Howdy there, dear readers. I stumbled upon this in an old box a few days ago and thought it too coincidental not to share, considering that it’s an early draft snippet of what became Well-Behaved Monsters. With some handwritten notes up top, after I printed it out for a writer’s club meeting.
It’s interesting to look back at old drafts and compare them versus the finished product. What almost always happens – and is the case here – is that you inevitably think, eh, I probably mostly was correct with the edits I made over time…but man, there’s a line or two I kind of wish I hadn’t changed.
And this brings to mind other related topics, too, which I either hadn’t gotten around to mentioning yet, forgot to mention yet, or else forgot about entirely. In the first version of this entire project, it was actually two fully completed books that took the same material and characters and themes from this era and had them separated out, depending upon a few loose categories. As you might gather from the handwritten note above, one of these was titled Flirtation Device. But that “half” of the project (they weren’t sequential, but literally fully segregated, where each book has no “knowledge” of the other) for example didn’t even include the Lily character, not at all, which now seems completely preposterous. As it should, which you will see when reading Well-Behaved Monsters in its final state. So I totally made the correct decision there in threading them together and combining them.
Others, however, you’re never entirely sure about. Like one consideration is what might happen when you decide to change a memoir-type project into a work of “fiction” instead, that’s shall we say just maybe possibly loosely (sure, that’s it) based upon your actual experiences. I’ve done a little of both, and there are pluses and minuses with each. The memoirs are great in that they allow you to mention specific people, places, and things, and pin down certain events for (at least your interpretation of) historical posterity. But they’re also somewhat surprisingly limiting. A good example is that even when attempting to be bold and brave and tell it like it is, you still find yourself in certain philosophical knots that leave you to conclude it’s better just to delete certain passages entirely, or edit them down a great deal, in the name of maintaining the peace. Another limitation is that if you don’t know specifics about something, you can’t just make them up, which rears its head most prominently for me in dialog – the conversation is often somewhat lacking in my memoirs, because I frequently didn’t write down exactly what someone said.
Taking this same material and fictionalizing it can be surprisingly freeing. For starters it allows you to take some minor characters and lump them into a composite. You can also play with the timeline a little bit, most notably by compressing it. And then if you have the general gist of what was said, you can construct a conversation that flows in realistic fashion around that, which also makes for a more well-rounded project, instead of little isolated quips floating around in space here and there. So this curiously in some respects ends up feeling more like reality than typing up a factual report ever would.
Also, well, another by no means small concern revolves around the use of real vs. fake names. As some of you may have already suspected, long before reading today’s newsletter, yes this is a project largely based upon a certain period of my life. Did some of us single guys go around wearing wedding rings and pretending to be married? We sure did. But, alas, I’ve been told by a handful of naysayers over the years who didn’t especially care for my memoirs, that if I just changed everyone’s name, it would make everything magically all better, and nobody would ever get their panties in a bunch. So we shall see about that.
Moving forward, I will surely continue to do a little of both, depending upon the project at hand. The printed out scene I excerpted in the photo above runs about 2 1/3 pages, but I’ll spare you having to look at the entire thing. Particularly as I already included this snippet of the finished novel in my newsletter a few weeks ago. One other thing this does bring to mind, though, is an interview I caught years ago with Bukowski, where he was saying thank god he’d been rejected so many times in his early years, by every publisher under the sun, because who knows what kind of dreck he might have cranked out otherwise. At the time I was thinking this was just false modesty, and there’s no way he could possibly mean that…but then after you do this for awhile yourself, and enough time passes to look at your own earlier work, it totally makes sense. I too have countless occasions glancing back at this stuff now, and am saying to myself some variation of yikes! I’m glad this junk never passed through the wickets!
For any number of reasons. Well anyway, thanks for reading, and we will talk again real soon!
As you probably know by now, my latest work, Well-Behaved Monsters, is coming out April 9. But I’m rewarding the brave and loyal among you with a special Kindle preorder price of 99 cents. Just click this snazzy little link here:
Well-Behaved Monsters Kindle edition
And then of course there’s also a “preorder” option for paperback fans. For you loyal readers, I’ve knocked off a few bucks, and you can also get yours earlier than everyone else. The general public has to wait until April 9. But for newsletter subscribers, I’ve decided to just go ahead and ship out orders as soon as they’re received. There are already a couple copies in the mail, including one sent out this morning, which is just incredibly exciting to think about. Anyway, for those, go here:
Well-Behaved Monsters paperback
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