Model Roles

There's something of a freedom of disappointment when those you tried to pattern yourself after turn out to be something less than you had imagined. Once you learn that there are no people worth truly admiring to that point, it's a relief.

I've long since ceased trying to emulate anyone else. It's an exercise in futility and sabotages any individualism when you subvert your own personality in trying to copy someone else. Once you realize that there is----in fact----nothing wrong with thinking for yourself and cease trying to become one with the brain dead herd whose general histories are usually embellishments at best and outright lies at worst, you simply stop caring.

At least I did.

This epiphany came, in part, around the year 2002 when I read Dracula.

No, I didn't decide to become a vampire. Not then, anyway.

I'd never read the book and it was assigned for an English class called Reality and its Discontents at Hunter College. I'd just returned to school to finish my degree that semester and went to Sweden for spring break (don't ask); sitting in bed reading the book, I got to the section about the Deaths Head moth. This was like a bolt from the blue because it hearkened me back to reading The Silence of the Lambs.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris used these unique moths decorated with the markings that are said to look vaguely like a human skull (I think it looks more like an executioner's mask; or Dr. Fate, but whatever) as a vital part of the story. Having believed that Harris's work was entirely unique, it further diminished the writer who I was desperately trying to emulate in my own work (and doing a horrible job at it).

This dovetailed with another disappointing bit of information that I found when reading one of the books by former FBI profiler Robert Ressler; Ressler was the agent upon whom the character of Jack Crawford was supposedly based; at least part of him was. It seems that the idea that Clarice Starling, as a student, would be utilized on an errand to speak to the notorious serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, never would have happened in real life. Never. Ever.

Of course it's understandable that an artist take dramatic license to create his vision, but for someone like Harris who is so precise and does such scrupulous research to make such a decision? It was a wake-up call that he wasn't exactly what I thought he was; and I don't know what "that" was.

It was a disappointment, but a liberating one.

Then came the last Hannibal Lecter novel, Hannibal Rising.

Yurgh.

You know when you're anticipating a movie or a date or something and when you finally are in the middle of it, it's isn't that it's not as good as you thought it would be----it sucks? Well, that was the feeling I got from Hannibal Rising.

I loved the other Lecter books, especially Hannibal; but in reading Hannibal Rising it was as if Harris wanted to turn Lecter into something of a hero. Not an anti-hero as he was in the first three books-----someone who you knew was bad, but rooted for and kind of liked (as long as you weren't one of his victims); but in the last book, he became a literal hero.

And it didn't work.

The vain attempt to explain the genesis of Lecter's psychopathy was to imply that it wasn't pure psychopathy at all; it was the evolution of a boy who had a genius IQ and watched his entire family slaughtered at the end of World War II. Systematically, Lecter goes and exacts revenge on those that did the final misdeed by murdering and cannibalizing his younger sister.

Ho-hum.

Another excuse.

He's not really bad; he's only behaving in an apropos fashion considering the wanton brutality inherent in humanity.

And Hannibal Lecter as Superman.

So at the end of that book you had a writer who I had admired greatly; copied embarrassingly; and read extensively and he'd stolen (or been inspired, your choice) Dracula; used a character who was placed into a position which reality would never have allowed; and wrote sludge in what appeared to be an effort to get paid for a book he owed his publisher as his heart was no longer in it.

This was useful.

While it diminished Harris in my eyes, it also emboldened me that there wasn't a magical gift anointed upon him and other writers; their way wasn't the only way; and if one truly had something to say and some skill, a way to express oneself could be found.

Years ago, I would think about wanting to write and read interviews with such a talentless dimwit as Bret Easton Ellis and try to implement his way of writing. (Or what he said was his way of writing----many times, these stories are utter bullshit crafted by some PR person to make things more salable and interesting.) Ellis was being interviewed in Rolling Stone about American Psycho and talked about how he does an extensive and detailed plot outline before he gets to writing the prose, blah, blah, blah.

Ellis is a horrible writer, but I didn't know that then. Back then I thought that if someone managed to get themselves published, that meant they had some viable reason for getting published. You learn the hard truth as you go along-----that in many cases, talent has little to do with big time writing success. Connections, luck and the buying tastes of the sheep are more important than talent and you see it in every endeavor from cooking to movies to anything else.

