James Madison on freedom of the press

• We have seen an erosion of freedom of speech and the press in the last few years, so it might be good to remind ourselves of what one of the Founding Fathers had to say about it.

James Madison:

• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
– First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

• Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people ... is favorable to liberty.
– National Gazette, 1791

• It is to the press mankind are indebted for having dispelled the clouds which long encompassed religion, for disclosing her genuine lustre, and disseminating her salutary doctrines.
– Speech in the Virginia Assembly, 1799

Campaign finance laws, laws against hate speech, mandated disclaimers in political advertising -- all these may seem like good ideas, but they come with a cost. The cost is allowing government (courts, bureaucrats, legislators) to get the idea that it's okay to restrict what people say.

It isn't.

Writers writing: Anthony Trollope

• Anthony Trollope wrote for money. He made out a schedule and stuck to it.

The way writers write - their habits, productivity, quirks, methods of procrastination, etc. - fascinate a lot of people, including me.

One of my favorite stories in this vein is that of Anthony Trollope, the mid-19th century British novelist and author of the Barsetshire series and the Palliser novels. Trollope's books were highly popular in his day, and his work has retained many fans in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Trollope was manic about his writing. He would arise at 5:30 every morning and write for at least two-and-a-half hours. He would produce 250 words every 15 minutes. In his early years as a novelist, he had a job with the Post Office that required some train travel, and he would keep this writing schedule even if he were traveling.

Trollope saw novel-writing as work that had to be done. He wasn't interested in inspiration nearly as much as productivity.

When I have commenced a book, I have always prepared a diary divided into weeks . . . In this I have entered day by day the number of pages that I have written, so that if at any time I slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there staring me in the face - and demanding of me increased labour.

Trollope made no secret of the fact that he wrote for money - something the critics of his day disdained.

• The Anthony Trollope website
  
  
• The Anthony Trollope society

The audacity and hope of Barak Obama, the writer

• Barak Obama wrote his own book -- no ghostwriters or co-authors. He did the literary heavy-lifting himself.

It was with plenty of audacity and no small amount of hope that Barak Obama sat down in the early 1990s to write his life story.

He had just turned 30 in 1991 and could reasonably assume that much was ahead of him -- an assumption that would be true, of course -- but he also knew that his life to that point had been like no one else's whom he knew:

• The son of a white mother from Kansas and an African father from Kenya;
  
  
• Raised in Indonesia, Africa and Hawaii;
  
  
• Intellectually brilliant, confirmed by the fact that he was editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Obama's defining experience to that point had been his relationship with his father, with him he had lost touch early in life and then re-established contact. Shortly after that, however, his father died, and Obama traveled to Kenya to find out more about the man. There, many of the images he had of his father are shattered. He finds that his father had slid from being a brilliant and respected academic to a drunk and an object of pity.

The small amount of fame that Obama achieved as being the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review netted him a call from a literary agent, a book proposal and a publisher. His first idea was to write about race relations, but that didn't suit him and where he was, according to an article about the book by Janny Scott published this week by the New York Times.

That journey of discovery through the images he had of his father is what he decided he had to tackle. What he produced was Dreams From My Father (Amazon).

He did so with confidence and flair -- even audacity -- using composite characters, invented dialogue, out-of-sequence events and a variety of literary techniques. He has since come under some criticism for his account. Inquiring journalists and political opposition researchers say things didn't happen the way he said they happened.

But there is one fact that no one disputes. Obama wrote his own book.

He struggled with sentences, phrasing and structure. He edited, rewrote and rethought.

The words are his and his alone. He didn't pay a ghostwriter or take on some partner to do the literary heavy-lifting. The writing is his creation. In this age of spin and carefully calibrated public pronouncements, getting an unobstructed look into the mind of a prominent political figure does not happen very often.

Obama wrote his own story. In my book, that counts for a lot.

Links:

• Janny Scott, The Story of Obama, Written by Obama, The New York Times, May 18, 2008
  
  
• Paul Watkins, A Promise of Redemption, New York Times, August 6, 1995 -- a review of Dreams From My Father

Jim Webb, writer - and also a senator

• A writer is supposed to "render to the audience things they haven't seen." So says Jim Webb, writer. He's also a senator.

Politicians who put their names on a book and claim authorship are not unusual. The ones who actually write the book are unusual indeed.

And the politician who says of himself, "I am principally a writer": Now that is rare.

And that is Jim Webb, the freshman senator from Virginia.

Webb makes that legitimate claim as he goes around the country touting his new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America.

Webb was interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio's Fresh Air this week, and much of the interview deals with Webb's book, his background and the political issues of the day. But about 24 minutes into the 30-minute interview, Webb talks about his becoming a writer, something he "never thought he would end up as," after he had returned from Vietnam and left his military career.

Webb wrote Fields of Fire, a novel about Vietnam, in 1978, and the book has become a classic in the area of writing about the Vietnam combat experience.

Webb has written five other novels and a number of non-fiction works as well. He was an embedded journalist with troops in Afghanistan in 2004.

The duty of a writer, Webb says, is to "render to the audience things they haven't seen."

