Warren Adler's Blog, page 57

Where is Our Culture Heading?

I wouldn't characterize myself as an intellectual snob, but I have always regarded fiction for adults as an indispensable endeavor that offers insight into the human condition through storytelling, excites one intellectually and emotionally, and is truly worth the investment of time and concentration.

My generation read deeply of the works of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, O'Hara, and hundreds of others, as well as the glorious classics as represented by Dickens, Thackeray, Balzac, Flaubert, Mann, Twain, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Proust and many, many others who form the canon of great works of literature.

We weren't necessarily academics or one-note specialists in the study of these works. We read largely for pleasure and to absorb ideas and inspiration that helped us navigate the shoals of a complicated life.

We graduated into these works from young adult fare that set the stage for future appreciation of literature and formed a lifelong habit of reading as our principal mode of gaining insight. Thus, we learned to profit from the leisure moments that are essential for a fulfilling life.

As a child, I did cut my reading-teeth on comics and eagerly followed the adventures of Smilin' Jack, Dick Tracy, Terry and the Pirates, Gasoline Alley, Flash Gordon and many others syndicated in strips in newspapers throughout the country. We called them "Funnies."

Then, came the comic book era with Superman, Batman, and other knock off superheroes rendered in colorful drawings with balloons of dialogue in staple bound magazines.

I read, too, the serial sets produced regularly by story factories that provided such series as the Hardy Boys, Bomba the Jungle Boy, The Boy Allies and for girls, Nancy Drew, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and numerous others. The heroes and heroines were teenagers, just like us. Edward Stratemeyer and his army of ghostwriters pioneered many of the series for teenagers.

This and similar books were the usual fare of young readers of my generation, and they are still being sold in up-to-date versions. In my case, these books were read long before television. Our Saturday movie fare consisted of comic book characters like Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon, who took human form in what were dubbed "chapters," which were continuing sagas that always ended in a cliffhanger to be continued at next Saturday's matinee.

Radio held sway in those days and we kids couldn't get enough of the adventures of The Shadow, Omar the Tentmaker, and Inner Sanctum with its scary, creaky-door opening.

Then, I grew up.

I turned away from comic books and those wonderful serial books, over which I haunted Stone Avenue's children's library in Brooklyn. I outgrew the excitement of the movie serials and limited the horror fare and Flash Gordon's adventures. I remember, too, outgrowing some brief childhood fling with fantasy, horror, zombies, vampires and other stories in books with characters that also cropped up on the radio and in the movie form.

It must have been around age of 15, but I began to upscale into semi-adult reading like Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson, Albert Payson Terhune's books about dogs, and the enduring books by Charles Dickens and Rudyard Kipling. Who can forget David Copperfield and The Jungle book? In high school, we were encouraged to read these books and were required to write book reports on them to be graded by our teachers, who could rest assured that we were reading these books.

Comic books began to fade from the American scene, along with the serial books. But then, I was growing older and the comics and the boy's adventure stories no longer interested me, along with horror, zombie and vampire stories. They were always around, of course, but did not seem to dominate the popular culture.

Now, all these categories are back with a vengeance, attracting vast hordes of fans, including, to my shock, people that are, by age, sophistication and experience supposedly outside the age of the young teenage demographic (which is still the golden target audience of these products).

So, my question to everyone within reading distance is: why the phenomenal upsurge? How come these categories are soaring back in other forms? Are we regressing as a culture? Why are comic characters returning in new wrappers that are attracting thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands or millions worldwide to graphic novels, games and movies illustrating the adventures of superheroes and superheroines? Please enlighten me. Does it have something to do with wishful thinking about empowerment? Perhaps.

Nor do I understand the enormous fascination with zombies and vampires. Indeed, I have a friend, a top executive at a major computer company in his fifties, who admits to being addicted to books about zombies. Others, in age groups well beyond the "teenage" category, are also in thrall to vampire and zombie movies and books. It baffles me.

Some say it is because real life is so fraught with problems and insecurity. They say that the doom and gloom retailed by our media and politicians turns us away from reality to an escape into fantasy, the unreal, or anything that turns our attention away from the terrors of modern life. Others say it is merely our culture inventing new forms of communications, reinventing and embellishing old cultural assets through the transformative wonders of modern technology. Still, others say that this is a passing phenomenon. Who knows?

I hate to think of it as a manifestation of our decline, which some have postulated, a kind of dumbing-down of American culture. I offer this later idea not as a flip or inflammatory insult to those thousands who flock to this kind of fare, but as a somewhat biased, informational observation. Admittedly, it could be evidence of stubborn literature elitism on my part.

Believe me, I have no quarrel with folks who love and enjoy these categories. I did when I was a teenager. But why are adults gobbling them up? Why is purveying this material increasingly profitable? Will it last? Where is our culture heading? Is it good or bad?

I am very aware of the vast diversity of human interests and the slicing and dicing of categories of human endeavor. As they say, "different strokes for different folks."

Was it always thus, or have I lost touch with what motivates Americans of upcoming generations? This is a possibility that I contemplate with very personal alarm.

But, please, don't condemn me for asking. I am open to explanations and enlightenment.

The Scales of Human Value

I have been trying to make sense out of what appears to be a strange bargain between the Israelis and Hamas to exchange a single kidnapped Israel soldier, Gilad Shalit, for a thousand Palestinian prisoners, many of whom have blood on their hands for having participated in the murder of Israelis. My understanding is that all of the Palestinian prisoners have been tried and convicted of their crimes in Israeli courts.

On the surface, the imbalance seems preposterous, its maddening inequality and disproportion makes the Israeli position seem alarmingly weak and counter productive, while the Hamas position appears strong, powerful and victorious. It appears to reward the strategy of hostage taking and opens the door to repetitive attempts at kidnapping tactics by Hamas as a key to freeing further Palestinian prisoners.

