Fiction or Not
I have now written 52 pages of the new book I am writing that is somewhat outside my normal comfort zone. The book is a compilation and expansion on a series of stories about the peacetime high-jinx of a group of young military officers who share a house on Virginia Beach in the early 1960’s. That 52 pages represents the first draft of the Prologue and first three chapters. I keep saying that I am less a writer than a storyteller, but the truth is that somewhere along the line of the last handful of years, I think I have also become a writer. This will be the third book I have written for someone else as primary author. They all have different degrees of original author involvement. One was written as a book (that is, the last one about drug addiction and recovery) and needed to be rewritten. Another was given to me as 235 pages of random life notes that I turned into a 400-page story (actually written twice). This one seems to be an overriding theme or construct and a series of short and succinct humorous vignettes (usually a paragraph or two) that I have to write into stories and weave together as a book. This one needs a general construct, a structure, a storytelling arc and lots and lots of creativity to make these stories funny, real and compelling. None of these books were really fictional, but then again, since I am coming at each of these as someone unfamiliar with the characters and their lives as well as somewhat unfamiliar with the underlying subject matter, there is lots of fiction imbedded in the storytelling.
The first of these that I did was for a motorcycling buddy and there was a large thread of motorcycling that runs through the whole story. It was also about a man I have known well for twenty-five years, who lived in and grew up in an area of upstate New York with which I am very familiar. He went to the same University and business school as I did. And he spent his life in the corporate business world and eventually the deal-doing world, much as I have. But he was a marketing professional and I was a finance professional, so we played from opposite sides of the business discipline spectrum. The drug addict story was completely foreign to me. While the man who enlisted me to write it is one of my motorcycle buddies, the story is about his daughter and there was little or no motorcycling involved in the story. I have never knowingly (or otherwise I think) taken drugs of any sort. This runs from marijuana to opioid pain-killers and beyond. I do not understand the mentality that leads to addiction and the escapism of drugs. And I certainly have never gone through withdrawal and the recovery process for addiction. So, whatever I added to the stories to make the writing flow better was, by definition, fictional. And if you are ever writing dialogue into your work, something that most readers want and need to have to feel fully engaged in the story, you are making shit up. Even when I wrote the biography of my mother, Mater Gladiatrix, I had to occasionally embellish to go beyond what I knew to be fact, what I researched and thus believed was factual, and what I surmised from facts. As I told my older sister who asked where it all came from, some of it just needed to be shit that I had to make up to fill in the gaps. And that was a subject matter I could claim to be highly conversant about.
My book about the way people think about retirement, called Gulag 401(k) was a series of stories from either my life or the lives of people very close to me. I would call that book stylized non-fiction, which is probably just a fancy way to justify that I had to embellish those stories as well as to make them especially fun and interesting. The baseline of the story is true, but the ordering of events or the details are left to a degree of imagination.
So, this book, which has a working title of War Games is once again my attempt to help a buddy who I worked for for many years and who is also a motorcycling buddy. The stories are about a time I did not really live through and are about a culture I did not participate in. One does not grow up in America as a man of my age without spending some time imagining what life in the military would have been like. My ability to create characters and develop them enough for readers to like and relate to them does not require too much of this missing experience, but the stories that go into military shenanigans requires me to research quite a bit of military trivia. Some of it I can get where I get 99% of all of my writing research, Google and Wikipedia. I find assimilating tidbits of knowledge from the internet to be very easy. My daily blog storytelling has honed my skills at weaving these little factoids into my stories to make them more believable. Many good writers of fiction do the exact same thing. John Grisham does it in all his books as does Clive Cussler. The master of the craft may be Tom Clancy, who made you feel that he understood everything Jack Ryan understood and everything there was to know about nuclear submarines and even the fictional cavitation drive during The Hunt For Red October. The reader rarely understands everything about the technical matters in question, but he finds the telling all that much more believable because they were revealed in the writing in a way that gives the reader confidence that the author understood his subject matter. And the thing about fiction is that the facts don’t need to be exactly true, they just have to be very plausible.
I just wrote a chapter about a helicopter drone used by the Navy in 1962. It was a simple affair to research what drone the Navy was using in that time and what the specifications were. In the process you learn little tidbits that can further be woven into the story to make it all work more smoothly and convince the reader that all this shit really happened like you said. For instance, I assigned a junior officer to a ship that was commissioned and named after his grandfather. I know the ship name from Google. I know who it was named after, so it was a small leap to tell the tale of the young man assigned to that destroyer because someone in the Admiralty thought it would be appropriate to let him serve on his family’s namesake. That little fact becomes a valuable storytelling tool around which several key elements of the story can then revolve. The reader doesn’t know that its not true because it sounds true and the story more or less holds together. it is that kind of texture and character development that drives realistic dialogue and makes the story more readable and interesting to readers. It personalizes it by letting the reader imagine how cool and yet unnerving it would be to get assigned to a ship named after your grandfather.
The greatest thing about writing fiction is that it can flow very freely and can get easily prompted by a minimum of supplemental research and a touch of creative spark. One of the things my co-authors always ask is whether they need to worry about liable liability since to them the story is true as they tell it to me. I explain that it is not something to worry about because the characters are all fictional (they have to be since I am writing them and I wasn’t there). What I always say in the prologue of my books is my way of threading the fiction/non-fiction needle. I say that some of what you read is true and some is imagined and even I cannot remember which is which. I feel that absolves me and tells the world that this is all fiction or not, depending on what they want it to be.