I have said before that I think the best part of writing
– better than seeing your work in print, better than cashing a check, better
than attending the opening of the film adapted from you book, surrounded by
adoring fans in skimpy—
Sorry. Where was I?
Best part. Right.
The best part is the moment of creation.
There is no idea and then suddenly, miraculously, there is. Amazing.
Often I can tell you
exactly when and where that moment happened.
I was driving down the road and a song came on the radio and – Hey! That line is meant to be a book title – And I almost
drove off the road.
But sometimes it
isn’t that easy. Take “Brutal,” my story
currently gracing the September issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery
Magazine. (On finer newsstands
everywhere, and some lousy ones too.)
I can tell you that
this story is a mash-up of a Jim Thompson novel and a Neil Simon movie, and
that’s true. But it doesn’t tell you
where the idea came from. I didn’t wake
up one day and say: “Thompson and Simon!
Perfect together!” No, something
brought the two tales together in my head, and whatever that was Is lost in the
swamps of memory.
So let’s talk about
the story itself. Coyle is a
professional assassin, one of those guys, as he says, “who can kill you with
one finger.” He is in a big city going
after a high-value target. Things go
well for a while and then, conflict being the heart of fiction, things go not
so well. And that’s pretty
much all you need to know about the plot.
Go read the thing.
But first, I wanted
to tell you one more oddity. A century
ago Robert Benchley wrote an essay called “Mind’s Eye Trouble,” in which he
lamented his lack of visual imagination.
I seem to have been endowed at birth by a Bad, Bad Fairy with a paucity of visual imagination which amounts practically to a squint... This limitation of mine might not be so cramping in its effect if the few visual images which I have were not confined almost exclusively to street scenes in Worcester, Massachusetts, the fortunate city which gave me birth... (I)t is not the ideal locale for the CHANSON de ROLAND or the adventures of Ivanhoe.
Benchley goes on to say that he pictures the entire history of the Roman Empire taking place in a driveway on the corner of May and Woodland Streets, while all the events in Dickens take place on the second floor of a house on Shepherd Street.
I suffered from that problem when I was a child, but as I saw more of the world I outgrew it. But here’s the interesting bit…
I recently sold
another story to Hitchcock’s, and, like “Brutal,” this one begins in a rundown
office building. I happen to know for a
certainly that both stories are in the same building.
How do I know? Good question. Neither the building nor the city are
named. The slim descriptions of the
buildings don’t even overlap much. But I am
sure, largely because I based them on the same building I visited a few years
ago.
At this point some writers or
writing teachers might try to draw a moral out of that. Like: both stories sold because they were
focused on a real place, real in my imagination and therefore vivid to the
reader.
To me, that’s magical
thinking. But obviously I don’t know
where my next story idea will come from or set itself (see the beginning of
this piece). So the fictional building
manager should probably tighten security.
Before
I fold my tents I want to thank R.T. Lawton for reading "Brutal" in its
earlier days and giving me the benefit of his advice. The check is in
the mail, R.T. Not to you, of course, but you can't have everything.
