Christopher Harris's Blog

I've let slip in a few social media venues that I've done some work adapting my novel Tulsa into a TV series. I wrote a pilot, it's made some rounds around the Hollywood Industrial Complex (feel free to send a note to HeyHarris@HarrisFootball.com if you're part of that complex and would like to chat), I've gotten some good feedback, and a producer likes the book and the script enough to do a table read. (Shout out to Michael!) Blah blah blah, I'm a huge deal. The point of this is that I was also asked to write the script for a teaser trailer in addition to the pilot and this whole process made me realize I don't remember my own book, at least not at the level of detail necessary to pull off these new tasks.

So a couple days ago, I read it again, almost certainly for the first time since 2018. In other words, this blog will be about pain.

Yes, yes, what a cliche, someone who made a thing looks back on that thing and can only see its flaws. Well but let's stipulate off the top that cliches might be cliches, but they can still smart when they're smacking you across your pedantic face. Reading back, there were a few moments when I squirmed and wished I hadn't.

I think it's a good book, and I'm proud of it, and if you haven't read it, I'd be delighted if you would. (In fact, for the first time, the paperback is now available at a non-Amazon property, if that matters to you.) I honestly forgot some of the plot machinations, and mostly was pleased at how well they still hang together, that there are surprises in what is, at base, a pretty pulpy (if still hopefully literary) story and that they feel "fair" and earned. Ah, but that feeling of trying on old shoes! Such great memories of the marvelous dancing I did in these musty brogans! Hm. Did they always pinch at the toe like this? Did my heel always feel quite so high? Who was the stranger who stretched these out?

Well, the truth is that I kind of wrote Tulsa for the screen. My previous novel, War On Sound, had been optioned and I was excited and thought: let's write something simpler and shorter and more visceral. I love The Road and wondered what would happen if I juxtaposed the world's descent into madness with a blank main character's ascent into becoming a fuller person, but as the result of an original sin that can't be forgiven. (If you've read the book: it happens on page 3 or something.) Tulsa really goes. I re-read it in one day. It's meant to be a perpetual-motion machine without fluff, a true plot-generating device that's intentionally light on extraneous information. It's good! But I also admit I can see the stitches. I found a few instances of pacing I don't love.

And the feeling I had is: Oh, I could fix those! Just give me a week! I'm embarrassed it's not perfect! Who cares about all the things I still enjoy and think are done well, what is the point of this book if it's not immediately properly canon-izable? Sure, it's a small unfamous book relatively speaking (but not *so* unfamous -- lots of you read it...thank you!), but I can't really help its lack of publicity -- and I've flattered myself thinking *if* it's discovered, *when* it's discovered by a larger audience, well, it will be ready. But now, here comes my Imposter Syndrome: it's *not* perfect, just a bit more emphasis here, a slight rejiggering there.... And the tragedy is it's published! It's done! It's out!

And I have friends who've told me that Tulsa is one of their favorite books, which of course may simply be charity -- one never knows -- but my friends tend to be on the brutal side. I know I'm seeing things others wouldn't. I know how cliche this all is, that Coppola looks at The Godfather and gnashes his teeth. But what can I tell you? Just because it happens to truly famous people doesn't mean it doesn't happen to me.

Ah well! I emerge bruised, but I emerge.

And maybe I'll rectify those annoyances in the TV series. Another bite at the apple.

As I read "The Sun Also Rises" again for comfort food (kind of a "For Whom The Bell Tolls" chaser), here's the challenge:

Do not try to write like Hemingway. Do not try to write like Hemingway. Do not try to write like Hemingway. Do not try to write like Hemingway. Do not try to write like Hemingway. Do not try to write like Hemingway. Do not try to write like Hemingway.

Because, like, it's really hard!

"She was looking into my eyes with that way she had of looking that made you wonder whether she really saw out of her own eyes. They would look on and on after every one else's eyes in the world would have stopped looking. She looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that, and really she was afraid of so many things."

