TRAVEL, CHANGE AND OBSERVATION GIVE
YOU FRESH MATERIAL—AND A BROADENED
WRITER’S PERSPECTIVE.
May 1989
Time for a progress report.
It was in February of ’88, as some of you will recall, that my wife, Lynne, and I became nomadic. We closed our house, pulled up metaphorical stakes, folded our metaphorical tent, and Took Off. Ever since then we have been living without a fixed address. It is late November as I write these lines, and in the past nine months we have put 25,000 miles on the car and considerably more than that on our own internal odometers. We’ve been out of the country twice, traveling first to Egypt, later to Italy and Spain. (We also walked across the Mexican border twice, for about a half hour each time, and we spent a few hours in Canada, driving from Detroit to Buffalo, but those brief excursions somehow don’t seem to qualify as Foreign Travel.) We’ve hit 29 states, including Confusion and Anxiety, and we’ve spent the night under some 80 different roofs. We have, incredible though it may seem, visited 23 different towns and hamlets named Buffalo, which would surely appear to constitute a record.
While not everyone can see the point of our pursuit of the elusive Buffalo, almost everyone does respond to the romance of the nomadic lifestyle. And most see it as serving a valuable vocational purpose.
“You must be getting great material,” they say.
Am I?
I wonder.
I could, of course, write an account of our travels. The public has an extraordinary appetite for such books, no doubt because the nomadic fantasy has such a strong hold on the American imagination. I could write my own version of Blue Highways or Walking Across America, a sort of Travels with Charlie without the dog. The Buffalo hunt would give the book an overall theme, and a laudably eccentric one at that.
There’s only one problem, and that’s that it’s just not my kind of book. I’m a fiction writer, and I’m out of my element when I try to write nonfiction. There’s one exception—I seem endlessly capable of writing about writing. But other nonfiction is less successful for me. I have to struggle with it, and the results almost always disappoint me and everyone else.
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned—and I’ve had to learn it more than once, I’m sorry to say—is to distinguish between books that ought to be written and books that I ought to write. I may try a magazine piece about Buffalo hunting, but I suspect that’s as far as it’ll go.
Am I, then, finding other inspiration? Settings for stories? Characters with which to people them? Incidents with which to enliven them?
I must be, but I probably won’t know it for a long time, because that’s how it seems to work for me. All of my observation and experience gets piled up in a great compost heap, and eventually something springs out of the soil.
Inspiration’s a curious thing. Writers are always seeking it, and in a myriad of ways. Somerset Maugham looked for plots in the South Seas, and some of his most successful stories amount to little more than the artful retelling of some anecdote related to him on some tropical island. James Jones, feeling burned out, took up scuba diving in the hope that he would be moved to write fiction about a scuba diver; ultimately he returned to the Second World War, always the setting for his best fiction. Searching for inspiration, some of us look afar, some look within, and some simply look around, finding that proverbial acre of diamonds close at hand.
Some of my own thoughts on the subject were triggered by a recent letter from my friend Tom Williams, a writer and bibliophile who lives in Oakley, California. “A while back,” he wrote, “my wife Kathy asked her paternal grandmother a routine question about her long-dead paternal grandfather, all in connection with school records for our own children. Her grandmother reacted as if she’d been asked to strip naked and roll around on a bed of broken glass. Kathy found this curious, but her grandmother had always been a bit reserved. And, since the woman was deaf, it was not easy to communicate with her.
“Earlier, after Kathy’s father had died, she’d received the impression that her grandfather had not indeed died in the war, as she’d been given to understand as a child. But she was never able to find out what actually happened. Recently, when her grandmother passed away, the whole question came up again, and I decided to see what I could find out. The two of us went down to sunny Fresno to play detective.
“What we were surprised to discover was that this little lady who’d kept so much to herself most of her life was in fact a murderess. Kathy’s grandfather had died in 1921 of a gunshot wound to the head fired by his spouse with the intent to commit homicide. That’s what we learned in the County Building, where we read the death certificate. We went from there to the library, where we learned from microfilmed records that the grandmother and her children were allegedly victims of abuse, that Grandpa had also been deaf mute, that Grandma shot him three times from behind, firing through the back porch window as he hunched over his breakfast, and that she went to trial with the prosecution trying for the death penalty.”
