Wishing I Knew How Things Were Going To End

 Today, The Paris Review let out from behind its paywall John Gregory Dunne, The Art of Screenwriting No. 2. I know between my age and criminal status screenwriting is now completely out of the question. Still, I have written one and may try again. I thought the interview might give me insight into screenwriting. Nope. Instead, it gave me reasons for doubting I know how to write fiction.

A different type of question for these kinds of interviews, and I can get behind Dunne's answer. I just wish I could see more of my airplanes taking off!

INTERVIEWER

What is your state of mind when you are writing?

DUNNE

Essentially, writing is a sort of manual labor of the mind. It is a hard job, but there comes a moment in every book, I suppose, when you know you’re going to finish and then it becomes a kind of bliss, almost a sexual bliss. I once read something Graham Greene said about this feeling. The metaphor he used was a plane going down a runway and then, ultimately, leaving the ground. Occasionally he had books that he felt never did leave the runway; one of them was The Honorary Consul, though in retrospect he realized that it was one of his better books.

Here comes the brick wall:

INTERVIEWER

How much do you know about the end of a book?

DUNNE

When I did Dutch Shea, Jr., I knew the last line was going to be, “I believe in God.”

INTERVIEWER

Why did you pick that line?

DUNNE

Because that’s the line the man would say as he kills himself. I wanted that most despairing of acts to end with the simple declarative sentence, “I believe in God.” In The Red White and Blue I knew the last line was going to be either yes or no, in dialogue, and the penultimate line was going to be yes or no not in dialogue. The first line of Vegas is, “In the summer of my nervous breakdown, I went to live in Las Vegas, Clark County, Nevada.” I knew that the last line of that book would be, “And in the fall, I went home.” I don’t think it’s necessary to have a last line; I just like to know where in general I’m going. I have a terrible time plotting. I only plot about thirty pages in front of where I am. I once had dinner with Ross MacDonald, who did the Lew Archer novels about a California private detective. He said he spent eighteen months actually plotting out a book—every single nuance. Then he sat down and wrote the book in one shot from beginning to end—six months to write the book and eighteen to plot it out. If you’ve ever read one of those books, it’s so intricately plotted it’s like a watch, a very expensive watch.

Okay, I have got an ending for "No Clean Slates", but I have been thinking about it for the better part of a decade. I keep switching ideas for "Chasing Ashes".

Trying to end on a positive note, this makes me feel better. The problem with "Chasing Ashes" is I know the climax is a fight, but I do not know if the protagonist survives.

INTERVIEWER

You have said that you have a lot of trouble with plotting a book. What makes it move forward?

DUNNE

I have no grand plan of what I’m going to do. I had no idea who killed the girl in True Confessions until the day I wrote it. I knew it would be someone who was not relevant to the story. I had always planned that. But who the actual killer was, I simply had no idea. Years before, I had clipped something from the Los Angeles Times in the small death notices. It was the death of a barber. I had put that up on my bulletin board. I was figuring out “now who . . .”—getting to the moment when I had to reveal who killed this girl, with not the foggiest idea who did it, and my eyes glommed onto this death notice of a barber. I said, Oops, you’re it. One must have enormous confidence to wait to figure these things out until the time comes.

sch 6/2