I could give an example where the trout are jumping out of the stream and the white wine is chilling under the water and it gets so cold it's painful, and those are minimalist and great, too. But the paragraph above is a different kind of Just The Facts that finds a way to turn at the end...fearlessness isn't *explicitly* invoked when he says "she looked as though there were nothing on earth she would not look at like that"...it could also mean she didn't care, or that she was unaware what looking like that might mean, kind of building on the question of whether Brett even sees out of her own eyes...but the "...and really..." at the end is so good, it explains what came before (that one apparent reason Brett can look like that is that she's unafraid of anyone), it contradicts it (she actually *is* afraid), and also makes us wonder *how* Jake knows this about Brett. I know Hemingway is a Bad Man and we should hate him -- and as I said earlier in this blog, of *course* some of his writing and many of his life's deeds are "problematic," they definitely are -- but this is the stuff that a lot of writing since 1926 is founded upon.

When I try and write like this it comes out like a Hardy Boys book.

Also I love this:

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed with sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes."

I absolutely just burned through London Fields, read it in a week. It's one of my favorite books. It made the Top Ten Novels list I did on a podcast back in 2016. (You can find that here.) I'm not shocked I loved it again. I will make a case that it's one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. I recommend the hell out of it.

So I'm going to *not* try and spoil anything essential with the rest of this post, but if you're interested in reading it and don't want to hear *anything* else about its conceit or its characters, I'd stop reading. Because I'm going to defend London Fields against a couple of its most common criticisms.

Famously, Martin Amis's book didn't make the short list for the Booker Prize the year it came out (1989 -- and who gives a damn about the Booker Prize or any other prize for art) because two of the panelists were offended by its treatment of women. I will stipulate that it's easy for anyone to say, "You're being *too* P.C.!" over anything, and the moment we allow knuckle-draggers whose favorite go-to line is, "Gee, you can't say *anything* these days!" to rule the day, we take big steps back. I can understand where a feminist criticism of London Fields might come from: Nicola Six is the doomed murderee (I'm not giving anything away! It's announced on the first page!) but there isn't much reason offered *why*...some hand-waving about being at the end of men and not wanting to age and lose her looks...it is, I'll admit, pretty thin stuff. Through this lens, Nicola is a bloodsucking harpy standing in for all bloodsucking harpies, leading to the charge of, "She's so problematic." And "Can't women characters be full people?" In this case, I think that lens is ill-applied.

London Fields is explicitly a neo-noir. It's an upending of the convention: the detective, the gangster, the foal, the moll. It's a mystery story in which the solution to the mystery is presented on the first page. And *everyone* is irredeemable. The men certainly don't come off better than Nicola, even if they do have clearer motivations. Nicola is a harpy? Nicola is a blood-sucker? Good heavens, get a load of *those* guys: Keith and Guy and Sam. (Just get a load of Keith! Get a load of Keith Talent! And get a load of the baby Marmaduke!) And seen through the dark lens of neo-noir, with Nicola, Amis is updating Phyllis Nirdlinger, the femme fatale from Double Indemnity. And I don't want to spoil that book, either, but let's just say the endings of those two characters are resonant. The subversion is the extent to which Phyllis-as-Nicola is suddenly in control. The subversion is the way she wraps the men around her little finger. The subversion is that her plan *works*. In a couple of the past few novels I've reviewed on here, it's seemed I've felt it necessary to explain my admiration for a book despite complaints about supposed "regressive treatment of women." And I don't want to be the one blurting, "Gee, you can't say *anything* these days!" But context matters. If you're writing a neo-noir, if you're turning the detective novel inside-out and showing off the shimmering viscera, I think I forgive you for not writing Nicola Six as Clarissa Dalloway. (Others might not feel the same, and I get it.)

Another criticism leveled against London Fields is that it's overwritten, that it's overmuch, that it's over the top. (*I'm* even writing like Amis here. It's contagious!) And all I can say to that is...everyone's entitled to their opinion, but the wild circus act, the give-no-shits floridity...it sure works on me. "People? People are chaotic quiddities living in one cave each. They pass the hours in amorous grudge and playback and thought experiment. At the campfire they put the usual fraction on exhibit, and listen to their own silent gibber about how they're feeling and how they're going down. We've been there. Death helps. Death gives us something to do. Because it's a fulltime job looking the other way."

