But it proved that I wasn’t skipping along as I usually do for the works that succeed, and I have had successes and failures, and haven’t we all?
I even went back to those novels of mine that did succeed (I number them at nine) and in them tried to figure out what worked before against what wasn’t working out now. In all my novels from before, something got turned on, something clicked. The secret was simple (especially for Indecent Proposal): in one place my heart was in it, I was aflame, full of passion, and in this place, this new place, I was simply writing to conform to plot.
The characters never talked back to me, never argued with me, never stood up for themselves, and when none of that happens, you’re writing cardboard.
I found this attempt at a new novel to be drudgery, and no matter how many times I told myself to keep going, that I will find the people, I will find the passion, I will find the excitement, I will find the voice, the novel refused to give itself up and refused to move. Still page 66. Nothing was happening.
(By the way, the working title for the novel that will never happen was “Welcome to Sogora.” If you ever see a novel by that name, it wasn’t mine, or my fault.)
Lesson number two on writing: If you can change the names of your characters midway, you’ve got nothing going. You are inventing, not creating. You are faking it, and with this discovery I went to bed that night. In the morning I glanced over a few pages and declared them to be officially dreck. I announced myself done with this project. I actually felt good.
I actually felt creative for making such a decision. Yes, knowing when a thing isn’t working, and being done with it, that too is part of the creative process.
I talked to the primo novelist John W. Cassell about this.
“Didn’t we agree?” he said, “that it’s on page one hundred that we can tell if a novel is working or not?”
Eureka! That’s how it was when Joan insisted, against my wishes, that she was going to take up the sultan on his million dollar offer, even as I kept saying no, and she kept saying yes. She kept saying yes and I could not stop her. She won, as did the novel. All that happened on page 100, when I stopped typing and began channeling, or rather when I gave in, stopped being in control and judgmental, and instead, let people behave as people behave.
Inspiration can’t be the moment of clarity that happens only at the start. Inspiration, if it’s real, has to keep moving you page to page.
I’ve already got a new novel started. I will let you know when I get past page 66.
JFK, Marilyn, Elvis:
Trashing the Dead with Books
NEW YORK, February 20, 2013 - I slept with Marilyn Monroe.
Can you prove otherwise? That’s right. You can’t, and that’s my point.
Or, as they’d say around my home, “Too much information, Dad.”
I say the same about books that keep coming out about dead celebrities, told by people who were intimate with them, or so they say.
I do not need all that information.
Let me depart from books for a second to talk about a film that was made for HBO about Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. This was okay as these specials go, but I did not need those sex scenes, and I turned my head when I knew what was coming, a momentary glimpse of Owen’s back end, meant to convey Hemingway in heat, in addition to his posterior.
Thank you, but I don’t need that about an American legend. Nor do I need all those tell-alls that defame the reputations of people we revere and idolize.
Is this an American thing, this need to destroy our heroes? I call it Sleaze Lit.
Again on HBO, here we have Alfred Hitchcock as “mad about that Girl” – and nothing else. He comes off hateful and humorless and now dead, of course.
In other words, we get one side about people no longer among the quick.
Out comes a book by Rita Moreno (one of my favorites) and today I learn that Brando was a sex machine and that Elvis was a dud.
I may never visualize Brando the same way again, and certainly not Elvis who, over the years, I’ve come to appreciate.
There is a good and legit bio of Elvis by Peter Guralnick, but that is literally a different story. In fact, real biographies by real biographers belong in a different category than gossip mongers, and frankly, I don’t know what to make of Kitty Kelley and Andrew Morton. I will more or less trust that the research was done.
Norman Mailer did his book on Marilyn (guessing all the way), and Peter Manso did his book on Mailer, but these are biographers who make no other claim.
We’re talking about those authors who claim to have shared their lives, and bedrooms, with our gods. Can we believe what they say?
Remember, they can say whatever they want….anything about anybody…as long as that person is gone.
The actor Frank Langella wrote a book in which he makes minced-meat out of nearly everybody, particularly those who are no longer around to defend themselves, like a particular sweetheart of mine and of the silver screen, Anne Bancroft. Do we really need to know that she was so vain that only the mirror was her friend?
More important, is this really true?
Or is this just one man’s opinion? Or is it one man getting even?
Mel Brooks can’t be happy and I’m not happy, for this is not biography and it is not memoir, it is bitchery.
Yes, I know, that’s what sells. I also know that when a prospective peeping tom approaches a publisher the question goes like this:
“Can you spill the beans? Can you dish the dirt?”
Langella also scandalizes John F. Kennedy, and who hasn’t? Seems to me that nearly anyone who was in or around the 1960s has since “revealed the truth” about our handsome 35th president. For a time I believed all those stories about his supposed lechery. But as these books and movies started piling up and piling on, I began to wonder.
If true, when did Kennedy have time to inaugurate the Peace Corps and get us to the moon?
I am starting to think that Kennedy was absolutely loyal to Jackie, like a monk, and that he planted the gossip himself to distract us from knowing that he was in constant pain. Either way, some respect maybe for a president who was assassinated?
