My Inspiration for Writing "The Great American Novel Returns"

The Great American Novel Returns exists to celebrate the public domain. Art belongs to the world as a part of our shared culture. For practical business reasons we let the creators hold on to their inventions for a time, but it's a temporary monopoly. Eventually all great stories become part of our collective experience and should be free to re-use, adapt, and build upon.

The book is a "mashup," blending an old work with something new. The idea has been around forever. How many myths have been reworked, how many classics retold? Shakespeare, maybe the most-referenced writer from the past, was himself working from stories that were old in his day. But the idea has taken on a life of its own in recent years. Since I first heard about Seth Grahame-Smith's Pride and Prejudice and Zombies I knew I wanted the chance to take an existing work and treat it like a LEGO kit: break it apart and reassemble in a way that featured both old and new.

One problem was I didn't want to tackle the same books everyone else was already tinkering with, so Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and most other writers from before the twentieth century were out. Also, I didn't want to go that far back in time. Weren't there new-old books being freshly put in the public domain? For twenty years—my entire adult life—the answer was no. The last copyright extension, the 1998 "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," created a gap, putting creative access to artistic works on pause for two decades. That ended this year, with a crop of works from 1923 finally entering the public domain in 2019.

Among them was the song "Yes, We Have No Bananas." I couldn't make a book out of that, but I hope for the life of me someone eventually does. Then I found The Great American Novel by William Carlos Williams. I knew little about Williams and nothing about the novel, but I have always loved the half-jesting, half-striving implications of that phrase, and immediately knew that was the one to work with. Williams still inspires many poets, but I think his books, and this one in particular, are mostly forgotten. It deserves to be revisited and recalled as a piece of our history and culture. That is part of what I hope to do by dragging his old words along on a road trip with my new ones.

How did I do it? The final result contains three roughly equal portions:

One third is text from the original The Great American Novel by Williams. The parts quoted represent maybe half of his original work and are presented with only minor modifications.

Another third of the book is a conversation with Williams’s text, adding commentary, playful discussion, and a century’s worth of insight and events.

The remaining third is a straightforward story, a road-trip buddy adventure of a car and a computer who set out together to discover America. This part came about because Williams's original satire had hundreds of scenes and talking points, but basically no over-arching story, and the best way I could conceive to make a satire of a satire was to put a story back in, but one that has machines exploring man-made world.

Now available on Amazon.

Fear and Loathing and NaNoWriMo

NaNoWriMo as seen through the eyes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Sincerest apologies to Hunter S. Thompson. Originally written in 2002, so some of the references are a little dated:

We were somewhere around five thousand words on the edge of a real breakthrough when the triple latte began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe I should switch to decaf ..." And suddenly there was this terrible roar inside my skull and the screen in front of me was full of what looked like plot penguins, sliding and cawing and hopping around the page, which was scrolling about a hundred miles an hour towards some insane but obscurely satisfying goal. And a voice was murmuring: "My God! Am I already reduced to using these animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My brother had taken his fuzzy Kangol hat off for the tenth time and was wringing it in his hands, to facilitate the creative process. "What the hell are you going on about?" he muttered, staring unceasingly at his own screen with eyes bloodshot and framed by gold-rimmed glasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to make the next drink." I hit command-S and aimed a copy of the Great American Novel toward my backup zip drive. No point mentioning those penguins, I thought. The poor bastard will need them soon enough.

It was almost the twentieth, and we still had more than forty-five thousand words to go. They would be tough words. Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But there was no going back, and no time to rest. We would have to ride it out. Wordcount verification for National Novel Writing Month 2003 was already underway, and we had to make it there by the thirtieth to claim our winner's graphic. A crazy website in California had taken care of the reservations, along with this clamshell-shaped orange iMac we'd just borrowed off a generous stranger in the Bay Area ... and I was, after all, an aspiring novelist; so I had an obligation to finish the project, for good or ill.

My brother and I had pooled $100 in cash, most of which was already spent on extremely dangerous chemicals. The table in front of us looked like the smart bar at a rave. We had two cartons of V8, seventy-five pellets of vitamin C, five bags of fun-sized candy bars, a canister half-full of presweetened Kool-Aid, a whole galaxy of multi-colored tea bags, coffee types, crackers, chips ... and also a bottle of tequila, a bottle of vodka, a case of Old Style, a bag of chocolate-covered espresso beans and two dozen pixie sticks.

