A reader asked how I deal with the darkness of my work in my own life. Here goes.
I’ll begin with a digression. Mr. Lippman and I were discussing the big news events of the week, as I assume many are, and we went back to 9/11. Mr. Lippman said the terrorists probably realized that the 9/11 plan was their one shot to take that kind of action; they had to know that cockpits would be secured in the future and there would be a protocol on what to do if hostages were taken and/or killed. I said that terrorists have one enormous advantage over people not inclined to use violence to achieve their ends: Their imaginations take them where most of us can’t quite go. After 9/11, IIRC, the U.S. government consulted with some famous thriller writers to brainstorm what they might want to anticipate. Personally, I think horror writers would be just as useful.
The two Kings — Stephen and Laurie, both heroes of mine — have noted that some writers write against their fears. Imagine the worst, then make it a story and thereby control it. So far, I really haven’t done that. My work has more of a Sliding Doors/Post-Birthday World aspect. I look back and see things I’ve done, or almost done, and think about how it might have gone differently. What if I had gotten into strange men’s cars? (Actually I did, just once, at age 21, and it was an oddly benign experience. But that was just luck.) What if I had been in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Or I think about a story that is familiar to me, but not mine. A serial killer leaves his penultimate victim alive; how does that person feel? Two sisters disappeared. How can that be? What would happen to their parents? And what if someone showed up thirty years later and claimed to be one of them?
Inside these stories, it’s not as bleak as you might think. It’s a kind of psychological spelunking. I can see where I’m going and I know the way out if it gets too scary. Interestingly — well, it’s interesting to me — I often have the most fun while immersed in the POV of a character with whom I don’t agree. Trudy Tackett in I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE is a good example. Trudy’s beloved daughter, Holly, was murdered by a serial killer and she thinks his execution will make her happy. But she also harbors an intense rage toward the girl that the serial killer didn’t kill. Because, like most people, I tend to think well of myself — that is, most of us think well of ourselves, not that everyone thinks well of me — I want to believe that I would not be so twisted by tragedy that I would vent my frustration on another victim. But when I allowed myself into Trudy’s world, that changed. I had to wonder if I would be as good a person as I would hope to be in the wake of an enormous tragedy. Like Trudy, I don’t think I’ve been particularly hubristic. I’ve tried to acknowledge that I was born on second base, if not third, and that I’ve had a pretty steady stream of luck most of my life. But where is it written that recognizing one’s own luck has any talismanic effect, that it safeguards one from tragedy? It is possible that such a person would be more bitter than most. The Trudy chapters required me to suspend judgment, to contemplate choices that — I think — would not be mine.
Almost everyone, I have found, shares the common fantasy of wondering what happens behind the lighted windows we see as we walk through a neighborhood at night. I feel that way about people. I want to know what goes on behind everyone’s eyes, even if it is uncommonly dark. I have very little interest in sociopaths, which I believe are a better fit for the horror genre. Perhaps that’s why I don’t feel particularly burdened by the stories in which I immerse myself. I write about people, _most_ of whom are doing their best, muddling through. Even Walter, the pathetic killer at the center of I’D KNOW YOU ANYWHERE, has his side to the story. I don’t agree with him, but I understand why he thinks he was justified in doing what he has done.
It’s hard for me to think about how to make this post interactive, so just consider it open mike night in the comments.
Betsy, I wouldn’t want most people to know some of the thoughts that pass through my mind almost daily, but they are not unlike your elevator fantasy. I think my primary subject is power, in all its forms. Who has it over whom? How? How does it shift?
And Jennifer, I think there’s always been a small glimmer of hope in my darkest books, tiny little victories for various individuals. It’s a bit like Pandora’s box, although I think I have that on my mind because of Kate Atkinson’s (excellent, excellent, excellent) Started Early, Took the Dog.
A few more nuggets from your Memphis book signing/master class:
You have dark dreams. How appropriate. Yet you, in your ‘naughty librarian’ luminosity, and Tom Franklin (who’s ‘Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter’ has planted me in his diehard fan club) in his worldly-folksy huggability, can sit behind a folding table in a dying book store, (well, the Davis-Kidd in Nashville has lamentably folded), and radiate untroubled generosity…
…and it’s that generosity that allows you to believe, as you said, the depiction of sundry characters’ POV can be taught. Perhaps. But the students of such instruction must have matured past a certain stage of childhood and acquired a crucial ability to step outside our entitled bubbles of self-absorbtion and empathise enough with our fellow creatures to make them come alive on the page.
‘A big pickney’ is what I was often bitingly, if affectionately, called by my Third World husband and in-laws. And now…inspired by ‘I’d know you anywhere’…when I’ve lived to tell the tale(s), after having stepped into countless cars, trucks, airplanes, and boats (by myself or accompanied, if not protected, by huskie-mutt Diablo or newfoundland-labrador Bogart) with strangers, many of whom where psychopaths of various flavors…I find I’m stumped by my big-pickneyness in attempting to render the first minor character who isn’t me.
Whether it’s a key element of craft or art…whether it can be cultivated or is a natural gift…I do believe that trying NOT to be a narcissistic swine before which you’ve cast your POV pearls, Laura, is worthy of the effort.
In the meantime, here are a few authors that have acted as guides to POVs that have helped me to reconcile the sickening nausea warring with exquisite satisfaction surrounding all things Osama/Obama:
Andre Dubus III ‘The Garden of Last Days’
Michael Gruber ‘The Good Son’
Thanks, Laura! Psychological spelunking… I’m gonna have to steal that.
(as someone advised, steal from the best…]
I find a thearaputic and even cathartic benefit of going to those dark places in my own writing. But as I tell my friends, if some of the things I say freak you out, you should hear some of the things I think about and don’t say.
