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Writing nonfiction that comes to life and jumps off the page is a hard task. I (Corn, not "Corn") know this. A few years back, I wrote a biography of a notorious CIA official. As many nonfiction writers promise when pitching their projects, I told my publisher that it would read like a novel. It would be real-life le Carre.

I discovered, however, that such a thing -- history as novel -- generally cannot not be concocted in good faith. I had wanted the book to be a series of linear scenes. CIA chief walks into an office, pounds his desk, and shouts to a subordinate, "Castro has to be taken care of! Now. permanently." That sort of stuff.

But after five years of research, I found that the tens of thousands of documents and the scores of notebooks with interview transcripts I had amassed still did not contain enough of the kinds of details needed for writing history as a novel. Moreover, people's descriptions of past conversations, meetings, actions (even murder plots) were too hazy to be rendered in the concrete fashion of fiction writing, and far too often, there were contradictions among different sources. They could not agree on whether it had been a dark and stormy night -- or a cheery, sunny day -- when a key decision was taken to set up a secret army in Laos.

After that, whenever I came across history written like a novel -- with lots of direct quotations and well-defined and well-detailed scenes rendered dramatically -- I was a bit suspicious. This was one reason that for my next book I turned to fiction and wrote a novel.

But that was before Morris -- or is it "Morris"? -- showed us writers a new way. There's apparently no need to choose between fiction and nonfiction. If you want to write history, you don't have to be hindered by conventions -- or facts.

Perhaps for my next historical nonfiction project, "Corn" will grow up with Lee Harvey Oswald and end up encountering him on the bus the morning of Nov. 22, 1963. Or "Corn" might be a young girl who taught Bob Dylan how to make a bar chord. Or a hardware store owner who shared old copies of Popular Mechanics with a geeky adolescent named Bill Gates.

I just hope that "Corn" him- or herself doesn't sell any of these stories elsewhere -- before I can get my own big-money contract.
salon.com | Sept. 28, 1999

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