I say read the book. It's great.

I can't remember if I ever showed you folks this? It's jarring because I know what the real one looks like -- and the real one was the result of my only professional book-cover location photo shoot, shoutout to Gibson in Austin! -- but this is pretty fun, too:

I finished the Hemingway book, and liked it...

I'm interested in whether anyone consuming these blogs has read For Whom the Bell Tolls and what your memories of it are. Having just gone through the experience, I'd say of course the ending (which I won't spoil and which is up there in "'Tis A Far Far Better Thing I Do" territory) is sticking with me, and then also dang Lupe, who's a pretty marvelous character.

Hemingway obviously gets a raft of crap for the guy he was. Sounds like he deserves it! And listen, from this very book, Maria isn't exactly the most believable person. (But then again: is Robert Jordan?) However, Lupe is great. And in my memory Brett from The Sun Also Rises is three-dimensional. If you read the short story "Up In Michigan," I think it's at least disingenuous to claim Hemingway doesn't understand and can't write sympathetic women. (Of course, that was a *really* early story.)

All of which is to maybe say: it's probably better to actually read this stuff rather than decide a writer "hasn't aged well" or "is problematic" *without* reading them. That's my response to the David Foster Wallace backlash that's now about in the world...anyone who has told me Infinite Jest "is problematic" almost universally hasn't read it. Of course, if you actually *do* read a book and still say, "Wow, I don't think this is the way the world is," cool. Of course, that's, like, just your opinion, man.

Next up for me, speaking of books that rub people the wrong way: a re-read of London Fields by Martin Amis.

So as I read "For Whom The Bell Tolls" and try not to write entirely in three-word sentences, I am also continuing to work on this beast, The Big One (not its title), and I read a Hemingway passage like this and oy:

"There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life."

That's pretty good! I also like Pilar as a character very, very much.

The rule (my rule) of writing a book is 800 words a day: sometimes more but never less. And there are days when it's no problem, but there are days when I hit the word count button a dozen times wanting to wriggle free. So in this big messy book I'm writing (see earlier posts for a description), one conceit is that a company called P.I.D. (for Phasing. Intonation. Duration.) has perfected a way to accumulate everything a singer ever sang during his or her lifetime and recreate the singer's voice, and have them say or sing anything you want. So popular music in 2050 in part consists of dead people like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson putting out new original songs.

Why do I impart this nugget?

Because today, a day on which I hit the word count button *more* than a dozen times, it so happened it was Robot Prince's turn to sing a brand new and vaguely xenophobic song:

Girl he don’t love you like I do
He ain’t grown up in this town like us two
He don’t know what we been through
Send him back make this place just like new

34 words! Almost for free!

I've read lots of Hemingway, but never For Whom The Bell Tolls. I honestly don't know anything about it, except it's about the Spanish Civil War and the world is a fine place and I hate very much to leave it.

It's long, but EH goes quick. I'm off! Have others read it? Am I remedial? (I hereby correct my remedial-ness!)

I'm working on what seems like it'll be a very long book. It's already ~115k words with no end in sight. That's already longer than three of my four previous. (War On Sound is something like 260k.) I don't know everything that's going to happen! At first that's thrilling, and as the past year has gone on, it's been progressively more frightening (a common experience for me). This book takes place in 2050 America, and as such I'm making up whole swaths of what life is like, and I forget what I've decided, and I have to go back and re-read, and that creates other worries because I find patches that aren't written very well and have to re-write, and basically: if there's a more anxiety-provoking thing to do while trapped inside my own head (and inside quarantine), I haven't found it. And would probably rather not!

