I'm always fascinated to hear about the inspirations behind other authors' works, and so today I'm going to discuss the inspirations behind two of my novels, Watershed and Sleight of Hand. I hope you'll find their backstories interesting.... And in giving tribute to the works that inspired me, I hope too that you'll check them out.
Watershed
In 2010, Don DeLillo published a short novel called Point Omega. Really, it's a stretch to call Point Omega a novel, at least if you're measuring by the term's traditional definitions. The book is a little over one hundred pages of large type and wide margins; it's surely not much more than 20,000 words long. But Point Omega is proof that the term "novel" doesn't necessarily have to refer to a specific word count. Measured by its breadth and subject matter, Point Omega is very much a novel.
One in which nothing happens. Truly.
For the first fifteen or so pages, we stand with a character who's pondering slow-motion images on a movie screen. For the next eighty-five, we're sitting in the desert with an old recluse, talking about time, society, everything, nothing, and God knows what. And then we're back in front of the movie screen, again pondering some slow-motion images. Sound exciting? Probably not. Is it one of my all-time favorite works? Yes. And only Don DeLillo could have written it.
Point Omega influenced my 2013 novel Watershed. It was the lingering image of that old recluse, out in the middle of nowhere, pondering everything and nothing. If nothing else, that image incapsulated everything I took from DeLillo's novel, that image, the recluse in the vast desert, pondering it all. Now, I knew (know) the limits of my writing abilities. I could never write the kind of novel DeLillo had written. And besides, I didn't want to. Inspiration is one thing; plagiarism is another.
At some point, the image of the recluse shifted enough that he became my character. Who was he? What was he doing? I decided he was a poet... who wasn't much of a poet anymore, who would be caught up in a wicked and deadly scheme.. And thus, Watershed was born.
As I said, I'd no desire in attempting an abstract, modernist work like Point Omega, but that pebble with the weight of a mountain had given me an image, and that image was a spark.
Watershed is a novel about writing. It's a little bit of a horror novel, a little bit of a love story, and it's completely and totally abnormal.
I guess that's something it has in common with Point Omega: I don't really know what the hell it is, but I'm glad it exists.
Sleight of Hand
As far as I know, there were two significant inspirations for Sleight of Hand.
The first was the song "Tulsa Time." Both the Don Williams and Eric Clapton versions have regular spots on my playlists, so I don't remember which one I was listening to when I decided to write a story about a young man who left Tulsa, Oklahoma for "Arizona, maybe on to California, where the people all live so fine." As it turned out, my character would head straight to California, and he'd do so in a Mustang, not a Pontiac, but those are just pesky details.... I couldn't make the connection too obvious, could I?
When I realized my main character was leaving Tulsa for Los Angeles, I immediately recalled an early Norman Mailer novel, The Deer Park, which I'd read a few years prior, and which proved to be inspiration number two for Sleight of Hand.
Norman Mailer's career was a fascinating one. He was without doubt one of the most talented writers of his generation, but the general consensus, amongst those who ponder such things, is that he never wrote that One Great Novel he yearned so badly to write. The Deer Park, for example, could have been, and maybe should have been, one of the century's greatest Hollywood novels. But it wasn't. As other critics have stated, The Deer Park, while fascinating and occasionally brilliant, is also very, very plodding and largely void of story.
I was under no illusion that I should even attempt the Great Hollywood Novel, but The Deer Park reminded me of what I could do: I could write a Hollywood novel from the perspective of an outsider... but to make my effort a little less plodding and a lot more fun, surely it wouldn't hurt to throw in some ghosts?
Sleight of Hand went through many drafts. The first and second were almost twice as long as the version I published. But that's because the thing was overwritten and the ending was a rambling mess. After a whole lot of hacking and gutting and rewriting, it became a stronger, leaner story, a short novel that I'm now very proud of. I think it says a lot and asks some good questions.
Most importantly, it's entertaining. And it ends while the reader is still having fun.
