The Goal of My Writing

Ayn Rand wrote an article so titled in 1963, which I discovered ten years later in the dusty upper stacks of the Milwaukee County Public Library at 3 a.m., illegally camped there to study bound volumes of her Objectivist essays. Too little too late to improve my moral stature, because I was well along the path to perdition as a 16mm filmmaker, headed to prison. Objectivists don't go to prison, neither in reality nor in fiction. Young morons often do both. Historical note: Victor Hugo routinely threw his main characters into dungeons. In the early 70s, Tom and I tossed our FM radio personas in jail many times and ended our comedy LP fictionally incarcerated for decades. I was okay with most of our goofy studio courtroom charges (disobeying Father, disobeying Mother, disrespecting women, etc) but I took exception to the accusation of fraud. America was littered with frauds — Federal, state, local, and cultural.

 

Be that as it may, I should discuss the goal of my writing. I make an effort to remain rational at all times, although comedy and psychedelic sex scenes sometimes make themselves embarrassingly brazen with Technicolor impudence. You can take the boy out of Hollywood, but you can't take Hollywood out of the boy. One of the pictures that inspired me was transsexual 'Performance' starring young lascivious Mick Jaggar. It had two pioneering music clips, Memo To Turner sung by Jaggar accompanied by Ry Cooder, and an Afro American poet chanting a ballad in an airport concourse with bongos, a hardnosed call for liberation in the far freer world of the early 70s. We ended the Vietnam War by insurrection. Ayn Rand said we were dirty savages. True enough. War was messy. We had a lot of casualties.

 

My initial purpose in writing was war. After I flopped as a film director, I wrote a sci-fi novel, determined to write my way past the gates at Paramount. In retrospect, it made no sense to invest the next 20 years attempting to gain traction in Tinsel Town. The crossroads of Sodom and Gomorrah relocated from boy meets girl to full blown intersectionality. Blacks, gays, and grievance merchants have a hammerlock on publishing and filmed entertainment today. My heroes and heroines are straight white wildcats.

 

I don't know where stories come from. I've authored 16 novels and novelettes containing 98% fiction. Sometimes I reference personal knowledge of places in the world and dramas I experienced. Truths are good things to have in a story. My heroes are better men than I am. They are stronger, taller, smarter, and far more courageous than yours truly. My heroines are awesome creatures, as many women in fact are. I've encountered real life heroines. I've also had memorable experiences with colorful people on all six continents. Russians are Russian to the bone. I like Chinese people, although they share as little of themselves as possible. I worked with blacks in Hollywood and London. I made every conceivable social mistake privately and professionally. We learn by doing. I learned to stand my ground. I'm an author.

 

All this bubbles and brews while I'm not writing. As previously mentioned, I don't know where stories come from, except an iron rule to never repeat myself, neither in story nor language.

I learned from long experience as an obscure author that making money is not the goal of my writing. What happens is that a story emerges in sufficient clarity to write it. The first word is a hurdle, then a sentence. It goes on like that 10 or 12 hours a day for innumerable weeks and months that don't matter. What matters is to write the whole story, beginning, middle, end. It has to make sense, read easily, and hold the reader spellbound with vivid scenery and compelling characters.

 

For a long time, I regarded Partners as a capstone masterpiece, never to be "topped." I amused myself with lighthearted comedy and satire for a while (Chiseltown, Heaven, A Better World) until Erik prodded me about writing a serious adventure novel, which I had stupidly discussed. At the time, my extent of story development was two and a half words — a space colony. It became a literary tour de force.

 

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