So, I’m reading up on the obligatory scenes in spy novels, in preparation for a book I am thinking of writing, and I stumble on this gem: How to Write Spy Novels, by Charles McCarry. I’ve loved his books for many years, especially The Tears of Autumn. Here’s how the article starts:
ALTHOUGH I’VE WRITTEN six novels in which some of the characters are spies, I’m not sure that I know what a “spy novel” is, or exactly how it is different from any other kind of novel. This fact became clear to me in 1973 when I turned in the manuscript of my novel “The Tears of Autumn.” My editor seemed to like it well enough, but the publisher did not. He summoned me to New York and, in his office high above lower Park Avenue, banged the manuscript on his desk.
“This book is talky, it’s slow, and nobody is going to believe a goddamn word of the plot,” he said. “Where’s the car chase? Where’s the torture scene? Where’s the sex? Where’s the good Russian? Do you call this a thriller?”
“No,” I said. He didn’t hear me.
Right off the bat: there are the obligatory scenes, and sure enough, the implied advice by a writer I admire to just skip them. Instead, this:
A novel is a collaboration between the writer and the reader, a strip of exposed film that must be developed in the consciousness of the reader. A piece of writing does not become a novel until this process takes place in the minds of many, many readers, who compare the characters and the imaginary world in which they live to their own experience of life, and in talking about the book to their friends become a part of its atmosphere.
He complains / explains that in fact, he doesn’t write spy novels, he simply writes novels in which the characters are spies. E.g.:
The elements of tradecraft that thrill us in books — cover stories, clandestine meetings, dead drops, telephone codes and so on — are techniques familiar to anyone who has ever covered a big story for a newspaper, negotiated a big contract against serious competition or conducted a clandestine love affair. Men and women who betray their spouses, a homely enough situation, often tell themselves that they are acting in a higher cause: true love. All traitors are alike.
and
Yet if the writer sets out to write what he believes, rather than what he knows, he is likely to produce propaganda…The novelist must see things as they are because his purpose is to record and illuminate human experience. The goal of politics is to alter human nature.
I find another article, Between the Real and the Believable, which contains this beauty:
Soon after this work appeared, I found myself at a dinner party in Northampton, Mass., seated next to an agitated feminist, who, like my unhappy character, was young and beautiful and a recent bride. Throughout dinner, she told me how much she hated the girl in the book, whose behavior she had found to be utterly unrealistic and an insult to women — “male chauvinist propaganda,” she called it.
I was not surprised by the onslaught. For a writer in America, going out to dinner is like living as an American in Europe: Total strangers think they can say anything they like to you. Still, I had trouble grasping the point. Why did a 1950s fictional character have to conform to an ideological model that had not yet been invented at the period in which the novel took place?
I asked my critic to tell me in plain English why she disliked and distrusted my character so. After a moment of angry silence the woman threw half a glass of California burgundy on my best gray suit and replied, “Because I used to be just like her!”
and
For a decade at the height of the Cold War, I worked abroad under cover as an intelligence agent. After I resigned, intending to spend the rest of my life writing fiction and knowing what tricks the mind can play when the gates are thrown wide open, as they are by the act of writing, between the imagination and that part of the brain in which information is stored, I took the precaution of writing a closely remembered narrative of my clandestine experiences. After correcting the manuscript, I burned it.
WOW. Can you imagine writing a book, then just casually burning it? He says he did it to get the real world out of his head, so he could proceed with inventing things; he strangely found that readers found the invented more believable than the real.
What I kept for my own use was the atmosphere of secret life: How it worked on the five senses and what it did to the heart and mind. All the rest went up in flames, setting me free henceforth to make it all up. In all important matters, such as the creation of characters and the invention of plots, with rare and minor exceptions, that is what I have done. And, as might be expected, when I have been weak enough to use something that really happened as an episode in a novel, it is that piece of scrap, buried in a landfill of the imaginary, readers invariably refuse to believe.
Just as often, however, irony prevails. A novel I wrote as a parable on hubris, entirely out of thin air, about the Kennedy assassination, has been passed from hand to hand like some sort of samizdat containing the inner mystery of the event. [Me: this is ‘The Tears of Autumn,’ one of my favorite, dare I say it, spy novels.] Not long ago, an old Washington hand, whom I had asked to read the galley proofs of my forthcoming novel about Washington and the management of a wholly fictitious constitutional crisis, phoned me in a dudgeon: “You’ve written about the way this town really is, and after looking into this mirror I’m not sure I want to go down to the office anymore.”
There you have it: write what you know, not what you believe, and don’t write a spy novel. Can’t wait to try this out.