At this point Tom sent for the trial transcript, only to learn that no trial records seem to exist. “We have heard that Kathy’s great-grandfather bought his daughter’s way out of it,” he wrote, “but it seems funny that there’s no record of any disposition of the case. In any event, the most eye-opening part of all this is not the detail of what happened but that it even happened at all to such a seemingly normal, everyday kind of person.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this. First, I wanted to sort through it, and what better way than to write it all out? Second, I’ve learned something from the whole affair. As a writer, as well as personally, I’ve been a fool to dismiss Old Maiden Aunt Mildred, Goofy Cousin Cecil and Weird Uncle Rick as dull, lifeless people that I’m simply obligated to visit once in a while. Probably (and hopefully) none of them is a serial killer or a pygmy rapist, but they might just have some past or present aspect of their lives that is worth knowing. They might even provide inspiration enough to yield up an idea that can blossom into a bestseller.
“What I turned up in Fresno may or may not find its way into my writing someday. I have a good visual sense of the shooting itself, and the image of two deaf people playing out such an intrinsically noisy scene gives the whole thing an especially stark reality for me. But, whether or not I make direct use of what I learned, I think the overall lesson is an important one.”
I would agree. And I would think it’s the kind of lesson that can’t fail to find its way into one’s writing because of the extent to which it changes one’s perceptions. Tom may not write about his wife’s grandmother, or about a woman shooting an abusive husband, or about a bullet fired through a porch window, or about one deaf person dying noisily at the hands of another. But whatever he writes about will be different for having been written by someone whose own horizons have been extended. Our writing is always changed when our view of the world changes.
I have to believe that my own wanderings will change the way I see the world, and that this will be somehow reflected in what I write. But this doesn’t mean I’ll go to Wyoming and then write something set in Wyoming. That might happen, but it’s not the way I most frequently process experience.
A couple of months ago, after all that time in transit, I holed up at a writers’ colony and wrote a book. The book was set in New York, in those side-blocks west of midtown where my series detective Matthew Scudder lives and works. The book, The Cutting Edge of Death, was one I had been trying to write for more than five years, a sequel to Eight Million Ways to Die which continues the adventures of Scudder after he has stopped drinking. (When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, written after Eight Million Ways to Die, was actually what Hollywood types call a prequel; it was set back in time several years before Eight Million Ways.)
This past April, riding a horrible square-wheeled night train across Egypt from Luxor to Cairo, unable to sleep and raddled with dysentery, I suddenly knew how to write a new book about Scudder. Characters took shape and scenes played themselves out in my mind. For perhaps an hour I lay there in creative ferment, and at the hour’s end I felt as though I could sit down and write the entire book straight out.
A month later, in Arizona, I worked on the book. I saw that I wasn’t quite ready, that I needed a secondary plot line, so I developed what I already had into a novelette. Several months later, when it was time to write the book, I had ideas and characters for the secondary story line, and, in rural Virginia, I wrote the book.
What does it owe to my travels?
I don’t know. At a glance, it wouldn’t seem to owe anything to them. The plot is an invention, and it is very much a New York story. I rarely take people and plunk them down in the middle of my stories, so the characters, too, are my own inventions. I can see antecedents for parts of the plot, and for some of the characters, too. The back story for one of the female characters is part of the life history of a friend of mine. Another character owes a lot physically to a man who used to own a couple of saloons in the Village; no one would recognize him from the physical description I provide, but his was the face I had in mind when I wrote about the character.
Another character remembers how he once voted 15 times for a New York mayoral candidate; years ago I heard a fellow tell how he and some friends had similarly voted early and often in Philadelphia, and the incident now found its way into my book. I could point to another half dozen bits and pieces of the book and explain where they came from, how something I once heard or saw or read about got transformed into fiction.
And, as I mentioned last month, while I was writing the novelette in Arizona I turned on the television set and watched an Oprah Winfrey Show about autoerotic asphyxiation, and that gave me just the plot element I needed.
As far as I can make out, that was the only part of the book I got by traveling, and I could have traveled anyplace with a television set. It didn’t have to be Arizona, any more than it had to be an Egyptian train that got the whole process started.
Am I getting a lot of material?
I don’t know. I’m seeing a lot of the world, and meeting some interesting people, and having the mind turned both outward and inward in ways that I have to believe will be valuable. Perhaps all of this will be reflected in books set in some of the places we’ve been. Perhaps whatever I pick up out here in the world will be mysteriously transformed into still more books set in New York.
It probably doesn’t matter. Tom Williams will be somehow changed, somehow enriched as a writer, because he knows the truth about his wife’s grandmother; this is so whether he writes about her or not. And I’ll be changed for having driven across the desert and climbed a mountain and collected a couple dozen Buffaloes, whether I write about any of it or not. Change the writer and you change the writing. How, really, could it be otherwise?