A Word on Words; 1007; Daniel Magida Wicker

A word on words, a program delving into the world of books and their authors. This week, Daniel McGeeda talks about the rules of seduction. Our host for a word on words, Mr. John Siegenthaler, chairman of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center at Vanderbilt University. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Once again, welcome to a word on words. This evening, it's a novel, a work of fiction, and it's by a new novelist, Daniel L. McGeeda. Welcome to a word on words. Thank you, Charles. This is your first book, The Rules of Seduction. That's a seductive title. And that's a seductive cover, if our viewers will look very closely at it. You were a lawyer by training, a lawyer by profession.

You spent an awful lot of days practicing law, worrying about rules of law and about opinions from the bench, and you were a litigator. Now you come with this smash novel. It's fair. It's a hit. I think so. It's a hit. Congratulations. Thank you. I mean, why the change of pace? I mean, I, you know, everybody, and now, has talked, everybody in literary fields, talking about John Grisham and the firm, Pelican Brief, and now you come, not a mystery, not even a story about law, a story about life. Well, when I first started writing novels when I was in law school, and for me law school was not a very wonderful experience, because in law school, they try to teach you to think like a lawyer, and I didn't want to think like a lawyer, I wanted to think like myself.

So every night, after I finished studying law, I would go back to my room and I would write, and that was how I sort of preserved a corner of my mind for myself, where I didn't have to think like a lawyer. And as a result, unlike a lot of the lawyers who are writing novels today, I'm not interested in writing about the law, because that's the whole reason I started writing was to get away from it. I'm much more interested in character than in courtrooms and in the life of real people and in the life of the law. And this book is really a character study of a young man rather than anything having to do with the law. Indeed, it is a character study of a young man, a modern young man, a young man who I think is fair to say has had a lot given to him in life, and he also takes a lot from life before he comes to grips with, I guess it's really, there is a moral crossroads he

comes to, and you took us a long time to get us there before you told us which way he was going to go, but he is a character for today's world. He's 28 when the book begins, it starts on his birthday, right, and it's an important birthday for you. Brother-in-law calls him. That's right. No sentimentality at all, it's a happy birthday. It says happy when the reason his brother-in-law calls him is because his brother-in-law is a banker and managing a trust fund for him, and the 28th birthday is the day that he comes into his inheritance because when he was 15, his parents were killed, and this inheritance like all good inheritances and fiction comes with a catch, and the catch in this case is that it's a legacy not only of money, but of memory as well, and as he thinks about his life and his parents, he comes to think about all the things, as you said, that were given

to him in life, but all the things as well that were taken away from him. When he was a young teenager, he had an unfair burden put on him, and he wasn't really able successfully to carry that burden, and as a result, people he loved ended up getting hurt, and that became for him a kind of a model for his relationships with people throughout his life. That every time he becomes involved with anyone, whether it's a woman or a man, a sexual relationship, a romantic relationship, or really a friendship, it seems to him that it ends badly, and the other person gets hurt. As a result, he's come to the conclusion that he's not going to put people in that position anymore. He's not going to take the first step, make the first move in a relationship, because he feels that if he does make that first move, then he's responsible for what happens, and

he knows that what happens is usually not good. That's people get hurt by that. People get hurt. It doesn't seem to me, though, that he really, maybe there's some psychological barrier that leads him to conclude that if he doesn't make the first move, and waits for it to be made by someone else, that there will be a chance to avoid pain for somebody on the other side. He comes to find out, though, that as he says at one critical point, he can't love Ellen and not break the rules if he loves Ellen. He must break the rules, and being torn between Ellen and one end, Kate on the other, and in the dilemma of how to do, quote, the right thing, and he's not really, I mean, he's not really milking the situation, he's simply taking what's there for him.

In the midst of that, you suddenly thrust him into a reminiscence childhood, 13 through 15, 16, 17, getting ready for the Westfield school experience, and on through that. And you put him in that first scene at age 13 with his father on a day together, starts out wonderful plans the whole day together. But a day that really, for the first time, I suppose, at least as he can remember it, the trauma of troubling the family dawns on him. He's all along been a very sheltered child. His lived a very good life, his family is wealthy, his father is a lawyer, partner in a good firm, and family background is lots of money.