And the process of writing, he adds, is to study something, think deeply about it, and then "go on the record."

Not a bad trait for a politician.

A seventh edition

• A textbook that goes into multiple editions can be like a child who grows up but doesn't leave home.

Textbooks can be funny things. If you write a textbook, you want it to be widely adopted so that about four years later the publisher will ask for a second edition (because, while your royalties don't amount to much at that point, the publisher is making a ton of money).

Only a few textbooks, maybe 15 percent, make it into a second edition. (I don't have a reference or stats to back that figure up.)

But then, the text may begin to gather new adopters and hang onto a few of the original ones. If that happens, about four years later, the publisher will ask for a third edition. And so it goes.

Sometimes a textbook can be like a child who grows into adulthood but never leaves home.

Those are a few of the thoughts I'm having this morning (May 20) as I am procrastinating doing work on the seventh edition of Writing for the Mass Media. The publisher is Allyn and Bacon, and the good folks there want the revised edition from me by June 1. That's why the posts on this blog and others I maintain have been a little thin in the last few days.

During its quarter century of existence, Writing for the Mass Media has been adopted as a textbook at nearly 500 colleges and universities (mostly in America but also in places across the globe). The sixth edition was used at 240 different schools, and many of those places are multi-year adopters.

So, this job is well woth doing (and has even become financially justifiable). But it's hard -- and a little boring and tedious. Fortunately, it's almost done.

And to make sure it's done, by June 1, I had better get back to it.

You can find out more about Writing for the Mass Media at these spots:

• Description on JPROF.
• The book's web site at Allyn and Bacon
• Amazon page.

On being an author - without doing any writing

• Margaret Truman, Eliot Roosevelt, Steve Allen - mystery writers? Did they really take the time out of their celebrityhood to craft, write and rewrite those mystery novels you see on the bookshelf?

We all know that politicians don't write their own speeches.

But novelists? Mystery novelists, in particular?

Surely no "novelist" would lend a name to a book that he or she hadn't written. Well, if you think that (as I did for a long time), you are most naive. This kind of intellectual dishonesty goes on more than you would think.

Over at the DorothyL listserve, a neat and lively community devoted to mystery and suspense writing, the topic of the "celebrity" author, who really isn't an author, comes up regularly. This week's discussion produced an interesting story about Steve Allen, the actor and television comedian who really began the Tonight Show.

Allen was a multi-talented guy who has his name on a number of mystery novels, and during his lifetime, he insisted that he wrote them. Not so, says Enid Shantz. She and Tom Shantz operate Rue Morgue Press, which is devoted to re-publishing the "traditional mystery which first came to prominence during the Golden Age of detective fiction (1920-1940)." They used to run a bookstore also named Rue Morgue when they encountered the Steve Allen/mystery writer conumdrum.

Here's the story Enid tells (reproduced here with her permission):

Did Steverino write his mysteries?

We had long been told by insiders that he didn't and mentioned this in our store newsletter a number of years ago. One day a few months later a man came into the store, looked around hesitantly, and then bought several books upon Tom's recommendation and left. That evening when we were going through our credit card receipts we saw the name "Steve Allen" on one of them, and remembered he was in town speaking at the library.

Several weeks later a customer mentioned that during Allen's talk, he had been asked about the persistent rumors that he didn't write his books, which he had heard from the Rue Morgue, and that Allen became quite angry and said he was going to march right over to the store and set us straight.

I guess he lost his nerve--but a few days after his visit we did get a phone call from "Mr. Allen's secretary" informing us that Mr. Allen did indeed write his own books, in word for word the same way he told Betty Webb that he did. So we thought, well, maybe he did--after all he's a smart, multitalented guy who did publish some literary short fiction in the 50s and 60s.

But wait, there's more.

Some time after that incident we were having a signing at the store for Robert Westbrook, a New Mexico author who had written several paperback mysteries set in Taos. Westbrook is the son of Sheila Graham, the Hollywood gossip columnist who had the fabled affair with Scott Fitzgerald. (Westbrook is not her son by that union, but from a later one with either Robert Taylor or Victor Mature.) He was an entertaining speaker, who told us that he had started his writing career as a teenager when his mother frequently turned her columns over to him to write when she was too incapacitated to do so herself.

He bounced around from one writing job to another--including one, many years later, ghostwriting the Steve Allen mystery series, for which he was a natural because of his Hollywood background. The way he tells it, he conceived and wrote the books in their entirety and the only contribution Allen ever made was to insert a few inappropriate reminiscences and anecdotes into the stories.

However, Westbrook didn't write the final book in the series--his wife did, as he had other deadlines to meet and she'd always wanted to write a mystery. Other than the fact that of course he had been contractually obligated at the time not to disclose all this (the contract was long over by then), he said that Allen was so accustomed to having other people write his material that he truly came to think of it as his own, an extension of his own personality.

But you know, people are going to keep on believing that Allen wrote his own books, just as they believe that Margaret Truman did and that the late Eliot Roosevelt really did leave behind a trunkful of unpublished manuscripts when he died. They'll believe it because they want to.

