October 23, 2003
FIGHT CLUB’S Chuck Palahniuk said THE CONTORTIONIST’S HANDBOOK was the best book he’s read in five, maybe ten, years. Josh Jabcuga says THE CONTORTIONIST’S HANDBOOK is the best book he’s read since FIGHT CLUB. Check out Part 1 of Squib’s interview with author Craig Clevenger to get unraveled.
Joshua Jabcuga: Your book, THE CONTORTIONIST’S HANDBOOK, deals with themes of polydactyly, child prodigies, and forgery. As we speak I'm only about sixty pages into the book, so you'll have to bear with me. Would you mind providing a description of the book for people who may be unfamiliar with it?
Craig Clevenger: Hmmm, that’s tough. Summarizing a book is difficult after I’ve spent so much time doing the opposite. In brief, it’s the story of John Vincent, who suffers from debilitating migraines that lead to overdoses from his attempts at self-medication. Because there’s no concrete evidence of the headaches, hospital personnel
assume he’s a suicide risk and detain him for psychiatric evaluation. This is a recurring pattern in Vincent’s life. Terrified of being institutionalized, he uses his prodigious skills to create a string of false names and histories in order to prevent his medical and/or police records from being cross-referenced. Vincent narrates his life story to the reader during the course of one such psychiatric interview. He simultaneously dissects the psychiatrist’s Q&A for the reader (analyzing his analyzer) while outlining his elaborate bluffing, and also reveals his true history.
Joshua Jabcuga: For those wondering, polydactyly is basically a person with an extra
digit on their hand, right? I guess I've heard of it before, but I never really knew it had a name.
Craig Clevenger: It’s not common, but it’s not unheard of. And for anyone that’s got it, I
seriously doubt it’s the stigma in real life that it is for Vincent. But it worked for the story on a number of levels: I wanted John Vincent’s very nature, both physical and mental, to be above ordinary, to be an obstacle to his goal of being invisible and blending in with the world. He struggles to be unmemorable and forgotten, effectively invisible, but that’s a tough thing to do when you’re an art prodigy with a six-fingered left hand.
Joshua Jabcuga: From what I've read so far, you totally immerse the reader into the mind
of the main character. We're very much plugged into his thought processes. As a writer, how difficult was it to pull something like that off? How do you capture that vibe without losing the reader and still advancing the story?
Craig Clevenger: I spent just under two years, unemployed, writing the book. I was completely immersed in that mindset the entire time, and started to think more and more
like my narrator. Trying to keep from not losing the reader was a bit of a balancing act. In truth, somebody of Vincent’s mental caliber isn’t going to enumerate every step he takes in his criminal enterprises. He’s going to do so much automatically, without thinking. But, I had to engage the reader, so some exposition on what he’s doing was necessary.
At the same time, with the story being in the first person and the narrator being a coke/amphetamine (among other things) addict, I also wanted to create a strong inner monologue, i.e. the voice of someone extremely keyed up and talking to himself. As such, the voice of the narrator lent itself very well to explaining in detail what he’s doing.
Joshua Jabcuga: I'm also assuming that there must have been a tremendous amount of
research behind this book. If I didn't know better, I'd think you were a master of forgery yourself, which is a credit to your book. Take me into the research process, if you will. What's it like for you?
Craig Clevenger: My line editor at MacAdam/Cage, John Gray, said something that I really took to heart: I don’t have to be accurate, but I do have to be plausible. Those things are sometimes the same, but very often they aren’t. For me, the research has several functions. First, there’s the obvious need to get the details right. Second, the more I research and learn about a subject, the more story possibilities I have. Details and factual minutiae aren’t constraining, but liberating. The more I know about a subject, the more I can do with a story. The process itself is this: I don¹t do any research until I have a solid story idea. The story absolutely cannot be driven by a thing- a factoid or
bit of trivia. It has to be driven by a person, and I use that word deliberately in lieu of “character.” Once I have the person who’s telling the story, the story evolves very quickly. Still, I don¹t do any research at this point, because I want an outline or structure based on the actions and decisions of a narrator. Once that’s ironed out, I start researching.
