Besting the Best-sellers
Commentary: Dude, Who's Looking Out for the Lying Liars of Living History Who Stole My Country?
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As an author, I am frequently asked where I get my ideas. The answer is obvious—I get them from observing daily life around me and by noticing other authors and what they are writing, as well as plots of TV shows and movies. When I see a book or a story line that is very successful and sells a lot of copies, I file it away in the "idea" part of my brain. Then over time I process it creatively into something I hope will be aesthetically pleasing and move some units in the marketplace.
Recently, for example, I was standing by the best-seller shelf at the front of a giant chain bookstore when a powerful inspiration came to me out of the blue. A trembling which I identified as a minor earthquake shook the floor, and books began to cascade on top of me. Fiction, nonfiction, diet and how-to, sweeping political indictments, and more sweeping political indictments flew in every direction, knocking me to the floor and burying me. I had just managed to claw my head and shoulders free of the pile when a second tremor sent the rack of current newspapers and periodicals sliding toward me, and it tipped over and showered down its contents. When rescue personnel finally pulled me out, they thought I was in shock. Actually, I was so full of the voices I had absorbed, physically and painfully, that I could hardly speak.
I rushed home and, ignoring the earthquake damage to my apartment, immediately sat down at my computer (which fortunately still worked). The various voices, by now one huge and clamorous amalgamated voice, demanded to be heard. Trying breathlessly to keep up with them, I began typing as fast as I could. "I'm fat, and I'm mad," I saw my fingers write. "I'm the 3 in 5 Americans who are overweight or obese, and I'm also the other 2 in 5 Americans who aren't fat but are just as mad. I'm especially mad at my previous weight-loss book—the one that tells you how to lose weight by being mad. Of course I'm also hopping, steaming mad at the Washington press corps, which ignores me, and at 'elites' of the East and West coasts and Hollywood (ditto), and at the federal government, many of whose members are, of course, also fat and/or mad. I'm even madder, if possible, at—"
Then suddenly without warning I found myself typing page after page about how much I hate Hillary Clinton. Rage at that ambitious, bossy, "P.C.," ruthless, etc., etc., woman shook me to my soul. Strangely, however, in just another moment the mood had reversed itself, and I began to write as if I were Hillary Clinton, with sentiments of reason and good sense and hope for what we can accomplish if we work together so uplifting they brought tears to my eyes, interrupted only by an occasional slippage into my previous anti-Hillary tirade. It's an amazing feeling when the words take over and carry you along. And despite my state of rapture (if you want to call it that), somewhere in the back of my mind my commercial sense went on high alert: Since a lot of popular books either are by people who hate Hillary Clinton or are by Hillary Clinton herself, my product had a good chance of capturing both audiences and scoring a real crossover smash hit.
Writing as Hillary naturally put me in a secular, humanist frame of mind, and while it possessed me I set out to destroy the Chris- tian religion. In an attempt to selectively mistreat Christians in the mainstream media and spread secular values all over the place, I poured forth sentence after sentence glorifying sex, materialism, and lack of personal responsibility. I was really going to town. But at the same time—and I don't know quite how to explain this except by the blows to the head I had received—I remained perfectly aware of the wrong I was doing, and so little by little, sentences promoting a strong pro-faith agenda began creeping into my prose. Soon I got the cour-age to stand up to my secular-humanist self and to be counted on the side of family values and decency. The abruptness of these swerves almost made me swoon, but I kept on going.
Frankly, I was having a ball. I knew that inspiration like this comes to an author only once in a very great while. As my fingers flew, my printer pumped out page after brilliant page. In the manuscript piling up around my knees, I glimpsed phrases I hardly remembered writing—phrases like "battles which draft dodger Bill Clinton left unfought," and "hot-button issues not beholden to political orthodoxies," and "the American Empire and its blood-drenched British henchmen," and "ultraliberal Francophile media," and "feral right-wing partisan whine." I channeled different views so quickly that my writing fairly crackled with tension, sentence arguing against sentence, paragraphs lined up in opposition to neighboring paragraphs, main clauses sometimes violently disagreeing with dependent ones. Such conflict, such ferment, such liveliness! And so far I hadn't even gotten to George W. Bush!
On the advice of my future publishers, I will not reveal here what I wrote in my chapters about Bush. The company hopes that readers will purchase the book and see for themselves. In modesty, I can only claim that my Bush chapters turned out unbelievably well. By great efforts of poetic compaction, I managed to portray the president as a liar, manipulator, moron, dupe, genius, war hero, determined commander in chief, and Churchillian statesman—all, sometimes, within a single sentence. Indeed, I hope it's not giving away too much to say that a few times I even accomplished that feat in a single word. (Those words are currently being reviewed for patentability by the Patent and Trademark Office, and so are not yet available publicly.) At last, exhausted by all this literary effort, I let the end of my very long book (for such it had now become) drift into a semifictional section where I viewed the prevailing world situation from heaven after my own violent death, framing the prose in tones of quiet and contemplation that I hoped would bring peace to our traumatized nation and further boost sales.
When the fever finally left me, I felt spent, but happy. With the help of a local farmer, I baled the pages into four convenient, heavy bundles and shipped them to my agent via UPS. The bidding war that followed was fierce and satisfying, and fetched me a fairly good price per pound. What happened as a result of the earthquake caused me no lasting side effects, besides mild astigmatism, a tendency to curse and answer "Yes!" and "No!" simultaneously when asked certain questions, and a desire to wear a little bow tie at the back of my neck rather than the front. Writing the book is an experience I'll always be grateful for. I've always considered myself an average person, and now I'm proud to be more extremely average than ever before.
Illustration: Zohar Lazar
