Alec Nevala-Lee

(Note: This post is the sixth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 5. You can read the earlier installments here.)

Most writers, it’s safe to say, know what it means to work at an unrewarding job during the day while pursuing their literary ambitions at night. It isn’t surprising, then, that many of them vent their frustrations over work in their fiction. Sometimes this depiction is thinly veiled, as in The Devil Wears Prada, or not veiled at all, as in William Styron’s savagely funny takedown of his first job at McGraw Hill in Sophie’s Choice. And whenever a writer uses elements of his own professional background in his work, it’s easy to wonder how much is actually true. In my own case, the art fund depicted in The Icon Thief isn’t exactly a portrait of my own experience, but it’s also true that I wouldn’t be writing about this world at all if I hadn’t spent several years working at a hedge fund that, like my fictional Reynard Art Fund, took great pride in being “smart money”—that is, in gathering and analyzing public information in ways that gave it an advantage, real or imagined, over other players in the market.

When I began researching the novel that became The Icon Thief, I was an associate in my company’s corporate development group, looking into potential new businesses for the firm. (None of my painstakingly researched reports ever led to anything close to a real business, but the work itself wasn’t bad.) At the time, art funds were starting to get some press, but if I ever thought about proposing that we enter the art game, I don’t think it got very far, if only because it was so obviously a bad idea. All the same, it struck me that it might make an interesting basis for a novel. In particular, I wondered what it might be like to approach art investing with the same quantitative tools that my firm had applied to other asset classes. And while much of what I subsequently wrote was pure invention, the recent unveiling of the Arnet Indices—which attempt to track price movements for both individual artists and the art market as a whole, although their claims have been justly criticized—imply that I was simply ahead of my time.

Chapter 5 of The Icon Thief, in which Maddy arrives for her morning’s work at the Reynard Art Fund, was my way of introducing this world to the reader. I put the firm’s offices in the Fuller Building on East 57th Street and Madison Avenue, home to many art dealers and galleries, and modeled its sleek, somewhat sterile interior after that of my old company. The presentation that Maddy attends is a thinly disguised version of the client meetings in which I frequently participated, and the result, I hope, is a fairly painless way of conveying a lot of information to the reader about the fund’s investment strategy. (Like just about everything else in this novel, the original version of this scene was much longer.) The chapter concludes with Reynard challenging Ethan and Maddy to find the name of the mystery buyer from the auction at Sotheby’s, coupled with a considerable financial reward. This also allows me to introduce the theme of Maddy’s money troubles, a late addition to the plot that I’ll be talking about more later on.

In hindsight, if there’s one thing I don’t like about this scene, it’s that we don’t meet any of the fund’s other employees. Maddy smiles at the receptionist as she walks in, but otherwise, Maddy, Ethan, and Reynard seem to be the only people working here throughout the entire novel, when the fund probably employed quite a few other traders, analysts, and back office personnel. At the time, I reasoned that because the plot was already so complicated, I should keep the number of supporting characters to a minimum. These days, however, after Mad Men and other works of art have taught me so much about the power of ensembles, I’ve come to value the moments of serendipity you get from a large supporting cast. In both City of Exiles and The Scythian, I’ve increased the number of characters glimpsed in passing, in hopes that one or two of them will strike an unexpected spark—as they have, in both novels, with surprising consequences. And part of me wishes I’d done this in The Icon Thief as well.

The next time you’re talking to a writer and get stuck for topics of conversation, here’s a tip: ask him where he gets the names of his characters. Not every name has an interesting meaning, of course, aside from the fact that it sounded good to the author at the time. But in my experience, most writers tend to invest a lot of thought and energy into coming up with character names, to the point where the names of even minor players have a long story behind them. In some ways, it’s not unlike choosing a name for a baby: you need to think of every possible scenario in which the name might backfire, whether because it calls up unwanted associations or lends itself too easily to a playground taunt. If it’s the name of a character in a novel, much less a series, you need to be particularly careful, because you’re going to be living with it for a long time. As a result, I generally spend a full day, maybe two, at the beginning of any novel project just coming up with names for ten or twelve important characters, which is much less fun than it sounds.

So what are the rules, if any? The critic James Wood has noted, quite fairly, that characters in a novel usually have different names, which is inherently unrealistic: “Whereas, in real life, doesn’t one always have at least three friends named John, and another three named Elizabeth?” Wood is perfectly right, of course, but even he would probably be the first to admit that this is an acceptable break from reality—like the fact that a character in a movie can always find a parking space when he needs one—that allows us to save time and confusion. Unless there’s a good reason why we should be uncertain as to which John or Elizabeth we’re reading about, it’s always wise to keep your characters’ names different and distinctive. In my own work, I try to avoid giving important characters names that start with the same letter, a rule that many other writers also seem to follow. (Now that I’m on my third novel with a shared cast of characters, this rule has become a real pain, but I still stick with it when I can.)

In the case of The Icon Thief, the names of the characters came about in all kinds of ways. Maddy and Ethan were a pair of characters who had been kicking around in my head for at least ten years, ever since I had the idea, way back in college, of writing a novel or screenplay that combined elements of two of the greatest of all American movies, Vertigo and The Searchers. The project was ridiculously ambitious, even for me, and I finally scrapped it, although not without emerging with two characters whose first names were taken from the leads of those films: Madeline Elster and Ethan Edwards. Alan Powell, as I’ve mentioned before, was named for Michael Powell, although his first name was Dennis for many drafts before I changed it to something that suited him better. And Ilya Severin was originally Ilya Kaverin, which I discarded, after spending more than two years living with that name, upon deciding that it was just too similar to that of a certain iconic character from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.

The rest of my characters have names that were chosen more or less at random. Rachel Wolfe, for instance, is just a name I like, combining the name of a close friend and an acquaintance in a way that strikes me as just right. John Reynard is a fun one: his first name is the most boring one imaginable, but his last name is that of a famously foxy trickster, which serves as a clue to some of his contradictions. Anzor Archvadze was one of the few plausibly Georgian names I could come up with that didn’t make my eyes cross, while Sharkovsky and Vasylenko were chosen for the sound, and Louis Barlow just looks like the name of an FBI assistant special agent in charge. And then we have the mysterious Alexey Lermontov, named, of course, for Anton Walbrook’s character in The Red Shoes. In my mind, he’s always been played by Walbrook, and I’d like to think that he gained something from the association, even if it’s just the slightest whisper of resonance from the character who, unforgettably, summed up the fate of the heroine in his ballet: “Oh, in the end, she dies.”

(Note: This post is the fifth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 4. You can read the earlier installments here.)

When it comes to writing about Ilya Severin, the cerebral thief and assassin who stands at the center of The Icon Thief and its sequels, my approach has always been that less is more. I’ve spoken at length about my dislike of backstory, and my feeling that characters like Hannibal Lecter have been destroyed by the spotlight retroactively thrown on their origins, and in Ilya, I saw a chance to test out this theory in real time. As a result, I’ve been careful, almost to a fault, to withhold nearly all information about Ilya’s past except what is crucial for the plot, content to let him express himself primarily through his actions in the present. This was partially calculated to grant me flexibility in subsequent installments, and also due to a sort of authorial indifference: unlike a lot of writers, I’m not particularly interested in what someone was doing before the story began, as long as he or she has a compelling presence on the page. Consequently, there are major elements in the lives of Maddy, Powell, Ilya, and other important characters in The Icon Thief that remain a mystery even to me.