All of this had been rounded up the night before, in a frenzy of high-speed shopping all over Fort Collins--from Safeway to Aggie Liquors, we picked up everything we could get our hands on. Not that we needed all that for the project, but once you get locked into a serious snack collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

The only thing that really worried me were the espresso beans. There is nothing in the world more twitchy and incoherent and depraved than an author in the depths of an espresso bean binge. And I knew we'd get into that rotten stuff pretty soon. Probably at the next chapter break. We had sampled almost everything else, and now--yes, it was time for a large handful of beans. And then do the next thousand words in a horrible, jittery sort of spastic trance. The only way to keep productive on espresso beans is to balance it with a lot of alcohol--not all at once, but steadily, just enough to ease the muscular flow as your mind fires ninety miles an hour through half a dozen plot twists.

"Man, this is the way to write," said my brother. He leaned over to turn the volume up on the stereo, humming with the rhythm section and kind of moaning the words: "Yeah I'll search the world over for my angel in black. Yeah, I'll search the world over for a Eurotrash Girl."

"Angel in black? You poor fool! Just wait till you see those goddamn plot ninjas. I could barely hear my brother's music ... slumped over in my lounge chair, head phones strapped to my head turned all the way up on "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." That was the only MP3 my borrowed laptop had, so I played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the stereo. And also to maintain my rhythm on the keyboard. A constant speed is good for the fingers--and for some reason that seemed important at the time. Indeed. On a project like this one must be careful about finger limberness. Avoid those quick bursts of typing that pull blood away from the brain.

My brother noticed the visitor long before I did. "Let's see what this guy wants," he said, and before I could mount any argument he was across the room and this poor neighbor kid was walking up to my computer with a big grin on his face, saying, "Wow, I never saw an orange computer before!"

"Is that right?" I said. "Well, I guess you're about due, eh?"

The kid nodded eagerly as I kept typing.

"We're on a mission," said my brother. "It's not like anything you've heard of before."

Oh crap, I thought, he's gonna go into the whole spiel again. "No more of that talk," I said sharply. "Or I'll put hot sauce in your coffee." He grinned, seeming to understand. Luckily, the noise in the room was so awful--between the dishwasher and the stereo and the headphones I'd removed--that the kid three steps away couldn't hear a word we were saying. Or could he?

How long can we maintain? I wondered. How long before one of us starts raving and jabbering at this boy. What will he think then? This same strenuous project was the last known endeavor of Nietzsche before he went mad. Will he make that grim connection when my brother starts screaming about penguins and black-clad ninjas converging on him? If so--well, we'll just have to force-feed him espresso beans. Because it goes without saying that we can't turn him loose unadulterated. We needed plausible deniability in case he tried to report us.

Goodness! Did I just say that? Or just type it? Was I talking, too? Did they hear me? I glanced over at my brother, but he seemed oblivious--making a mixed drink of tequila and coffee, talking to our neighbor at a thousand words a minute or so. There was no sound from the visitor.

Maybe I'd better have a chat with this boy, I thought. Perhaps if I explain things, he'll understand.

Of course. I leaned around in the seat and gave him a fine big smile ... admiring the skull logo on his Punisher shirt.

"By the way," I said. "There's one thing you should probably understand."

He stared at me, not blinking. Was he gritting his teeth?

"Can you hear me?" I yelled.

He nodded.

"That's good," I said. "Because I want you to know that we're participating in NaNoWriMo to complete an American Dream." I smiled. "That's why I borrowed this laptop. It was the only way to do it. Can you grasp that?"

He nodded again, but his eyes were nervous.

"I want you to have all the background," I said. "Because this is a very strenuous assignment--with overtones of extreme personal punishment ... hell, I forgot all about this coffee; you want some?"

He shook his head.

"How about some Old Style with V8 and echinacea drops?"

"What?"

"Never mind. Let's get right to the heart of this thing. You see, about twenty days ago we were sitting in a coffee shop over in Oakland--in the couch section, of course--and we were just sitting there with an extra foamy latte when this tall skinny guy wearing a brown shirt that said NaNoWriMo came up to me and said, "You must have been waiting a long time for this kickoff party."

I laughed and ripped open a bag of espresso beans that skittered all over the table while I kept talking. "And you know? He was right! I'd been expecting that kickoff, but I didn't know what the mission would be. Do you follow me?"

The neighbor's face was a mask of pure angst and bewilderment.

I blundered on: "I want you to understand that this man in the kitchen is my brother! He's not just some dingbat I found on campus. Shit, look at him! He doesn't look like you or me, right? That's because he's from SoCal. I think he's probably a beach bum. But it doesn't matter, does it? Do you have a problem with that?"

"Hell no!" he blurted.