Thomas Mullen

(I know, I know, I haven't blogged in like forever. With a book on the way and a new baby on the way, it's been a bit crazy at the Mullen household. But since I'm struggling through the latest toddler virus my son loving shared with me, and I don't seem to have the verve for fiction at the moment, back to the blog I come! I promise to be here more often in the coming weeks, as part of the launch for the new book, for which I am totally and incredibly excited. And on to today's post.)

I spent the morning deleting body bags from my new novel.

Wouldn't it be cool if books were like DVDs and came with special Behind the Scenes bonus features? Instead of a backstage interview with George Clooney, or storyboards from Tim Burton's earliest brainstorming session, or commentary from the director and cinematographer about how they got that cool tracking shot over the beach where all the soldiers lay dying amid twenty simultaneous explosions, etc., you'd get stuff like this: tales of writers frantically making corrections to their text in the final minutes before it goes to the printer. Not nearly as interesting, true. But this one involves body bags!

My new book, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers, comes out in less than three months. (Mark your calendars! January 26.) It takes place in the 1930s, and it has some gunfights, and the aftermaths of some gunfights. In the final pass-through proofread, an alert and historically astute reader noted that, in one scene, I make a certain use of a black, plastic, zippered body bag. Specifically, a character who is not entirely dead finds himself in one. It's a cool scene. Kind of funny, kind of twisted. I'm fairly confident it hasn't been done before (at least, I'm quite confident it hasn't been done the way I do it, but that would be giving away too much). Alas, the astute proofreader pointed out that body bags did not yet exist in the 1930s.

Some frantic emailing led to some frantic Googling, and some more researching, and some angsting. I've read many, many books about the 1930s and crime or both over the last three years, and I could have sworn I'd seen reference to body bags back then. Apparently, I hadn't. Or I'd been reading the books of other misinformed writers. Mattress covers or bedsheets were the more common method of corpse transportation until after the Second World War, I am now told. I consulted my notes and, alas, I failed to find any record as to whether body bags did in fact exist in 1934. If they did, it's safe to assume that they would have been rare and cutting edge technology, and would not have been used in rural districts of Missouri, which happens to be where the relevant scene is set.

So: Rewrite! Call in the writers! Wait, that's me. It meant I had to lose a few lines I liked, as well as a certain description of the sound of a zipper, etc. And it meant I had to beg and plead the very friendly and patient copyeditor into allowing me to make these changes at the three-month-and-counting mark, which in book publishing is equivalent to the last minute. But I can now safely say there are no anachronistic references to body bags in the version of the book that will soon be mass-produced and available at a bookstore (let's hope) or Target or Wal-Mart near you. There will no doubt be other anachronisms in the book despite the best efforts of myself, my various editors and proofreaders, and at least one history professor I enlisted specifically for this task. I can predict an email or two from retired history professors or 1930s buffs who insist I used a slang term two years before it was invented, or the wrong model of car, or a hair wax that wasn't really in vogue that year. It's these little things that can make the writing of historical fiction so vexing. But historical fiction is also the only way I can vicariously rob banks, and drive a 1933 red Terraplane, and date a wealthy automotive heiress, and come back from the dead.

More on that later.

link to this | File:  Writing 

Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez, and (please, God, let it be untrue) David Ortiz are merely the most recent baseball players to be outted by the ongoing steroids scandal -- which began, curiously enough, with the publication of a book: former slugger Jose Canseco's expose, Juiced.

Which has me wondering: What if writers doped, too?

Experts now trace the birth of baseball's Steroids Age to roughly 1995-1997, when the sport was suffering from fan disgust after the 1994 players strike. Today's publishing industry is suffering through its own moribund period. Writers have never gone on strike, but readers seem to think we have. Just as the 1998 home run race between the suddenly strapping Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa boosted ratings and attendance, today's writers could use a shot in the arm to save us from reader apathy.