The result, I hope, is a character who holds our attention, even as the reader is left wanting to know more about his past. Does it work? I’m the last person in the world to judge this properly, but as far as I can tell, Ilya becomes more interesting the less we see of him, and certainly more interesting than if we’d been given his full backstory. This doesn’t mean that I haven’t tried to make him a complex character; indeed, I was all but forced to deal with the complexities that arose from his original conception. Ilya began as little more than a neat idea for an antihero—a Russian Jew, steeped in the cabala, who is also an expert thief and killer—but the more I thought about him, the more problematic he became. Why would so intelligent a man be working as an assassin, especially given the mob’s historical antisemitism? And as I started to work through these issues, I began to see that the organic complexities that arose from his character were far more interesting when his past was kept in shadow, perhaps because I sensed that no backstory could do justice to his contradictions. (This is one reason why I responded so positively to Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive.)

When I look back at Chapter 4, in which Ilya is fully seen for the first time after his brief appearance in the prologue, one of the first things that comes to mind is how much I cut from it. The first draft of this chapter was something like 3,300 words long; the published version is 1,800 words. So what got cut? A lot of it was excess verbiage describing Ilya’s arrival at the airport and his subsequent trip to Brighton Beach, the sort of thing that any responsible revision would have pared away. But the biggest cut of all was a long, introspective passage in which Ilya reflects on his failure in Budapest, his subsequent actions, the reappearance of the painting he was assigned to retrieve, and his intention to recover it. The first draft of this material covered about five hundred words. In the final version? It’s a single sentence, or not even half a sentence: “Ever since Budapest, he had been dealt another hand entirely.” That’s it. Everything else—his humiliation at his failure, his loss of status, his determination to restore his reputation—is contained between the lines in the scene that follows. And the result is much better than before.

That said, this chapter gave me a lot of problems, and I don’t think I really fixed it until the final draft. The first conversation between Ilya and Sharkovsky, the Brighton Beach gangster he meets here for the first time, has to accomplish a lot: it needs to suggest the tension between these two characters and the differences between Ilya and the men with whom he has been assigned to work, while also telling us something about Sharkovsky himself and setting up the next phase of the plot. This is a lot to ground to cover in just over a thousand words, and it took me a lot of tinkering to get it right. The key moment, oddly enough, is a minor one: Sharkovsky’s speech about the night porter and the problem of loss of inventory. It’s a good speech on its own, but it also hints at Sharkovsky’s underlying shrewdness and his attitude toward Ilya, who serves as a night porter for the mob—left alone as long as he does his job well, but held responsible when something goes wrong. And when Ilya, in response, takes out the photo of the man from the auction, we get a sense, for the first time, of the job he has been sent here to do…

In his book Information Anxiety, Richard Saul Wurman claims that an average issue of the New York Times contains more information than an ordinary citizen of seventeenth-century England would have been expected to absorb in his entire lifetime. I believe it. I don’t think I’m alone when I say that many of my nonworking hours online—perhaps as many as half—are spent on the Times website, which has long been my primary portal to events in the world around me. Yet I find myself barely scratching the surface. I rarely go past the articles displayed on the first page, for one thing, although a click on any section reveals vast amounts of additional material. And I generally don’t go looking for articles on subjects that don’t already interest me, at least not without an extra nudge. Which is why the little box of “Most Emailed” articles along the right side of the page is so useful: it’s a crowdsourced list of the best stuff in the day’s paper, and I always find something fascinating there that I wouldn’t have seen anywhere else.

On March 10, 2011, however, everything changed. Instead of displaying the “Most Emailed” list, the Times defaulted to a new tab called “Recommended for You,” based on their new recommendation engine, which suggests articles based on what you’ve read in the past. “Most Emailed” was still there, but it was hidden by the recommendations tab when you were logged into your Times account—which was all the time, if you wanted to read more than the ten free articles they offer you every month. You could change your preferences fairly easily to put the “Most Emailed” list up front, but like the passive slug that I am, I left things in default mode for a whole year. And a funny thing happened: I stopped using that tab. The recommendations list updated less frequently, for one thing, and the algorithm behind its suggestions often seemed crude. But the real problem was more fundamental: what the recommendation engine thought I might want to see was far less interesting than what other people unlike me were reading at the same time.

What I discovered, in short, was that the least interesting thing the Times could possibly do for me was indicate stories that were similar to articles I’d read before. To put it in a slightly paradoxical way, I don’t care about the stuff I already care about: I want to be surprised, or at least find articles that break me out of my usual routine. “Most Emailed” does this beautifully; “Recommended For You” sure as hell doesn’t. In the end, I finally did what I should have done months earlier: I clicked the one link that restored the “Most Emailed” tab as my default setting, and I noticed the change almost at once. Overnight, I was happily reading great articles that I would have missed before—but I still can’t help feeling a sense of regret at the thought of that lost year. (Of course, the really serious way to find good stories is to browse, page by page, through a physical copy of the paper, as I keep meaning to do every Sunday. Whenever I open the paper at random, I invariably find something surprising and interesting. But for all my good intentions, I still have yet to engage in this kind of systematic browsing.)

I’ve spoken before about the importance of serendipity—our chance encounters with unexpected ideas in libraries and bookstores, in encyclopedias, and in the world around us—and how the end of browsing has led to a corresponding decline in such experiences. (George Steiner calls it “the genius of waste,” the quality of a great bookstore that allows us to find what we aren’t looking for.) The question of whether the Internet tends to increase or decrease serendipity has been hotly debated, with lots of good points made on both sides. What seems clear, at least to me, is a recommendation engine can only diminish the kind of serendipity that we all need, especially those of us in creative fields. It may be exactly what a lot of Internet users want, and I assume that the Times wouldn’t put its recommendations front and center if it hadn’t seen a corresponding increase in clicks. But try this: go to the New York Times homepage, scroll down to the “Recommended for You” list, and click the “Don’t Show” link at the bottom. Hiding that tab made my life better and more interesting. It may do the same for you.

If you happen to be in the Chicago area, you can tune in this afternoon to hear me talk about The Icon Thief on Bill Moller’s show on WGN Radio 720, starting around 12:45 pm CT. You can also listen to it live online. Not sure if there’s going to be a podcast version, but I’ll post it if I can. (And if, by chance, you’re just joining us now, you can learn more about the novel here and here.)

(Update: The interview is now online! You can listen to it here.)

(Note: This post is the fourth installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 3. You can read the earlier installments here.)

As I’ve mentioned before, I knew from early on that The Icon Thief would follow three parallel stories, each unfolding more or less independently until they converged at the end of the novel. Once I’d identified my three main characters—Maddy Blume, Alan Powell, and Ilya Severin—the problem became one of structuring the novel so that the narrative transitions made sense. I quickly discovered that there’s a reason why most books and movies, with the occasional exception, focus so clearly on one protagonist: not only does it give the audience someone to root for, but it allows for a kind of narrative clarity that can be hard to achieve with more than one main character. I finished the first draft of the novel thinking that I’d solved this structural problem fairly well, but one of the earliest comments I got back from readers was that I’d done almost too good a job of cutting between the three strands: I’d given Maddy, Powell, and Ilya roughly the same number and distribution of scenes, so it was hard to figure out what the novel’s true center of interest was supposed to be. And I soon found that fixing this problem would require some radical restructuring, at a point when the entire novel had already been written.

