories? Coming-of-age? The challenges in our multi-cultural world? Comedy? War stories? Fishing stories? Fantasy novels? Sword and sandal novels? Epic poems in dactylic hexameter?
Somewhere inside every one of those books is a part of you, the author. It is something you saw, something you heard, something you felt. Some connection. It may be obvious. It might be obscure. It might shout. It might whisper. Finding it and processing it and seeing how that moment can expand into a story and a story into a novel might not be the very first step on the path to being a writer. But it is a crucial one. This is as true for John Grisham, as it is true for Anne Tyler as it was for Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Carlos Fuentes. Or drop back centuries and realize it was the same for Proust, Dickens, and Tolstoy. Zip further into the past and see it was the same for Dante, Virgil, or even Homer. Now, history tells us that Homer was blind. But I’d be willing to wager that one day a friend said to him as they walked on the beach next to the Aegean Sea, “You know, great poet, the waves and the waters appear quite dark this morning. Maybe as dark as wine.” And Homer thought Wine dark sea. I can use that…
And so, at long last we get back to that knotty question:
“How do I become a writer like you?”
And the true answer is:
You already know.
Amherst, Massachusetts
October 2023
English (United States) 
English (UK)