It used to be so easy for me to be a writer. I just made stuff up and people paid me for it.
But that’s changed…because now the stuff I make up keeps coming true before I can sell it as fiction. And, to complicate things even further, it’s the same problem that Ian Ludlow, the thriller-novelist hero of my spy novels True Fiction and Killer Thriller, is having. And if that wasn’t complicated enough, I am Ian Ludlow…or at least that was the pseudonym I used to write my first four, published novels.
Are you confused? I sure am. So, let’s take a step back and figure out how I wrote myself into the frustrating position I’m in now and maybe it will begin to make some sense for both of us.
I’ve always been fascinated by the impact fiction has on people. I didn’t know that about myself until my brother Tod Goldberg, a novelist and a guy who teaches fiction writing for a living, pointed it out to me.
In my 2003 novel The Walk, a network TV executive is stuck in downtown Los Angeles when the Big One hits, and he has to walk back to his gated community in the valley. Throughout his ordeal, his fears about what he’s going to face and how he will be expected to deal with it come from those 1970s disaster epics like Airport ’75 and The Towering Inferno. In my 2005 novel The Man with the Iron-On Badge (later republished as Watch Me Die), the hero is an unlicensed, self-taught, wanna-be private eye who learned everything he knows from reading Spenser novels and watching Magnum PI and discovers he’s totally unprepared for the reality of the job.
In those books, I explored how people’s expectations about themselves, about relationships, about their jobs, and about nearly everything in their lives, are impacted by books, film and television. Or, to put it another way, I looked at how we constantly measure ourselves against a fiction of some kind (like the airbrushed/ photoshopped models on the covers of magazines) and are surprised when we don’t measure up in reality.
But now, with the publication last year of my novel True Fiction, my exploration of that theme has apparently evolved. In that book, New York Times bestselling thriller writer Ian Ludlow is asked to come up with terrorism scenarios for the CIA (this is true, btw, many writers I know have been asked to do this). When one of his scenarios comes true, Ian realizes who is responsible for it and goes on the run…pursued by assassins. Ian has to essentially become his fictional action hero to survive. So now my exploration of fiction vs reality has become how our fantasies, or in Ian’s case his fiction, can shape the world around us.
Perhaps that’s because fiction changing reality has actually become a real issue in all of our lives. Just look at the impact of “fake news” on how we interpret facts…or what we consider facts to be these days (wasn’t it Kellyanne Conway who coined the term “Alternate facts” to justify the White House’s fictional view of events?)
Or look how foreign actors—like Russia—keep trying to change our perception of reality with their fiction by manipulating social media with fictional articles and doctored photos.
Or how our own President tries to replace objective, verifiable facts with him own version of truth.
In Ian Ludlow’s case, it’s how his fiction is coming true….and how increasingly difficult it is for him to find the line between fiction and reality. And by him, of course I mean me. Many of the things I made up in Killer Thriller, my new novel, have become fact.
For example, every day there is another revelation in the news about how China has hardwired “backdoors” into the devices that we manufacture in their country so they can spy on us, whether its security cameras and cell phones or children’s toys. I also suggested that Chinese investors were buying up hotel chains so they could get our passport numbers, credit card numbers, and other personal details. Well, apparently that’s a real thing too…and China is also suspected of hacking Marriott to get that information.
That’s only one example from Killer Thriller that has come true. There’s so much more, as you will see when you read the book (Just remember, it wasn’t real when I wrote it. Honest.)
It’s not just the spy novel stuff that is coming true faster than I can make it up. I recently had the surreal experience of editing the galleys of my next novel, a police procedural called Lost Hills (October 2019), while some of the entirely fictional events I described on those pages, like a raging wild fire sweeping through Calabasas and Malibu, were coming true on the evening news exactly how I imagined them. In fact, I had to evacuate my home…and I found myself editing the scenes I wrote about the fictional fire while watching the real flames licking the edges of my neighborhood on TV. It turns out that I imagined the fire just right, by the way.
It seems like every day I’m forced to decide whether to re-plot my story, so my fiction is still fiction (which I have done half-a-dozen times already) or just keep going, reality-be-damned.The blurring line between fiction and reality has been a very real problem for me while I’ve been writing Fake Truth, the third Ian Ludlow novel, which won’t be out until April 2020. I’m afraid my book will come out and will already be old news…and that readers will think either I am too unimaginative to come up with original ideas or that my novel is intentionally “ripped from the headlines” like a Law & Order episode rather than something I made up that came true. It seems like every day I’m forced to decide whether to re-plot my story, so my fiction is still fiction (which I have done half-a-dozen times already) or just keep going, reality-be-damned. I’ve decided on the latter because I’ll never finish the book if I keep rewriting the plot.
My editor isn’t worried. She finds my plight amusing and gleefully emails me links to news items that are eerily close to things in my book (“didn’t you do this in Chapter 23?”). My wife just wishes I could predict winning lottery numbers, or the fluctuations in the stock market, or how the cards will land on a blackjack table, rather than some crazy stuff that Trump or Putin or Xi Jinping or some terrorist group end up doing.
So that brings me back to where I started, stuck between fiction and reality, writing fiction that keeps coming true, in novels about an author who has the uncanny ability to write fiction that is non-fiction by the time he finishes.
I’m writing about a guy who is me, but living a much more exciting and dangerous life, in a world where fantasy and reality are fast becoming the same thing… except that he manages to stay one step ahead of it, using his grasp of fiction as his edge against reality.
Maybe if I can, too, I can write wild thrillers that will continue to thrill you… while also scaring you just a little because they are coming true as you read them.
Or maybe I’ll just drive myself crazy.
I guess we’ll see.
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