John Joss is one of our most dedicated contributors. He was asked, by another one of our contributors, how he writes? We felt our viewers might be interested in his response:
Writing novels
Everyone researches, writes and edits differently. As a working journalist I approach subjects as a reporter who must tell a story correctly. Everything in my books must be physically possible, culturally correct and geographically accurate, while meeting my basic criterion for a novel: people who never lived doing things that never happened. I despise thinly disguised memoir masquerading as fiction. Fiction is exercising the imagination, not regurgitating personal lives, however salable that may be. I have traveled and seen many places, many lives, to satisfy my endless curiosities.
My books deal with places as distant as the Aleutian Islands, Algeria, Australia, the Caribbean, Corsica, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, India, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Siberia, Spain, the U.S. . . . a long list. I went to most of those places and looked at the lives there. I also talked to the natives and watched them in action.
My work has described air combat in current fighters, street and hotel prostitution, dinghy and yacht racing, farm labor, glider flying, day jobs (the curse of the creative classes), murder investigations, land development, fashion and photography, restaurant work, wine growing and tasting, car and motorcycle racing, ditch digging, home construction, free diving and scuba diving, oilfield engineering, kinky sex, broadcasting, money laundering, experimental test flying, drug running, business and financial matters, film and television writing/directing, acting on stage and on camera, costume and special effects . . . again, a long list. I studied these activities first hand and where appropriate (never illegally or immorally) participated. I’ve been jailed once (in Mexico, after a road accident in which I was not the driver, merely a passenger).
Some of the above can be researched, e.g. on the Internet, but nothing matches life experience. Living and struggling with difficult activities in challenging places enables a writer to capture the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and feelings of people. Writing is more than creating beautiful sentences, directed by some MFA instructor who may know a lot about language but has not lived except in an academic ivory tower.
I write/edit daily, five to eight AM, then work full days as a business writer/editor. My editing takes five times longer than my writing. One novel, A FULL ACCOUNTING, about a U.S. Navy pilot shot down in Vietnam, extracted to the USSR and rescued from the gulag by his young sister, took me 1,500 hours to research and write and 6,500 hours to edit. I was helped by a fascinating Russian, Viktor Belenko, who defected from Russia to Japan flying a MiG-25 jet fighter.
My fiction is concerned with people of all kinds, from good and generous to wretched and foul, living their lives, interacting with others, making decisions and taking action, often under heavy stress. It rarely reveals inner dialog, personal rumination or philosophical discourse. I like brevity and clarity and avoid long lists of trivia that merely fill the page while driving sensible readers mad (thank you, David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Ann Beattie et al). None of the people in my novels ever existed; their situations, characters and behavior flow solely from my imagination.
I avoid copying anyone stylistically and consider plagiarism in any form contemptible. I consider my audience to be curious and cultured, open to new experience.
Actually, John wrote this in reaction to a question I fired at him while reading his intriguing book ‘Lulu’ which has a section on call girl prostitution in Parisian hotels. The question was part serious, part facetious. “How did you research ‘Lulu’?”
I first of all received the above reply. I then received an even more detailed reply as to how he specifically researched ‘Lulu’, which involved a fair amount of travel and a surprising number of interviews with hotel staff, Parisian police etc..
I promised that I would reply in terms of how I write my books …..
I kid myself that I only write from my own experience but, as my wife frequently complains, I more often write from hers.
She also complains that from the evidence of my writing I seem to have understood so much but from the evidence of my life I am almost clueless.
As they say, “It is not so much that married men make more mistakes – it is more that they find out about them quicker”.
In writing, it is the small details that bug me the most. How did anyone write novels before the Internet?
I am sitting here thinking that my character is just about to down some street drug or another. Not taking drugs personally, which one is that character in that situation in that country most likely to be taking and what are its effects? Fifteen minutes tops on the Internet will give me some strong clues. Twenty years ago, I don’t know what I would have done.
Which is maybe why I did not write novels twenty years ago. I wanted to, but I realised that I had not lived enough of a life yet and that the research would be too time-consuming and complex.
Much of the background to my stories I have already lived, or rather my wife has already lived.
“Blood & Marriage” is based on family stories – I merely re-told them and guessed my way into the gaps. “Little Fingers!” was written because I realised I knew a paedophile and, more shockingly intriguing in some ways, I encountered at first hand his close relations’ strong desire to wish his callousness away. “Girl on a Bar Stool” is about brand marketing – I have been a brand marketer for nearly thirty years. It is also about Christianity which was imposed on me from the age of seven. “Shade+Shadows” is about classical and alternative medicine and human rights abuses. Thanks, if that is the word, to my wife’s and elder son’s serious illnesses of ten years ago, I have experienced a great deal of alternative medicine and come to be fascinated by its resistance to ‘scientific’ proof in the face of its evident effectiveness. I also volunteered for Amnesty International for a few years, so I knew where to find the bodies. “The Ghoul Who Once” is a ghost story. I have actually (I think) seen a ghost, but I have also met a lot of people who are intensely spiritually-minded and claim to have experienced many extraordinary things. “The Dance of the Pheasodile” just turned up, but I was born in Hull, I have seen a thousand programmes about gangsters – fictional and factual – and the torture scenes are based on official US submissions to inquests into the abuse of prisoners during the Extraordinary Rendition process.
The hardest book of all to write was “Fishing, for Christians” because I have never knowingly met an angel, or God, or gods, or the Devil, so I haven’t a clue what they sound like, and probably still wouldn’t even if I were to meet any of them. As Wittgenstein observed “If a lion could speak, we wouldn’t have a clue what it was saying.” The first level of research I did was to follow much of “The Course in Miracles”. I also read up on Gnostic Christianity – Wikipedia is a great resource for that type of information – and I then crammed the mythological gods from the Godchecker site. Strangely enough, long after I finished the book, I discovered that many of the elements I thought I had made up were actually officially endorsed by one religion or another, even down to writing the book itself as a quasi-gospel (Gnostic Christians believe that everybody should record their own gospel).
I have never met Adolf Hitler either, but I have to agree with him on one thing – “The people are more likely to believe a greater lie than a smaller one.” So, I am quite comfortable wandering off into realms that nobody knows that much about, but I have to get the details right. I even check train timetables.