Author’s Notes (Fiction)
Major influences. Probably the most important influence on my writing was John D. MacDonald, author of the Travis McGee series. I greatly enjoyed the character of Travis McGee as a somewhat cynical observer of the passing parade, wandering through life trying to do the right thing. I identified personally with Travis’ peripatetic journeys. But MacDonald’s primary influence on me was his attitude toward writing. When asked how he would describe himself as an author, he responded, “I am not an author. I am a story teller.” I could not choose a better description of my own writing than that.
Another, more recent, influence was Robert Parker, author of the Spenser novels. I was less attached to the Spenser character than I was to Travis McGee, but I was very much enamored of the way Parker employed dialog as a tool for characterization. As most reviewers have noted, dialog tends to dominate my fiction. In fact, after completing my initial draft of a novel, I have to go back to break up the endless sea of dialog by inserting descriptive narrative. Dialog flows easily for me in a kind of Joycian stream of consciousness, while descriptive narrative requires significant effort.
For my science fiction novels, Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov were my heroes from the ‘50s. Epiphany is something of a paean to both. The notion of benevolent powers behind the scenes manipulating civilization, which was central to Asimov’s Foundation series, is the main theme of Epiphany. Heinlein explored social systems in novels like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Starship Troopers. I do some of that in Epiphany and plan to make that theme central to the sequel.
When I was in high school an English teacher caught me reading a Sherlock Holmes novel and bugged me to read better literature. Alas, I liked Sherlock Holmes and most of my novels have bits of deductive logic strewn throughout them. However, I did follow the teacher’s advice with decidedly mixed results. First, I tried some classic Victorian novels. Unfortunately, many of those authors were paid by the word, which probably explains my aversion to descriptive narrative. Then, I tried some critically acclaimed modern American novels. The first one was the Caine Mutiny, by Herman Wouk. I liked that book because of the plot twist at the end, which I thought was very well done. Thus, some of my novels have similar plot twists, most notably Epiphany. Sadly, that was followed by a number of anti-hero books, like Rabbit, Run, resulting in my pretty much giving up on modern literary fiction and focusing on popular fiction instead. So, it is no surprise that I regard myself as a story teller; I just don’t like dark novels with obnoxious protagonists, which is the modern trend. Thus, my protagonists may have somewhat tarnished armor, but they wear white hats. They are largely likeable, and they win in the end.
I can’t leave the topic of major literary influences without mentioning James Joyce. I regard Joyce as the greatest novelist in the English language. Unfortunately, I didn’t want to spend twenty years getting a novel right. Worse, I am enough of a realist to know that I simply don’t have his kind of command over the language to carry it off, even if I tried to get it right. Therefore, I make no attempt to emulate Joyce in my works, lest my works become mere caricatures. So I remain an admirer of Joyce from afar, as a story teller with no pretensions to literary fame.
My final influence is psychology. In college I was an alcoholic, and the AA approach of absolute abstinence was unacceptable to me because of my psychological set. Being rational and objective were cornerstones of my personality, so admitting that I could not control a psychological dependence as anathema to me. When my friends convinced me I had a problem, I spent a lot of time in the library researching abnormal psychology. I developed a strategy that enabled me to drink heavily for two decades while functioning normally. After two decades I realized I no longer needed the social crutch alcohol provided and I quit drinking. Today, I try to have a glass of red wine a day for health reasons, but I keep forgetting to take it. During that research, I found psychology to be quite interesting. As a result, my characters often have psychological issues, though I take substantial technical license for the sake of the story.
How I write. I don’t create large outlines and then elaborate them into sentences and paragraphs. When I sit down at the keyboard, I have, at most, a mental paragraph that describes my general goals for the book. When I start a new chapter, I often have less than that in mind. In other words, I pretty much just start typing and let things flow naturally.
This approach, of course, is antithetical to everything the writing courses tell you to do. The problem with my approach, which the writing courses try to address, is that I don’t know where I am going from the perspective of overall organization and consistency. The result is that I often have to do substantial re-writing to provide a natural plot flow. This is complicated because most of my books have two parallel plot flows – one around the action and another around the psychology of the characters’ interactions. I can usually produce 250 pages of initial draft in a couple of weeks, but it takes another few months to elaborate that draft into something I can present to reviewers.
My writing is very much driven by my characters. Both Epiphany and Hobson’s Dilemma started out in my mind to be action books centered on Joe Braxton and Jack Hobson, respectively. However, before I was a quarter done with both books, women had become the central characters. As I wrote, I found that what the women were saying and doing was more interesting than what the men were saying and doing, so I pursued them. For example, in the first chapter of Epiphany, I initially wrote the following lines when Joe’s secretary announced a visitor:
“His name is Ian Fleming.”
“Is James Bond with him?”
“No. Neither is Pussy Galore.”
