How the truth gets through

Living in the world as a writer

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How I came to write my first novel, “Dress Gray,” begins with a story about my life as a writer until that time.  I started out working for the Village Voice and wrote for magazines for almost a decade before I wrote “Dress Gray.”  I had gotten good at it.  I was successful.  I wrote stuff about the culture, like a long take-out called “Inside the Disco Boom,” about the burgeoning scene around discos and the music they made popular.  Think: Donna Summer and The Hustle and Barry White and Le Jardin and the Paradise Garage.  I wrote another piece on druggy genius Gary Kellgren, who owned the Record Plant, where the Eagles recorded “Hotel California,” and who coincidentally committed suicide on the day my story was published. 

But mainly I wrote long, complicated investigative stuff.  I covered Watergate, I wrote about municipal scandals in New York City, I chased crooked congressmen and pestered political bosses like Meade Esposito who “made” dozens of Brooklyn judges and was friendly with mob bosses like Tony Scotto and Vincent “The Chin” Gigante.  I got good at it, good enough that editors at major publishing houses noticed me and invited me to uptown lunches at places like La Grenouille and Lutece, where they asked if I was interested in writing a book. 

I passed on these offers, mainly because I was having so much fun writing for the Village Voice and magazines.  We didn’t know it at the time, but it was a golden age for journalists like myself. I was young, I was writing virtually anything I wanted, and the scene in New York City was amazing.  I paid $200 a month rent on a 2500 square foot loft on Houston Street, you could afford to go out to eat, people like John Prine and Kris Kristofferson and Bob Dylan were playing at a club right the corner, and every time you walked down the street you saw someone you knew.

There was one editor at Doubleday who was dogged in her efforts to sign me up to write a book.  Her name was Betty Prashker, and she took me to lunch every fall and every spring for years.  In April of 1977 I had recently done my taxes and in going through my receipts for the previous year I had discovered that I had spent more than 150 days on the road writing stories.  I dug out my date book for 1975 and found I had spent even more time on the road that year. 

By chance, my phone rang that month.  It was spring and it was Betty, and in her this high-pitched girlish voice she said, “Loooshun, don’t you think it’s time for another one of our lunches?” I hopped on the subway and went uptown and met her at one of the power tables at the Four Seasons Grill Room, and this time when she bent to the task of trying to talk me into writing a book, I was receptive.  I was tired of the road.  I wanted a rest, and I figured signing up to write a book was a good way to be able to sit down for a while.

I had spent part of the previous year writing on a grant from the Alicia Patterson Foundation about my class at West Point, which was the first class in Academy history to have fifty percent of its members resign from the Army.  Betty suggested the pieces I wrote would be an excellent basis for a book about what the war in Vietnam had done to the Army.  I agreed and we shook hands.  We had a deal.

A few days later I went up to Betty’s office to sign the contract.  I didn’t have an agent, so I sat down and read it.  It was a standard boilerplate book deal, but the one thing that bothered me was the indemnity clause.  Basically, the entire onus was on me, and the contract gave Doubleday the right if we were sued for libel to settle the case separately and leave me out there hanging in the cold by myself.  I asked Betty if we could negotiate a better clause that wouldn’t permit the publisher to sever me from a lawsuit against both of us, and she answered that Doubleday wouldn’t do it.  I argued with her for a while, asking if I could meet with Doubleday’s lawyers, but she said the indemnity clause was the one thing in the contract that wasn’t negotiable, so it really wasn’t worth my time, because it wouldn’t happen.

I knew it wasn’t Betty’s fault, so I wasn’t mad about it, but I told her I just couldn’t sign a contract with a clause like that in it, so I put it on her desk and turned to leave.  I had my hand on her door handle when I heard her voice from behind me: “Loooshun, have you ever thought about writing a novel?”  I turned around and answered that no, I hadn’t.  “Well, if you wrote a novel, what would you write?” she asked.  I thought for a second and just for the hell of it answered, “How about a gay murder at West Point.”

Betty picked up the contract and waved it at me and said, “Get back here and sign this.”  I walked over and asked her what she was talking about.  It was a contract for a non-fiction book about my class tentatively called, “Generals and Other Victims.”  It wasn’t a contract for a novel.  She said, “You let me worry about that.  You just sign the contract and I’ll have a check for half the advance in your hand before you leave this office.”

