Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Indeed! Thanks for the response, Charlie. I especially enjoyed the
way that the group figured out things like food and architecture -
the compromise to allow water power, for instance, to power the
sawmill - the grist of communal living when it succeeds (finding
compromises that people are willing to live with). On what did you
base the California community? Were you just following the story as
it spoke to you, or did you have historical examples from which you
extrapolated?
  

    
Ari, the books I read for background on California social
experiments included "New World Utopias" by Paul Kagan, which is
something to behold. It details (with a lot of photos as well as
text) all kinds of intentional communities, many of them in that
country east of L.A. They were based on ideas ranging from
relatively conventional religious beliefs to loopier theories of
race, faith healing, Christian anarchy, secret meanings of the
Bible, and so on. This is what inspired my chapter where our guys
buy their mules at that wan commune with the flaking domes on the
buildings. In all, it wouldn't have been unreasonable of the
Sunlanders to expect that they could find a tolerant setting in that
desert.

 
  

    
<18>: That photo of the long-ago hippie reminds me of a glimpse of
Randsburg that I got on a field trip long ago. I could see that
there was something ancient in the odd buildings there.
  

    
V. Sea Monkey, thanks for Randsburg. I haven't been there, but the
photos online definitely have the aura... they remind me a little of
Bisbee, Arizona, which I visited years ago --  the copper mine moved
out and some very unhurried hippies moved in.

When writing "The Current Fantasy," I tried to retrace my
characters' first steps in California. I made my way by transit from
Oakland to San Pedro, saw the waterfront and took a ride on the
vintage "Red Car" trolleys that run there as a tourist attraction.

Then more transit to San Bernardino, and I walked with full pack
from there to Redlands to get a sense of the walk the Sunlanders
take to their property. Hot, arid, beautiful on the way, and then
Redlands is an oasis built by citrus money -- the old library and
train station are terrific. I also went to see Tahquitz Canyon
outside Palm Springs, where Bill Pester and subsequent hippies spent
time -- I based Benji's walk to find Rolf and Manfred on that.

Because those landscapes have changed so much, I found the photo
books from Arcadia Publishing very helpful. These are the little
sepia-toned books you see for sale in local history museums and
libraries, usually called something like "Historic [Name of Town
Here]." That main street of old Fullerton, with the pool hall and
"Chili - Noodles" restaurant, was the way I described it in the
book. Their old L.A. and New York books were a big help too. 
  

    
WOw that's a lot of walking!
  

    
It must have been fun to walk and be immersed in your characters.

So, Charlie: what's next? Another novel? More long walks?
  

    
Charlie, thanks! I do understand the individual artists and writers
who wander all over the place, swirl about, sometimes congregate in
schools/movements, but it's certainly intriguing the idea of
community moving and creating something new (-ish) altogether --
your band of characters and the German Christians off to Haifa.
Goodness. And, thanks again for your explanations.
  

    
Ren, thanks for asking about what next. I scratch my head about this
all the time. I've got an idea for a novel, but I don't know if it's
practical for me to attempt finishing it in the coherent years I
have left. Novels for me are a slow process and a lot of wear and
tear. (I think this is partly because I came to them late, after a
long time in journalism and movies.)

I might be better off writing shorter things now. I wrote a piece
for The Threepenny Review recently and it was nice to do something
that manageable. As I'm fond of saying, the novel is to the nervous
breakdown what the controlled burn is to the forest fire, and the
controlled burn isn't an exact science. 

But I've been awfully lucky in getting to do these things. 

 
  

    

> But I've been awfully lucky in getting to do these things.

I feel the same way! Weirdly, I have published three coffee-table books in a
row.
  

    
None of us know how many coherent years we have left. I hope life
continues to surprise us
  

    
> after a long time in journalism and movies.

Are you considering writing any more film scripts? Or did you leave
that far behind?
  

    
Jon, thanks for asking about movies. I paused work on "The Current
Fantasy" a couple of times to work on film projects, in both cases
with directors I'd made things with in the past. It was wonderful to
work with them again, but neither project was realized and I was
reminded of how lucky I'd been to have pictures made when I did.
With a few exceptions, people in their seventies aren't busy in the
movie business.

It's always been hard to get movies made but it's especially hard
now, with the nasty consolidation of studios and the crash of the
streaming gold rush.