As I reread those lines, it occurred to me that not everyone in my target audience would be familiar with the James Bond novels so I was about to strike the second and third lines. Then it hit me that those lines said something very interesting about Claire van Cortland, Joe’s secretary. How many women were reading James Bond novels in the ’70s when the chapter was set? How many women back then would make a joke about Fleming’s outrageous character names? How many secretaries back then made such jokes with their bosses? Suddenly Claire was such an Interesting Person in my mind that I felt I needed to further develop her. So, all I did was to alter the second line to provide some context for readers who had no idea who James Bond was:
“The author? Is James Bond with him?”
From there I ran with Claire’s character. A similar thing happened later with Beth Peyton in Epiphany. As I wrote the initial scene when she was introduced, she and her son were being kidnapped at gunpoint by Joe. My initial version had Joe doing everything he could to keep her from becoming hysterical, which she didn’t. Then it occurred to me that your typical soccer mom would probably be hysterical or do something stupid in panic no matter what Joe said, simply because the situation was far beyond her experience. So, on the fly, I made her a psychologist who fell back on her professional skills to shrink her captor. Now, she was another Interesting Person.
I recently took a DVD course on writing effective sentences. The instructor seemed to feel that the longer and more complex a sentence was, the more elegant it was. I found myself getting lost in the middle of most of the examples he cited as demonstrating good writing craft. I may be out of step with modern writing, but I find long, convoluted sentences distracting. Therefore, you will rarely find a sentence in my novels with more than two dozen words. I suspect one reason I lean towards more Spartan sentence structure is that I wrote text books prior to novels. In that context simple sentences are mandatory.
Epiphany. I have always been a fan of science fiction because it forces one to examine ideas that are beyond Conventional Wisdom. In fact, I regard that as the central purpose of science fiction. In Epiphany there is a central core of science – the very real danger that the Earth will return to the depths of the Quartenary Ice Age that began over two million years ago. The hype over global warming tends to overlook a lot of hard geological science, such as the fact that we are in an Interglacial Hiatus and our current temperatures are actually much cooler than the Earth’s average temperatures over the past 700m years. As a former geologist, I have a unique perspective on the mechanisms that are currently working to return us into the depths of the present Ice Age in the next few decades.
Epiphany is not about the Ice Age, though, despite the fact that the Ice Age is well beyond today’s Green Conventional Wisdom. There are three classic science fiction themes in Epiphany. One is about how fragile our civilization actually is. The geologic forces currently in motion are vastly larger than anything our technology can handle. As a result, our entire civilization will very likely collapse within a decade of the onset of glacial cooling. Worse, our civilization is so high tech that our species may not be able to survive. During the last cold epoch, seventy thousand years ago, Homo Sapiens was down to a few thousand individuals. They survived because, as Stone Age people, they were well equipped to live off the land. But, what will happen to modern society when the power goes off?
The second theme examines the question of how human civilization can be saved so it is still there to give H. Sapiens a running start in the next interglacial hiatus. That’s a very complex issue. Most of the book describes one possible scenario for doing that. However, in that scenario well over 90% of the world’s current population dies, simply because we do not have the technology to save more. In the grand tradition of science fiction, I also postulate an extraterrestrial civilization with vastly greater technology that refuses to help. The interesting idea is about why they cannot.
The last theme for Epiphany superficially deals with the mechanics of saving civilization. But the real issue is the ethics of what they must do to save civilization. In the Foundation series, Asimov skirted the problem of ethics for Seldon’s disciples; they never did anything really nasty to keep Seldon’s plan on track. But in Epiphany the protagonists routinely steal, blackmail, assassinate, and foment revolutions to achieve their goals. It was not my intent to provide a series of ethical dilemmas. Rather my goal was to present an overall context in which, at the end, the reader wonders whether there wasn’t a better way. That, in turn, hopefully dovetails with the extraterrestrial’s view that H. Sapiens is a serious danger to the entire galaxy.
Hobson’s Dilemma. Like Epiphany, this novel has three themes. The most obvious one is the action/adventure plot line of defeating a major conspiracy against the US. Hopefully that plot moves along with the speed typical of that genre. But, it is really just a skeleton upon which the other themes rest.
The second theme is also fairly obvious: the love triangle between Marta, Jo, and Jack. Presenting the bizarre situation that gives rise to the characters’ dilemma was a primary purpose of the novel. As in most science fiction, I wanted to examine the implications as well as and provide an out-of-the-box resolution. It also provided an opportunity for conflict when Jo’s original hope — that Jack and Marta would find they were different people now — was dashed by their working together again in the same sort of action context as their original affair.
As I got into the actual writing, a third theme evolved. I became interested in the relationship between Jo and her daughter, the precocious Becky. That led to developing Jo’s nest-building drive that enabled her to resolve the love triangle. Indirectly that also led toward examining the entire family dynamic, as well as their psychological issues, such as Marta’s transference of her love for Jack to Jack’s family. The more I got into it, the more complex it became and I realized that delving into everything would distract from a taut summer read plot development. Reluctantly, I decided to defer much of this theme to a sequel.