But from the time he's about 11 or 12, he starts to realize that things are not what they seem. Well, I think a child gets ideas like that and doesn't have a very good sense of what it means, how to put it all together, and it becomes sort of a bogeyman, something that is not understood but is dreaded. What happens on the day that you're referring to is that he's forced to confront that the reality of that dread, and it becomes real for him. And as he discovers, at that point, there is a whole other world behind the world that we, he ordinarily sees, it was interesting when I was writing that long section of reminiscence that I found myself writing very, very flat prose, un-ornamented prose. If you read it, you'll see that there are almost no metaphors until the moment I didn't

get that sense. And until the moment that he's forced to confront the reality of this secret in his family, he has no need for a metaphor. He doesn't need to think about the world behind the world to create another image of the world. And I think that's where his sense of a sort of a divided life is learned. And the interesting thing that you would say that, because I found that glimpse of his confrontation with sadness that was in his life, I found that a vital segment of the book. I mean, he's a visit to Dougie to find out how Dougie handled the divorce of Dougie's parents, his pals, through to the point where a couple years later, I guess, Dougie let's him know that he thinks he's become a bit of a snot.

Right. Yeah. And it's interesting that you feel that the writing became rather flat. Well, I found it very lively and very, well, that's very much alive. I guess what I meant was that. We don't need to use a metaphor is an image of the world that is not the world. And we use metaphors because we want to see something different than what the reality of life is. And until Jack, the main character in the book, comes to the point where he recognizes this trouble in his life, he doesn't have any need for another world. From that point on, he lives very much in a world of metaphor, in a world of duality, as he says, there's a place where he goes, where he's not himself, because where he's not there, because if he's not there, nothing bad can happen.

I hope the writing is good and lively, but it was very much on the surface up until that point. And I realized that for him, the whole course of his life became, at that point, sort of a two-track life, a world on the one hand that he lives in public, where he goes through the motions, and he is what everybody wants him to be, so that he doesn't disappoint anyone and that no one gets hurt. In his other world, where he lives a very lively life of emotion, that he feels very deeply, many of the things that are happening to him, but which he has to keep hidden, because that world is dominated by the secrets that he has and that he feels he needs to keep. There are many, there are many moments in his life that are important to the story. I think of one of them when Kate decides to shampoo his hair, sort of against his will.

You get, for the first time, maybe wasn't intended by you, for the first time, I sensed real alienation developing, or maybe self-doubt developing there about that. Maybe it was there before, I guess it was there before. Remember that, he's, at the beginning of the book, he has what would look to the outside world like a perfect life. He's intelligent, he's good looking, he's got a fabulous job, he's got money, he's he's engaged to Kate, who's a woman who's from the same kind of social background, and she's beautiful and intelligent, and, and clearly loves him, and loves him, and, and yet, and yet, it's clear from the beginning that something is not right here with this person.

I think that the senior describing is something he remembers on the evening of his birthday, and I think the fact of his receiving his legacy, for us it's him to think about a lot of the unhappiness in his life, that, that, and that makes him think a little differently about his relationship with Kate, which is, since he's just become engaged to her, of course, his, his primary and his mind, and indeed that, that scene is a very ambivalent scene. And, on the one hand, she's doing something that's apparently very nice for him, and on the other hand, the feelings that he has sort of underneath the surface of what's going on are very different, and that becomes, I think, characteristic of this character throughout his life. He, he does live a very double kind of existence, and, and the book, in the end, forces him to choose between the two levels of his, of his life.

