To celebrate the release of my forthcoming novel, I’m posting a series of short pieces about writing the novel.  This series is meant to address the questions people tend to ask me about the writing process, the inspiration behind my novels, and the other writers who’ve influenced me.  Here’s the fourth one.

My wife was working in a psych hospital when I wrote the first draft of Madhouse Fog.  She’d started the summer before I started writing.  On Tuesdays, the hospital cafeteria had a baked chicken special that my wife loved, so I’d come onto hospital grounds and eat lunch with her.  We ate together there several times before the summer ended and I started teaching on Tuesdays.

Of course, there aren’t separate cafeterias for patients and staff.  When I ate lunch with my wife, I also ate with the patients.  If I’m not mistaken, the patients worked in the cafeteria and prepared the food.

My wife also took me on a tour of the hospital once.  She used her key fob to get me into all the different buildings housing patients who ranged from very low functioning to very high functioning.  A lot of the patients came in and out of the hospital for a very short time: typically seventy-two hours.  Seventy-two hours is the length of a state-sponsored involuntary hold.  If you attempt suicide or otherwise demonstrate that your psychological health is a danger to yourself or others, you can get a seventy-two hour stay at this hospital.  Because most of the patients were there for such a short time, the staff didn’t get to know them very well.  Because most of the patients I saw were high-functioning and because they wore their regular clothes, they looked more or less like the crowd at the county fair.  In fact, I’ve seen more bizarre behavior at the county fair than I saw in my trips to the psych hospital.  To be honest, I couldn’t really tell who was a patient and who was staff without looking for ID badges.

The tour my wife gave me was brief.  For one thing, it was unauthorized.  No one really batted an eye.  I guess unauthorized tours of the psych hospital aren’t that uncommon.  But my wife didn’t want to get fired and I didn’t want to get her fired, so we kept things to a minimum.  Plus, at the time, I was working on the novel Train Wreck Girl, which maybe has some characters who could’ve done with thirty days at this hospital, but didn’t focus on these issues.

In January of 2007, when I first started writing Madhouse Fog, I called one of my wife’s supervisors, Dr. Randy Wood.  I arranged for an authorized tour of the hospital.  Dr. Wood took his time.  He showed me everything.  We got to talking.  I told him I worked at Channel Islands.  He said he’d worked there when it was the Camarillo State Mental Hospital.  We took a seat in a conference room and he told me stories about the old hospital for forty-five minutes.  The guy is a hell of a storyteller.

Did I steal some of those stories for Madhouse Fog?

Yes I did.

My visits to the psych hospital taught me a couple of things about writing a novel set in a psych hospital.  First, it taught me that patients aren’t a spectacle.  Movies that are set in psych hospitals always have crazy patients running around screaming, “Feces!” or otherwise bouncing off the walls.  In general, these actors act like someone you would find in the early morning hours of a bar where a coke dealer operates rather than someone with a mental illness.  Most of the patients I saw at the psych hospital weren’t crazy.  They were mentally ill.  The more severe the mental illness, the more drugs they were on, the more sedentary they were.  Most of the patients looked sad or tired or like they’d learned to mask their pain.  Certainly, the occasional patient does act up and need to be restrained.  This does happen regularly, but not regularly enough for me to witness it on several chance visits.

In general, though, patients at a psych hospital are nothing to gawk at.  They’re about as remarkable as patrons in a restaurant or shoppers in a mall.  If I really wanted to see mental illness, I wouldn’t have to drive up to the psych hospital to do it.  I could walk a few blocks to the park across from the post office.  There’s probably a gathering of homeless people putting their mental illness on display right now.  It’s a sight that we, as a culture, have chosen to ignore.  In fiction, we can’t treat it realistically or our realistic portrayals will be likewise ignored.  I would have to take a different approach with the novel.

To be honest, I’d never really considered writing a novel about mental illness or patients in a psych hospital.  I’d certainly never considered writing one in which those patients are a spectacle.  There’s something cruel about that.  Also, it’s been done before.  Cervantes did it so well with Don Quixote that, try as imitators might, it’ll never be matched.  No novel will ever be as popular or influential as Don Quixote has been.  I can only honorably bow to Cervantes, then walk down a different path.

I was thinking about Don Quixote when I wrote Madhouse Fog.  I was teaching Cervantes in one of my lit courses.  And while there is a cruel kind of giggling that occurs when I read about the characters tormenting the delusional don, I recognize that that’s not where the power of the novel comes in.  The real power of Don Quixote is the creeping fear we feel when we’re around a delusional disorder, the fear that the other person might not be the one with the delusions.  And now that we live in such a quixotic world, now that our concept of the world is built so much on fiction, now that we live in an economic system that is propelled by fiction (the fiction that bottled water—tap water from Jersey wrapped in a petroleum by-product—is safe and clean to drink, the fiction that cars are freedom), how can we feel any sense of a non-fictional world?

Exploring those questions was so much more compelling to me than gawking at mental illness would’ve been.

To celebrate the release of my forthcoming novel, I’m posting a series of short pieces about writing the novel.  This series is meant to address the questions people tend to ask me about the writing process, the inspiration behind my novels, and the other writers who’ve influenced me.  Here’s the second one.

My workplace had a lot to do with the setting for Madhouse Fog.  It’s an old madhouse.  Sometimes, it would drive me a little mad.

