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Writing about secrets

Catch You Later, TraitorMy forth­com­ing book, Catch You Lat­er, Trai­tor, is all about secrets. Fam­i­ly secrets. Polit­i­cal secrets. Secrets among friends. Secrets between brothers.

It was a very dif­fi­cult book to write, in part, because I had lived some of those secrets when I was a boy. More­over, I lived on the edge of a world that told me again and again, “Don’t ask about those secrets.”  “If you know the secrets, don’t tell any­one about them.”  “Don’t even talk about them on the phone. Some­one might be listening.”

And here I was, writ­ing about those secrets. Shout­ing them out, so to speak, in this book.

It made it a hard book to write.

Years ago, in anoth­er of my nov­els, The Man who was Poe, I have Poe say­ing, “Writ­ers write best about what they know, and what they know best are their own fears.”

I sus­pect, how­ev­er, reveal­ing secrets can bring about good writ­ing. Still, it is per­fect­ly under­stand­able that one would not want to share such things with the world. And yet, that which is true—as Hem­ing­way might have said—is the most pow­er­ful thing a writer can write about.

So what do you do?

You tell the truth. And then you do what Paula Fox once said to me, “The writer’s job is to imag­ine the truth.”

In short, the best fic­tion is true.

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