Beneath the surface is the agony of parents, siblings, friends and relatives of those innocent civilians who were murdered by the deliberate acts of many of the prisoners, who indiscriminately exploded or helped explode bombs to extinguish the lives of people who had the bad luck or timing to be eating in restaurants, traveling in buses or simply walking the streets.

It must be awful to see the killers of their children go free, whatever the political rationalization. To them, such an exchange must appear as a knife opening old wounds.

The Hamas side reveres these killers as martyrs and trains its army of suicide bombers by brainwashing them to believe that welcoming death by murdering enemies offers martyrdom and greater rewards in their religiously imagined heaven.

Why some mothers and fathers on the Arab side extol and praise these deaths by their children is beyond my comprehension, both as a parent and a human being. Yes, I do understand the psychology of passionate religious devotion and the politics of nationalism, tribalism, and affinity, although, to be fair, I admit my ignorance of Islamic imperatives.

But looking beneath the surface for motives, one discovers that such a simple analysis is far from clean cut. For example, looking at it from the point of view of a father of sons, nothing, but nothing would ever deter me from moving heaven and earth to spare my children's pain and suffering. Gilad's parents spent the past five years of their son's captivity in a 24/7 campaign to get the Israeli government to find a way to affect the release their beloved child.

One assumes that the Israel Defense Forces spent days trying to figure out a way to release Gilad by military action that would not result in the young man's death. Apparently, every plan they conceived had too many risks, and it is clear that Gilad's captives had cunningly created an impregnable prison for the young man.

The Israelis also had to wrestle with secular and religious interpretations. On the secular side, the Israeli's have a largely conscript Army that vows to leave no soldier, dead or alive, on foreign soil. This is Israel's solemn pledge to its military and has been proven again and again in numerous ways.

The Palestinian side, knowing of this promise and what was interpreted by them as vulnerability, have cleverly exploited this in the past, extracting other prisoner exchanges even for dead soldiers and citizens resulting in the return of thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of whom resumed their bloody terrorist attacks against Israelis.

On the religious side, a powerful force in Israeli political and cultural life, there are admonitions in Talmudic biblical interpretations that state that redeeming captives takes precedence over sustaining the poor and clothing them, and there is no commandment more important than redeeming captives.

Indeed, in the Torah, the sacred Jewish text reputed to be the five books of Moses, it tells of Abraham's early life when he raised an Army to release his nephew Lot who was taken captive in Sodom by enemy invaders. There are other passages as well in holy texts that favor release of captives through barter.

But in the end, after much inner debate about the rights and wrongs of such a decision, I come out with a persistent thought that after all the political, military, strategic, moral, religious, ethical and practical considerations are dispensed with, Hamas unwittingly has given worldwide credence that on the scale of human value, the life of one average Israeli soldier is worth the lives of a thousand Arabs.

The Publishing Civil War

So, Amazon is to become the official publisher of its own books. It was, of course, bound to happen, too tempting to resist. After all, it does represent a large chunk of the retail book business and does operate its own production and distribution facilities both through its Kindle and print sites.

In effect, it now competes not only with its suppliers (meaning other publishers), large and small, but also with other authors, both traditionally published and a giant wave of self-published authors.

As a pioneer in the eBook juggernaut when it was a pipsqueak possible spinoff of publishing in the early days of Internet sales, I viewed this development as an inevitability. It is by no means a surprise.

The upcoming phase in what is clearly a civil war between the traditional publishers and a powerful arm of its distribution system is what will happen next. The fact is that Amazon has been skirting around the edges for years, and in some ways has been its own publisher, offering titles exclusive to its sites.

The bookselling landscape as it now exists is like a giant funnel into the bookselling pipeline, where traditional publishers are stuffing their products along with self-published authors by the gazillions, pushing books in every conceivable category.

Soon to come will be a global reach as all this product appears in translations in every language of the world being sold on the web. Amazon has a head start on this and will undoubtedly figure out ways to be globally dominant. Another issue for authors will be in the contractual terms Amazon will offer.

Will Amazon take worldwide rights of authors, all the translations in all languages and adaptations to movies and television?  My crystal ball tells me that one day all visual entertainment will find its way to the web and crowd out auditorium theaters for films.  It could be sooner than one thinks. And who will dominate the output of those products?  Take a guess.

With all of the traditional filters obliterated by the slicing and dicing of all authoritative critiques on the Net and in print and non-cyber media, authors and publishers will be hard pressed to individualize or brand their future offerings.  At some point, the rush of third party Internet publishers to scoop up out-of-print books of authors who still might be remembered, will continue to join the product flood of reading materials all competing for the consumer's attention and bucks.

Then there are the classics being offered gratis or near gratis as eBook sets. One can get the entire works of Twain, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and many others in digital form for less than a Starbucks coffee. This does not mean that physical books will disappear since many readers will want to display their books as old friends on their book shelves, although the chances are that future readers will get their content via the digital versions.

There will always be a hard core of readers who will opt for the physical version, unable to enjoy the content without the tactile feel of the printed page. Unfortunately, they will, sadly, become a diminishing minority.

It was a pretty safe bet for Amazon to start its roll out with self-help and celebrity books. Self-help has its built-in possibilities and celebrity books have the advantage of prior promotional identity. Expect more of the same.

Presently known genre writers will, of course, benefit from their long tail recognition and fan base, and newer presently unknown genre writers will make their bones by charging readers a ninety-nine cents price point or give their books away free to lure them into the fold. Expect price wars to accelerate as individual authors try to amass a respectable readership.

The big and yet unanswered question is how will Amazon favor its own books. What marketing ploys within its jurisdiction will it employ to make certain that the sales of its own books earn back their advances and make a profit?

