Spanked!

"Too many pop references", said my main man, having caught up on the reading of the, uh, gibberish.

"Well, Salman Rushdie and Nick Tosches have 'em", I stuttered back, "Murakami, too".

"Cut them down", the master ordered, sipping his margarita, and, to cheer me up, added, "But I liked the 'Lonely Avenue' piece."

We talked about Ray Charles' recording of it, its flaws (the song lacks a bridge), and about the legendary songwriter who wrote it, Doc Pomus (who also wrote Viva Las Vegas for Elvis.)

We then talked about coincidences in Paul Auster's fiction and Auster's explanations for it. We agreed that the explanations made more sense than the occurences of these coincidences in his novels. Jim Crace has a new book out, a dystopia in the vein of Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things, he told me. Will have to look for it.

And then he spanked me. "Your 'I' is unbelieveable", he said, "He's either super cool or hysterically emotional. Which is it?"

Knowing how highly he regards psychobabble, I decided to refrain from offering an amateur psychoanalitical explanation.

"Should I make him into two characters then?"
"No, cool the hot one off and warm up the cool one. Put more of your own self into him"

"This 'your own self' is too pedestrian, boring, predictable", I answered.

I told him about how I got in a small mess fictionalizing a response of one actual person with just one word, and how everything else there could put me into a bigger stew now. He said he had learned that lesson a long time ago. It's better to fictionalize your exes and your former acquaintances than the current ones. He cited examples from books I hadn't read, some of them by Tom Wolfe's Three Stooges.

"None of these precautions will prevent your wife to still think she's the prototype for the Evil Queen, or your lover, who's mad at you this week for one reason or another, to imagine that the relationship you're describing in less than favourable terms is hers with you", he said.

I nodded.

"You look like a cat who swallowed a canary."

"I'm the canary", I offered.

Looking at me with that penetrating gaze of his, he added, pointing his finger at me, "Don't forget now that prey being hunted tries to keep as quiet as possible. Good luck."

I took a quiet sip of my drink.

We proceeded to discuss the difficulty of incorporating one's ongoing travails into fictional stories. "That's why all writers keep journals", he advised, to go back into them after some time passes and search for story ideas. And "we never fully understand what's happening to us until much later". The problem with delaying your writing, I told him, and he agreed, is that by the time you're ready to write about something that happened to you, all the detail is gone from memory, incomplete in the journal, and has to be re-invented. "The detail, however sketchy and inaccurate, is less important than our understanding of the past event", he said in the final piece of advice he handed me.

Then he asked if he could fictionalize in his current work one present acquaintance of his, myself, and use a couple of episodes I had described. I said, sure, how could I refuse, but what if I wanted to use me and mine, too, later on? I'd be accused of plagiarism writing about me! His margarita finished, the master answered saying we'd go on Oprah to resolve it, which would give automatic boost to the sales of our respective tomes. Oh? OK.