On Writing and Research—for Books and Screenplays
Almost all my novels have required a certain amount of research, even the ones set in the present or very recent past. For Union Dues, I had to learn about the coal-mining techniques of the day (I’d just been working in a sausage factory, so those scenes were easy), and for Los Gusanos I had to get my Spanish, something I’d never studied, to the point where I could talk to Cuban people who didn’t speak English and read things that had never been translated.
(Researching Your Fiction Like a Reporter.)
In contemporary screenplays I’ve written, I’ve had to dig into what’s being used for both military and street weaponry, the cop jargon of the moment, advances in science and space travel, the music currently popular with America’s youth—each project reveals something you don’t know enough about. But for my truly ‘historical’ novels- A Moment in the Sun, Jamie MacGillivray, and now To Save the Man, this is a much bigger, and in many ways, more rewarding job. One thing leads to another, you realize you’ve misunderstood history you thought you knew, you get new ideas that can lead you off into undiscovered territory—
Which is very seductive.
And time-consuming. I’ve spent most of the day in a library reading a whole book I was only probing for one factoid. So my basic rule is that I can spend a maximum of one week digging for information for any chapter or sequence, and then I have to sit down and write some fiction. Of course, sometimes you have to leave blanks for details you haven’t nailed down yet, but those can be found and inserted later. Sometimes you’ll write stuff that you later learn makes no historical sense, but I think it’s more important to keep your forward motion going—I’ve even written ‘Better writing here’ in the margins when I’m on a roll and want to get something down before I forget any of it.
You write, basically, so you have something to rewrite, and I’m lucky in that I very quickly forget what I’ve already done. Two days away, or even better, a week of research on an unrelated topic, and I barely recognize what I’ve already laid down when I get back to it. Because I’m bad at labelling and keeping track of computer files, I have more than once gotten two paragraphs into a scene before starting to wonder, ‘Isn’t this awfully familiar?,’ then discovered an eight-page scene I’d already written a month earlier squirreled away somewhere. Sometimes it’s even good.
To Save the Man began with research I did for a rewrite-for-hire screenplay job I got many years ago, about a once-famous football game between Army and the Carlisle Indian School the last year Jim Thorpe played for them. The script I was given to rework had lots of obvious historical errors just in the football itself—nobody ‘blitzed’ in that era because there were few forward passes, and the word didn’t get into our vocabulary for another 20 years when Hitler started his ‘blitzkreig.’ There wasn’t yet an end zone, goalposts being up at the zero yard line, and coaches weren’t allowed to send plays in with replacements—the quarterbacks were truly ‘field marshals.’
So I started from scratch, learning what I could about the origins and ambience of the Carlisle School, and lots of dramatic non-football stories kept popping up. The Thorpe movie never got made, but a character I invented who ran away from the school showed up in my A Moment in the Sun a bit later, and then I wrote a spec screenplay, set in 1890-91 (only shortly after Jim Thorpe was born) and we went about trying to get financing to make it into a movie.
Unsuccessfully.
Something like 20 years passed, and as was the case with Jamie MacGillivray, one day I decided it was too good a story to just abandon, and began to turn it into a novel. For me, the biggest difference in these two forms is their relation to time. I still write feature films to be viewed in one sitting, with editing and music to give the audience a certain rhythmic experience. But anybody who reads A Moment in the Sun, described in one review as ‘a cat-crusher of a book,’ in one sitting, needs an intervention. Most readers pick substantial books up and put them down, sometimes for more than one day, before finishing, so your efforts at rhythmic novel writing go into sequences or chapters.
And then you turn the page.
In adapting a screenplay into a novel the idea of something that will run between 95 and 130 minutes goes out the window, and suddenly the opportunity to inhabit the points of view of multiple characters becomes an option. In movies, generally, there are maybe three distinct points of view—the omniscient (the wide shot of the about-to-be-besieged house on a dark and stormy night), that of the antagonist (seeing the house through the slit in Jason’s hockey mask), and that of the protagonist (the heroine in the closet, watching the chainsaw blade cut through the door). In fiction—take something like Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying—you can create a mosaic of characters and their points of view, which I find a really satisfying way to tell a complex story.
And with each character and situation, questions come up, both about practical details (What year did we start having Social Security numbers?) and larger issues that affect the character’s world view (Is this before the women’s movement? Before Freud? Before capitalism?).
In the case of To Save the Man this meant reading books written by both faculty and students at the school, reading about the histories of various tribes, reading the Carlisle School publications from the era, looking at photographs, getting insurance maps of Carlisle, Pa. in 1890—one new discovery often leading to another I hadn’t even known existed. My biggest serendipitous coups were discovering the juicy family background of the Carlisle teacher who edited the school’s newspapers, finding the pro-genocide newspaper articles of L. Frank Baum of Wizard of Oz fame, and stumbling upon the diaries of Father Francis Craft, a loose-cannon of a Catholic priest who proselytized on the Lakota reservations and was stabbed, not fatally, at the Wounded Knee massacre. A chapter heading from the person who found and assembled his diaries reads ‘Was Father Craft Insane?’
This is a man you’ve got to get into the book—
Check out John Sayles’ To Save the Man here:
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