One thing is certain and that is that the unattached author will have to market his own work in an increasingly crowded field.  Matching the reader to the author will be extremely difficult and will require new and imaginative ways to project his or her work.

To a novelist writing stand-alone works of fiction, which is my principal interest, it presents an overwhelming challenge. He or she will be lost among the profusion, finding it hard to individualize and sustain his name and his work. Indeed, the whole concept of "best selling" may be out the window as books find their own niches and authors find ways to market within these niches.

Ever the optimist, I truly believe that the serious author to whom writing works of the imagination is akin to breathing oxygen to stay alive, will eventually find his circle of dedicated readers. He might not get rich or famous in traditional terms, but the mysterious machinations of word of mouth might find its way to readers world-wide, who will be enriched with his or her insight, wisdom and wonder.

The Snides of March

Hollywood pictures about political campaigns are usually contrivances that portray politicians as corrupt and deceptive. Politicians are cast as liars, cheats, and sexual predators, and their campaign staff as masters of cover-up– cynical manipulators who would send their mothers to the gas chambers to get a win for their candidate.

The Ides of March, a new movie directed by George Clooney, takes this category to new heights of stupidity. It is the epitome of the genre and makes the democratic process seem like an adventure in hell.

George Clooney plays a good-guy politician running as the Democratic candidate in the Ohio Primary on the way to the White House. He is the flavor of the year, save- the- world candidate out to defeat the guys in the black hats (meaning: the destroy- the- world Republicans). The script provides snippets of policy talk for party authenticity.

The Clooney character is not running against a Republican, however. He is in a primary battle with a Democrat of a contrary mindset to his opponent, perhaps someone who might advocate things Republican.

Clooney's image-maker PR guy, played by Ryan Gosling, is an idealist, a true believer in Clooney's Governor. Gosling's character is dedicated to the belief that Clooney best represents the good guys who, in Hollywood's terms, care the most about the little guy.

Naturally, Clooney's Governor is portrayed with minimum flaws as a great Governor, a loving husband, and an exemplary family man. In his affectionate devotion to his wife, who has almost no dialogue, he is portrayed as gentle, loving and downright cuddly. He even rewrites his own speeches.

The behind-the-scenes campaigning sequences are typical of what we have seen before and are moderately accurate. It features starry-eyed, dedicated, ambitious and attractive young people who are up at all hours reveling in their close proximity to power and doing whatever jobs are required to ingratiate themselves and boost their resumes. As expected, and undoubtedly true-to-life, there is a lot of coffee-guzzling, implied general partying, and numerous hook ups, especially with young, nubile interns turned on by the excitement of it all.  Think: Monica Lewinsky as the intern role model.

As we have learned from real life, powerful, big shot politicians, especially Presidents, are turn-ons for sexy, young interns and vice versa. One of Bill Clinton's most memorable quotes about his affair with an intern, aside from his definition of sexual intercourse, was: "I did it because I could." Indeed, you know from the get go that the young, gorgeous, sexy creature that catches the horny eye of the idealist Gosling character will very soon end up in his sack.  By then, we suspect that she has been available to others along the power ladder.

Then comes a plot device that must have been right out of the trash bag of overused embarrassing and often rejected clichés .It turns out that the gorgeous intern has also been in the sack of Mr. Clooney's picture-perfect save-the-world politician. After all, we always knew he had first dibs. Unfortunately, the little lady must have flunked her sex education course. She is, heavens to Betsy, pregnant by the good Governor.  Ah, the aphrodisiac of power.

Here, the plot thickens to sticky molasses. To save the Governor the possibility of political suicide, Gosling's idealist sends the little girl to get an abortion and urges her to get lost.  Impregnating the intern is bad enough, but aborting the Governor's illicit child is the ultimate no-no. The Governor, you see, is Catholic. Still, at all costs, the good guy governor with the zipper problem must be protected.

By now we know that Gosling's image-maker character is something of an idiot. Worse, he takes money from the campaign to pay for the abortion. At this point, it becomes apparent that the good governor is not too smart about his hiring practices.

To nudge this travesty of plot creation further over the cliff, the idealist is fired for other reasons having to do with his opponent's campaign manager trying to hire him away from good guy Clooney, which proves that the other guy was just as dumb in the employment department.

When the little lady discovers that Gosling has been fired, she promptly kills herself by taking an overdose of pills given to her at the abortion clinic. It turns out that the impregnated lady was also a Catholic, which may or may not have motivated her suicide.

The bumbling script does not ask why the intern killed herself and apparently the police department has little interest in the lady's demise. The city in Ohio where this takes place must have the laziest and most incompetent police force in the country.

And so the idealist Gosling blackmails the good Governor into running his campaign and firing the guy who ran the campaign before and fired Gosling.  After all, he has discovered the good Governor's Achilles heel, which surely is a euphemism for another part of his anatomy. The obvious, heavy-handed implication is that Gosling will now become a close advisor to the Clooney character when he wins the Presidency, which the movie assumed from the beginning.

In a line of dialogue that wins hands down the prize for the weirdest line ever performed in a movie, the Governor says something like: "Does that mean that I will be stuck with you for eight years?"

You betcha, the close-up of Gosling clearly implies. The poor bastard is about to spend eight years as the future President's pimp.

There is a strange scene near the end of the movie showing another gorgeous, young intern carrying a tray of coffee containers to the Governor and his top brass during a rally. The camera follows her as she makes her way through the crowd like a lamb to the slaughter—clearly, a symbolic insert– as if the point of the movie is: "lock up your daughters before the political predators make them their sex slaves."

This movie travesty ends with Gosling's character running the campaign for the good Governor. The ending, meant to be a profound, "loss of innocence" statement, shows a long close-up of Gosling's face which the movie makers must have hoped would convey disillusionment with the whole bloody corrupt system as imagined by Hollywood.

