From my occasional screenwriting work, I’ve learned to write these outlines for novels in the manner of treatments for film scripts, where the idea is not just to convey the plotline but to give a real feel for what the script and hence the potential film is going to be like.
Usually these novel treatments of mine run between twenty and forty pages. But as I started working on my treatment for Journals of the Plague Years, it started getting longer, and longer, and longer. I found myself writing whole short scenes, one after the other. I found myself putting in more and more detail, more and more of the thinking I had done about the disease and its possible cure.
By the time I had finished, to my own befuddlement and amazement, I had produced a treatment of well over a hundred pages, half the length of many whole books.
At the time, I believed that I had poured so much into this huge treatment because my agent had convinced me that Journals of the Plague Years was at best going to be a very difficult novel to sell to a publisher, that I had therefore better write the mother of all outlines to have any chance at all.
But looking back, I wonder.
I wonder if on some deeper subconscious level I hadn’t believed what my conscious mind refused to believe—that my agent was right, that no matter what I wrote, no matter how good it was, in that time and place a novel like Journals of the Plague Years was simply going to be unpublishable. And that therefore, the outline was going to be all there was, that I had to get it all said there or not at all.
When my agent read Journals of the Plague Years, her opinion was that this was about the best novel outline she had ever read, but that the chances of selling the book it purported to describe were still zilch.
And she was right.
My editors at Bantam, Lou Aronica and Shawna McCarthy, rejected it as a proposal for a novel.
But in the same breath they told me that they wanted to publish the outline itself in Full Spectrum, an anthology they were putting together.
Say what?
The reading public is simply not ready for a novel like this, I was told, or at least we’re not ready to risk trying to distribute it. But as part of a major anthology rather than a freestanding book, the commercial risk is minimal, and we’re willing to take the chance.
Understand, I had never conceived of what I had shown them as something I had written for the public. It was a description of something larger that I wanted to write. Or so at the time I thought.
Read what you’ve actually written, I was told. As far as we’re concerned, this isn’t just a long outline, it’s a complete short novel in itself, and all that it needs is a few extra scenes here and there.
I reread Journals of the Plague Years, the manuscript of the short novel you have just read yourself with a few minor additions, and they were right. It was all there.
And so Journals of the Plague Years saw its first publication in Full Spectrum in 1988. It was critically well received. In the next five years, it was published in several other languages. In France and in Finland it has been used in AIDS education programs. It has, in certain circumscribed circles, become something of a classic.
And yet I was never quite satisfied.
Time passed, but the plague didn’t. Time passed, and AIDS became more and more a subject of central cultural concern. Time passed, and friends died. Time passed, and millions of words about AIDS saw public print.
Time passed, and as it did, I felt more and more that Journals of the Plague Years needed to be published in a form that would be more permanent, that would reach a more general audience than the readership of an anthology of speculative fiction, no matter how successful.
I wanted Journals of the Plague Years published as a book, in other words.
This put me in something of a quandary.
Six years on, publishing perceptions had changed, ironically enough probably in part due to the publication of Journals of the Plague Years itself and its nomination for science fiction awards, and the chances were pretty good that now I could find a publisher for the very full-length novel I had written it as an outline for in the first place.
But I no longer wanted to write that book.
In retrospect, it seemed clear to me that fate, karma, commercial constraints, and subconscious forces had already combined, back in 1987, to cause me to write just about exactly what I should’ve written, namely Journals of the Plague Years as it appears in this book.
Rereading it, there’s precious little that I would want to change, and expanding it to twice its size would, at least in the author’s estimation, add little more than hot air.
Fortunately for me as the author, and I believe for you as the reader too, publishing perceptions have changed, and Bantam Books, the very publisher that could not see its way clear to publishing Journals of the Plague Years as a long book in 1987, now feels able to publish it as a shorter one in 1995.
This is just the way I wanted Journals of the Plague Years published, upon reflection, and so it should make me happy, and on the level of maintaining the work’s literary integrity and allowing it the chance to reach a new audience, it does.
Yet on another level, it makes me sad.
For I cannot really avoid the realization that Journals of the Plague Years is now viable in book form because the matters that it deals with have, alas, become more central to our lives than ever they were in 1987, not less, so central that denial is no longer a viable psychic option.
The writer of speculative fiction dies a little whenever the passage of time eclipses one of his visions, but if ever there was a work of speculative fiction of mine that I wanted to see turned into a quaint, obsolete period piece, Journals of the Plague Years is surely it.
If we were emerging from the Plague Years it describes, rather than moving ever deeper into them, closer and closer to that tragic world of my imagining, then friends of mine who have died might still be alive. How few among you cannot say the same? In future years, how many fewer still?
The story that I wrote in 1987 begins with a fictitious retrospective introduction purportedly written in 2143 by a critic in a happier age looking back on the Years of the Plague.
“It was the worst of times, and it was the saddest of times,” he writes.
Alas, in 1995, it seems painfully clear that those times are becoming more and more our own.
about the Author
Norman Spinrad is the internationally acclaimed author of sixteen novels including Bug Jack Barron, The Iron Dream, Little Heroes, and Russian Spring that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is also the author of numerous short stories and screenplays, is a political commentator, literary critic, and an occasional songwriter. Spinrad currently resides in Paris.
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