On the DIY side, of course, movies can be made more cheaply than
ever, shooting on a camera from Best Buy or an iPhone, editing on a
laptop, and submitting the film to festivals with the possibility of
a distribution deal. But I gather that getting things into those
festivals is murder too.

For all their sins, the studios continue to support people like Sean
Baker, Ryan Coogler, Paul Thomas Anderson, Kathryn Bigelow, Richard
Linklater, and a lot of talented genre people. These days I'm
spending more of my time in the audience, and that's not bad. 

 
  

    
I think I remember a conversation with you many years ago in which you noted
that you were making some good money from films that weren't being made :^)
  

    
David, yes, and I think that's pretty standard for screenwriters
working steadily. (It wasn't <great> money but it was better than
magazine-writing money, which I couldn't have lived on although I
loved the work.) 

My way of thinking about this is to imagine my efforts in all media
being put in one blender, and the payments in another blender, then
turning on the blenders and seeing everything pureed and averaged
out. 

To get back to books in this regard, I think the publishing business
doesn't sustain literary writing -- the universities do. A great
percentage of writers teach writing for a living, and that's how
they make it. Their MFA students will publish and teach after them,
and so on. 

This enables the publishers to pay small advances and stay in
business, because they're not responsible for the writers' survival.
And the teaching process is (for a lot of writers) intrinsically
rewarding and also good for their own work, because they're thinking
about writing all the time. It's a win all around, I think. 

So then of course I worry about what's happening to the universities
under this administration, but that's a larger and more dismaying
story.
  

    

> My way of thinking about this is to imagine my efforts in all media
> being put in one blender, and the payments in another blender, then
> turning on the blenders and seeing everything pureed and averaged out.

That's how I feel about my many-facated career, too. It all seems to work out
in the long run. As long as the mortgage gets paid, I'm happy.

I would guess screenwriting is pretty different from novel writing in any
mumber of ways. Only one editor on a =novel, and how many writers and
´producers are you collarating with?
  

    
Being on my own through the writing process was definitely a shift.
An even bigger change was in what the writing required. On a
screenplay, you're not writing interior monologue to express what
the characters are feeling -- the actors do that for you, with their
faces. You're also writing barely any description, maybe a few lines
about what the room or the landscape looks like.

Well. You get into writing a novel and those things are crucial,
especially those unspoken thoughts. Of course there are exceptions,
the writers who do almost everything with dialogue. But in general,
we want to read how the characters respond to what's going on. I
read the novelists I love most and now and then I look up and think,
"This has been x pages of just the character thinking and it's
completely gripping."

So I've tried to teach myself about that. What I noticed on "The
Current Fantasy" is that, draft by draft, the reactions came closer
to delineating the characters as I understood them. There was a
truth there, but I had to keep circling it and getting closer in. 

In my experience, this process leads you to know stuff consciously
that you've sort of known but never had to think about enough to
convey it. Inevitably you come out of this changed. 
  

    
How many drafts were there?
  

    
Nice reflection, Charlie. When I was writing my book, I enjoyed
editing but hated rewriting. Could be a flaw in a writer
  

    
I enjoy rewriting! Take another pass through your brilliant work and see if
you can tighten it up a bit? Definitely worth the effort.

When Blair Jackson and I turned in a manuscript that was significantly bigger
than we agreed to, the editor (who was also the president of the company)
said, "Cut 30,000 words and we'll print the rest." We spent a couple of days
in my living room, hunched over my laptop, making very careful edits as
opposed to cutting large chunks at once. I enjoyed the process!

Ren, I'm not sure I understand the difference between editing and rewriting.
  

    
(If you edit something, the writer doesn't even notice you've
touched it, but assumes they were always this concise and accurate.
If you rewrite something…)
  

    
That makes sense!
  

    
I have always tried to be the editor whose touch was light and constructive;
during my magazine writing career I ran into a few editors who were quite
heavy-handed.
  

    
When I was writing features for a local weekly, I realized quickly
that the first editor I worked with wasn't even reading what I'd
written, just handing it over to be set. So I made an extra pass or
two and hoped I wasn't missing something.
  

    <scribbled by tnf Sat 13 Dec 25 12:36>
  

    
THat's taking "light touch" a little too far!