Work has been very quiet for the past 48 hours, which has allowed me to get around to doing a bunch of stuff that I’ve been putting back and back. One of these tasks was to fulfill my promise to read one of my writer friends’ new manuscript.
This was something that I had been avoiding for the past few weeks because:
(a) I’ve been too busy to find the time.
(b) I really don’t like reading large amount of text on-screen.
(c) He writes fiction and I really don’t like reading fiction very much normally.
I have to say that I really enjoyed his book. It was a real page-turner (or, in this day and age, more accurately a ’screen-scroller’). One of the reasons that I enjoyed it was due to the fact that it was set against the sub-prime crisis and he had done a hell of a lot of research into the subject. I remember discussing with him a year ago how bad we both thought things were going to get economically, but I don’t think either of us imagined that it would get quite this bad.
The other reason that I liked it was because I was named as one of the main characters in the book (albeit I had become Finnish in it and changed my job). I was very pleased that I was the main villain in the book - the asshole capitalist pig who thinks of nothing but money no matter what its human consequences might be.
Actually, I think that this is the third time that I’ve been a character in someone’s book (not counting my own, which would be rather cheating).
The last time was probably in another friend’s book, but I don’t know for sure. He’s a writer of pulp-fantasy who churns out paperbacks so fast that he can probably write them faster than I could read them – 3,000 words a day, every day. He told me that he usually bases characters in his books on people that he knows and, as I was one of his main associates in those days, I’m sure that I was in one of them in some capacity. I’m sure again that I would have been someone very evil and calculating because, whereas most people in his circle of friends talked about nothing but dwarves, orcs, goblins and elves, him and I spent most of our time talking about royalty payments, compound interest and offshore tax havens.
So I was probably cast as Accountant King of the Dark Elves or something.
The first book I was cast in I don’t think was ever published, but it was a supposedly fictionalized account of a very sad story that happened in the late-eighties – a doomed love story.
I always got on well with the girl who did PR for our company and we would have each other in stitches every time we were on the phone to one another.
I never thought much about it until my secretary, who was good friends with the girl asked me one day, “do you fancy xxxxxxxx?” (I’m not changing the names to protect the innocent – I’ve just forgotten her name – which probably makes me sound very callous, but a lot of shit has happened over the past 20 years and I’m probably suffering from Alzheimer’s already).
I’d never really thought about it before. She was no ravishing beauty, but she was a lot of fun.
“Well … errm … yes, maybe,” I stuttered, put well and truly on the spot. “But she’s got a boyfriend hasn’t she? Don’t they live together?”
“Yes,” my secretary replied, “but it’s not working. She wants out. She asked me whether you would like to go out on a date.”
“Well … errm … Yes, OK, then, I guess.”
At this point I had been single for about three long years and had tried just about everything to try and get a date, but had never got anywhere at all, mainly because I was a complete social retard.
So we met up at a restaurant and had dinner. It was a bit weird at first being in a totally new environment after previously being work colleagues, but the initial nervousness soon wore off and we got along really fine. We parted saying that we must do it again soon.
The rest of the story I only found out from third-parties.
The next day, a Sunday, she had to go to work as she did a second job as a waitress or something. Before she left for work, she told her boyfriend that they needed to have a serious chat when she got home that night.
During the day, she phoned her sister and recounted the events of the night before to her. She said that she had a really great time and that she was going to dump her boyfriend.
But a few hours later, she got a terrible headache. She tried to persevere, but it just got worse and worse until she had to be taken to hospital.
She died a few hours later from a massive brain hemorrhage.
Obviously everyone was totally devastated by this. I learned about it from one of the other girls in the office who worked for me as my secretary was too shocked to come into the office. The boyfriend never found out about our date the previous night – everyone thought it better not to tell him, including me.
The sister was supposed to have written a book about it, but I’m not sure that it ever came out as there wasn’t really enough material in there to make a whole novel about, as sad as the whole event was.
But anyway …
As I said earlier, I’ve never been a great fan of fiction. In a lot of cases, it’s because I don’t see ‘the point’. This is obviously a stupid thing to say because there is equally as little of ‘a point’ in watching a movie or watching some crap on TV, yet for some reason I don’t have a problem with that.
Another problem that I have with fiction is that I find it overly descriptive, and my friend’s book (the one I read yesterday) was no different. I almost stopped reading it when he got too heavy with the description of the buildings surrounding the main character at one point in it and what he had for breakfast.
Every day.
Maybe it’s because I have a good imagination that I don’t need for all of the details to be laid out in front of me, or maybe it’s just because I’m naturally impatient, I don’t know, but it bores the pants off me.
When I was involved in the movie biz I read quite a few movie scripts and these were a lot more to my liking. They just contain the main elements of the surroundings plus all of the dialogue – leaving the production designer to fill in the details (or rather my imagination while I am reading them).
My own (pathetic) attempts at fiction always ended up reading more like scripts than novels – the dialogue was pretty good (if I do say so myself) whereas I always struggled to express the surroundings, what people looked like, etc.
But the main problem that I have with fiction (in terms of writing it rather than reading it) was to come up with a proper beginning, middle and end. I have to admire people that can come up with a proper and interesting story because I’ve tried and failed to do the same on numerous occasions.
For me it’s a lot easier to write non-fiction because it’s easy to break down all of the information that I need to give over into chapters, and then simply write up each chapter one at a time. And they don’t need any descriptions – simple facts explained as easily and quickly as possible, because I know that people don’t read non-fiction for the entertainment value of it – they just want to get the core points out of it as quickly and painlessly as possible.
Maybe another reason I struggle with fiction is because my unconscious mind realizes that there’s very little money in it. So I soon realized that, when I had an enterprise that needed some fiction to be written, it was a lot easier to pay someone else $500 to come up with 30,000 words than it was for me to do it myself.
So maybe an evil Finnish Accountant King of the Dark Elves is a pretty good analogy for me after all.