You can find the canned quirkiness and unbelievable stories everywhere. That pompous ass Jonathan Franzen goes to great lengths in his interviews to highlight his style. He puts a blindfold on and earplugs in his ears (or something to that effect) to block out any and all distractions when he's writing in the "high art literary tradition". That's the phrase he used when he turned down Oprah Winfrey's attempt to stick her little seal of gigantic sales on the cover of his dull book The Corrections. I'd have said, "gimme the fucking thing!!!" were it ever offered to me.

In fact, it was about that time that my novel Breaking Balls was published and I emailed Oprah's show and said that if Franzen didn't want the financial windfall, I'd take it.

Never heard back.

Since I mentioned Dracula earlier, there's the case of Elizabeth Kostova, author of The Historian.

I got to page 60 of that book. Literally. And flung it across the room.

The story was so convoluted; so impossible to understand; so boring and poorly constructed that it was enough to bag it; but it was the countless editorial mistakes that finally did me in. I said at around page 55 that if I saw one more mistake (and the book was over 600 pages), that was it.

I saw one more mistake and that was it.

Reading the book bore little resemblance to the hype surrounding its publication. There was a bidding war for the thing; all for a first novel from a woman just out of grad school for creative writing (as I mentioned in an earlier post, a colossal waste of time).

Did someone discover her? Or did someone help her? If she had talent, I'd say the former was possible, but the book was awful; well, what I read of it was awful. Presumably it didn't get any better.

Then there are the likes of Joe Hill.

Joe Hill has a very lucrative career as a novelist going right now. I've never read his stuff save for a few brief passages from his first novel, Heart Shaped Box. It was okay; pedestrian; nothing to get one's panties into a twist over; but he's famous and becoming wealthy.

Joe Hill also happens to be Stephen King's son.

Now, you can believe the story they often tell of Hill using his middle name to "make it on his own"; that he got his literary agent through a simple query letter and became published without his father's help.

You can believe it.

And I don't know any inside information to the contrary. But I can tell you the following: I had a contract for my novel in hand and I couldn't get an agent; I've had people who are relatively famous give me the names of literary agents to contact and drop said names in an effort to secure representation and have still been unable to do so. It's easier to get published than it is to find an agent. Now, I've achieved a bit of respect within certain circles and I still don't have a literary agent.

Do you really believe that someone out of the blue could send what amounts to a slightly better than average bit of writing and succeed on his first try? I got published on my first try and before age 30, but everyone who hears that----people who are successful writers----widen their eyes and say, "wow" because it doesn't happen; and the book didn't really sell that many copies.

So did Joe Hill King manage to do it? Or did he receive subtle help from his ridiculously famous and successful father to make it and take part in a crafted cover story to make it seem more palatable for readers to shell out money for the work of Joe Hill and not for a book that openly said "by Stephen King's Son"?

There are always people who make it on their own terms with their own abilities and don't owe anyone anything. If you find someone who's managed it and not waited until they're 70-years-old to achieve any notoriety, then you should probably take lessons from them.

But don't follow them blindly.

Even as there are people who come up with fiction greater than anything they put on the written page to make their achievements sound more impressive than they are, as you learn and grow you find a way to easily sift through the nonsense and come to a conclusion as to what the logical sequence of events was; but it's a hard truth to accept and sometimes it's easier to believe the lie; to believe that anyone can make it if they work hard; that the "dream" exists. Well, it only exists if you work at it and ignore anyone who tells you you can't do it.

That's the only way.

Ignoring people.

As you move along, you'll find this negativity and jealousy percolating in those who have never had the courage to try and achieve anything for themselves. "Oh, you can't do that!" Ask yourself this: who is anyone to tell another person what they can and cannot achieve? If Ellis and inept people in the aforementioned career paths can make it, then why can't you? And who cares if there's critical respect? Some deserve it; some don't. Ellis is reviled by critics and they're right because he's horrific; but does he care? In an ego sense, he probably does; in the long run, what's the difference?

Role models have a place, but in the final analysis, it's more of an example to follow rather than someone to overtly try and copy because once you delve deeper into their histories and unwrap the package, you might----scratch that, you will be disappointed. But it could be that disappointment that spurs you into finding your own voice.