Reading to write

Research isn't necessary for every novel, but it turns out that it's important for mine, so I spent the weekend in San Francisco having anonymous sex and popping pills. There is no sacrifice I will not make for the integrity of my Art. Not one. If I've got to go all desert tribal and kill a goat and use a big bronze bowl to splash its blood all over the altar, then by God I'll do that, too.

Meanwhile, in the real world I've been furthering my knowledge of a scene that doesn't really exist anymore, because I plan to recreate its analogue in the future setting of my tale. Part of that research involved reading what I consider to be the two definitive novels of the late 1970s New York gay party circuit, Larry Kramer's Faggots and Andrew Holleran's Dancer from the Dance (hence last week's good_words). What's smashing about reading those two back to back is that although they cover the same scene, deal with the same themes, and were published in the same year, their approaches and viewpoints are entirely different. This lends a stereoscopic depth to the world they explore, a world so insular that the books share several of the same anecdotes and some memorable peripheral characters.

Each book is a work of fiction, but they are grounded in a firm reality. So, while I won't be stealing details, characters, or scenes, I will be stealing impressions. By that I mean: there are certain types of details and eyeball kicks which convey verisimilitude and lend an overall sense of realism to a world. Kramer and Holleran wrote fiction that takes place in a real subcultural scene, while I'm writing fiction that takes place in a scene I'm creating. That scene owes much to the past, but it exists in a fictional future, so if I intend to give it the same glossy sheen as the clubs of New York and the house parties of Fire Island I've got to hit some of the same notes and take some cues from those who have gone before.

Not all research is about people, places, and things. Some of it is technical or structural, such as observing how Holleran used first person narrative and framed it with a series of letters exchanged between the narrator and an unnamed correspondent at the beginning and end of the novel. In observing that method, I discover two things: one, I won't do that myself, lest I be accused of aping my betters; and two, there are many ways to tell a tale within first person narrative which break out of the restrictions inherent to that point of view. I knew this already, but in a more theoretical sense. These days I'm finding that everything I read is like fieldwork, observing The Author in the wild as he brings down a wildebeest and fends off hyenas.

I've adopted the same attitude while I'm reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is a non-fiction memoir with fiction-style tweakings. Dave Eggers does me the favor of deliberately calling attention to his devices, which is instructive because I can then see a clear and well-executed example of a particular kind of trick. This, in turn, gives me ideas about various tweaks I might apply to my fictional account that will make it seem more like non-fiction. Again, there's no direct stealing: just riffs, playing off of melodies.

When I was younger, I was of the OMG I can't read anything while I am Writing because it will contaminate The Work school. I think that was a function of insecurity, and that I was actually attending the OMG I can't read anything while I am Writing because I suspect that my ideas are trite and if I read something that resembles My Work I won't know what to do and then I'll have to drink a lot which I do anyway so whatever community college. That was back when Originality was Everything! It's still important, of course, but when you're dealing primarily with story, you realize that there are really only a handful of great ones to work with and riff on. Much of the overt Originality in Heartbreak consists of characters realizing they are characters in the author's narrative and objecting or consenting to being used as mouthpieces, which the San Francisco Chronicle calls a trenchant way of dealing with the artifice of writing. It is an unquestionably well-defined method. To me, it evokes Monty Python's Flying Circus, with its cast of characters who were aware that they were in sketches and were often quite peeved about it. The true story is parents-die-leaving-a-young-man-to-raise-his-even-younger-sibling. But for me it's the method that's instructive, so even if I was writing a fictional tale about parents-die-leaving-a-young-man-to-raise-his-even-younger-sibling, I'd be able to glean a few nifty things from Heartbreaking without polluting my precious Work.

Sometimes overt similarities between what you're reading and what you're writing are unavoidable. If you're creating a camp character, you're going to evoke Dancer's Sutherland or Bella from Faggots, because that's the nature of camp. If you don't hit the campy notes then it's not a campy tune, darlings! But that doesn't mean you can't put your own stamp on the improvisation you're spinning from that particular theme, because if you've done the necessary work to build the character up into an individual, then he won't be Sutherland or Bella, he'll be his own man, in his own tale. If you're reading a book and come across a character or a scene that sets a black ball of sickly tar roiling in your stomach because it's exactly like someone or something that you've created, it's most likely because you haven't developed the people and places with sufficient depth to differentiate them in your own mind. (Or maybe you have, and another author has perfectly matched that depth in every detail, in which case you've got a telepathic doppelganger and you're screwed.) If you can't tell the difference, you can be sure your readers won't be able to.

Now: I'm off to engage in a weird cat-and-mouse game with shadowy government agencies and mysterious transgendered hackers.

For research, you know.