Between Kate and Ellen, but beyond that, two women. It's more than a choice of women, it's a choice for the future. That's right. Now, then you, you, you put him with Ellen largely through his friend Timothy, Ellen's sister, and you, I didn't really get a feel for Timothy, I mean, I, sure he was a pal, his father was an architect, but I really, you think you fully developed Timothy as a, as a character, and maybe you didn't mean to, or maybe you did, and I missed it. Well, I don't know, that he, I like Timothy a lot, and he's a character who does a lot for Jack. Oh, he's a pal. Jack, Jack lives in a world where, as he says, people always want things from him, and, and Timothy is really the first person he's mad, he doesn't want anything from him, apparently. And I think that, that it's important for, for Jack to have a friend like that, because

without, without the experience of someone who simply likes him, and doesn't want anything more than to be his friend, I don't know that he would ever have come to the, the point where he was, he was aware of the options that he has in his life. I mean, look, his life has worked out for him. Yes, it's, it's a stressful thing. He's a person who, who loves people very, very deeply, but who has learned in life that it's not safe for him to love, so he's caught in a, in a contradiction. It works, he's, he's, he's, he's stable, he's, he's, he's successful, but he's not happy. And I think without Timothy as a catalyst, I don't know that he would ever have recognized the contradiction, or seen that there were options.

Yeah, so Timothy is more than the person who introduces him to Ellen. Timothy is really a bridge over which you let him walk to really a wider world. And I think as Jack himself recognizes that, that he is, he is changed, that by the time he meets Timothy's sister, Ellen, that he's changed because he's managed to spend some time with someone who isn't always asking him for something or wanting him to be something other than what he is. Then there's another little glimpse that you give us in that exchange in which he says to Timothy, I think I'm in love with your sister. And Timothy says something like, why did I bring you together, why do you think I brought you together? Yeah, right, right. Something of, of, of, of that's, right, that's what. Well, let's deal with the moment of tragedy, the moment of, first of all, the moment of tragedy and then the moment of, I guess it's fair to call it, the moment of truth. When you create this scene of family conflict, mom and dad want this kid to go with him, his

father makes a big thing of it, probably blows it away out of proportion. Right. Yes, my best client wants to see you so you must go, no dad, I'm going to date, I don't want to go. And he's resentful because he knows now that his father's got a serious drinking problem and that his father's not professionally as successful maybe as he thought he was and he's worried about the, I, it's just a lot of adolescent resentment that builds up and boils over. Right. I mean, I tell you, I related to Jack and to Johnny at that moment. Well, I think that's, that's a, one of the things that I, that I like about the character is that through all of it, through all this terrible family situation, he's still a kid. And, and that comes through in the way that he does simply out of adolescent peak decide

not, not on a crucial, not what turns out to be a crucial night to do what his parents want him to do. Well, we've all done that and we all, you know, put up a, throw tantrums when our parents want us to do something at the age of 15 that we don't want to do. And for the most part, that's a normal part of growing up as, as, as said several times in the book, that you have to go through the period when you hate your parents. Jack's problems, he can't hate them because they're dead and, boy, do you keep guilt on him? I mean, you, I mean, I'll tell you, it's about as mean a thing as an author ever did to a hero, I, he comes home that night and I thought you did it with great subtlety. He turns into the driveway and he knows there's a problem at two cars there. And then it's a long, long time before you get him to acknowledge that burden of guilt he's carrying. Right.

He's, he has retreated into, to a world where everything will work for him and where he will not have to ever again be, as he says, the occasion for pain. He will never cause hurt. And the book presents him with a very stark conflict. Is he going to continue to live that kind of life where everybody is happy or comfortable or safe at bottom? Or is he going to go out and love and take all the risks that go along with loving, including the chance that the woman he loves is going to end up being hurt? That's the choice that he has through the book and I think as we, we see his past and his experiences, you understand why that's such a critical choice for him and why it's entirely possible up until I hope the last sentence of the book that he will go either away and it isn't clear, but it is clear that those are both options for him and they're

still open to him. If he had made the other choice with the book it worked as well. It's interesting because all along he was supposed to have made the other choice with my head and he was going to. And I'm not sure whether it wouldn't have made a better book with the other choice. I'm not sure either. But I don't know that it might not have been more satisfying. I don't know. Did you write Kate down after you decided? After you came to the conclusion and I read somewhere what you said about where you were in terms of finishing the book before you decided whether it was on the case. But after you made the decision and completed, did you go back then and rewrite Kate in any way to make her less attractive, less appealing? No it went the other way actually.