Ghostwritten celebrity mysteries have been around since at least the thirties, with people like Helen Wills Moody, Queena Mario, Helen Traubel, and later George Sanders and possibly Gypsy Rose Lee employing ghost writers to produce mysteries published under their names. According to Jeff Marks, the jury is still out on Gypsy, but so far as I know the only celebrity, if he can be called that, who has beyond a doubt written his own mysteries is Kinky Friedman.

Lots of people claim to have done things they have never done. They say they fought in wars they were never close to. They say they have degrees they never earned. They say they knew people they never met. I don't like any of that, but I guess I can forgive it.

But this one -- claiming to have written a book you didn't write. Somehow, that really offends me.

The Indiana primary - 40 years ago

• The upcoming Indiana primary is the most important primary election in the state in 40 years. The last time it happened, I was there, and I shook hands with Robert Kennedy.

The talking heads of the TV babblerati certified it to be true -- this is the first time in 40 years the Democratic primary election in Indiana has been important. That would be 1968, and Robert Kennedy had just jumped into the race for the Democratic nomination after Lyndon Johnson had just bowed out.

I know. I was alive. And I was there -- in Indiana, the weekend before the primary election.

At the time, I was a sophomore at the University of Tennessee and news editor of the UT Daily Beacon. As news editor, I was running a staff of reporters, editing copy and having the time of my life. The war in Vietnam meant something to all of us. The designation on my draft card was II-S, which meant I had a student deferment. That could change quickly and did for some people I knew.

I was at my desk one afternoon in late April when I got a call from Fred Parke, leader of UT's Young Citizens for Kennedy. Parke said the group had chartered a bus and were taking about 30 Tennessee students to Indiana that weekend to canvas for Kennedy. It would be the last weekend before the primary election on the next Tuesday. There were two seats left on the bus.

Would I like to go? Parke asked.

You bet.

Do you think there's a Beacon photographer who wants to come along?

Sure, I said.

I rounded up the Beacon's chief photographer, Terry Moore, and a couple of days later, on a Friday afternoon, we found ourselves bundled up with a bunch of Kennedyites and headed north toward a small town called Columbus. We would be staying in cabins at a summer camp nearby, and the group would spend Saturday dividing up the town and going door to door, handing out literature and soliciting votes for Kennedy.

We arrived sometime after midnight and found ourselves billeted in cabins with no heat to guard against the spring cold and no hot water. But the next morning, coffee, donuts and orange juice at the local Kennedy headquarters lifted everyone's spirits, and the students hit the streets. I played my role as reporter and wandered around town to see what I could see. My first stop: the local newspaper office where the local journalists were putting together the Sunday edition. I talked with several people on the staff, including the editor, and they invited me to the backshop to watch them make up the paper. (The paper was "hot type," which will mean something to journalism folks over forty but doesn't bear much explaining otherwise.)

I also met the mayor who explained the Republican nature of the area and said he didn't think people of his town were very excited about the presidential campaign. They did like having visitors from Tennessee, however. That evening, the townsfolk threw the group a fried chicken dinner and provided everyone a warm bed to sleep in. Most of the people who did this were not Kennedy supporters, just folks who wanted to be hospitable.

The canvassing continued on Sunday, and late that afternoon, we boarded our bus for the drive back to Knoxville. We stopped at the last town in Indiana before crossing the Ohio River -- New Albany -- where Kennedy was scheduled to speak. A massive crowd of about 4,000 people gathered around a small Knights of Columbus hall and went into a frenzy when Bobby Kennedy and his wife Ethel arrived with their campaign entourage.

Kennedy spoke for a few minutes and then a handshaking line formed, and Kennedy shook the hand of every person there -- including mine. While he spoke coherently, I remember thinking that he looked like he was in a daze, undoubtedly fatigued from four weeks of non-stop campaigning. Still, the people with whom I was traveling were thrilled to see him, and the memory was burned into their heads.

And into mine, especially because of what happened shortly thereafter.

On the next Tuesday, Kennedy won the primary and became the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination.

Four weeks later he was dead, assassinated on the night he won the California primary.

I have thought of that trip often in the ensuing years, and I was happy to recently find a book about the Kennedy campaign in the Indiana primary. Ray Boomhower has written a lucid account of what happened and how important it was in Robert Kennedy and the 1968 Primary -- a small piece of history worth knowing more about.

The fiction writer's bookshelf

If you are interested in writing fiction, here are two of the best books you can have:

Christopher Vogler
The Writer's Journey

Renni Brown and David King
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers

(These are the Amazon links.)

No one explains "story" better than Vogler.

I'm going to post these to a couple of lists to which I subscribe and see if any of those folks have suggestions. If they allow it, I'll post them here.

Alexander McCall Smith on NYT Book Review podcast

• Alexander McCall Smith talks about his latest efforts on the NYT Book Review podcast.

Lovers of Alexander McCall Smith's books may want to tune in (so to speak) on the audio interview with him by the New York Times Book Review podcast.

Here's the page with all the podcast links going back to 2006, and you can go directly to the podcast with this link.

Smith is famous for his Number One Ladies Detective Agency stories -- among others.