Most outted ballplayers issue denials or claim they accidentally took some silly home remedy that set off the alarms. But a few contrite veterans will admit that they doped, claiming that they needed a competitive edge, sought help recovering from a bum knee, were worried about keeping up with all the young studs coming up from AAA, etc.

What if a few of us scribblers decided steroids would give us a competitive edge? Imagine the benefits! It could help us past the tricky plot hole that's been bedeviling us, help us fend off writers' block (the bum knee of the literary world), help us keep up with the Young Turks and bloggers and MFAs. The mental thesaurus would bulge, the ability to conjure unique imagery would be out-of-the-park, our sentences would remain energetic and youthful. And our literary stamina would be unmatched -- a 500-pager every year!

Granted, the obvious lack of parallel here is that steroids enhance you physically, not mentally. Bulging pecs and biceps are unlikely to help me ward off clunky prose, cliches, or existential crises.

But given the immense pharmacological creativity that goes into the design of new steroids, it shouldn't be too much to ask for some new, specially targeted, mental steroids for writers. Preferably ones that don't have nasty side effects like male breast enlargement and testicular shriveling. Would this be bad? Nonsense! Mental steroids in fact would help writers conquer our addictions to other creative and chemical props. For example, I've been drinking far too much coffee lately, hoping to jazz my brain towards inspiration. But the coffee messes with my stomach, and can leave me rather irritable and twitchy. Mental steroids would allow me cut back on the caffeine, all the while increasing my daily word count and helping me look much better in a swimsuit. I can already picture my next book-jacket photo!
In fact, maybe there already are mental steroids for writers, and I just don't know about them yet.

Scarily enough, in a recent article in The New Yorker, Margaret Talbot notes that an increasing number of college students are taking prescription ADHD drugs like Adderol under the assumption (not yet vetted by the FDA) that the drugs help them to focus and concentrate over long periods of time, without fatigue. Ms. Talbot ponders a frightening future in which professionals of all stripes are pressured in a sort of mental arms race to pop "neuroenhancing" drugs, thinking that it makes them smarter and more efficient, and fearing that, if they don't take the drugs that everyone else is taking, they'll fall behind. (Which is curiously similar to the dilemma of the mid-career second baseman who starts taking steroids in order to hit the fastball thrown by the pitcher who himself is doping. Or the young writer trying to win his first National Book Award.)

In this brave new world of mental steroids, I can't help but wonder if some of our most successful writers are already doping.

When I read The Corrections a few years ago, I recall thinking that Jonathan Franzen writes wonderfully muscular sentences. His prose seemed powerful, sinewy, with great bulges of fifty-point words and an overall well-proportioned physique. Now I can't help wondering: was Franzen doping? Should his National Book Award have an asterisk beside it?

And isn't Philip Roth's recent output of near-annual gems rather suspicious, given his advanced age? Doesn't it put you in mind of a certain 40-plus Texan pitcher who only seemed to get better and better (and more and more muscular) at an age when most flamethrowers lose their heat and retire? Some of Roth's more recent characters have waxed poetic about the virtues of Viagra; could the author himself have been secretly praising Adderol as well? Could -- gasp -- a national treasure like Roth be doping? Is this why the Nobel Committee keeps passing him up?

Suddenly, every scribe is a suspect. A couple years ago I attended a lecture by the amazing Edward P. Jones. During the Q&A phase, someone praised Jones for packing so much into his short stories, noting that they tend to have as much plot and as well-developed characters as other writers' novels. Jones replied that too many writers these days write novels that are just over-stuffed "stories on steroids." He won applause and laughter when he added, "I don't want to write stories on steroids." Clearly, Jones isn't doping. Unless, of course, his spoken contempt for 'roids is a case of the writer protesting too much, the literary equivalent of Rafael Palmeiro pointing at the congressional inquiry and swearing that he didn't juice, only to flunk his test months later.