In the end, I was forced to conclude that, while it might not be as elegant as the perfectly balanced structure I’d initially conceived, I had to pick a main protagonist, both in terms of narrative screen time and emotional emphasis. The obvious choice was Maddy: she was arguably the most complex, interesting character, as well as the most relatable, and the one I’d conceived first. (In some ways, Ilya was the real heart of the book, but for reasons I’ll explain later, it was important not to overexpose him.) Once I’d decided to focus on Maddy, the book’s structural problems came clear: in the original draft, Maddy first appeared in Chapter 1, but wasn’t seen again until Chapter 4, after the two other main characters had been introduced, and her scenes were similarly parceled out throughout the first half of the novel, which made it hard for the reader to get involved in her situation. To make her the obvious lead, I saw that I had to keep cutting back to her end of the plot. Chapter 1 would still be about Maddy, but after introducing Powell in Chapter 2, I’d cut back to Maddy again, and continue focusing on her in alternate chapters for the first eighty pages or so. When in doubt, Maddy’s story would be my home base, and the reader, I hoped, would respond accordingly.

When I looked at the novel in this light, I realized, with a sinking feeling, that it would require some radical surgery. The number of chapters allocated to Powell had to be reduced, which required cutting and combining several of his scenes. Even more problematic was the realization, after I’d reshuffled the pieces, that I needed a new scene for Maddy, one that would come right after Powell’s introduction, to lock in the impression that she was the main character. None of the scenes I’d written so far fit the bill, which placed me in the somewhat awkward position of having to write a crucial early chapter from scratch, several months after I’d finished what I thought was the final draft of the novel. Because of its placement, it had to be a strong, interesting scene, but it couldn’t upset the sequence of chapters that had already been written. This presented me with a rather challenging puzzle to solve, much as a director might request a reshoot to fill in a plot hole revealed in the editing room. Luckily, as a writer, my budget is unlimited, so it wasn’t hard to reassemble the cast for a new scene in which Maddy meets a couple of friends in a New York restaurant for a drink—and some information.

Looking back at Chapter 3, I can’t say it’s one of the novel’s most memorable scenes, but it’s a nice, cleanly written chapter that does more or less what I needed it to do. By the time I wrote it, I’d been living with Maddy for well over a year, so I understood aspects of her character—her ambition, her relative destitution, her willingness to use others, and her underlying loneliness—better than I had before, so I was able to bring these out more clearly. (It also allowed me to describe her appearance more fully, which was another common request from readers.) I also solved another problem almost by accident. In the first draft, and this was nothing but a dumb mistake on my part, I didn’t fully explain the art world mystery behind Étant Donnés until much later, when Maddy goes to meet Alexey Lermontov, her former employer. Reading the novel over again, I realized that by withholding these details for no good reason, I was failing to play one of my strongest cards, and that this new scene provided a convenient way of putting this information up front. In short, by adding one fairly straightforward chapter toward the end of the writing process, I addressed the novel’s structural problems, gave more insight into a difficult main character, and foregrounded some of the most interesting material in the entire book. Now that’s a good fix!

When I was writing The Icon Thief, the book I read the most for inspiration was Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal. This shouldn’t be surprising: more than forty years after it was published, Forsyth’s debut remains the best international thriller ever written, and it’s arguably still the single most influential novel of its kind. Much of its fascination comes from the figure of the Jackal himself, a coolly efficient British assassin who claims more than a few innocent victims, yes, but is also enormously attractive, to the point where a reader can’t help rooting for him, at least to some extent, as he nears his deadly appointment in Paris. We like the Jackal, despite ourselves, because he’s professional, clever, and resourceful as he goes about his business of forging identities, obtaining weapons—and even making breakfast. Here’s my favorite paragraph in the entire book:

He made himself a quick breakfast of scrambled eggs, orange juice and more black coffee in the flat’s small but compact kitchen, and ate it off the kitchen table. Being a tidy and methodical man, he emptied the last of the milk down the sink, broke the two remaining eggs, and poured them also down the sink. The remainder of the orange juice he drank off, junked the can in the trash basket, and the remainder of the bread, egg shells and coffee grounds went down the disposal unit. Nothing left would be likely to go rotten during his absence.

Taken out of context, the scene is vaguely hilarious—it reads almost like a parody of the lovingly detailed sections in which the Jackal acquires, assembles, and tests the rifle he intends to use to assassinate Charles De Gaulle. Really, though, it’s a reminder that the Jackal, who has no real backstory or even a name, is defined completely by his efficiency. Note, for instance, that his breakfast apparently consists of nothing but scrambled eggs, as if bacon or toast would upset the balance of so streamlined a meal—and it wouldn’t do at all, of course, for him to make pancakes or waffles. Something about those eggs, as well as the curiously redundant “small but compact” kitchen, is just right, and it lies near the heart of the Jackal’s appeal. Both he and his book are models of professionalism, down to the smallest detail, and the more we look at the Jackal (as well as his more heroic successors like Jason Bourne or Gabriel Allon, or even my own Ilya Severin), the more he comes to resemble the ideal of the suspense novelist himself…

(Note: This is a preview of my guest post today at Lauren’s Bookshelf. You can find the rest of the essay here.)

Over the past few days, I’ve been devouring the book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, which I’d mentioned here before but only recently got around to reading. It is, as promised, rife with fascinating insights and stories—my wife says that I seem to have underlined every sentence—and I’m still only halfway through. In particular, Chapter 17, “Regression to the Mean,” is one that everyone should read, even if it’s just standing up at Barnes & Noble. The chapter is only ten pages long, but it’s packed with more useful insights than a shelf of ordinary books, and I can all but guarantee that it will subtly change the way you think about a lot of things. The key passage, at least to my eyes, is one that begins with Kahneman sharing what he calls his favorite equation:

Success = talent + luck
Great success = a little more talent + a lot of luck

This is something that most of us know intuitively, but Kahneman takes it one step further. Basically, if we accept the premise that a single instance of exceptionally good performance is due largely to luck—or, more precisely, to positive factors outside the performer’s control—then our best guess about the next performance is that it won’t be quite as good, as the performer’s luck regresses to the mean. We can’t predict anything about luck except for the fact that, in general, it will be more or less average. As a result, someone who has excellent luck on one occasion, like an athlete who makes a great ski jump, will probably only have average luck the next time out—and the better the original performance, the more extreme the regression will be. And while we might be tempted to ascribe all kinds of causal factors to the change, it’s really nothing but simple mathematics.

This is obviously true of sports, given the important role that luck plays in most sporting events, but it’s also fascinating to think about its implications for the arts. In particular, regression to the mean is the most likely explanation for what I call “the New Yorker feature curse” in my recent article in Salon. When we interview movie stars or directors based on a recent great success, it’s likely that we’ve caught them just before they regress to the mean, which is why their next project—the one we’ve spent the entire article extolling—often seems like a relative disappointment. And this has nothing to do with the talent of the subjects involved. The movies are such a volatile business that even successful filmmakers can only be expected to succeed perhaps half the time, so it shouldn’t be surprising when a big success is followed by a movie that seems like a failure in comparison, and vice versa. For a particularly stark example, one need look no further than the recent career of Woody Allen, who, in Match Point, had a character say:

The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a little luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.

