I'm Not a Lawyer and Other Rumor Control

So a couple of things . . . .

One of the reasons you have an agent is that pesky document called a contract. There are all sorts of things to work out--movie rights, licensing agreements, how many copies sold before it kicks up to a higher percentage of royalties, and so on. I'm not a lawyer, but after years and years of seeing contracts and dealing with them, I bet I could muddle through on my own okay--though I MUCH prefer my agent being the pain-in-the-ass my publishers deal with rather than me being said pain-in-the-ass.

But contracts aside, people wonder about other legal issues. Like . . . can someone sue you if you depict them in a book? Most of us have heard of the the Running with Scissors case in which the Turcotte family sued the author saying that all of what he said happened didn't, in fact, happen, and the family had been defamed. Or the James Frey case, in which his memoir turned out to have seriously altered the truth in grandiose ways. As an aside, if you have ever loved an addict, is that so surprising? Well, I'm not a lawyer, but my take on it is, frankly, as we have been discussing, truth is subjective, and even more so, eyewitness testimony is unreliable. A memoir cannot be taken as the God's honest truth because there is no truth, only subjective truth. Too much thinking for pre-dawn. However, both of those books now carry a coda. Burroughs agreed to call his a "book," not a memoir. Frey's carries an addendum note.

But what about fictionalizing your own life? I have multiple (!!!!) published author friends who have been confronted by family members (one at a signing!) who have accused them of depicting them in a bad way in their novels. In every single case, my novelist pals have insisted to me that they were blindsided by these hysterical claims. "The mother in the book isn't my mother." I have had multiple readers who know me see fragments of my life in The Roofer and wondered how my family handled it. In fact, it's dedicated to "The real Roofer." Actually, the book is a love letter to some people, and they took it that way. So no one in my family confronted me at all. But had they, I would have said, rightly, that there were FRAGMENTS there. No portrait was complete. Could any of the people in question have sued me? They COULD have but it wouldn't have gone anywhere. I used no real names, and there was nothing to hang their hat on because the burden of proof--and I'm no lawyer--would be that ANYONE reading that book could then quite easily figure out who the characters were and were thus defamed. (And were any of those people public figures, they don't have a snowball's chance in hell.) A quirk, a trait, an attribute, even something specific like "A left-handed man with a glass eye" wouldn't be enough to have strangers draw a direct connection.

On the flip side, legal issues aside, we've been talking about honesty. If you DO mine your life and you DO become published, are you okay with that totally naked feeling once the book comes to light? For so many of us, we create for years alone, or maybe with a critique group. But think TOO hard about this question and you'll censor yourself and not write an honest book. So just be fearless is my motto. My mother is my best friend. I mean, I have my bestest girlfriend, but I talk to my mother for a full hour each day. Every day. Sometimes longer. These are not obligatory "I have to call my mom otherwise she will guilt-trip me." These are "I want to call my mom and tell her this or that and laugh with her." She's my friend AND my mom, and I suppose calling her each day is cheaper than therapy. She also does NOT read this blog, so this rosy picture of my mother isn't because she is now reading this. I could say she was a b*itch and it wouldn't get back to her. But, in fact, she is NOT a b*tch. She is really, really, REALLY pragmatic and practical, yet she loves Christmas in a completely magical way. She is a gourmet cook (friggin' amazing) and she teaches me knitting stuff (I have now made a HAT and not just scarves). She is funny, a decent poker player, can bait a fish hook, and curses like a sailor if she's mad. She like happy movies, reads a book a day, at least, and is very, very, very funny. AND . . . if you decided to "discern" who my mom was by reading my books, you would think my mother is a horrible person, a terrible mother, evil, the whole nine yards because dramatic tension is important and it's far more interesting to have a difficult mother in fiction than a great one. That's why in some of my books I write in the acknowledgments that mom is great because I don't want people speculating.

In other bits of rumor control, I have heard more times than I care to count that Editor X acquired Suzy Q's book because Suzy Q wrote a vampire book/erotic historical/spy book featuring a woman/fill in the blank because the concept was "hot," but the book isn't well-written. The author isn't talented. It's just a so-so book. Look, I have spent my entire life around editors and agents, and authors and small publishing houses, and public speakers and so on. Every once in a while, an editor will tell me they bought someone's SECOND book, which was not as good as the first, but they are a household name and it will sell strongly, and they have six months or so to edit it, so they presume they can shore it up. But I have never, and I mean never, heard an editor say "I don't believe in Book X but it's a hot concept so . . . I bought it." In general, and especially now when so many decisions are done by committee, a book has to be signed off on by the editor, their boss, marketing, the editorial team, and so on and so on. No one is going to go in front of 15 people and say, "This book really isn't good, but you know, vampires are hot." Do some books that aren't, in some people's opinions, very good, get swept along on a trend? Sure. The chick lit market flooded. But someone--some editor, some editorial assistant, someone--still thought the book was good. And I think when people devalue an author that way, it's wrong, sour grapes, jealousy. No editor is going to say, "Let me buy this piece of garbage because it has a vampire in it and let me pass by these ten worthy books by these as-yet-unheralded geniuses." In fact, be comforted by this, because it means editors look for TALENT. Yes, do they want it to be a hot concept, have a hook, want it to stand out . . . but they also want it to be well-written.

So there you go. Thoughts?