Derailed

SPECIAL EBOOK FEATURE:

A NOVEL BEGINNING:

INSIGHT INTO JAMES SIEGEL’S

DERAILED

By James Siegel

When I left college, I was fully committed to becoming the next great novelist — a cross between Graham Greene and Robert Stone — with a little John Fowles thrown in for good measure. At the time, I was still driving a cab through the early morning hours of New York City in order to pay the rent on my modest studio in Flushing Queens. As it turned out, it was a fortuitous occupation.

My novels, alas, remained unsold, but one of my passengers turned out to be an executive at an advertising agency. We got to talking, as often happened between a bored taxi driver and a passenger with something to relate. I professed to the ability of being able to write anything — advertising included. A jingle, a clever line — how hard was that? My passenger, for some amazing reason, decided to overlook my hubris, and offered me a job.

As it turned out, taxi driving at four in the morning in East Harlem (where, by the way, I'd been robbed twice at gunpoint) proved to be the easier of the two occupations. For one thing, there was that annoying 30-second thing. You had to say everything about your product in half a minute. None of my sentences took half a minute. But in the brave new world of advertising, that was all you got. Hmm. How to give the product news, mention a tag line once or twice, and entertain someone enough to watch — all in the veritable blink of an eye?

It took a long time to master this particular discipline. And it is a discipline. My first efforts were impossibly corny — not to mention impossibly long. While creative writing had always easy to me (not that easy — I suffered through my writer’s blocks) being creative in thirty seconds was tortuous.

As I remember, my first commercial was for a Campbell's Soup and involved Sherlock Holmes saying things like: ‘It’s elementary, my dear Watson, there are bigger carrots in this soup!’ Had this commercial actually aired and had anyone been eating soup at the time, they probably would have upchucked it pronto.

Over time, I did improve. I learned that advertising, like the best jokes, is short and punchy. I began to think in thirty seconds. My tastes migrated from corny to halfway sophisticated. My commercials began to get noticed and for the right reasons. A Bob Dole spot here, a Super Bowl spot there, and I slowly climbed the ladder of success.

Eventually, I missed writing novels too much to not try it again. I wrote, I perservered, I got published. Which, oddly enough, is where I had to learn a similar kind of discipline all over again. My first novel was a literary detective mystery — long passages, long chapters, and sentences that often started at the top of the page and made it all the way to the bottom. It garnered good reviews and modest sales.

Like most first-time authors, my fondest wish had simply been to be published. Like most second-time authors, I now wanted to be read. We collectively agreed that my second novel would be a page-turning thriller. And once again, I found myself trying to learn the art of paring down. Halving two sentences when one sentence will do. Losing a scene here and there when it slowed down the story without adding something absolutely essential. Slaughtering passages, expunging expositions, dismembering digressions. Keeping things moving — like the commuter train my ad-writing protagonist takes in the story itself. Suspense, I learned, is a fragile substance that doesn't survive well in sterile environments.

This process of learning to shorten my thriller, was no less painful for me than learning to shorten my ad-copy. But I survived it. And so did the book. Which, after all those cuts and slashes, seems to be doing just what I intended it to — taking readers on a twisty and pulse-racing journey into the dark side of the American dream, and out the other side.

Enjoy.