And this applies to literature as well. If athletes have the Sports Illustrated cover jinx and directors have the New Yorker curse, novelists have second-novel syndrome: the big debut novel followed by a sophomore slump. We like to ascribe all kinds of causal explanations to this—pressure, time constraints, authorial self-indulgence—but most often, it’s just another case of regression to the mean. Luck, as I’ve learned firsthand, plays an enormous role in a book’s publication and reception, and it’s mathematically unsound to expect lightning to strike twice. This is true, most obviously, of a book’s commercial prospects, but also, oddly, of its artistic merits. Luck plays a larger role in a novel’s quality than many of us would like to admit: like ski jumpers and golf players, we benefit from moments of serendipity and inspiration that may never return. Until, of course, we try again.

One of the buried themes of this blog over the past year has been the ongoing, and not entirely intentional, acceleration of my writing process. The Icon Thief took about two years to write, revise, and sell. Its sequel, City of Exiles, was written in less than nine months, not counting a few extra weeks at the end for revision and copy-editing. And while I tried to negotiate a little more wriggle room for The Scythian, I’m still slated to deliver it about nine months from the day I signed the contract, which, when you take other projects into account, is even less time than it sounds. I don’t necessarily mind the compressed schedule: it’s forced me to be smarter and more efficient in how I plan these books, and as a result, I’ve learned a lot as a writer. I’ve even begun to take a certain pride in my productivity, and until recently, I held on to the hope that I’d eventually be able to scale back to the comfortable pace of a novel a year.

Or so I thought. These days, however, the consensus in publishing seems to be that a novel a year is far too slow, and even a novel every nine months is nothing special. A recent article by Julie Bosman in the New York Times points out that mainstream novelists are increasingly being compelled to publish two or more books every year, both because of competition with other kinds of content and in an attempt to keep a writer’s name in the public eye. The enormous popularity of series fiction has taught publishers the importance of building an audience with successive books, rather than betting everything on one big, self-contained novel every few years. This makes a lot of sense for individual writers—and it’s certainly had a surprising influence on my own career—but when everyone is doing it, the advantage disappears. As Lee Child observes, with a nod to Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen: “It seems like we’re all running faster to stay in the same place.”

Of course, mainstream novelists have always felt pressure to work at a fast pace. Agatha Christie referred to herself as “a perfect sausage machine,” and, at her peak, she produced two novels a year with clockwork regularity. In his book Writing Popular Fiction, published in 1972, Dean Koontz casually notes that a novelist who can produce “only” one or two category novels every year will never know real financial security, and that “half a dozen novels per annum” are the minimum for a comfortable lifestyle. Koontz, in his prime, was more than capable of writing a category novel in a week, and he was so prolific that he published under multiple pen names, out of his publisher’s concern that he would saturate the market—a fear that seems positively quaint in the days of the likes of James Patterson, who turns out something like twelve books a year with an army of co-writers, forcing the rest of us to struggle to catch up.

The trouble is that once a novelist, or any artist, has begun to produce at a certain rate, it’s all but impossible to pull back, at least not without alienating readers who have grown used to the ability to buy a new book by their favorite author (or brand name) multiple times every year. And it’s ultimately impossible for a writer to maintain that kind of pace forever, at least not without outside help. It isn’t hard to imagine a publishing landscape divided between a handful of big brands, often assisted by ghostwriters, and independent authors working vainly to keep up with the endless demand for content that this environment creates—if we aren’t there already. In the short term, it’s good for business, and I don’t blame publishers for trying to maintain their financial viability by any means possible. But as a writer, and reader, I can’t help worrying about where this all ends. As the Red Queen herself says: “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

The funny thing about living in a digital age is that it makes it increasingly easy to go back in time. I may not remember offhand what I was doing a year ago this week, but thanks to searchable email, this blog, and the dreaded Facebook timeline, the answer is only a few clicks away. Part of me worries about this, because it feels increasingly like I’ve outsourced my memory—along with my institutional knowledge and most of my common sense—to Google. Still, there’s something nice about being able to look back with such precision. Revisiting some of the earlier entries on this blog, in particular, fills me with mingled nostalgia and relief. For instance, I can see that on May 5 of last year, I had just finished an outline for the second half of the novel that eventually became City of Exiles, with an ungodly amount of work still remaining. (At the time, the novel was untitled, and I wrote: “If you have any title suggestions, please let me know—I’m feeling pretty stuck right now.”)

So it’s with a great deal of satisfaction that I can say, a year later, that not only did I finish City of Exiles, but it looks like it’s really going to be published. The proof arrived in the mail the other day, when I came home to find uncorrected advance copies from NAL waiting on my doorstep. I’m the last person in the world to look at this novel objectively, of course, but to my eyes, it looks gorgeous, even better than the advance copies of The Icon Thief. It’s especially surreal to see it in print now, given this book’s rapid journey from conception to publication—eighteen months ago, I didn’t even know that I was writing a series. And it’s a good boost for my morale, given that my third novel has just entered the most dangerous phase for any writing project, the halfway point, with only six months to delivery and no end in sight. All the same, if history is any indication, I’ll look back on this post a year from now and be glad that it all turned out fine. I hope.

(Note: This post is the third installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 2. You can read the first few chapters of the novel here.)

From the day I first conceived The Icon Thief, its structure was clear in my mind: I knew it would tell three stories, each with a single strong protagonist, that would advance in parallel, occasionally intersect, and converge at the novel’s conclusion. This sort of structure had intrigued me ever since I’d encountered it in the book and movie of L.A. Confidential, mostly because it gave me a chance to engage in the kind of narrative puzzle-making that had drawn me to fiction in the first place, and I’d already tried something similar with my unpublished novel about India. I also knew from the beginning that one story would follow an employee of an art hedge fund in New York, who eventually became Maddy Blume, while another would center on a Russian criminal, later named Ilya Severin. For a long time, however, I didn’t know what my third story would be. At first, I thought about focusing on an art analyst, the character who would evolve into Ethan Usher, but it was too much like Maddy’s story. And it was with a feeling of great relief that I finally realized that my third thread could, and should, be something else entirely: a police procedural.

I was pleased by this decision for three reasons. First was the obvious fact that it gave me a lot of material to work with, with entire shelves of books available for background and inspiration. Second, by making my third lead a criminal investigator, I had a means of organizing and assembling the pieces of what was already looking like a very complex story, with a character who could view the plot from the outside and figure it out with the reader—which, indeed, was the role that this character, eventually named Alan Powell, ultimately ended up playing. Third, and perhaps most important, was that it gave me a narrative line of relative clarity. I knew from early on that this was going to be a complicated novel, and in particular that it was going to be hard to structure Maddy’s story, since I was figuring out her character and motivations as I went along. Ilya’s share of the plot, by contrast, was fairly straightforward—it was a heist that turned into a fight for survival—and I intuitively knew that the third narrative strand should be easy to follow as well. In general, a novel can’t push the bounds of complexity on every level, and by making a third of the story a procedural, I would always have a familiar home base on which to fall back whenever the rest of the plot threatened to get out of control.