Or maybe not…
Ten years ago I moved into a house with my two children. I was a widow trying to make ends meet. My husband was into older cars and I stored a Chevy II in our garage. The neighbour down the street noticed the car one day and wanted to by it.
It seemed pretty innocent at the time and looking back he looked to be a “normal” person. He wanted the car very much and I took a partial payment on it. Hind sight is always 20/20 and wanting to see the car on the road and trusting someone with this vision was a huge mistake.
He didn’t pay for the rest of the car and taunted me that he would never pay. I had been ripped off so much after my husband died. I hired a lawyer and the bailiff found the car inside a person associated with the Hell’s Angels. Wow, could it get any worse? Yes it did. This wonderful neighbour found out who the woman was who worked for the bailiff and threatened her. He went to my lawyers office and made a death threat against him and my family. What a wonderful call I got at work that day. I could hardly drive home, my children who were 16 and 21 at that time wanted to protect me.
I did get the rest of the money and it went to the legal costs of this mess.
A few years later my neighbour who by this time moved a few miles away killed his wife and dumped her body in a wooded area. He was convicted and is in jail. I am on the victims call list for if and when he ever gets out.
Sociopaths are everywhere, the so called friendly neighbour down the street can and is one of them.
The shit I put my children through because I was still grieving over my husbands death haunts me to this day.
Thanks! I agree – I think everyone contains both light and dark – and even if you are 98% “light” you can read about, relate to or otherwise debate the 2% darkness without having to succumb.
I think we contain both ourselves (our TRUE self) and our antithesis. Like ego and id.
When you write about the brutality, the choices when the tipping point yields inhumanity rather than humanity…. I guess that is to which I referred in the FB comment… because truth is always stranger than fiction, and when you write what you do, on some level, you realize that there is a monster out there who can top anything you come up with…
In fiction, there can be a happy ending… but not always in fact. As a writer,I’m sure this plays out in many ways… but it doesn’t seem like you let it drag you down or swallow you whole. I’m a soldier, and I face a similar paradigm but through different mechanisms. I guess we both have to believe that good ultimately triumphs over evil.
Thanks for blogging my question.
Colleen
Thank you for the most perfect articulation of the process which makes moments of writing fiction a nearly thespian (in the Method sense) pursuit. This is something I have been asked about in my books, even though I am not a crime writer (though I often write about crimes and frequently tell the story through an unreliable narrator).
Your unreliable narrators are marvelous, by the way.
As a frequent traveler I often amuse myself in TSA lines and while waiting at the gates by trying to imagine the lives of some of the more interesting folks I see. Do they live in an apt. or house? Are the alone? What caused her to decide to wear that? What makes that person with the permanent frown like they are?
The nice thing about this is there are zillions of questions to ask about zillions of people. You never run out of subjects. And when things get dull you can always “have a man enter the room with a gun” according to Chandler.
I have always enjoyed the way you (LL) have the ability to really step inside and capture the essence of characters so completely different from yourself.
In one of you novels (Power of Three?) your Baltimore County detective (Kevin?)follows a lead to Sea Island. Your description of him scoping out the teenage hostess at the restaurant was written as if the writer were a 30ish horndog detective, not an Edgar losing novelist. I loved that scene. Stepping inside the creations must be a challenge and lot o fun. And you really do it well.
And, didn’t your detective Kevin make an appearance in THE WIRE in season 4 or 5 when McNulty visits the Baltimore county morgue?
Good catch, Kevin. Infante and Nancy Porter do show up, using just their first names. A very lovely tribute from Mr. Lippman.
The novel with that scene is What the Dead Know and I am very gratified that you believe I caught his inner life. And the scene you mentioned is key to his (oh-so-incremental) development, his decision in the novel’s last chapter that “the redhead could wait.” At least — I think that’s the line!
Wonderful post. Thank you.
I guess I just have a fascination with things that are on the morbid side and I have no idea where that comes from. And it�s less about pondering right vs. wrong, and more about just being curious. Sometimes if I�m in an elevator with someone smaller than me, I try to imagine what it would feel like to just take them down for their wallet. Of course I would never be able to do that (not that I�d want to) but it makes me think that muggers have an incredible amount of nerve. Where does that come from? Is it like diving off the high dive? Do they see it as a way of making living, or maybe they are just so desperate from being addicted to whatever that they don�t even give it a second thought. (Probably the latter case most of the time.)
I wonder what it is that makes someone a sociopath by definition. I recently broke free (that�s code for got a protective order) from a friend who definitely had some sociopathic tendencies, but not the kind of person who is a serial killer. But he did some seriously crazy things (and just plain weird things, like he had to rip the sewn-in tags off every item of clothing he ever wore.) Anyway, the Walter character reminded me of him ever so slightly.
I just have a lot of morbid thoughts, which is probably surprising since I have a really optimistic nature. But when I see a large crowd of people I wonder who will have something horrible happen to them in the next few years. That sounds so terrible! Nobody knows these things, I keep it all to myself!!
I’m just glad that I can vicariously enjoy somebody else’s cave explorations.
What is wonderful and strange to me—I see some dark stuff in my work–you’d think I’d avoid it in fiction.
But for some reason, your darkest novels have actually cheered me up!
When I lived on Okinawa,Japan, our downstairs neighbor woke us up with a scream! An Okinawan was peeping in the window and she caught sight of him in her mirror! curiosity of how the round eye lived was high at that time! so the wondering of what goes on behind the curtains is not limited to any one race or creed. As a child I was taught not to question or wonder! But I still do, glad to know I am in such esteemed company!