Not quite. A lady named Mimi Alford caused the latest stir. She wrote a book (who hasn’t?) and appeared with Meredith Viera on TV to talk about her steamy affair with Kennedy, some of which got into perversion. As we get it, she started off as an intern, then named Mimi Beardsley, and next thing you know she was canoodling with the president in bed and in swimming pools. (Oh those interns!)
That happened in 1962. She broke the news 2012.
Is all that true? Maybe it doesn’t matter as long as we enjoy watching the dead squirm. How reliable are memoirs anyway? See as revealed here.
Now it’s back to my book, “How I Scored with Ava Gardner.”
Adultery, Anyone?
WASHINGTON, DC, February 8, 2013 - In a book just published, and getting deservedly good reviews, I do and I don’t: A History of Marriage in the Movies, author Jeanine Basinger asserts that we can’t seem to get it right at home or at the movies. Infidelity lurks from bedroom to silver screen, and, as I define it, the love of sex and money is the root of all great fiction.
In real life, surveys mislead as to who is misbehaving, but online there are hundreds of website choices for “hooking up,” single or married. On surveys and statistics we only know what people are saying, not what people are thinking, especially when it comes to sex.
Writers of fiction do it best, and on this topic I do have a say. I’ve been told that I started a new baby boom from what gets started on page 228 of Indecent Proposal. Too often I’ve been asked to define the novel and my standard response is that if I could define it in a single paragraph I would have written the paragraph instead of the book.
However, temptation comes close to the mark, and as I’ve already written, sex is nothing. Temptation is everything…and anyway, sex is not for girls.
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nbsp; I’m okay with Basinger naming David Lean’s Brief Encounter as perhaps the best take on infidelity at the movies, even as the film was minus any scenes of lovemaking, drawing chuckles from reviewers in France who found it so “very British” for a film to feature sex but without the sex.
Ditto for Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina as contenders. There, too, most of it was flirtation and temptation.
Likewise, in books or in film, presenting married couples in the act of sex, does nothing. Who cares? That’s what people are supposed to do, to be fruitful and multiply. When it gets illicit, that’s when the fun and the drama begin. “All happy families are alike” – Tolstoy’s opening line for Anna Karenina.
So thrilled as I was to be mentioned in the same pages as Leo Tolstoy, and Gustav Flaubert, and astonished that she missed James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, Basinger was mistaken to surmise, on page 142, that Indecent Proposal (the movie) “floats on an unlikely story.”
Not quite. After my novel came out, followed by the Paramount movie, I counted a hundred letters spilling the beans on oil rich sheiks who offered a million dollars (more or less) for a night of love – and the many Hollywood actresses willingly sharing their bedroom charms for the cash.
I had no idea that this was going on (and still going on) when I wrote the book. We may think we are creating when in fact we are merely taking down dictation.
All that got me to wondering where we are, ethically, in this Real Housewives/Page Six world where nearly everything goes. Is there anything left that’s taboo? The movie Indecent Proposal premiered April 7, 1993, so we’re approaching a 25th anniversary. The novel was published four years earlier. In each instance, there was shock.
Someone out there said it better than I could.
Writing for NPR (National Public Radio), Jimi Izrael ranked Indecent Proposal number one on a list of “Five Great Films about the Perils of Infidelity.” Izrael complained (as did I) about Amy Holden Jones’ “jerky script” but cited the novel as “a gut-wrenching study on love, money, and trust that sparked dinner party conversations for years afterward here.”
Back then, women’s groups blasted me for sexism, even when they’d only seen the movie and not read the book. To my defense comes a recent Amazon UK review from Thomas Hardy for the Kindle edition of the novel: “Indecent Proposal is probably the ideal example of why a screenwriter should never be allowed near a great writer’s work.” (His words, not mine.)
Still, back then, even as the novel kept selling and getting fine book reviews, and even as the movie broke box office records, I took it on the chin from movie reviewers coast to coast. The New York Times and Roger Ebert were overly generous about the movie, but the rest of them were overly hysterical.
My guess was that people simply did not want to be challenged like this – like what would you do if you were impoverished and were offered a million dollars to perform a sinful act that could change your entire life? Movie reviewers expected a popcorn outing and were vexed and offended when asked to go back home to think and face up to a too-near-to-home moral dilemma.
Robert Redford, though I had nothing like him in mind, rather an oil rich sultan, even liked the script and especially the novel despite or maybe because of its “hard-edged writing” and “flagrantly sexual theme.” He said, “Yeah. It will work.” Sure did. The movie took in $260 million at the box office worldwide and made everybody rich in Hollywood, and sales of my book zoomed here and around the globe.
So nobody got hurt except for the critics.
The novel, and even the movie, got personal, and touched America deep into its Puritanical soul. On live TV, Matt Lauer chuckled and asked me if my novel was based on personal experience…hell no!…and on live radio, Larry King asked, “Why only a million dollars?” True, I had not thought of inflation.