Actually, this last close up of Gosling staring into the camera is the most accurate and honest portrayal in the movie. Thank God it's over, Gosling's character seems to clearly state, let me take the money and run.

Would I Have Joined the Protesters?

Boy was I pissed off. I had just graduated college as an English major. It was 1947. World War II had finally resulted in victory. At nineteen I found myself competing for jobs with millions of ex-servicemen who had come home from the war with guarantees of getting their jobs back.

Since my parents were broke, we were living with my grandparents in a tiny three bedroom house with one bathroom. There were eleven of us. Since quarters were tight, I slept with my kid brother and my parents slept in the dining room and an uncle in the kitchen.

I worked my butt off trying to find a job. Who the heck wanted to hire an English major? My choice. My own damned fault.

It was not fun running around New York City, sitting in employment agency offices, suffering rejection after rejection.

The odd jobs I had cadged working during the war to pay my tuition had dried up. I packed candy at Abraham and Straus, delivered telegrams by telephone for Western Union, sold shoes at Macy's, did surveys for corporations, worked as a busboy, anything to make a buck. Thankfully, I lived at home where everybody chipped in to put food on the table and clothes on our backs.

I was really angry and depressed. Everything seemed beyond formidable. In Manhattan, people went about their business as usual. People had cars, lived in fancy apartments, saw shows, and ate in fine restaurants. How dare them, I thought, when I was trying so damned hard to get a foothold on a career, whatever that meant to an English major.

I'd start my day with a nickel ride into Manhattan, visiting crowded employment agencies, walking the streets, sitting in Central Park when the weather was good, getting a cream cheese sandwich on nut bread for fifteen cents at Chock full o'Nuts. It was downright discouraging and, believe me, I was angry as hell. I thought, I'm a college graduate, I deserve a job.

I admit it. I blamed all the politicians, the fat cats, the banks, the stock markets, the bejeweled attendees at opening nights at the theater, the country club types, the socialites, the bosses, the people who owned cars, traveled, bought great clothes, ate in fabulous restaurants, anyone that had more than me, which was pretty much everybody.

I considered myself a victim of other people's greed, of injustice, unfairness, prejudice. You name it. My blame list was as long as Broadway.

Sure I had empathy, but it was mostly for me and my Dad, who could not find a job, but was too proud to apply for welfare. It was called relief in those days. I agreed with him. We had our family. It would have been unthinkable for us to take an unearned handout.  As they say, we got by the skin of our teeth.

I felt crushed by circumstances, massively pissed off at everything and everybody. The dreams and ambitions that had fueled my childhood and college days were in the trash can.

Now, in the light of decades of struggle and experience, I ask myself would I have joined the protesters on Wall Street? Maybe. They, as I was then, are pissed off. Many are close to my age at the time of my personal great depression.

So here is my advice to those people who apparently have the time and energy to protest their plight by blaming everybody in sight. Forgive me if I sound somewhat harsh. And yes, I know, then was then and now is now. But having lived through depressions, recessions, poverty, disappointment, ecstasy, love, military service, numerous wars, fatherhood, failure, rejection and what passes for success, here it is folks. Hate it or love it.

We live in America, land of opportunity, fierce competition, innovation, imagination, ambition, risk taking and resourcefulness, big dreams, big ideas and big chances. Not everyone becomes a movie star or a billionaire and, as they say, wishing won't make it so. The price of this free-for-all environment spawns both good guys and bad guys, saints and charlatans, successes and failures. As old Ben Franklin said, "diligence is the mother of good luck" and Winston Churchill's "Never Surrender" is as good a mantra as ever devised.

Like them I've learned that the real joy is in the aspiring, reaching for the moon, coping with the rough patches, dreaming big, never surrendering to despair or jealousy or worst of all blaming others. That's what freedom is all about.  Hell, millions of people in America can tell a story similar to mine.  Just ask Zuckerberg or Gates or Jobs or Buffet. Go for it and stop whining.

Would I have joined the protesters? Maybe. But it would have been a waste of precious time and, when you add it all up, all we have is time. So stop all this "woe is me" baloney and get on with it. The "getting there" is three quarters of the fun in the game of life and America is just about the best playpen you'll find on the planet.

And if you want to protest, then protest the fact that no matter what, the game ends for all of us. That, too, will get you nowhere. Oh yes, I have done all the things other people were doing that pissed me off years ago. Big deal. I'd settle now for that cream cheese sandwich on nut bread from Chock Full o'Nuts.

Shakespeare was right.

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings."

How Will It End?

People are always asking me whether I know the ending when I begin to write a novel. I imagine many writers of fiction are asked the same question.

It brings to mind what one of my friends, Rod Thorp, used to say. Rod and I and a group of other novelists and at least one screenwriter were part of a luncheon klatch that met every month to shoot the breeze and discuss this and that, life in general and the joys and perils of the writing trade.

Among the group during my tenure were Andy Kaplan, Jonathan Kellerman, Sid Stebel, Mann Rubin, Brian Garfield, and Ib Melchior and, of course, Rod Thorpe.

During my six full-time years in LA, it was one of the highlights of my stay and turns out to be what I miss most at my west coast sojourn. Occasionally when the timing is right and I am in LA, I join the group and take my place in its conversations.

We started the group in the late-eighties and it is still going strong, although some of the original founders have been replaced by others. None are retired from the writing game, but then, as we have learned, only something extremely dire and disabling will ever stop a real writer from writing. Retirement is never an option.

Rod, who died in 1999, one of our founders, was truly a real writer. He wrote what are now described as thrillers and they were wonderful novels with great characters, compelling stories and lots of insight and wisdom. His book The Detective was a roaring bestseller, which he wrote when he was just under thirty and became a film with Frank Sinatra and Lee Remick. One of his novels, Nothing Lasts Forever, was produced under a changed title, Die Hard, which made millions for lots of people, although I don't think Rod ever received his just financial rewards, which is the typical fate of most original writer creators in Hollywood.

