You can't make this shit up: A novelist looks at Trump as a fictional character
It’s a good thing, rather than bad, when work you produce as a writer results from failure. That’s how it happened when I wrote my first novel, “Dress Gray,” beginning on Memorial Day in the summer of 1977. I rented the first floor of a house on High Street in Sag Harbor, New York and shoved one of the twin beds in the guest bedroom up against the room’s north wall, hauled in a wooden desk chair and a folding 4 by 8 table, set up my IBM Model D electric typewriter and tore open a ream of typing paper and put it next to me and sat down and started writing.
I wrote every day in that little spare bedroom from 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. By the middle of June, I had completed 200 pages, which I handed to my editor over dinner one night. The next day she called to tell me they were “great, keep going,” so I did, completing another 200 pages by the end of August, which I also handed in over dinner and was rewarded with the same praise and prompting.
The only problem was, I didn’t know where the novel was going. I had never written fiction before, so I was just writing blindly, hoping for the best. By the time Labor Day weekend rolled around, I had some serious doubts about the work I had done, despite the encouragement I was getting from my editor at Doubleday. That Saturday, I went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night having completely sweated through my sleeping shorts, t-shirt and sheets. I staggered to the bathroom and took my temperature. It was 102--something. I took some aspirin and managed to get back in bed and kept sweating, getting little if any sleep.
This is an excerpt from my bi-weekly column in Salon. To read the rest, follow this link:
That’s a brilliant column, Lucian. I love your description of the process of writing fiction. As a writer, I identify with it -- and am now eager to read your novel. As a Jungian psychoanalyst, I wonder about your description of Trump’s evil as emerging almost full-blown without respect to context, family, etc -- like some monster from the deep, unheeding of the call of humanity.
Once in a while you meet a person in real life who nobody would accept as a fictional character. I had a boss like that once. A reader would have dismissed that boss character as unrealistic and thought me a hack for creating them. As you point out, Trump is that to the nth power, a villain cut from whole cloth of his own design.