The Accidental Author, Intro, Part 2
Delusions of Competence, or What Made the Accidental Author Think He Could Do This Thing?
I mean, it’s just putting one word after another, right? How hard could that be?
Hard.
Not the writing as such, maybe, but certainly the rewriting, not to mention the re-re-rewriting.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Long before things ever reached the point of words on paper, I had an inkling I could do this thing.
It wasn’t utterly unfounded. I’d published a couple of magazine articles (right around the time of the ill-starred Cosmos episode, in fact), and my day-job as a consultant to a major telecommunications corporation entailed a modicum of what, for want of a better word, one might call creative writing. At least, I’d found it useful to emplant the occasional outré turn of phrase in the otherwise dry-as-dust reports and memoranda I was tasked with drafting — as a way of making sure the intended readership was paying attention.
Or maybe, just maybe, it was all the fault of some stray neutrino passing through my head, as one friend was kind enough to comment.
Whatever the reason, I kept coming back to that germ of an idea (Tunguska and the mini black hole, remember?) that had first started me on the road to accidental authorhood. It got so I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I’d always read a lot of science non-fiction, particularly in areas like cosmology, relativity, quantum mechanics, but now I couldn’t pass a bookstore without checking out the astrophysics section, just on the off chance I’d find something that would feed into the evolving storyline.
At the same time, little bits and pieces of locale and characterization began sliding into place: Tunguska was in Russia, right? And, hey: I knew a fair amount about Russia, having done time there as an exchange student at Moscow State University back toward the tail end of the Cold War. So, why not people the story, at least in part, with Russians? Then, too, in light of my day-job, it struck me a thriller featuring a consultant in the starring role might make a welcome departure from the doctor- and lawyer-centric novels that seem to dominate bestseller lists then as now. After a while whole chunks of storyline started (neutrinos again?) popping into my head unbidden, like: what would you do with a submicroscopic black hole? (More on plot development later on.)
So, maybe the question wasn’t what made me think I could do this thing, so much as what was holding me back?
In retrospect, I think the real problem was that I cared about this not-yet-book, this book-to-be. Not that I didn’t care about the routine white papers and reports I was cranking out at work. I cared about them, all right; it’s just that I didn’t care about them. Not to the point of wanting them to be perfect, not to where I imagined there was only one right way to do this, as if the book were already out there (like The Truth in the X-Files) subsisting in some Platonic realm of pure idea, and it was going to be up to me to transcribe it into earthly form.
This in itself was worrisome, because the only other time I’d cared that much about writing something, the caring had spelled disaster, pure and simple. I’m talking about my long-since abandoned doctoral thesis on the politics of Soviet censorship. In the year it took me to acknowledge that it was never going to get written, the dissertation had, in those pre-word processor days, furnished my kindergarten-aged kids with an inexhaustible supply of coloring paper, each sheet bearing a single sentence, or at most a single paragraph, of introduction to this unrealizable topic.
In retrospect, this siege of writer’s block was a blessing in disguise, saving me as it did from committing to an academic career in a field of expertise that, not too many years hence, was going to lose its raison d’etre with the collapse of the Soviet Union. There’s nothing like having a whole regime shot out from under you to give you the sense that maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea.
I can laugh about it now, and in fact did, in a deleted scene from Singularity, where my protagonist, senior consultant Jonathan Knox, encounters Gustav Atheling, a former fellow grad student, now a Georgetown professor, at a cocktail party hosted by the enigmatic Russian oligarch Arkady Grigoriyevich Grishin:
“So, what’ve you been up to, Jon? You quit the Soviet field, didn’t you?”
“Going on twenty years ago. The technical term for what I do these days is bottom-feeding, scum-sucking consultant.”
Gus chuckled, then sighed. “Yeah, same here, a lot of the time. What with the salary freeze on at Georgetown, image consulting for these bozos” — he waved the stem of his tobaccoless, for-appearances-only pipe in the vague direction of Arkady Grishin — “well, it’s getting to be the only way to make ends meet.”
Gus seemed more than usually morose. Also in his cups: unlike the pipe, the vodka glass in his other hand was loaded and ready for business. “Tell the truth, Jon,” he said, “don’t you miss them?”
“What them? Russian area studies?”
“No-no-no! Them. The frigging bogeymen. You know — the Soviets.”
Gus turned to Marianna. “Back in the old days, honey, it was the biggest game in town. Hell, the only game in town. The only other superpower, the only other nation on the face of the earth that had prayer of kicking our butts. And VIPs, real movers and shakers, used to come to guys like me — and Jon here too, if he’d stuck with it — to find out what to do about them. I mean, that was the deal, right? The damn Soviets’d scare the shit out of everybody, and we’d all make a living off it.”
Gus drained his glass and laughed bitterly, “Look at them now. Scary? They’re a joke. It’s got to where you can’t so much as write a decent thriller about them anymore — nobody gives a shit. Even Clancy’s given up on them. I could be teaching Scandinavian politics, for all the good it does me.”
If you were to read that as a dialogue between me and alternate-universe, might-have-been me — well, you wouldn’t be far off the mark. As I said, it all worked out for the best.
Though, nowadays …
Anyway, that wasn’t how it felt at the time. That year of the thousand introductory paragraphs to a nonexistent doctoral thesis was an unadulterated hell, the death of a thousand paper cuts. I had no desire to launch another project likely to repeat the experience.
So, why did I?
