Oops, I lied again. I promised we’d get into the Seven Principles of using your real life in fiction. But again I’m gonna jump forward to a critical corollary:   Don’t be afraid to fictionalize.   I used to be. I thought if I made stuff up, that would be lying. Being untrue to real life. I would read Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway and think, “See, they’re telling the truth! Everything they’re writing is real! That’s why it works! That’s what I’ve gotta do!” Of course they were fictionalizing. They were exaggerating. They were heightening reality. The trick…

  [Continuing our new Mon-Wed-Fri series, “Using Your Real Life in Fiction” … ] I said last week that we would go through the seven principles of using your real life in fiction. But on second thought, we’d better skip to Principle #7 and study it first. It’s by far the most important.   Detach yourself from the character that is “you.”   The first three novels I wrote (all unpublished and unpublishable) were excruciatingly autobiographical. I was the central character. Everything was about me. But what made them unbearable to read was that the real-life me, the writer, was…

Today we start a multi-part series on using your real life in fiction. The example I’m going to use is my own newest novel, The Knowledge. We’ll bounce back and forth from story principles in the abstract to how these concepts were applied in The Knowledge. I’m gonna put up a new post every Mon-Wed-Fri, just for this series. Hopefully we’ll run through Christmas. If you have any questions, please feel free to write them in to the Comments section below. I’ll answer them as best I can. Ready? Let’s start with what was honest-to-God, real-life true in The Knowledge:…

  One of my favorite passages from books about the artist’s life is this one from Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit:   I begin each day of my life with a ritual: I wake up at 5:30 A.M., put on my workout clothes, my leg warmers, my sweatshirts, and my hat. I walk outside my Manhattan home, hail a taxi, and tell the driver to take me to the Pumping Iron gym at 91st Street and First Avenue, where I work out for two hours. The ritual is not the stretching and weight training I put my body through each…

I was thinking about Marco Rubio. I’m writing this a few days before the election, so I don’t know if he won his Senate race or not, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that he did. I’ll bet Marco and his family are breathing a major sigh of relief. A Senate term runs six years. The Rubios are now set up till 2023. No worries about fading from the public scene. No shiling for work in the private sector. Marco now, and for the next six years, possesses a position of high status and influence, a guaranteed income,…

  I wouldn’t blame anyone who read last week’s post if they thought, “Man, that’s a bit airy-fairy, ain’t it?” Lemme answer by getting even more airy-fairy. Consider this artist’s body of work:   Goodbye, Columbus Portnoy’s Complaint My Life as a Man The Professor of Desire The Ghost Writer Zuckerman Unbound The Counterlife Sabbath’s Theater American Pastoral The Human Stain The Plot Against America Indignation The Humbling             Clearly there’s a theme here. Without doubt Philip Roth is dealing with a unified, ongoing issue. He’s examining this theme from every angle, playing games with it, turning it inside-out and…

  We were talking last week about “what works and what doesn’t,” i.e. what activities produce (for me) peace of mind at the end of the day. I listed a number that didn’t work—money, attention, family life, etc. Let’s talk today about what does work. If you asked me at this time of my life to define my identity—after cycling through many, many over the years—I would say I am a servant of the Muse. That’s what I do. That’s how I live my life. [Remember, this post is Why I Write, Part 6.] Consider this (incomplete and possibly out-of-order)…

  I declared in the second Why I Write post that I would have to kill myself if I couldn’t write. That wasn’t hyperbole. Here in no particular order are the activities and aspirations that don’t work for me (and I’ve tried them all extensively, as I imagine you may have too if you’re reading this blog): Money doesn’t work. Success. Family life, domestic bliss, service to country, dedication to a cause however selfless or noble. None of these works for me. Identity-association of every kind (religious, political, cultural, national) is meaningless to me. Sex provides no lasting relief. Nor do…

  The hippie version of behavioral therapy (I remember it well) was “acting as if.” Are you scared? Are you anxious? Act as if you’re not. Shawn has a principle for Black Irish Books: publish as if. In other words, bring out a book/promote it etc. as if we were Knopf, as if we were Random House. What about writing as if? (Remember, the theme of this series is “Why I Write.” It’s my own admittedly personal, idiosyncratic, possibly demented view of why I do what I do.) I definitely write as if. I write as if I’m being published…

I had been working in Hollywood for five or six years and had a semi-respectable B-level screenwriting career going, when I got a new agent. My new agent was a go-getter. He decided to mount a campaign where he would “re-introduce me to the town.” That sounded good to me. I said, “Let’s do it.” My new agent started setting me up with meetings. The campaign would last six weeks, he said. He would send me out to two or three places a week—studios, production companies, the individual development entities of actors, directors, etc. The meetings would usually last between…