One of our group members, the brilliant and prolific Brian Garfield, often regaled us with his Hollywood war stories, particularly about Death Wish, based on his book that became a giant franchise.

Our conversation was often light-hearted camaraderie, but embedded in our exchanges we often offered each other what in hindsight were some golden nuggets of insight and wisdom, the kind that clutches the memory for a lifetime, which brings me back to Rod Thorp. He was the kind of writer that sprang out of working class New York and truly understood the core idiom of that life, which spawned so many terrific fiction writers. He had taught writing and having worked at his father's detective agency he knew the grit and motives of the secret lives of criminals and dissemblers that gave his characters such heft and emotional truth.

Rod's answer to that question posed at the beginning of this essay about endings was this: "If I knew the ending in advance I wouldn't be interested in writing that novel."

For me, as it might have been for others around the table, he had hit the nail on the head. I, too, could never stick with a long work of the imagination if I knew the surefire ending in advance.

This in no way is meant to be critical of novelists who outline carefully and follow a template to construct their story and proceed to a pre-arranged goal line ending. I'm sure many good novels are turned out using that method.

But for Rod and me, writing a novel is like watching a parallel life unfold. Characters come alive in our imagination, they interact in an imaginary environment. They love, hate, observe, think, talk and act. The novelist must know and report his or her character's thoughts and what motivates their relationship with others.

To the creator, these characters become real, full-blooded, three-dimensional. The creator knows their mind, their thoughts, their inner life, the complicated clockwork behind their motives as they seek their destiny, perhaps love, money, fame, forgiveness, vengeance, ecstasy, or the thousand other needs of the human self.

Like the life we live in our reality, no one can predict what will happen next. The creator, like those readers who enter his or her parallel world, is just as eager to know what will happen next as he presses on with his story. Sometimes the characters who live in the mind of the writer will do exactly the opposite of what might have been expected when the story began.

They come upon obstacles, detours, make wrong turns, disastrous decisions. As a result, endings change. An apt image might be the creation of the Frankenstein monster, who provides the ultimate unpredictable outcome.

In the end, the writer becomes a slave to his character's motivations. Like real people they change their minds, their point of view, their emotional responses. They cannot be contrived. If they are, the reader will catch on quickly. So it is with the writer. Without authenticity the story is without truth or substance.

For many who ask this question, such an explanation might seem baffling. For the writer the special reward, as it is for the reader, is "finding out," discovering how this story will end. The characters, as they follow the intricacies of the plot that is hatching in the mind of the writer must be people who have engaged the reader (and the writer's) interest or the exercise is for naught. If either the writer or reader knows in advance what will happen the thrill of finding out disappears.

I know this is what Rod meant and I have tried to articulate it to students in creative writing seminars that I have taught and to the casual reader who often asks this question. Some have been confused by this answer. Some have understood without question.

My musician friends tell me that this is how Jazz is composed. Perhaps. I don't know.

But, after all, there are lots of mysteries inherent in the compulsion to create art, in this case the novelist's art. Ask an artist why he or she does anything to create their art and they will come up with explanations that often baffle the questioner.

Especially if he or she must answer questions like: Do you know how your novel will end in advance?

Books to Movies

I recently served as a speaker on a panel discussion organized by the Book Publicists of Southern California under the irrepressible founder and Chairman emeritus Irwin Zucker on the subject of "Books to Movies."

Beside me, there were two other panelists, Ron Bernstein, a savvy and powerful senior agent at ICM and Barbara Schiffman, a much admired and experienced script consultant. I was chosen, I suppose, because I had either sold or optioned a dozen of my books to Hollywood producers and studios.

There were about 150 people in the audience. Most, because of proximity, had some knowledge of the film and entertainment business. Many, as I later learned, had self-published memoirs and books on various subjects as well as fiction. Some had books published by traditional publishers.

All were anxious to know how their offering could be adapted to a movie, which for them, was the gold standard of literary achievement, the holy grail of their efforts. I am talking primarily about big screen movies, those shown in popcorn palaces, touted by big ads and endless promos, the movies that make people famous.

Bernstein, who is on the daily firing line of selling books to the flicks, opined that many movies today were designed for a very young demographic and were made to sell ancillaries like toys and video games. There were, he noted, adult movies being made but fewer than in the past. He did acknowledge that many movies headed straight to cable television or DVDs and streaming sites.

Schiffman, an acknowledged expert on the technique of film stories was what one might characterize as a strict constructionist. She knew how stories could best be told on film, but admitted that it was impossible to predict marketability in advance in a constantly changing environment.

In my talk, I recounted the difficulties, complications and disappointments of getting a book adapted to a movie and the long odds that followed an option or even an outright sale of finally getting the book to the silver screen. I attributed my own experience to pure luck since I have never written a book with a movie in mind and my talk centered around my "war" stories of dealing with the clashing opinions and egos of the Hollywood creative and business community.

I cited the nightmare of the so-called collegial experience, of having to confront not only producers, directors, actors, their spouses or significant others, all of whom had their own views about how the movie should proceed. For a novelist, used to being king of his mind-made mountain, the process is terrifying.

One can easily understand why Ernest Hemingway said something to the effect that the best way for an author to handle Hollywood was to stand at the Nevada border, throw the book over the fence to California, have them throw the money back, then run like hell.

What astonished me in the question period at the event and the aftermath, was that many of these self-published authors were absolutely certain that their books were big movie material.

Some were convinced that the public needed their take on this or that cause, and that their book "deserved" a movie. People lined up to flack their books on such subjects as life in New Caledonia, Autism, social justice and other areas designed to "inspire" movie goers and help save the world. It was futile to cite movies as mere entertainment.