Writing a novel meant that I didn’t have to worry about the indemnity clause in the contract, so I signed it and walked out with a check for enough to get me started writing. I didn’t have a clue what I was in for.  The only “fiction” I had written was the re-writes I did for True Magazine, and that wasn’t real fiction, it was just fudging the facts a little. 

I rented a house in Sag Harbor and on the day after Memorial Day in 1977, I sat down to write what would become “Dress Gray.” Almost immediately, I noticed a big difference.  Up until then, in writing non-fiction, I compared what I did to opening a box.  The rule was, you could explore everything in the box that was your story all the way down to the bottom, digging into the corners for obscure facts, pushing the sides of the box, but not beyond.  You were constrained by the facts you came up with, by what you could prove.

But now there was no box, there were no constraints.  I could make stuff  up.  Oh boy.

It seemed at first like writing fiction came with a great sense of freedom, but I quickly discovered the effect was almost the opposite.  If there were no boundaries on what you wrote, then where were the edges of the story?  Where was the truth in the tale you were telling?

Well, it took me a while, but I eventually figured out that fiction presented an opportunity that came with a different responsibility.  You could make things up, but you had to do it in such a way that it was believable.  There had never been a gay murder at West Point, but if there had been, how might it have happened?  What would be the Academy’s reaction?  The Army’s? 

I knew exactly what West Point would do in such a situation.  All I had to do was explore a new box, that of my own understanding not only about the Academy as an institution, but of the men who comprised it.  I knew they would do everything they could to cover up a gay murder.  But how?  And why?  It wouldn’t be just institutional ass-covering.  Deeper motives would come into play, and there were complex reasons about what they would do and why they would do it that way.  There were boundaries, but they weren’t lines, or the corners of an imaginary box.  The boundaries were the blank spaces I had to fill.

I found that writing a novel changed my understanding of what I did as a writer, period. I had always thought of writing as story telling.  But there was more to it than that.  Everything was in the choices you made.  In non-fiction, it’s not just the facts you learn, it’s how you assemble them, and it’s not just what you know, but also what you leave out.  In a novel, it’s also about the choices you make and what you leave out, but it’s different.  They’re all yours, because they aren’t absolutely dictated by the real world. 

If the edge of the page is where the real world begins, then what is on the page?  Which story is real?  The one on the page, or the one out there in the world?

When I sat down to write “Dress Gray,” I didn’t want to know how it ended.  I made up my mind that the story would tell me.  I’d know the ending when I got to it.  What I discovered was, it didn’t matter who the killer was, or even how the story ended, because telling the tale was what counted.  I went in as a writer the same way you went in as a reader, not knowing what was going to happen or how we would get there. You entered the world inside the book with me, but you came out on your own, with your own ideas about what had happened, your own conclusions.  And the story was yours to enjoy, or hate, or love, or resent, or wish it ended another way.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that I will frequently start writing a sentence not knowing where it’s going or how it’s going to end, other than there will be a period.  It’s not knowing what I’m going to say or how I’m going to say it that’s important.  It’s not that it’s more fun that way, although often it is.  It’s that discovering what’s out there at the end of the sentence is what there is to do.  You’ll get there eventually. Finding your way is what makes a sentence count, and that goes for stories, too. 

Someone asked me in a comment recently, how do you keep all that stuff in your head?  It was a good question, because it made me think about it.  And the answer is, I don’t.  I start out with an idea for a story.  Usually I’ve got a headline, maybe a sub-hed, and then I start filling in the blanks.  If I need to look up what Roger Stone was tried and convicted of, I’ll do that.  If I need to see when he communicated with Guccifer 2.0, I’ll look that up.  Making the connection between what Stone did with the Russians, and what he did with the Oath Keepers, and why he did it and for whom is where the story is.  What can you conclude not only from the facts but from what we don’t know?  That’s how you find your way to the end of the sentence, by looking for why he did the things he did.

Writing is amazing.  It’s all these words on paper, or these days on the screen of a laptop or a smartphone.  But it’s the space between the words that counts.  Is it a synapse, a connection?  A distance, a gap?  The spaces are where the truth gets through, the empty places you fill with your own questions, and your own answers.  While I’m writing, they’re  mine.  Once you read it, they’re yours.