For the record, the Internet is a wonderful tool and aid in research, but
if you want to go deep, the search engines will hit a wall faster than you think. And key-wording makes people lazy. We get used to typing in a string of nouns and using whatever gets kicked back and forget how to dig and look for creative entries into a subject. Books, books, books, that’s still where the knowledge is. Learn to love your library, and send whatever chocolates and liquor baskets you have to in order to butter up your reference librarian. These people are the black belts of information access.
Two things happen with the research. First, I start filling holes in the story, addressing placeholders I’ve used pending research data. Secondly, the story starts to alter; I see ways I could take the story based on new facts I’ve learned, or I have to ditch entire sections based on data I’ve come up with because I’ve strained the plausibility of the story. The research itself? There’s a lot out there. As I’ve said many times, I’ve
got a reference library that could land me in jail, and I just know that I’ve been flagged somewhere, by someone (fuck you very much to every quick-fix, grandstanding jingoist who signed the Patriot Act, you assholes).
One thing that people often forget in researching a subject is how much can be found out learning about a subject’s antithesis. You can learn a lot about property ownership law by researching tenant’s rights and vice versa. Ironically, very little of the
ID forgery stuff in the HANDBOOK came from studying forgery itself. Most of it came from studying the investigative methods of finding missing persons or doing background checks. I read a lot of forgery books and most of them weren’t very helpful as far as hard information goes but, when I started learning about how a private investigator uses public records to track down deadbeat dads or bail jumpers, that’s where the real meat of the subject came to light. As for the actual fabrication of the documents, I wasn’t as interested in that. Vincent is an expert at manipulating systems and people, and I wanted to avoid the spy-gadget gimmickry of faking passports, etc. For most of that, I researched art forgery to learn methods of paper aging (again, books specific to ID forgery were laughable compared to the master art forgers), replicating inks or writing utensils, etc. For example, not one single book on ID forgery mentioned the fact that the ball point pen wasn’t introduced until almost the ’50s.
I don’t want to tell a story by simple creating a litany of technical detail. The story needs to be about the people in the story, most significantly the narrator. The research and the details I include serve one chief purpose: to make the reader feel complicit. In other words, I have a narrator who’s arguably a borderline sociopath. He’s a drug addict; while he’s not abusive, he’s very callous and manipulative. But I’ve had my own readers, on numerous occasions, take me to task for disparaging John Vincent in that way. They love him because they’ve walked a mile in his shoes, as they say.
When I’m revealing some tidbit about forgery or something that’s new to the reader, then the reader gets charged up by this new bit of “forbidden” knowledge and they feel like a partner in crime with John Vincent. This means they start seeing the world through his eyes more and more throughout the story, and finally they have complete empathy for him where the law and other authorities do not. And that’s the chief benefit of research- to make the reader feel complicit with the narrator, thus more empathetic with him. Otherwise, it’s just a tech manual, not a novel.
Joshua Jabcuga: As far as your personal bio goes, from what I gather, you seemed like
maybe you were on the verge of going postal, you hunkered down on one now infamous Fourth of July when you churned out 6,000 words, quit your nearly six figure-paying job the next day, and here we are. Is that right? Are there any regrets, besides maybe not doing it sooner?
Craig Clevenger: Fourth of July has since taken on a very new meaning for me. It truly is my independence day, but from a lot of other things. Ever since then, no matter what’s going on that day, what wild party is happening, I always make a point of knocking out a page or two, just to celebrate. The fourth of July is a writing day for me and if I’m late for a barbeque, then so be it. No, I don’t have any regrets. I wouldn’t give up writing for anything.
Be back in seven days for the conclusion of Josh Jabcuga’s interview with Craig Clevenger. And in the meantime, visit Craig’s Web site, CraigClevenger.com
Take a direct hit! Read Josh Jabcuga’s Squib Central, every Thursday, only at www.moviepoopshoot.com!
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