A number of people flashed their self-published book covers, which featured entertainers long gone written by middle to old age offspring convinced that the world was waiting for their filmed resurrection.

Some bold people thrust manuscripts at Bernstein who very politely and with great tact, refused them. I made the mistake of dismissing one eager questioner with "But who would come to your movie?" which he took as an insult.

If there was a takeaway from this experience it was that there is a giant groundswell of traditionally published and self-published wannabe recognized writers out there who really believe that their work deserves not only to be read and lauded, but adapted to big Hollywood films. They fantasize that they have created works that demand attention in this media. Indeed, many have been bolstered by relatives and close friends out of genuine love or ingratiation and lavish encouragement that their work is a surefire movie.

In that room I saw first hand what it meant to these people to believe absolutely in their work, most of which probably passed through countless rejections before ending up as a self-published book. These were, indeed, true believers. They were not to be dissuaded.

That said, I continue to admire their pluck and self-confidence. It is really, really hard to write a book. Whether it be fiction or non-fiction the investment in time is enormous. If not self-confidence and commitment, what can sustain a determined writer to spend long hours alone spurred on by the absolute belief that their work is worth doing despite rejection after rejection?

Suddenly digitization and the e-book phenomenon has opened the doors wide to their creative efforts and the old stigma of vanity publishing has disappeared, giving them confidence that they could compete with writers and publishers everywhere on the planet.

One can forgive them for being convinced that their effort is well worth the candle. They have to embrace the idea that after such a massive effort it surely is a psychic thrill for them to hold a book in their hands with their name emblazoned on the cover, or see their work in digital form on a reading device. They must believe that they have not only enriched themselves but the world at large, and yearn for others to lionize and praise them.

In a society where people without achievement or portfolio are publicized as public heroes and given dubious celebrity status, surely a long form book writer deserves some sort of honors, at the very least, for his or her heroic effort to create a book.

In a profound way, seeing their work adapted to the silver screen in an auditorium filled with rapt attentive people concentrating on their ideas, characters and conception can offer the thrill of a lifetime.  I've experienced it and know its power.

Fortunately, the future for the committed writer who believes that his or her work demands a visual moving picture component is not all that bleak. A sister technology to the digitization that made his or her self-published work possible is also available to adapt the work to moving images.  It may not offer the Hollywood treatment, complete with massive advertising and distribution treatment, but it is quite possible to create a respectable product available through various outlets on the Net in a similar way as a self-published book.

The process is bound to get easier and cheaper as it matures, and I predict many will avail themselves of the opportunity as time goes on and more and more Net producers and writers seize the opportunity, producing documentaries or fiction stories on their own. There are also rumbles that the future of the standalone theater auditorium is doomed as more and more people shift to the technologically enhanced and economical home experience.

Marketing and distribution opportunities may be severely limited but there is, as it is with a book, a great psychic satisfaction for a creator to see his or her work adapted to a "film." Granted its audience will be severely limited as it competes for recognition in a vast sea of other productions, but it may, however long the odds, offer a way into the more lucrative world of the big movie.

Of one thing I am certain. Technology has unleashed ever-expanding opportunities for the creative mind. It is surging and unstoppable.

You Betcha

So here is what once was dubbed a typical American story. This pretty little girl is the daughter of a High School English teacher and a mother who was what was once a revered and iconic American role model, the devoted homemaker, the admired mother hen housewife.

Her family most probably lives from paycheck to paycheck, and are ardent followers of the traditional verities of the American way, family, country, God, the stuff of the Pledge of Allegiance, the national anthem, God Bless America. You know the drill, when the flag goes by you put your hand over your heart and often, like me, shed a tear or two of pride and gratitude.

The pretty little girl is feisty, competitive, athletic, gregarious, outspoken, religious. She is murder on the basketball court, passionate and curious. Her dad moves the family around, winds up in Alaska, a small town. He teaches high school English, a noble pursuit. The little girl gets prettier, falls in love, marries, has kids. Her energy is boundless. She has opinions and finds her voice, goes from PTA to town council, runs for Lieutenant Governor, loses.

Here she is, juggling home, kids, and, of all things, politics in a new state, mostly rural, ruled by old boy cronies, now enjoying the power bonanza of energy resources. She has endured the sniping, innuendo and vitriol that comes with the territory. Then she takes a long shot. Young family in hand, a hard working husband, little kids, she runs for Governor, beats the old boy network and makes it.

Isn't this the gold standard of the new woman, the ideal, the fully liberated female with the energy to take on the once impossible split role of full time working mom? Come on guys. Love her or hate her, agree or disagree with her, credit is due.

She gets picked by a candidate for President to be his running mate.  She makes a great opening speech, despite a high pitched voice that is sometimes squeaky. Of course, she knows what she's in for. Politics in America has always been a blood sport. For a woman it is double bloody based on years of put downs and women's place is in the home sort of thing. The snotty superior snobby media give her the bum's rush. She is dubbed stupid, ignorant, uninformed. Governor of what? Alaska. Hell, that's not even attached to the mainland. A potential Vice President of the United States? Get outta here.

Most haven't a clue to the policies she has supported and fought for when Governor. Are they really that far out of the mainstream of the American body politic?   She is indeed right of center and it's fair game to oppose her vigorously on those grounds. That's expected in politics.

But I have found that many people who hate her can't articulate their policy reasons. Ask a bully why he or she bullies and you'll get the same answer, meaning no answer. Or something like: I just can't stand her. Or just plain "yuk."

I may be prejudiced. I hate bullies.

Okay so the ticket loses. Some people blame her for McCain's loss. How many times have you heard that lately? I would have voted for McCain but I was frightened by that dopey lady from Alaska.

