Now Write! Mysteries

STEPHEN JAY SCHWARTZ is the bestselling author of Boulevard and Beat. He spent years as director of development for Wolfgang Petersen, where he helped develop AIR FORCE ONE,OUTBREAK, RED CORNER, BICENTENNIAL MAN, and MIGHTY JOE YOUNG. Stephen has written for the Discovery Channel, and he works as a freelance screenwriter and script doctor. He is currently writing his third novel and is on assignment rewriting a 3-D zombie film. He has personally interviewed half a dozen zombies and he’s lucky to have made it out alive.

I might be in the minority here, but I actually love it. With a capital L. I can trace the moment back to college, when I convinced five professors that the research I would do in the Navajo reservation was important enough to excuse me from two weeks of classes, and it would require the rescheduling of my midterm exams.

I can understand why my screenwriting professor went along with this, and maybe even the guy who taught Film as Literature. But how did I convince my American history, astronomy, and sociology professors? Somehow I got them on board, and then I was off on a road trip that took me through California, Utah, and northern Arizona, taking the picaresque journey I was writing for the protagonist in my screenplay.

What the hell was I doing? I had a broken-down Toyota Corolla and a hundred bucks to my name. Was I ducking my responsibilities, intent upon reenacting my own version of Kerouac’s On the Road?

But then a funny thing happened. The road trip became a life lesson. I met amazing people—Native Americans and Anglos alike—and, after skating through Mojave Desert flash floods and sucking rainwater from my car’s overwhelmed carburetor, I somehow landed at an acquaintance’s house in Window Rock, Arizona, on New Year’s Eve with a .32 revolver under my pillow. The next day I found myself strapped to a wild beast in a snowy desert plain after saying the words, “Sure, why not?” to the little Navajo kid who asked me, “Wanna ride my daddy’s rodeo horse?”

Dangerous? Maybe. Fun? Hell, yes. I ended up near a place called Rough Rock, without electricity, plumbing, or running water, surrounded by hundreds of dogs and thousands of sheep wandering the hills looking for shrubs. I played duets with an ancient Navajo medicine man—his tribal flute to my soprano sax—and he fed me peyote for my ailing back and blessed it with cedar bark and eagle feathers, and soon I saw spirits in the linoleum on his kitchen floor.

And I rode horseback through Canyon de Chelly to view the Anasazi Indian ruins firsthand, and I interviewed Navajo teachers and prophets and politicians and farmers. On my last day, I was driven out to the boonies (it was all the boonies) to the home of a Navajo educator who had promised to drive me back to Gallup. It was late and cold when I arrived and he saw me and said, “It’s an old Navajo tradition to sleep in the same bed for warmth, you know,” and I realized that I had just met the first gay Navajo I’d ever known and I said, “Thank you, I’ll just stay over here in this bed . . .” and when I awoke I found him standing over me peering out the window saying, “Doesn’t look good. We’ll be snowed in for days . . .” and he was right, the snow had descended on our little world and there I was.

Then at breakfast I met his parents who figured I was one of those hippies who blew through in the sixties, stopping to herd their sheep for weeks on end. They asked if I would herd their sheep and I declined. And during my stay I discovered that the gay Navajo (who was respecting my boundaries, by the way) was an amazing writer who had graduated from St. John’s School of Great Books and had, in his youth, danced professional ballet in New York City and had been a good friend to Andy Warhol.

When you call yourself a writer, people talk. People will tell you the most amazing things. Everyone wants to be remembered, and everyone has a story to tell. And if you’re willing to listen . . . watch out!

When I start a project, I like to do what I call “wallowing in research.” Sometimes I call it drowning, or sponging, or diving off the deep end. It’s boots-on-the-ground stuff, and you’ll discover things about yourself and your characters you’ll never learn from Internet research or books alone. If you’re unpublished, you might think you don’t have the credentials to ask for an interview. Nonsense. Writers ask questions. Writers need to know. Define yourself as a writer and move forward. The odds are that you know someone who knows someone who knows the thing you need to know. Contact the guy you know and begin the process.

I tend to believe that we’re all just three degrees of separation from the person who has all our answers. Still, when I was writing my first novel, Boulevard, I was desperate to find a contact at the L. A. Coroner’s Office. I called everyone I knew and asked if they could get me in. No one had a lead. I finally broke down and sent an e-mail to the Chief Coroner Investigator. I didn’t think I’d get a response, but lo and behold, he wrote back with an invitation to tour the facility and interview him personally. In a half-hour tour I saw over two hundred bodies and six simultaneous autopsies, which, combined, included every variant of death and decay you can imagine. It was strangely serene and the experience reinvented my paradigm for writing about dead bodies. When I returned home I rewrote all the scenes I had placed at the Coroner’s Office, because the book research I’d done didn’t capture the essence of the world I had just seen.

My second novel, Beat, brought Boulevard’s protagonist, Hayden Glass, to San Francisco. I spent many days over a period of many months embedded with members of the San Francisco Police Department. I rode with narcotics officers, sergeants, and patrol officers, interviewed captains and city councilmen, went on vice calls and foot patrol in the Tenderloin, interviewed everyone who had an opinion. I’ve been seen with so many officers in North Beach that I can’t convince the locals I’m not an undercover cop.

When I meet them I become them. Through research I’ve been an astronaut on the International Space Station, a deep-sea submersible pilot, a cosmonaut on Mir, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, a member of an organization that hides women from human traffickers, a Special Agent for the FBI.

EXERCISE