So what would my procedural be about? In theory, the initial crime could be almost anything, because it was really just a means of introducing my investigator into the larger plot. A murder seemed like a safe enough bet, and for some reason, I hit on the image of a woman’s headless body mummified in the sand under the boardwalk at Brighton Beach. The headless corpse was, of course, both a nod to Étant Donnés and to the Russian mob’s famous propensity for cutting off the head and hands of its victims. (In this, I was probably more than a little indebted to Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park.) The Brighton Beach setting was inspired by the same angle. But I wouldn’t have been able to write this scene at all if I hadn’t found an article by Michael Wilson of the New York Times about the history of the space under the boardwalk, which, after the beach was extended, had been gradually reclaimed by the sand. And with this fact in mind, I spent several memorable days snooping around the Brighton Beach boardwalk, doing my best to walk in the footsteps of my fictional investigator.

Alan Powell is obviously named after Michael Powell, the director of The Red Shoes, and while it took me a while to get a fix on his character—as I’ll have occasion to discuss elsewhere—this chapter remained largely unchanged from first draft to final version. (I was helped by the fact that the main character’s objective in this chapter, as with the auction scene in Chapter 1, was both clearly defined and familiar from other procedurals.) This scene also marks the first appearance of FBI Special Agent Rachel Wolfe. Wolfe’s history is an interesting one: when I first conceived the part, she was basically just someone for Powell to talk to, and at first, she was a man, not a woman. Even after the first draft, I didn’t really know who she was, and I briefly toyed with the idea of making her South Asian. In making her a Mormon, I was inspired by the historically large number of Mormon agents in the FBI and CIA, and as soon as I made this decision, she blossomed in unexpected ways. In the end, I got to like Wolfe so much that I made her the hero of my second novel, City of Exiles, and she’s perhaps my favorite character in the entire series. Wolfe doesn’t have much to do here, but keep an eye on her. She’s got some surprises in store…

“But I understand, Holmes, that you are turning to practical ends those powers with which you used to amaze us?”
“Yes,” said I, “I have taken to living by my wits.”

The first speaker in the passage above is Reginald Musgrave, a much wealthier college acquaintance of Sherlock Holmes, and the story is “The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual,” an account of one of Holmes’s earliest cases. It’s easily one of my ten favorite Holmes stories, and I especially love this exchange, which gives us a window both into Holmes’s early career and into how he was regarded by his friends. It could almost be taken as a conversation between two contemporary college classmates, one of whom has gone profitably into consulting or investment banking, while the other is pursuing something vaguely absurd, like writing or performance art, in an outer-borough neighborhood. (We sometimes forget that the Holmes depicted in the original stories is dangerously close to a Bohemian—no, not that kind—and that the rooms in Baker Street, which since have been so lovingly recreated, wouldn’t be out of place in a ratty brownstone in Williamsburg.)

Musgrave seems amused to hear that Holmes is trying to make a living from his powers of observation, and in this portrayal, it isn’t hard to sense Conan Doyle’s own feelings toward those who looked with skepticism at his early literary aspirations. Anyone who decides to make a living in the arts is looking for support from skills that we tend to think of as diversions, hobbies, or parlor tricks—acting, singing, storytelling. When Holmes was in college, it’s possible that he regarded his own gifts in much the same light, the way some of us might have dabbled in undergraduate theater, and only later began to consider turning them toward more practical applications. And while working as a consulting detective may seem more interesting than, say, being a writer, in practice, they were equally exotic professions: the first true freelance writers in England, the denizens of Grub Street, had emerged just over a century before.

And Holmes’s response to Musgrave is revealing as well. “Living by one’s wits” has always had a rather sinister connotation, as if you’re surviving through cunning rather than hard work. As W.H. Auden memorably writes:

All those whose success in life depends neither upon a job which satisfies some specific and unchanging social need, like a farmer’s, nor, like a surgeon’s, upon some craft which he can be taught by others and improve by practice, but upon “inspiration,” the lucky hazard of ideas, live by their wits, a phrase which carries a slightly pejorative meaning. Every “original” genius, be he an artist or a scientist, has something a bit shady about him, like a gambler or madman.

By phrasing it the way he does, Holmes is putting himself in with the card sharps, the buskers, the fortune-tellers, and the writers. And this gives us another glimpse of his creator. Conan Doyle may have claimed that he disliked the Holmes stories, and that he was more interested in his painstaking historical fictions and, later, his investigations into spiritualism, but at heart, he was one of the greatest of all working writers, turning out mysteries, science fiction, Napoleonic tales, ghost stories, and more with the sort of invention and productivity that can only arise from the peculiar life of a freelancer, living, like Holmes, by his wits.

And some of that same disreputability still clings to any kind of artistic freelancing. When you’re just starting out, in particular, it’s hard for others to take you seriously—and they aren’t necessary wrong in this—and even later, there’s a sense of incredulity, as if they suspect that you’re secretly engaged in something more shady. (I’m always amazed by how candidly people will ask about my sales figures and advances, when they wouldn’t dream of asking about someone else’s salary—but what they’re really doing, I think, is trying to verify that this is a real job at all.) But such a life has its own satisfactions. Holmes was famously willing to take on cases for free, but he also took great relish in being paid for his work—”I am a poor man,” he says at the end of “The Priory School,” affectionately patting his check—and that’s something that any freelancer can appreciate. The result is, undeniably, a rather strange, unconventional existence. But if it’s good enough for Holmes, it’s good enough for me.

(Note: If you’re in the East Bay, don’t forget to come see me read at 7:00 pm tonight at the Hayward Area Historical Society. More details here.)

(Note: This post is the second installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering Chapter 1. You can read the first few chapters of the novel here.)

As I’ve said before, there are two scenes that are impossible for a writer to screw up, no matter how hard he tries: a jury delivering its verdict, and an auction. In the former case, no matter how tedious a legal thriller has been up to that point, when the judge takes the note from the foreman and tells the defendant to rise, there’s always a little frisson of suspense, even though we’ve seen the same scene a million times before. Similarly, auctions are structured as miniature contests of will, which, even without any context, are totally clear at once. In both cases, unlike most scenes in fiction, in which the author needs to work hard to define the stakes, we’re handed all the components for suspense right off the shelf. (This is another reason why even bad sports movies tend to suck us in when the big game comes down to that final pitch.) You can’t go back to this well too often, but it’s nice when you can. Which is one reason I’m glad that I was able to put a big auction scene right at the start of The Icon Thief.

Looking back, I can also see that an auction scene serves another useful purpose in the first chapter of a novel, which is that it immediately gets you inside the protagonist’s head. The main character of The Icon Thief, Maddy Blume, is by far the most complex figure I’ve ever had to create: she’s clever, ambitious, and insecure, capable of making incredibly smart choices on a tactical level but very poor choices when it comes to her own life, prone to jealousy and vanity, ready to use other people when necessary, but also vulnerable to being used herself. There are a lot of layers here, and there’s no way to get them across in one scene. Fortunately, that isn’t necessary. As I’ve noted in my discussion of the opening scene of The Godfather, characters become real, not through pages of introspection, but through scenes in which the reader can follow them from one clear objective to another. And an auction provides the clearest objective imaginable. Once you’ve sweated with Maddy through that opening scene at Sotheby’s, I’d like to think that you’re at least mildly interested in what she does next, even as her many complexities and contradictions gradually begin to reveal themselves.