What now?  She has been anointed America's dummy by the media elite. Mention her name and the Ivy League league establishment has a twenty point rise in blood pressure. In my circles, they get indigestion and I catch hell if I am less than negative.

She has been proclaimed a lousy mother, a money grubbing greedy bitch, a loud mouthed moron and given a thrashing in the press that would have floored any stout hearted male with an outsized ego. No politician, man or woman has been so vilified in the national media. Not in my lifetime. In my opinion the Sarah haters have crossed the line.

After her Vice Presidential loss the much maligned lady discovers that once you look behind the rot proclaimed by the smarty pants opinionators, there are lots of people who really admire her. Millions. Politics aside, many like her feistiness, her resilience, her strong feminine creds. For lots of young ambitious girls in Middle America who want more out of life, she is a genuine heroine.

Guys admire her toughness, her kick ass attitude and, yes, her good looks. She is a wife a guy can be proud of.  Not everyone of course. But enough for some genuine mass applause.

Irony of ironies. All that endless drumbeat of negative media attention has made her a celebrity.  They spelled her name right and made it a household word. And, by God, if you are a celebrity in America you are really dumb if you don't cash in. If Sarah is so dumb, I'd like to know what smart is.

This defense of Sarah screed comes on the heels of Joe McGinniss' snarky book about Sarah and her family whose title I won't deign to mention. I don't even need to read it but the reviews indicate it's full of gossipy innuendo and sly unflattering hints of dubious conduct. The usual, only more so.  Enough already.

If anything, the book by its very publication offers some insight by its mere publication into the Sarah Palin phenomenon. The negative publicity machine seems in perpetual motion. Soon the guy that impregnated her daughter will have a book out. It will undoubtedly offer more negatives for the usual pile on. Sarah, too, will write another one as well as members of her family. Every scrap of information about Sarah Palin sells. She has a helluva endurance record, commercially and politically.

She is one of the first Vice Presidential candidates in history whose name you will most likely remember. Past her peak? Hardly.

As for politics, remember the question that Reagan raised during his campaign? Are you better off now than you were four years ago?

I'll give you Sarah's answer.

"You betcha."

The Three Questions for Authors

It is a strange phenomenon and most authors of fiction appear to confirm it. They are always asked the same three questions. Whether the questions are asked in a formal interview setting or by readers, non-readers, fans, or casual acquaintances in every conceivable social setting . The three questions cross boundaries of country, language, age, and gender.

They are always the same and asked in exactly the same order.  These are the questions:

How do you write? Meaning whether the author writes in long hand, typewriter or computer.

When do you write? Meaning time of day, morning, afternoons, or evenings.

Where do your ideas come from?

Although the repetitive pattern of these questions from all sources in this exact order is nothing short of uncanny, one can find some universal logic in the questions and their order. If one accepts the premise that writing a work of the imagination is an art form, whether fashioned as a novel, a short story, a play or a poem, then what the questioner is really asking is: How does one create the writer's art?

One might pose this question as well to creators of the visual or musical arts.

The first two questions involve process and are easy to answer. But there is a long stretch between process and that crucial third question.  This is the ultimate secret of the writer's art. I do not want to sound mystical implying that these ideas are mysteriously channeled into the writer's mind by some esoteric process of osmosis.

But the fact is that there is something unique about the ways in which ideas become stories that cannot be as easily explained as process. After all, a fiction writer creates a parallel world in his or her imagination. In creating this parallel world he or she deals with the single question that everyone must ponder. What happens next? Who among us does not want to know what happens next? It is the bedrock of all stories, lived or imagined.

Ideas for stories come from an amalgam of life experiences, observations, the chance meeting, an anecdote, a life changing  personal experience like falling in love, being betrayed or abandoned, a memory of  pain or loss, or joy and ecstasy.

They are triggered by books or newspapers read, hearing stories told by friends, relatives or chance acquaintances, by movies or plays seen, songs heard, by incidents buried in one's past or imagined. They come from dreams, visions, fantasies, memories, olfactory reminders, remembered tastes, traumas observed or experience, an errant look, a brief word, a religious experience.

For Proust, the aroma of a piece of cake inspires a vast tapestry of human folly and striving. For Tolstoy, a brief paragraph in a newspaper inspires the story of Anna Karenina. Hemingway finds inspiration in the story of an old man's struggle to land a big fish. Faulkner imagines a world inspired by life in a Mississippi County. It goes on and on every creator of a work of the imagination has some idea where his or her inspiration has come from.

While I can't speak for every writer of fiction, my own experience tells me that most writers can identify the original spark that ignites the inspiration.

Nevertheless, these questions do reveal a clue to the people who ask it and why.  They, too, have the urge to tell the stories that have been rattling around randomly in their brain. They want to extract the fiction writer's explanation, hoping to find the magic key that will open the way to their own artistic creation.

For the record, I thought readers might like a sample answer to that third question, one that hardly can be articulated in a casual moment. Here is how I got the idea for one of my novels "The Trans-Siberian Express".

I was having a drink in a Pub in London with a close friend, a British diplomat who was on leave from his post in the British Embassy in Peking in the mid seventies. It was at the height of the antagonism between China and the Soviet Union, and a hostile relationship existed between China and the West.

I had met my friend years before in Washington where he was on assignment to the British Embassy in some capacity that he never defined, but which I intuited had some cloak and dagger aspect about it. I was a young soldier then, assigned to the Pentagon as the only Washington Correspondent for Armed Forces Press Service.

It must be said at the outset that a committed novelist, like a prospector searching for gold, is always on the lookout for an idea that will spark a story. Every observation, every person he meets, every episode in his life, every thought, memory, reflection and cogitation is geared, consciously or subconsciously, to the concept of what will make a story. Everything in the zeitgeist was and is fair game.