(I'm kidding, of course, and am deliberately picking on three of my favorite authors. Still, the idea that writers might start popping the pills is alarming.)

Jones' comment begs the question: what is the difference between a "story on steroids" novel and a finely told, well-wrought, not-too-chemically-enhanced novel? Will readers be able to tell? More importantly, could I get away with it? Like the work of other young novelists, would my pharmaceutically enhanced fiction strike certain critics as "overly clever," would my prose "get in my own way," would it call too much attention to itself? Is it better for one's sentences and scenes to be as spare, elegant and nimble as an old-fashioned shortstop, or do readers prefer plots, characters and clauses to be as muscle-bound as A-Rod?

Oh well, time to get back to work. Where's my triple espresso?


link to this | File:  Writing 

I recently received the copyedited manuscript of my second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. A manuscript wearily proceeds to the copyeditor only after it has valiantly survived numerous rounds of edits and revisions at the hands of the editor; the editor and writer strike this metaphor, eliminate that repeated verb, compress this chapter or that paragraph, remove this unnecessary character, clarify that plot point, etc. By the time the writer has finished an umpteenth draft and the editor signs off on the manuscript, the writer is convinced the book is as perfect as it can be, that nothing more can possibly be done. But no. Then the even-yet-more-anal copyeditors come in, questioning every comma, every dash, every split infinitive or somewhat unusual verb construction or nonstandard usage of the English language. The author has a few options here -- he can accept the copyeditor's edits, figuring that this person is probably so well steeped in grammatical rules that she must be right; he can override all her edits, taking out his frustration at all those middle school English teachers he didn't like, insisting that he is the artist here, thank you very much, and that if he wants to bend some grammatical rules, then that's well within his rights; or he can obsess about each and every edit, questioning why he originally wrote it that way and wondering if it really is in fact better, or if that tiny violation is in fact ruining the book, and he should change it again.

Which brings me to my son, who turns three this summer. He is deeply, deeply into the Why? phase. He questions everything -- why this, why that. I had never imagined it possible to question so many things. Why is this truck blue? Why is this wheel round? Why this truck has four wheels and this truck has six wheels? Why this excavator has tracks and no wheels? Why this front-end loader has wheels and no tracks? I'm an intellectually curious person, but a toddler blows an artist away when it comes to an almost metaphysical sense of curiosity.

"Why this water cold?"
"Well, buddy, it's really hot out, so people like to drink cold water when it's hot out."
"Why people like cold water when it's hot out?"
"Because it cools them off."
"Why it cools them off?"
At which point, you can begin a complicated discussion of physics and biology, or you can make up a goofy answer, or you can try to distract him with an entirely new line of thought, such as, "Hey, buddy, wasn't that fire truck neat?" But this runs the risk of being countered with, "Why that fire truck neat?" Or why was it red, or why did have a light, or why did it go Wee-a-wee-a-wee-a instead of woo-woo-woo, etc.

Interestingly, this curiosity is directed not only at the outside world but also -- like any navel-gazing novelist -- at himself as well. Such as:
"Daddy, I just drew on the wall. Why I draw on the wall?"
"Um, I don't know, buddy. Why did you draw on the wall?"
"Huh."

Or:
"Daddy, why I like trucks?"
"Because trucks are awesome."
"Why I like fire trucks and excavators more than telephone line repair trucks?"
"I don't know, why do you like fire trucks and excavators more than telephone line repair trucks?"
"Because I'm a silly goose."

As I spent a week or so staring at and debating the various marks on my copyedited manuscript, I questioned the logic (or lack thereof) behind every literary decision I had made in the roughly two years of writing and revising the darn thing. Okay, the copyeditor wants me to insert a comma into this sentence, and this one, and this one. I guess I didn't like commas that much while writing this book. Why? Should I allow her to insert the commas? Or was I right to leave them out -- did their absence, despite going contrary to accepted grammatical etiquette, add something indefinable to the sentence, and therefore the book itself, or was it just a weird mannerism of mine that I should correct? Why did I do that? Was I subconsciously mimicking some other writer? In which case, is that bad? Or do I simply want a new, freer world unencumbered by so many commas? But will that bother readers? Why?