I re-wrote much more to make her more appealing because both women have to be believable as characters and she wasn't in the earlier drafts. And I got a lot of help from my editor, Houghton Mifflin, and we really did change her character a lot. She's a much nicer person now than she was originally. You know, part of what this program is about is not just what's in the book but how authors go about devising plots and creating characters. And I've had some authors tell me that characters really run away with them. They create them, maybe for a minor role. And then suddenly that character becomes a major player in the scheme of things. How much control did you have over these characters? None at all. I started out with a very short sentence that I had written down in a notebook 10 years before I started the book.

And that sentence is the need to be seduced to avoid taking a stand. It's in the book. It is. Well, I started asking questions about that. Why would somebody need to be seduced? Why would he view seduction as the avoidance of taking stands? Why would someone protect himself so strenuously that he wouldn't emerge from his shell unless he was enticed or seduced out? And that's what I started with, those questions. Writing the book for me was a process of answering those questions. And for Jack, I think the experiences described in the book are also a process of answering those questions. As we've mentioned, Jack has a lot of secrets. He keeps them really well from his friends and from his family and even from himself. And he kept them from me also. I didn't know that he had one big secret until I had written maybe 75 pages of the book. And I wasn't sure exactly what that secret was until I had written even further along.

People think that authors' fiction have complete control and can do anything and are omnipotent. But in fact, once you've created a character who's a real person, real people act according to their natures. And just as you can't make a child do what you want simply because you're the parent, you can't make a character in fiction act against his nature. Sure you can write down the words. But if you do, you end up with something that's very mechanical, that's not believable, and that I think would not be fun to read. On the other hand, if you treat them as real people and you're willing to respect their personalities and their nature and be willing to say, this character is doing something that I did not envision that's totally different from anything I thought was going to happen. But that's what he needs to do at this point in time.

If you're willing to do that, I think you end up with characters who the reader will believe are real people. Those are the kinds of characters that I want to read about. And those are the kinds of characters I want to write about. Are you working on another novel? Yeah. How far along? I've pretty much finished what I call the second draft. It's being read now by three or four close friends who are going to give me some feedback. And then I'll do a final draft, which I hope will be ready by the end of the year. Well, I don't want to pressure too much on content because I know sometimes authors and particularly publishers don't want to give anything away until they're ready to give it away. So I won't probe too deeply. But another romance now? It's, I wanted to pick a subject that would have universal appeal. So I'm writing about adultery, which I think is something that has become more and more

a universal characteristic of contemporary fiction. There was a time when you couldn't open a magazine without reading a story in which somebody had an extra marrow affair. I'm trying to take a slightly different take on the question of adultery and faithfulness in marriage than I think is prevalent in most fiction today. And maybe I'll leave it at that. Oh, my God, sounds like you're getting ready to glorify monogamy yet you'll never sell. What about titles? Titles are fun. This title came to me when I was about the rules of seduction, there's a point in the book where Jack is thinking about how his brother-in-law conducts his business according to certain rules.

And he realizes that the rules are sort of the same, that his brother-in-law prays on people as a banker and those same people then in turn pray on Jack as an object of desire. So the concept of rules was in the book very early on and I had the idea of rules of seduction. When we were talking about it with the publisher, there was a lot of discussion back and forth about whether we should use the title or not. We tried out some alternate ones, but nobody liked any as much as this one. And I think it's appropriate because the book really is about whether or not you can live your life by rules that work only to serve a part of your life. We all have rules, some of them are moral rules that we apply to everyone, others are

personal rules that we have for ourselves. And as we go through life, we alter those rules to, we don't trim to fit the circumstances, but as we gain new experience, we find out what works and what doesn't work. One of Jack's problems is that whenever he thinks about breaking the rules, the consequences are so disastrous that he doesn't get a chance to experiment the way a lot of us do. And the way I think we have to find out what works, what is right for us, what is the moral way to behave and then the seduction. Daniel McGeeda, author of the Rules of Seduction, has been our guest on a word on words. Your host has been John Saganthom. This program was produced in the studios of WDCN Nashville.