The resulting chapter was a real pleasure to write. As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, this scene is based on a true incident, in which an unknown bidder paid a record price for Picasso’s Dora Maar au Chat at Sotheby’s in 2006. To research it, I went to auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York and took detailed notes on auction procedure, behavior, and atmosphere. I learned about such salesroom arcana as the lighthouse bid, in which a bidder holds his paddle in the air and keeps it there, indicating that he’s willing to buy the item at any price. As always, there was a lot of stuff that I cut for the sake of time. In particular, the original draft included at least a page of material leading up to the main event, the auction of Study for Étant Donnés, that I excised to cut to the chase. And the result is, I think, a really good chapter, perhaps the best in the entire novel. If nothing else, it’s one of the few scenes I can look at now without seeing a lot of things I wish I could change, and it’s the section I always read at author events, like the one I’m scheduled to do in California next week. And I feel especially lucky that it’s the first official chapter in the entire book.

As always, there are a lot of small touches and inside jokes that are probably of interest only to me. Study for Étant Donnés is the fiftieth lot of the evening—which means, of course, that it comes right after the crying of lot forty-nine. The names of the two phone clerks, Vicky and Julian, are nods to my favorite movie, which will be referenced repeatedly in the novel to come. And the most significant moment in the scene didn’t come until late in the process. Quite simply, I didn’t know how to end it, and even as I was preparing to go out to publishers, the ending of this chapter was very weak. It wasn’t until I went back and reread the chapter, using the principle of the standing set, that I realized that the answer was right in front of me. Earlier in the chapter, Maddy looks up at the skybox above the salesroom floor and notices that someone is there, although she can’t see who. When I wrote it, this was just a throwaway detail—designed, perhaps, just to show off my own location research. Much later, however, I began to wonder if I did, in fact, know who was watching from that skybox. And when I look back at the chapter now, it seems like he was there the entire time, unknown to me, waiting for the right moment.

Last year, in an interview with The 99 Percent, Francis Ford Coppola offered up a piece of advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. When asked for the most useful advice he’d give a student, Coppola said:

The first thing you do when you take a piece of paper is always put the date on it, the month, the day, and where it is. Because every idea that you put on paper is useful to you. By putting the date on it as a habit, when you look for what you wrote down in your notes, you will be desperate to know that it happened in April in 1972 and it was in Paris and already it begins to be useful. One of the most important tools that a filmmaker has are his/her notes.

This may seem like a small thing, but we should pay close attention, because here, for once, is a piece of creative advice that is practical, immediately applicable, and utterly important. The more time goes on, the more I come to agree with Coppola that an artist’s notes are crucial, and one of the first things any writer needs to figure out is a system for dealing with the countless pieces of paper that any novel automatically generates.

Simply put, this is a bookkeeping problem of enormous difficulty, and every writer is will come up with his or her own solution. In my own case, a novel like The Icon Thief will usually end up producing something like two thousand separate pieces of paper—index cards, notebook pages, and various random scraps and jottings, all of it accumulated over the intense work of a year or more. And being able to keep track of this material is essential. It’s basically impossible for me to hold the shape of an entire novel in my head at once, so I’m completely dependent on my notes. If I don’t write something down, or if I lose it, it’s quite possible that I’ll forget it entirely. In the end, my pile of notes comes to seem like an extension of my brain—or an urgent means of communication, a la Memento, between my past and future selves—which means that all this paper needs to be treated with particular care, even as it continues to multiply.

As a result, I’ve had to implement a system for what one of my friends compares to inventory management—a means of keeping track, at least in a rough sense, of what’s there at any given time. My system has evolved a great deal over the past couple of years, but at the moment, here’s how it looks:

1. I keep a notebook for writing down big, fairly permanent pieces of information about an unwritten story—its premise, its major plot points, and any areas that require further study. This is especially important when you may not get to a novel for a long time. In my current notebook, for instance, I had a page devoted to notes for The Scythian well over a year before I started work on the novel itself.
2. An informal card system, using the business cards I mentioned earlier, on which I jot down smaller plot points, beats for specific scenes, and other things as they occur to me. Such items can end up almost anywhere in the finished story, so it’s important that they be sortable. These start as a big stack in a designated corner of my desk, and end up in separate piles for each chapter, usually on the floor.
3. Finally, a series of text files on my MacBook that contain slightly more systematic notes, especially detailed research on particular topics.

The result has a sort of jury-rigged feel to it, but it seems to work. And its somewhat ad hoc nature is a big part of its usefulness—because a novelist can’t be too organized. It would be a mistake, for instance, to do everything in text files: it might be easier and more convenient, but it would lose some of the serendipity that comes from seeing cards and notes thrown together at random, in which the juxtaposition of two otherwise unrelated ideas will sometimes lead to an insight. I’ve found that it’s also a good habit to take as many notes by hand as possible, as my hero Walter Murch—who has worked with Coppola on some of his most famous movies—does for his scene cards. And finally, if you possibly can, take Coppola’s advice and date each page. I don’t always do this, but I should, and so should you. Years from now, when you’re looking back with wonder at the pile of notes that somehow turned into a novel, you’ll be glad you did.

(Note: This post is the first installment in my author’s commentary for The Icon Thief, covering the novel’s prologue. You can read the prologue and the first few chapters here.)

The opening of any novel is a sort of triangulation, or compromise, between several sometimes contradictory factors. You want to begin with an arresting scene that will engage the reader’s attention, hopefully from the very first page. You need to set up themes and images that will pay off later in the book. You’re trying to will yourself, the author, into the story for the first time, which often requires writing a lot of introductory material that will later be discarded. And you’re doing all this at a point in the process when the rest of the book is just a vague shape in the distance—although you’ll usually go back to revise what you’ve written once you’ve got a better sense of where you’re headed. In my own case, whenever I start a novel, I’m always thinking about my own favorite openings in fiction, such as that of The Postman Always Rings Twice, which Tom Wolfe famously extolled as a model of narrative momentum. Not every novel needs to come out of the corner so quickly, but in general, especially when you’re working in suspense, there’s something to be said for getting right down to business.

Here’s how the prologue to The Icon Thief came about. When I first realized that my book was going to center on the world of Russian organized crime, I began by reading everything I could on the subject. One of the most useful books I found was Comrade Criminal by Stephen Handelman, a well-documented look at the rise of the Russian mafiya in the early nineties. In particular, Handelman devotes several pages to the trade in smuggled art and icons, including a brief account of an encounter between a solitary art smuggler and a pair of bandits on a deserted road—a rather common occurrence in that line of work. As I read the description, something clicked, and I made a note of it, thinking that a similar incident might make a good opening scene for my own novel. At the time, I didn’t know who my smuggler was, or what he was smuggling, but something about that lonely image stuck in my mind. And a surprising amount of the subsequent plot—including the fact that much of the story revolves around a smuggled work of art—arose from my attempt to figure out how we arrived at that one moment.