I could hear my son's high-pitched, ridiculously cute, Platonically inquisitive voice in my head: Why Daddy use a dash here instead of a semicolon? Why Daddy not use comma in this sentence? Didn't Daddy use semicolon in similarly constructed sentence on page 137? Daddy wants to be consistent here, doesn't he?

Which led to even more agonizing conversations:
"Why Daddy not use a comma in this sentence?"
"Well, I thought the sentence would kind of move better, would flow with the action or the revelation of the scene a bit more naturally without the comma in the middle there."
"Why Daddy not think action flows as well with commas?"
"Well, that's a good question actually. Huh. Why don't I?"
"Because Daddy's a silly goose."

Or:
"Why Daddy insist on keeping that long phrase in the middle of sentence here?"
"Well, I understand why the copyeditor wanted me to strike it, but see -- it's in the middle of a paragraph, and all the other sentences are these short, declarative sentences. If I strike that phrase, then I'll have a paragraph consisting of too many consecutive declarative sentences."
"Why Daddy not like too many consecutive declarative sentences?"
"Well, son, have I ever told you about a man named Raymond Carver?"

Etc, etc, for roughly 400 pages. Well, I did indeed complete my round of the copyedits, and I sent the manuscript back to my publisher, and the book even has a release date now (mark your calendars! January 26). I will of course continue to question myself when I read the galleys in a few weeks or months, and the advance copies after that. My son, by then age three, will no doubt still be questioning everything as well, and I'll continue making up answers and hoping they're right, or close enough.


link to this | File:  Writing 

(First, apologies for the lack of posts all summer. My family and I have just relocated from Washington, DC, to Atlanta, and my life has been consumed by realtors and title attorneys, box cutters and bubble wrap. What little time for writing I've been able to squirrel away has been devoted to editing my forthcoming second novel, The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers. I promise to be a better blogger this autumn. And to drink less coffee, and to think purer thoughts, and to call my mother more often...)

When I opened the New York Times Web page the other day on my pirated and very slow wireless signal (still setting up the new Mullen office), I saw the photo of that familiar bandana-ed head above the headline "The Magic of David Foster Wallace." I thought, oh joy, a new DFW book is coming out! I had no idea! So I clicked on the headline and was stunned to learn that Mr. Wallace, 46, took his own life last weekend.

DFW is the Sonic Youth of contemporary American fiction. Just as the unusual and challenging but brilliant sounds crafted by Thurston Moore & Co. inspired a litany of "alternative" bands who achieved more crossover success than they themselves ever did, DFW's dense and unusual but horizon-expanding books probably kept away a good deal of casual readers even as they laid the groundwork upon which many of today's most heralded writers stand. His influence on the last decade-plus of fiction cannot be overlooked; it is hard to imagine the novels of Dave Eggers or Jonathan Safran Foer, to name only two, existing in their current forms without Wallace showing up to show us how many different forms great fiction can take.

I read Infinite Jest during my first year out of college. I was living in Boston and I clearly remember lugging that enormously heavy tome with me on the Boston buses, to the orange line at Sullivan Square, through the bowels of the T, to my horrible first job, and over to the Common on my lunch breaks. I somehow managed to read the 1,000+ page monster in only one month, a surprisingly short period mainly because I made a point of taking it with me wherever I went that April (I still remember the month!) and cramming one or two pages of reading into every elevator ride, on-hold call, and burrito-microwaving I could. I loved it. Loved it so much that not only did I march out to buy his other books, but I flipped to the back jacket and made a point of buying the works of the writers who had blurbed it, most of whom I'd never heard of in 1997 but have since taken their rightful places as Literary Bigshots (nice to meet you, Mr. Franzen and Mr. Eugenides).