However, upon a re-re-re-re-re-read here at the start of 2021, one thing that occurs to me is in several respects it's already been a high-wire act I feel I'm passing. When I started writing (very late 2019), understanding that this would be an adventure in "world-building" (as the kids say) unlike any I'd tried, I decided to allow myself to free-associate much more than usual. What the hell, I thought, just write it down. So for instance. There's a very early scene I remember writing at a coffee shop in Los Angeles -- I would like to have the choice to do that again someday, please -- in which people are standing on line to be considered as contestants on the 2050 version of the Price Is Right. A physical therapist is there with his elderly patient and the patient's middle-aged daughter, and the elderly patient has anxiety about being allowed to be a contestant on PiR even though he's in a wheelchair, and during his pre-show interview he tells an intern he was a boxer in the Soviet Union, and the scene is (hopefully) at least a little winsome. And then the middle-aged daughter goes to the bathroom but picks the wrong door and that door is cracked open and some people grab it before it closes and they enter the room and they've got guns and masks and frankly as I was writing it I wasn't particularly sure why they were there or what they wanted, but suddenly one of them is yelling, "We're here to express support for Linda Ramirez!"

But who is Linda Ramirez?

Well, hell, I didn't know. I just wrote it.

And in the early stages of writing this book, that happened so many times: describing some earthquake I made up or product someone's using, and then having to build the world around this random neural firing. Having just done that re(x5)-read, I can say: I know who Linda Ramirez is a little better (not much yet!), and generally speaking I'm finding it fun that the world in my brain has evolved to incorporate all these hinky details that I didn't know the meaning of when I wrote them down. I also, however, don't remember many of them, and have to retrofit, and edit, and edit, and edit...in a way I've never had to do before. And editing kind of sucks!

I finished reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and it's great in all the ways people said it would be, and probably in ways a writer can't get away with any longer, because the modernist technique of streaming consciousness and accordioning time and conflating the past and present has been done so many times and ways in the past century, that if someone presented you with the Mrs. Dalloway manuscript today you'd probably say, "Wow, you can really turn a phrase, but where's the *story*?" When, in fact, the story *is* partly the manner of its telling, which means in 1925 it was one of the freshest stories ever published and now, were we to remove it from context, I think it would seem less fresh. The first person to go up in space gets the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The hundredth gets a nice Wikipedia entry. But being first is important, and Mrs. Dalloway is brilliant and wonderful and harrowing and touching, and I'm not sure I'd want to read its exact equivalent written in 2021 but reading the 1925 version was delightful. I recommend it!

I also found this: Woolf's initial first paragraph in Mrs. Dalloway went like this:

"In Westminster, where temples, meeting houses, conventicles, & steeples of all kinds are congregated together, there is at all hours & halfhours, a round of bells, correcting each other, asseverating that time has come a little earlier, or stayed a little later, here or here."

...which is very good writing! And it got the axe. Here's the actual book's opening:

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning—fresh as if issued to children on a beach."

From a more conventional (and showoffy) open to something much more personal and metaphorical. The doors, over the course of the book, will be taken off their hinges, indeed. And in the second paragraph, we'll suddenly, disorientingly, get our first time jump in Clarissa's head, the squeak of a hinge reminds her of Bourton and her childhood home, which (we don't know it yet) sets the context for everything she feels and tries not to feel throughout the novel's single day.

I'm sure there have been times in my own writing when I've realized the nice thing I've written was wholly inappropriate for the overall thing I was trying to say, and scrapped it. But *this* level of clarity and knowing-thyself is something else. Now that's an edit!

I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning, I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.


(this part is me:)

I can't get away with this stuff. In a way, the whole book is there. Condensing your whole book down to a sentence is a swing. I suppose genius makes it work!

Shredding and slicing, dividing and subdividing, the clocks of Harley Street nibbled at the June day, counselled submission, upheld authority, and pointed out in chorus the supreme advantages of a sense of proportion, until the mound of time was so far diminished that a commercial clock, suspended above a shop in Oxford Street, announced, genially and fraternally, as if it were a pleasure to Messrs. Rigby and Lowndes to give the information gratis, that it was half-past one.


I mean come on.