I also did not think that we’d turn as blasé as the Europeans, who take sex casually and often.
When I asked columnist Liz Smith to please get women’s lib off my back, she wrote, “What are you complaining about? Your book is a runaway bestseller.”
Nowadays every sitcom comes with overt sexual titters and nearly every movie opens with two or more people in bed and nudity is ho-hum.
I refuse to rate my book or my movie on the scale of infidelity and I refuse to judge the behavior of my characters.
Sex is about love and nothing else and let someone else, not me, be the judge.
I write and I publish because there may be one person out there with whom I’ve made contact in a world so brutal and lonely.
Salinger, Roth, Hemingway
and the Wilderness of Writing
WASHINGTON, DC, January 16, 2013 - Philip Roth has quit writing and nobody knows exactly why though I can guess. Salinger wrote only for himself, for his own pleasure, and considered getting published a nuisance, a bother and an intrusion. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last royalty check amounted to something like six dollars and change. He said, “Why am I doing all this writing. No one’s reading me.”
Hemingway was so unimpressed with his Pulitzer, his Nobel, his wine, his women, his fame, his books waiting to get written, that he committed suicide.
John Kennedy Toole (“A Confederacy of Dunces”) won his Pulitzer too late. He kept getting rejected and answered right back with his own suicide.
Dear world…How’s that for rejection!
Both a doctor and an auto mechanic (people I admire) marveled at the fact that some of us can turn emotions into prose.
I explained that we are all geniuses at something. The trick is to find out what it is.
Writing novels, as I do, is fun, and more than that, once the inspiration kicks in there is nothing compared to the exhilaration when the words begin to flow, and there is no stopping us once we get started. There is no choice but to write and as I have said plenty of times, you don’t choose writing, writing chooses you.
But that’s the writing itself that I’m talking about, and in that period when the going is good and the words (from above?) keep coming so fast that even the keyboard can’t keep up – in that period we are charmed and blessed. At these moments, as we write and lose track of time, we create a universe and discover continents. We become gods and kings.
In the publishing we turn ourselves over to our readers and trust that we will get a fair hearing. We don’t ask our readers to love us, only to understand that a novel is tender and precious and easily broken when trashed. We worked long and hard to get it done and deserve leniency for the effort alone – and for having the guts to stick our necks out where there may be multitudes waiting to do us harm.
This is an especially tricky time for writers. We find ourselves squarely into the teeth of a technology that permits anyone to comment on our work without telling us who they are, so that by remaining anonymous they enjoy a tyranny. Bygone writers faced their accusers.
All around I have been lucky with reviews though we don’t know what a new day will bring, but on getting published it has been a drag from day one, and yet there have been some astonishing successes, which only recently I have come to appreciate. I keep saying that every work of art is a failure because we never get it exactly right, but even so, sometimes we click and our books get praised, become bestsellers and get made into movies…and for that much I can vouch.
But generally all true writers – all true artists – are failures. We are dependant on the mercy of strangers.
I even wrote a novel about a novelist, his triumphs yes, but oh brother the rejections, the hardships, the bills. I knew what I was talking about.
I am reading the biography of David Lean the great director of “Lawrence of Arabia” and am astonished at his feelings of inadequacy even after scoring success after success. Even at the height of his fame Hemingway had trouble getting a press pass to cover World War II. Even after “The Catcher in the Rye” Salinger had to keep proving himself at The New Yorker. (Read Kenneth Slawenski’s fabulous bio on this.)
Tod
ay I have begun writing a new novel and I wonder if it’s worth the trouble. I keep hesitating as I consider my predecessors and about their weariness and despair and the uselessness of it all. Fitzgerald in “The Crack-Up” extended King Solomon’s despair in Ecclesiastes. All is futile and futility.
Readers will misunderstand, as is to be expected, but some will misunderstand the work purposely and viciously.
Once the work has been done and is out of your hands you have no say. Onward your readers become gods and kings. They, not you, interpret your work, and this is their duty in this, the final act of intimacy, more intimate than sex, this give-and-take between writer and reader.
But who will be around to read this book of mine? Will we all be tweeting by the time it’s done – tweeting instead of reading, and tweeting instead of writing? Already the language has changed and already we have a generation trained and conditioned to express themselves in 140 characters or less.
I notice this even at the movies where a typical scene in today’s films runs no more than about 10 seconds. Our attention spans are devoted to the next commercial.
I also notice that the finest writing these days comes not from our novelists but from our screenwriters. (Is this why Roth quit?) True that so many films are junk but also true that good films keep getting done, and the writing is good and sometimes very good. I cannot write a screenplay because to me words are notes, sentences are music, and I need rhythm to keep moving from paragraph to paragraph.
Rhythm is something you have or you don’t. Read the first paragraph of Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms.”
Read the opening lines to James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice.”
Read Kafka to find that a writer does not and should not care if his works get read. Kafka died before seeing his novels in print.
The work – it’s only the work that counts. Forget the rest.
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