Infinite Jest had a huge influence on me, and it affected my writing in, I admit, ways that were not entirely good for me or my early readers. I was one of the nameless thousands who wrote terrible imitation Wallace for at least a few years: run-on sentences that were equal part erudite academic jargon and hipster slang, intentionally difficult sequences of narrative disconnection, three adverbs when two or even one would have sufficed, occasional uses of acronyms and strange terms without explaining what they meant until like the thirtieth page, the use of the word "like," etc. etc. (This influence probably is not at all apparent in my first novel, but it sure is there in my earlier, failed, unpublished first novels.) So many of us have imitated him, and none of us could get it right. None of us had his energy -- that's what caught you and made you want to keep going, until, almost without realizing it, you were as addicted to his prose style and pace and skewed viewpoints as his characters were addicted to drugs and sports and money and sex. I've been thinking a lot lately about Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, a very different novel, but along with Jest it was a hugely inspiring book for me during that scary first year after graduation. In Wonder Boys, protagonist Gray Tripp is a drug-addicted novelist who has written a 2,000+ page book that is nowhere near finished; when asked why it's so long, he says "I couldn't stop." In a similar but far less scatological way, that sums up the experience of reading Wallace -- you read him and read him because you couldn't stop.

It's weird too that my first-ever blog post last spring was about writers who died young and/or suffered from mental illness. I did not realize we would be adding another exalted name to those unfortunate ranks, certainly not one I was such a big fan of. I didn't see this one coming. But at the same time, sadness and depression were always a big part of his art (one of his best stories was called "The Depressed Person"), so it isn't surprising to find that they were part of his life as well.

Someone once said (Tolstoy, probably) that when a writer is tackling the ending of a book, he or she should aim for "unpredictable inevitability." The reader should be surprised by the ending, but at the same time, on reflection, it should feel inevitable, that it never could have happened any other way. I wish this had happened any other way. I wish that the man who wrote such inspiring fiction was still doing so and, more importantly, was as happy as I was when reading his work.

Just last week, before hearing the news, I had been talking with a writer friend who mentioned that he enjoyed reading Haruki Murakami much more in college than he does now, and I mentioned that I'm the same way with Don Delillo. We talked about how there are some writers who seem to appeal more to the intellectual side of our brain and less to the emotional, and how these writers resonate a bit more with the college and academic crowd but ring less true as we grow older or leave that cloistered world. Which isn't a negative judgment or a positive one, and maybe isn't fair or right, but hey, the fact is, I so loved Infinite Jest when I was 22 that I reread most of its 1,000+ pages, but as I read Wallace's other fiction (his first novel and his short stories) over the next decade, they didn't quite grab me as much, and a few years ago I mentally assigned him to that College Cultist section of my bookshelf. I bought Oblivion, his final book of short stories, a while ago but still haven't cracked it open. (His essays and journalism, however, are another matter -- absolutely goddamn worship-inducing fantastic.) I'm rethinking this appraisal of Wallace now, and remembering the ways he let his tiny moral and emotional streak poke out of all that postmodern haze every now and then. Sometimes we make people laugh or we show off our intelligence because we're insecure, and then we suddenly open up, and we hope people didn't miss that key moment.

Wallace did write a Big Important essay in which he called on young writers to stop with the solipsistic/narcissistic gimmickry and instead to dare their fiction to tackle the Big Important Moral Issues of the age the way 19th Century novelists did, but he's been criticized for failing to do this with his more recent fiction, a criticism I agreed with. But I certainly plan to pull those giant books (in more ways than one) off my bookshelf again and take another visit to DFW's odd and troubling and brilliant and inspiring universe. There was always a lot of sadness in there, and reading him will never be the same, just as listening to Nevermind was never the same after Kurt pulled the trigger. The sadness will feel stronger. But all the sad and difficult stuff, as any writer of postmodern inclinations will agree, only makes the sudden, surprising moments of sweetness and light that much sweeter.


link to this | File:  Writing 

Interrelated Thoughts on Sacred Games, The Wire, and Everything Bad Is Good For You

(OK, I've been slacking on the blog. I have an excuse, which will interest those of you wondering about my new book: I've been busy putting some finishing touches on the manuscript, which my agent has now read and green-lighted. So after a few more edits I'll be sending it off to my editor, and then, presumably, I'll have more time to exercise my right as a 21st Century Human by blogging. So, here goes...)