Since China in those days was a closed society, I was anxious to hear about his experiences in this world and, after a pint or two, he was happy to oblige. Most of his stories were gossipy. He had played frequent tennis games with George Bush, the elder, when he was a representative in China during my friend's multiple assignments.

Then it came. The ignition spark. He described how he had periodically hand carried the Diplomatic pouch to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia twice a month. He explained that his route was to take the railroad journey from Peking to Mongolia and explained how the Trans-Siberian Express was linked to this line and that he had taken it himself from Moscow.

As he described his journey on the Trans-Siberian Express, I became more and more intrigued. He told me it was the longest railroad trip in the world, a 7,000 mile journey through numerous time zones, that it's original route was from Moscow to Vladivostok, the latter a naval base that was then off-limits to foreigners. He told me that the Russian track gauge was wider than the world standard, and the carriages had to be raised and the new wheels attached to ride the rails outside of the Soviet borders.

He told me that sleeping compartments were assigned without regard to gender and that the food was ghastly and the third class passengers had to buy their food from vendors along the route through Siberia. He told me about the monotony of the Siberian tundra, the various ethnic groups that used the train as it traversed the route and that the train was pulled by giant steam locomotives, the largest in the world at the time.

One must relate this eureka moment to the context of the times and my world as a child growing up in the earlier part of the twentieth century. The train was the principal mode of land travel in those days. Railroad travel was exotic and far-reaching. The celebrity culture was built around trains and boats. Photographs of celebrities disembarking trains was a common media event. Railroad stations were palaces. Grand Central Station in New York City was a work of art, one of the most celebrated structures in the world.

Model trains were the ultimate toy for a boy and department stores featured elaborate displays to hawk these toys. Railroad travel was exotic and romantic and was featured in books and movies. Staterooms were shown as the height of luxury and private cars were the ultimate in luxurious travel. Graham Greene's novel Stamboul Train and the movie The Lady Vanishes, among many others, offered exciting stories about train travel. I was a child of those times, and when my friend spun his yarn about his experiences on the largest train ride in the world, my head began to swim with story ideas.

The idea had everything, Cold War intrigue, spies, staterooms assigned without regard to gender, the paranoia of the times, the closed world of the Soviet Union and China. The setting that filled my mind was a novelist's dream, and my imagination began to conjure up a story that would take place around the centerpiece of a journey on the Trans-Siberian Express.

It was a perfect title. It took a year to write the book and it was published by Putnam and translated into many languages. It was also sold to the movies but never made.

The E-Book Intrusion

It was completely predictable that the e-book phenomenon would spawn various enhancements like video and music designed, according to their creators, to "enrich" the reading experience.

I suppose there are some readers who will welcome having their e-books enhanced by such accompaniments. Indeed, I have known many writers who compose their books while listening to music.

Packaging e-books with musical backgrounds has been announced with much fanfare while video book enhancements have already begun their march into the marketplace.

Alas, I will not succumb to such alleged blandishments. Call me a purist, but as a creator of works of the imagination, meaning works of serious fiction, I consider such embellishments intrusions on the author's intention and the reader's reception of this intention.

Boiled down to its essence, the author to reader is a one-on-one communication experience. In telling his or her story, the author has plumbed to the depths of his or her subconscious and conceived their characters to pursue their destinies in a parallel world that grows in the author's imagination in ways that are often mysterious and unexplainable.

In this imaginative world, the white noise of inspiration already fills the reader's mental space as organ music reverberates in a giant cathedral. One does not require a musical accompaniment to capture and thrill to the emotional suspense of the author's creation.  I intend in no way to negate the beauty and power of music, but words, too, have their intrinsic artistic power to speak to the human psyche and the reading experience is a prime example.

Nor does one need a musical accompaniment to feel the true power, for example, of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Melville's Moby Dick, Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and yes, the Old and New Testament and a long line of fabulous works of the imagination created by authors that have enriched our lives and given us insight and knowledge into the human condition. Indeed, one might say that the music is already inherent in the prose and can be heard by the reader with great emotional impact within the author's composition.

I know this sounds a bit highfalutin and perhaps flies in the face of those who will cite the movies as a prime example of how musical accompaniment embellishes a story line.  The fact is that movie background music is designed as a kind of guide to the emotional high points that manipulate the action on the screen. It is designed to tell you how to feel and anticipate what a movie character is experiencing or is about to experience as the plot unfolds. There is no need for such an accompaniment in reading.

Nevertheless, I do believe there is probably a place for enhanced e-books, especially in the area of young children's books where moving images and music could be helpful in engaging a child's interest. I am somewhat tentative in that assessment since my experience with my own children was reading to them without benefit of other sounds except my own voice, which in retrospect seemed sufficient for their rapt attention.

Perhaps, too, musical and reality sounds will be useful in certain genre categories, particularly science fiction and books that are based upon comic book characters.

But the idea of adding anything more than words to the reading experience gives me pause in another area, such as opening the door to adding advertising to e-books. Using e-books as a platform for advertising is a real possibility and, for me, it is chilling.

I well remember going to the movies in London and, for the first time, being trapped into seeing advertising on the screen prior to the features, which I found offensive. I was apparently premature in celebrating the fact that this practice was not then found in American movie theaters.

It is now standard in most movie theaters in America to be forced to watch advertising before the feature is screened, a practice that intrudes on the pleasure of the movie experience. But then, today's mass-market movies are all about toys, popcorn and selling a captive audience whatever is on offer.

From my perspective, reading has always been both a solitary and sacred celebration of the imagination, a gift of creation from the author to the reader. What worries me is that first will come the music, then the video and once that intrusion is thrust upon us, then will come the advertising. Advertising does, indeed, have its informational uses, but there are limits to its intrusion, especially for the serious and dedicated reader.

Frankly, I don't want to open a book by a favorite author and be solicited to save 15% or more on car insurance or be pushed to buy the latest cure for acne.