The Germ of an Idea

November 24, 2009

The next book on my queue is Sunnyside by Glen David Gold. I’m going to read it while I’m at my residency in Vermont for the month of January. It’s sitting on my nightstand now and I’m just itching to get to it!

“[The] author of the best seller Carter Beats the Devil, now gives us a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, heartrending and darkly comic, that captures the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.

Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Charlie Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary delusion that forever binds the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he finds unexpected love on the battlefields of France; Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed expedition against the Bolsheviks; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vise of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother.”

(from Random House Website)

I’m a big fan of Gold’s writing– he’s also got a blog but doesn’t update it as much as I’d like!

One blog post from the end of the summer (August 2009) described a beautiful chapbook he created in limited quantity for Sunnyside, in which he worked with fabulous artists JD King and Patrick McDonnell (creator of the comic Mutts). The chapbook is the first section of the novel, Sunnyside, and –drat!–is no longer available (it sold out quickly). But I was intrigued to read how Gold came up with the topic of Sunnyside, which he explains here.

In short, he had been struggling with the novel for a while:

I had the first hundred or so pages in the bag. Except they were bad. It is a terrible thing that even after you are allegedly a professional, sometimes you fall off the beam. I wrote badly for a few weeks, put it down, did other things, then wrote badly again. The most terrifying thing about this was either that I kept trying new angles and I still wrote badly or that the pages sounded so much like me.

This went on for years.

Then, he explains:

I tossed the original idea for the novel away. I wrote essays, short stories, scripts. I started thinking hard about a small unanalyzed moment in David Robinson’s biography of Chaplin. On a Sunday in 1916, Chaplin had been the subject of a mass hysteria and had been seen in over 800 places simultaneously. How odd is that to hear? I’ve thought about it so much I can’t really tell anymore. Sometimes I dream a line of prose that, in my dream, has already been written. And I write it down in my journal and realize that, no, it’s just so much a part of my unconscious already that it feels like it’s been written already. That’s how the subject of Chaplin-as-delusion felt. I almost didn’t write about it because it seemed so obvious to me.

I wrote a few pages about this mass hysteria and read them aloud to my wife. I felt some shame because of how easily they had come. My wife told me I had finally found not just an interesting story but also the voice of my novel. In other words, what I thought was an incident was the beginning of something. I wrote the first draft of what is now “A Day’s Pleasure” fairly quickly, in about three weeks. When I got to the end, I had the structure of the rest of the book in mind.

(who is that wonderful wife? None other than writer Alice Sebold).

Anyway, the reason I tell you all this (all 4 of my readers) is because  1. the novel i’m working on has real-life characters in it, also from Hollywood/Movies, and 2. I got my idea in a similarly unique manner.

Like most twelve year-old boys in the early 80s I spent my Saturdays reading old film star biographies, and it was while reading the biography of husky-voiced 1940s-50s film star June Allyson that I came across a sentence that would eventually be the inspiration for the novel. It was a sentence that stayed with me for over 20 years, however (did I mention i’m a procrastinator?).

I’m not going to say what the sentence is, because I worry about talking about the novel too specifically while it’s still in very rough draft form, but I was wondering, does anyone else have interesting stories of how they came up with the topic for their book? What inspired your novel or a short story? An anecdote? A real event? A dream? A sentence read somewhere else? An overheard conversation? The shape of a cloud?