I recently read Vikram Chandra's 900-page Indian cop-gangster epic Sacred Games. Good stuff. But let me note again that it was 900 pages, meaning that it finishes second only to Infinite Jest as Longest Novel By A Non-Dead Guy I've Ever Read. And honestly, if it had a different font size and a more standard use of paragraph breaks, it probably would have been 1,100 pages. (The first sign of trouble, after noticing how impressively heavy the thing is to carry around (in hardcover!), was the fact that it didn't have page headers listing the author or title, as the book designer wisely dispensed with them to buy Chandra a few extra lines per page, which probably saved them 50 pages or so.)

I really dug this book. Taking place in present-day Bombay/Mumbai, it alternately follows a humble, hardened Sikh cop (Sartaj Singh) and Bombay's number one gangsta, Ganesh Gaitonde. Most critics spent much ink noting the crazy multinational empire that Gaitonde builds, with harems in Thailand and movies in Bollywood and money laundering in the Middle East and assassination plots in London, etc, and all the attendant statements about globalization and interconnectedness. But my favorite parts of the book were the Singh (cop) chapters. Cop stories are so easy to get wrong, as there are so many cliches waiting for the ambitious writer to trip over, and I can think of few cop novels that I've really, really liked. Chandra, though, does a perfect job of following the genre conventions just enough to keep the story going while also subverting them in interesting ways. Through Singh's investigations, we get to learn about the tensions between different castes and immigrants and religions in Bombay (tensions which resonate in any country), the complicated modern relations between men and women (there's a great blackmail plot involving an affair), and the constant presence of corruption and graft (Singh is portrayed as a Good Cop partly because he only takes some bribes, which tells you something about the state of policing in India).

I might even call Sacred Games a Great Book, but a 900-page Great Book, like a great marriage, is going to have its rough patches. I eventually became bored with the Gaitonde chapters; maybe this makes me out of touch with my fellow Americans, but mobster characters (Goodfellas, The Sopranos, etc) don't quite do it for me. Also, the Singh chapters were told in spare but pitch-perfect third-person narration, combining an eye for detail with a heartbreaking weariness of what Singh sees around him, whereas the gangster chapters were a cockier first-person, narrated by a total egotist who I eventually got tired of. Egotists can be either superb narrators (see Nabokov) or really annoying ones, and Gaitonde seemed more the latter to me.

But the part of the book that I vacillated between admiring and disliking, and the theme of today's post, was the many many tangents and sidebars and extraneous stories. Tangents, of course, are what can make fiction so interesting and fun, but too many of them can muddle a book. And a reader's tolerance for tangents tends to decrease on page 650 or so, when we start wanting the storyteller to get on with it already. Writers constantly face choices, choices about what to put in and what to leave out. I myself struggle with this all the time. The Last Town on Earth has chapters or long sections written from at least six major characters' perspectives, so there was a lot of balancing to do, lots of balls to keep in the air at once. But readers can only handle so much before confusion or impatience set in. As a writer, I tend to gravitate toward multicharacter, multiperspective stories (my new one has at least five characters' perspectives, as of the current draft), so I can totally relate to the desire to put more in, to add something from the daughter's perspective and something from the second-cousin's perspective and hey maybe a chapter about the immigrant waiter at the restaurant down the street and something about that panhandler guy, etc. Aiming for that epic scope, trying to tell The Complete Story, to get it all down, to encompass this great big sprawling story we call Life. But as a reader, that sometimes doesn't work, and we want the writer to use his artistic judgment to choose only the characters and stories that best tell his tale. So: why this disconnect?

