How This Book was Written
by Michael Dare

     I've always been scared of novels, sure in the knowledge that someday I'd write one. As a quick sketch artist, the commitment frightened me. I've never spent the amount of time necessary for a novel on ANYTHING other than child rearing.

    I did have one extraordinary piece of training. Years ago, one of my favorite novelists, Tom Robbins, hired me to work on a screenplay based upon one of his books. In exchange for teaching him how to write screenplays my way, he taught me how to write novels his way. (For the full story of my amazing apprenticeship with Robbins, check out How to Write Like Tom Robbins) Not that his advice did me much good. He told me to work on each sentence individually, without any concern for anything immediately before or after. When you read a Tom Robbins novel, you’re reading it not only in the exact order that he wrote it but the exact order that he thought it. I couldn’t write that way and still can’t believe he does.

    Then recently, in a collection of Hunter Thompson’s letters, I read that he practiced for writing his first novel by writing a novel that had already been written. He literally retyped an entire Hemingway novel just to see what it would feel like for those words to come out of his fingers. Then he did it to F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only when his fingers were limbered up by typing a couple of masterpieces did he get started on his own.

    The answer came to me in a flash; I would combine these two techniques. Like Hunter Thompson, I would write a novel that had already been written. Like Tom Robbins, I would ponder each sentence, rewriting it till it became mine.

    Obviously, I’d have to start in the public domain. First stop - Project Gutenberg, an online reference library of books in the public domain. I downloaded Metamorphosis and substituted our president for the main character, coming up with a sentence I’m rather fond of, "Bill Clinton awoke to find he had been transformed into an enormous cockroach."

    But further research revealed a more promising premise. I downloaded A Christmas Carol, did a bunch of quick search and replaces, Valentines Day for Christmas, Bill Clinton for Scrooge, then started reading. I was ready to get down to the hard work of the actual rewrite when I read the very first couple of sentences, "Hillary was dead to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that." I stopped. There was absolutely nothing I could do to improve upon those sentences.

    I kept reading. To my astonishment, I discovered that half of my work was already done. My Pentium was a satirist, and a damn good one. Dicken's wordplay is so brilliant that with only minor adjustments, it makes sense in present day. Aside from the story, which we all know, the actual words are remarkable, profoundly influencing my own style. It's like Dickens, along with Robbins, has personally taught me how to write a novel.

    And so using Tom Robbins' technique of working one sentence at a time, I slowly and steadily turned A Christmas Carol into A Valentine Carol - the story of a lady’s man visited by the ghosts of Valentines Past, Present and Future, who change him from an ignorant chauvinist pig to an enlightened chauvinist pig. It's constructed in such a way that the reader will confront sentences that are so totally modern they will assume they are mine when they are in fact Dickens, and other sentences that are so classic in structure the reader will assume they are Dickens when they are in fact mine. I had a GREAT time writing it: one part Dickens, one part Robbins, one part Thompson, but definitely all me.

   If you enjoy reading it half as much as I enjoyed writing it, then I enjoyed writing it twice as much as you enjoyed reading it.
 

Stave 1: Hillary's Ghost
Stave 2:  The First of the Three Spirits
 Stave 3:  The Second of the Three Spirits
 Stave 4:  The Last of the Spirits
 Stave 5:  The End of It