In my experience, that’s how writing a novel works: you’re start with a single image or idea, which leads to others, until a huge plant has grown from that one mustard seed. Once I had the figure of the smuggler, for instance, I had to figure out who he was and where he was going, and I spent an ungodly amount of time coming up with a plausible background for the man I ended up calling Andrey. In the original draft of the prologue, I go into great detail about his past—he’s married with one child and hopes to start a coffee shop in Moscow—nearly all of which ended up being cut in the final version. In fact, the first draft contains something like a thousand words of material, much of it painstakingly researched, that was cut for reasons of space or clarity. (For example, the “border” mentioned in the book’s opening sentence is the border between Russia and Ukraine, just outside Shebekino, although I don’t name any of these places in the final draft.) These excisions were necessary, and I don’t miss any of the extra material. But it made Andrey more real to me, which was crucial, since he’s the first person in the novel we meet, even if his real function is to introduce us to a much more important character who appears in the prologue’s final pages.

When I look back at the prologue now, I’m especially pleased by the details that are essentially inside jokes: the fact that Andrey ends up in a hotel on Rákóczi Road in Budapest, for instance, is a nod to Foucault’s Pendulum, in which a mysterious figure with a similar name plays a small but crucial role. I also like the fact that Andrey is playing a Deep Purple mix tape while he’s driving. This, too, was a fairly random decision—I somehow came up with the idea that the bandits, while accepting other forms of tribute, would take his mix tape as well—but it led to some unexpected discoveries. The music playing here had to be something that a Russian might plausibly have in his tape deck, while also, ideally, having some larger thematic resonance, and I arrived at Deep Purple, or Dip Pepl, because I knew they were big in Russia. (Medvedev, apparently, is a devoted fan.) But the song itself provides a clue of what is to come. “Smoke on the Water” is about a fire on the shore of Lake Geneva, the occasional home of both Lenin and Nabokov, who will later cast their shadows across the story. It also, interestingly, appears in the background of a certain work of art to which the reader will soon be introduced. And then we’re off to the races.

As I’ve said before, I like commentary tracks. While some audio commentaries can be a waste of time, or worse, I’ve learned so much from the best of them, and derived such pleasure along the way, that a few have even supplanted the underlying movie itself in my affections. I still love The Usual Suspects, for instance, but at this point, I’d rather listen to Bryan Singer and Christopher McQuarrie’s wonderful commentary, probably my personal favorite, than watch the movie again. Commentaries by the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Nicholas Meyer, David Mamet, and Steven Soderbergh (especially his famously prickly exchange with Lem Dobbs on The Limey) only get better with time. And in particular, the stunning commentary tracks for The Simpsons have been playing continuously in the background of my life for the better part of a decade now.

I’ve often wished that something similar existed for novels. There are, of course, annotated editions of classics ranging from Alice to Sherlock Holmes—the latter of which is my favorite book of all time—and several authors, notably Nabokov, have cooperated to some extent with annotated versions of their works. Other novelists have written in detail about the creation of particular books. The most comprehensive example I’ve seen is The Writing of One Novel by Irving Wallace, which I recommend with the caveat that Wallace was a pretty lousy writer—although quite readable on the subjects of research, revision, and publication. Similar accounts have evidently been written by Thomas Mann and Thomas Wolfe, although I haven’t read them, and I don’t think they’re quite what I have in mind when I envision a true author’s commentary: something that runs in parallel with the text, but chatty, digressive, and not particularly organized, like Paul Thomas Anderson talking about Boogie Nights.

This is all my roundabout way of announcing that starting on Monday, I’ll be writing an occasional author’s commentary, for lack of a better word, on The Icon Thief. I’m not precisely sure how this will work, since I haven’t done it before, but at the moment, I’m hoping to post one installment per week, taking one chapter at a time, and writing about whatever strikes my fancy. There won’t be a fixed format: I’ll just be talking about what I can remember of how each chapter written, explaining some of the references, throwaway details, and inside jokes, and giving whatever insight I can about the choices I made along the way. Behind every page lies a story, some more interesting than others, but since this is essentially a blog about writing, I figure that at this point I can afford to indulge myself. And my goal will be to write the kind of author commentary I’d like to read—light, heavy on the gossip, cheerfully candid about plot holes and mistakes, and generally as honest as possible.

Obviously, these posts will mean a lot more to those who have read the novel, so if you haven’t had a chance to pick it up yet, you might want to swing by your local library, steal a copy from a friend, or even buy one. (You can also read the first three chapters, and bits and pieces of the rest, on Google Books.) While I can’t entirely avoid spoilers, I’ll do my best to tread carefully around certain plot points. And as much as I’m aware that it can be risky to pull back the curtain like this, I can’t resist showing you a few of my tricks. Every work of art has its own secret history, and the same part of me that is intrigued by commentary tracks, artists’ sketches, and storyboards is also fascinated by the process by which every novel is made—a story often as compelling, and surprising, as the plot itself. Ideally, the result will be of interest even to those who haven’t read the book, and won’t affect the enjoyment of those who have. So I hope you enjoy being part of my book club, because if you’re reading this, you’re already in it—and the discussion starts now.

Can a book be so good that it’s dangerous? As columnist Crawford Kilian has argued on NPR and the Tyee, there are, in fact, novels that offer such compelling examples of voice, style, and originality that they can seduce generations of young writers into following their lead, often with disastrous results. The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, gave Kilian and his peers license to “essentially be a stenographer for [their] own teenage writing”—even though Salinger himself quickly moved in other directions. Other books that Kilian cites as bad influences include The Lord of the Rings, On The Road, and For Whom The Bell Tolls, and while one might argue with his choices—it’s certainly better to be inspired by Tolkien than by any of his imitators, and some of Kilian’s selections, such as Blood Meridian, seem motivated more by personal distaste—you certainly can’t say that he’s wrong. And Atlas Shrugged aside, in most cases, the better and more original the novel, the more dangerous it can be.

The problem, to put it as simply as possible, is that most highly original novels are the product of a long process of development, and when a writer imitates the result while neglecting the intermediate steps, he can miss out on important fundamentals. I should know. In my case, my dangerous book was Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, a wonderful novel, but as I’ve confessed elsewhere, I’ve come to agree with Tom Wolfe that it essentially represents a “literary cul-de-sac.” It gave me all kinds of bad habits, especially a tendency to indulge my characters in extended discussions of ideas, and almost twenty years later, I’m just beginning to escape from its influence, a process that required writing and publishing an entire novel that I’m hoping will exorcise it for good. And I can’t help but wonder where I’d be as a writer if I’d followed a less misleading example. As Henry James says, after comparing Tolstoy to an elephant carrying all human life: “His own case is prodigious, but his example for others dire: disciples not elephantine he can only mislead and betray.”

Since then, I’ve become a lot more cautious about my influences, especially when I’m working on a project. Now that I’ve finally begun to develop my own style, it’s probably less a problem now than before, but when I was first starting out, I found myself picking up the tics and habits of the writers I was reading at the time, always in a diminished, embarrassingly derivative form. As a result, as I’ve said before, I tend to avoid reading works by strong, idiosyncratic stylists when I’m working on a story of my own, and also works in translation, on the principle that it’s best to read good prose originally written in my own language. The trouble, of course, is that since I’m always writing these days, I’ve automatically excluded a world of good books from consideration. It took me forever to read Cloud Atlas, for instance, and even now, there are a lot of worthwhile books, ranging from Infinite Jest to, yes, Blood Meridian, that I’ve been avoiding for years for the same reason.