Because I'm behind the times TV-wise, I've only recently started watching Series 1 of The Wire, which has been hailed by critics as the best show in the history of television. And I can't disagree: I absolutely love it. If I didn't have a toddler and if my wife and I weren't always so tired by dinnertime, we'd try to watch a season a week. What makes the show so great? The dialogue and the realism, yeah, but mainly the characters and the complexity and the many interwoven subplots. There are at least a dozen "major" characters thus far, cops and drug dealers and cop's spouses and DA's and drug dealers' girlfriends and judges and other cops and other dealers, and I'm only on the eighth episode. The show has been called "a television novel" because of its novelistic scope, encompassing so many characters and daring to go on tangents (for example, by taking time in a random episode to show ten or fifteen minutes in the life of one of the characters we hadn't seen much of before, just to flesh him or her out, to add depth, to reveal something new). It's awesome, and addictive: I want to know more about everyone. Yay, complexity! Yay, tangents! Give us more!

In Steven Johnson's provocative Everything Bad Is Good For You, he argues that societal whipping posts like TV and video games are actually making us smarter, not dumber, because they are so much more complex than they used to be. Instead of Pacman running around on a simple screen, Myst or Doom contain hundreds of secrets that need to be explored, challenging our cognitive processes. And instead of the linear storytelling and small casts of CHIPS or Starsky and Hutch, more recent TV sensations like Lost or 24 have countless subplots and dozens of characters and aren't afraid to confuse us or leave us hanging or throw out information that it might take us a whole week of water-cooler gossiping to figure out. Johnson argues that people who blindly bemoan TV and praise literature haven't noticed how far TV has come, and he makes a lot of points that intrigue and frighten me as a novelist.

Because here's the thing: Some of the aspects of The Wire that I most love are extremely difficult to pull off in fiction. Even though The Wire has been called "a TV novel," the fact is, few novels have as many characters and perspectives as The Wire has. It out-novels the novel. And it makes me wonder (or fear) whether this is a sign that TV could be (shudder) a more effective medium for complex storytelling than fiction is. Why? First of all, the visuals help: as anyone at a cocktail party or at a new job knows, we remember faces a lot better than names. So when a random, previously unimportant character wanders on screen in episode 5 and suddenly does something really important, we might not remember his name, but we do remember that he's the guy that threatened McNulty a few weeks ago. Whereas, with fiction, for example Sacred Games, when Chandra suddenly hits us on page 500-something with a 40-page chapter that's a flashback to an episode early in the life of a character whose name I don't at all recognize, because he hasn't been mentioned in hundreds of pages, I'm kind of lost, and maybe even annoyed. Second, TV and film are more social than reading; even if we don't remember who that somewhat familiar face on the TV is, we can hit pause and ask our friends, whereas reading is solitary.

(I should note that some of The Wire's extraordinary writers, like Richard Price and George Pelecanos, are also great novelists. And that, although critics and writers love The Wire, its viewership was relatively low compared to, say, Everybody Loves Raymond, so maybe viewers don't want complexity after all. Or maybe only certain kinds of viewers.)

So what does this all mean? I have no idea. I only know that, as a writer, I want to tell complex, complicated stories, and I want to go on tangents, to find a way to squeeze in this perspective and that story and this anecdote and that overlooked character. I want to get it all, even if this challenges the reader -- and maybe, if it challenges him, that very challenge will become addictive, and make the reading experience so much richer and more rewarding than a straight first-person linear tale would have been. But I have the constant fear that if I do make it too complex, if I ask too much of the reader, if I annoy him too much, he'll throw up his hands, put the book down... and just turn on his TV.


link to this | File:  Book Reviews  TV  Writing