So what books should a young writer read? It might seem best to play it safe and follow the advice of T.S. Eliot, who notes that if a poet imitates Dante’s style, at worst, he’ll write a boring poem, while if he imitates Shakespeare, he’ll make a fool out of himself. The first thing any writer needs to master is simplicity and clarity, so of all contemporary authors, it might make sense to read only writers who embody those virtues—McEwan, say, or Coetzee. But it’s a mistake to start there as well. Like it or not, every writer has to go through a period of being misled by great authors, and perhaps it’s only by writing a bad imitation of Salinger or Jack Kerouac or even Eco that a writer can get it out of his or her system. Clarity and transparency aren’t virtues that are acquired by reading clear, transparent authors to the exclusion of everything else; one arrives at these qualities at the end of a journey that begins with self-indulgence and imitation and finally concludes with simplicity, with plenty of wrong turns along the way. In short, it’s fine to be misled by great books. Just keep the results to yourself.

So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and change conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends.

—Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

What does it mean to devote your life to one book? Yesterday, I spoke about the figure of the freelancer turned man of letters, who spends his career moving from subject to subject like a shark, but this tells us nothing about a man like Robert Caro, who has spent his entire life writing about two subjects, and for the past forty years only one, the life of Lyndon Johnson. What was originally expected to run three volumes has now expanded to four, with a fifth on the way, covering something like 3,500 pages, with most of Johnson’s presidency yet to come. As Charles McGrath points out in a recent profile in the New York Times, Caro has now spent more time writing about the crucial years of Lyndon Johnson’s life than Johnson spent living them. At first glance, then, Caro might seem like the opposite of the kind of writer I’ve described. But when you look more closely, as Caro himself would, you find surprising affinities.

If Caro has mostly turned aside from other kinds of work, it wasn’t because he didn’t need it—McGrath’s profile notes that Caro and his wife sold their house in Long Island and moved to the Bronx to save money during the writing of his first book. Instead, Caro’s singlemindedness seems inspired by both his own meticulous personality and an almost fanatical sense of progressive revelation, the idea that looking closely enough at one life can allow us to understand an entire society, but only if we dig as deeply as possible. And it helps, of course, that he has chosen subjects that lend themselves to such expansiveness. As McGrath points out, The Years of Lyndon Johnson encompasses everything from detailed miniature biographies of secondary characters like Sam Rayburn or Hubert Humphrey to a history of the United States Senate, all of which Caro furnishes for the sake of necessary context. In short, like any author, he constantly follows his curiosity into unexpected places—he’s just lucky enough to be able to encompass it under one larger theme.

I haven’t read all of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, although those three big volumes have been staring down imposingly from my bookshelves for a long time now, but I have read The Power Broker, Caro’s biography of Robert Moses, which remains one of my fondest memories from a lifetime of reading nonfiction. It’s about as big, physically, as a book can be and still fit between two covers, but it’s a marvel of pacing and detail—the reader’s interest never flags—and we can almost believe Caro when he says that he cut 350,000 words and still regrets every one. (The real hero of McGrath’s piece is editor Robert Gottlieb.) Caro clearly takes his cues from Gibbon, an edition of which is visible in his office, and like Gibbon, his life has been consumed by one great work, to an extent that seems to have taken even his loved ones by surprise. “I never thought this would be all he’d write about,” his wife Ina says. “I’ve always wanted him to finish a novel.”

But of course, Caro has already written his novel, or novels, which are buried throughout his larger work. (Just one example out of many: the account in The Power Broker of the relationship between Robert Moses and his brother Paul, which reads like a self-contained tragedy.) Every story unfolds into others, and episodes that were originally conceived as a single chapter end up taking up most of a book. In this sense, Caro’s approach really is Homeric: in the Iliad, there are passages of a couple of lines in the surviving text that, when originally sung, could be expanded by the performer to last for hours, based on the interests of the audience. Similarly, there are times when Caro’s work reads like a standard biography of Johnson in which each paragraph has been expanded in every imaginable direction. Like Thomas Mann, Caro knows that only the exhaustive is truly interesting. And its pursuit is, in every sense, the work of a lifetime.

When I was younger, I wanted to be a man of letters. I wasn’t sure what this meant, or even if such a thing still existed, but based on my vague sense of what the position entailed, it sounded like an ideal job. You’d be a novelist first, sure, but you’d also write short stories, nonfiction, criticism, and more, following your own inclinations, after the example of many of my early heroes, like Norman Mailer. It never entered my head to wonder why a writer might produce a body of work like this—I assumed he did it just because it seemed cool. But the more time passes, the more I realize that the figure of “the man of letters” is really a byproduct of years spent looking for ways to make a living while writing. And it’s been like this for a long time. Speaking of the essayists of the eighteenth century, whom he calls “writers of all work,” the critic George Saintsbury says:

The establishment of the calling of man of letters as an irregular profession, and a regular means of livelihood, almost necessarily brought with it the devotion of the man of letters himself to any and every form of literature for which there was a public demand…It became, therefore, almost necessary on the one hand, and comparatively easy on the other, for the [writer]…to be everything by turns and nothing long.

Strike out the phrase “comparatively easy,” and you have a pretty good description of the contemporary freelance writer, which is essentially what Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and other denizens of Grub Street really were. They worked as essayists, dramatists, poets, and producers of what Saintsbury calls “hackwork or something more”—translations, histories, popular science—as demand and opportunity required. They were, in short, freelancers. And if their work has endured, it’s because of their exceptional talent, productivity, and versatility, all of which were born, not from some abstract ideal of the man of letters, but from the practical constraints of being a working writer, which is something that every freelancer can understand. They just happened to be better at it than most.

Looking at my own life these days, it’s clear that I’ve had to be “everything by turns and nothing long” to an extent that still takes me by surprise. In the past couple of months alone, I’ve seen the publication of my first novel, worked on the copy edit of the second, and pushed ahead furiously on a rough draft of the third. I’ve written a couple of articles, including my debut essay in The Daily Beast, as well as a long Q&A, a guest post on another blog, and thousands of words here. I have a science fiction novelette coming out in Analog in July and I’m preparing a proposal this week for another nonfiction project. In short, as usual, I’m working on a lot of things at once that don’t, at first glance, have much to do with one another, and sometimes the payoff can be hard to see. But this is what being a working writer is all about.

And this sort of multitasking has creative benefits as well. Drew Goddard, talking to the New York Times the other day about Joss Whedon’s wide range of activities, puts it nicely: “Everything became a vacation from other things.” When you get burnt out on one project, it’s nice to have something else to turn to instead, and your various pieces of work can inform one another in surprising ways. I’ve learned a lot about structuring nonfiction from my work as a novelist—a good essay is often surprisingly similar to a well-constructed chapter—and my fiction, in turn, has benefited from the skills I’ve acquired as an essayist and, yes, a blogger. Everything feeds into everything else, if not right away, then somewhere down the line. It keeps me sane. And after forty years of scrounging around, I’ll have a body of work of which I can hopefully be proud. Because in the end, a man of letters is just a freelancer who survived.