I actually showed up late for my job interview.  I was on campus with plenty of time.  My interview was scheduled to be in a room in a building called Bell Tower West.  I went to the Bell Tower building and I could tell I was in the right place because I saw the actual bell tower.  I walked around that building for ten minutes trying to figure out why the numbers of the rooms weren’t exactly sequential and why the room number I had for my meeting wasn’t close to the room numbers I was seeing.  I was afraid I’d actually miss the interview.  Luckily, one of the interviewers was running late.  I didn’t know who he was, but I stopped him in the hall and asked for directions.  He introduced himself and walked me to the interview.  I was only a couple of minutes late, but I walked in with my alibi.

At the end of the interview, the woman in charge asked me if I had any questions.  I had the typical responses that I’d learned to ask at all job interviews.  They gave me the typical answers to those questions.  Then, I asked a genuine question.  I said, “If this is a brand new university,” which it was; it had only been in operation for about a year at the time, “why are the buildings so old?  What was this place before it was a university?”

The three-person panel looked at each other and smiled.  They all knew something good and seemed unsure whether or not to share it with me.  Finally, one of them said, “It was a nuthouse.”

I guess I looked too confused, so another interviewer clarified matters for me.  She said, “These are the old grounds for the Camarillo State Mental Hospital.”

I laughed.  It was literally a nuthouse.  I knew I should’ve stayed focused on the interview, but all I could think was, there’s a novel here.

The campus at Channel Islands doesn’t seem like a nuthouse anymore.  It’s largely renovated.  Most of the more bizarre artifacts of the hospital have been torn down and replaced with something else.  Either that, or they’re inaccessible.  During my first few years teaching there, though, the relics of the madhouse surrounded me.

An old bowling alley still sits on campus.  It’s tiny and dusty and only two lanes wide.  You can stand on a bench and squint through a dirty, barred window and barely see the old warped-wood lanes.  They’re gone now, but I seem to remember, years ago, you could still see a few balls hanging around, hard chairs and scoring tables.

Underneath the old administration building which is now the library was the former hospital morgue.  Some students claim that the morgue is still there.  It’s not.  I was on campus the day builders tore down the old administration building.  It was an incredible structure.  Wrecking balls pummeled the roof, and the roof barely gave way.  I had the sense that, untouched, the hospital administration building would have stood on those grounds for centuries.  Maybe the new library will.  It’s pretty well built, too.  Like the old admin building, the new library is a beautiful structure.  I don’t mind tearing one of them down to build the other.  I spend a lot of time over in that library now.  I spent almost no time in the old admin building, mostly because it was always locked and I had no business there.  Supposedly, there were all kinds of crazy rooms in the building.  When the hospital was around, they had their own courtroom where a judge sat to try crimes committed on the grounds.  Apparently, the courtroom went down with the morgue and the rest of the admin building.  The courtroom was in an early version of Madhouse Fog.  It didn’t withstand the wrecking ball of my revisions.

On the day the old administration building came down, I stood next to a woman from personnel.  She started crying.  She told me, “I can’t watch this.”  She kept watching for a few more whacks of the wrecking ball, then said, “I can’t watch this,” again and left.  Part of me empathized; part of me saw the other side of the story.  Sad to see the old admin building go, but this was a university, not a museum.  Life goes on.

There used to be an outdoor stage on campus, too.  A small concert shell.  It was in the north quad.  It stuck around until the summer of 2011, when progress took it down.  I didn’t see it come down.  I don’t know why it did.  I hope for structural reasons.  I hope it was just structurally unsound.  Otherwise, it would’ve been a great place for outdoor performances.  Back around the time when I was writing the first draft of the novel, the student government brought in some manufactured “indie” rock band to play the concert shell.  I don’t remember who they were.  I’m sure I could find out, if I cared enough.

There was also a hallway of murals on campus.  I think that came down with all the recent North Hall renovations.

The coolest artifacts were right around the corner from my office on campus.  When I wrote the first draft of Madhouse, my office was in a building called Malibu Hall.  In its previous life, Malibu Hall was the center of worship on hospital grounds.  To the west of my office was the Protestant chapel.  We still hold events in this room.  It still feels a bit like a church.  Behind my office was the Jewish temple.  That was turned into classrooms for the music department.  I think they still use it for that.  To the east of my office was the old Catholic church.  The Performing Arts program uses this room now for classes and plays.  I saw a play about the Donner Party in the old Catholic church a few semesters back.  Recently, Performing Arts put on a presentation of Cabaret in the old church.  I should’ve gone to savor the irony, but I’m just not a fan of musicals.  In the back of the church were the old confessionals.  They were empty when I started writing Madhouse.  A couple of times, I went over and checked them out, my Catholic childhood itching me like a phantom limb.  Now the confessionals are used as closets for Performing Arts junk.

The confessionals and the courthouse ended up on the chopping block of the novel.  The outdoor stage, the hall of murals, and the bowling alley survived, though I bastardized them.  The things from the old psych hospital days that survived the most in my novel were the stories I heard from old employees.  But that’s a whole other column.

To celebrate the release of my forthcoming novel, I’m posting a series of short pieces about writing the novel.  This series is meant to address the questions people tend to ask me about the writing process, the inspiration behind my novels, and the other writers who’ve influenced me.  Here’s the first one.

I never enjoyed writing like I enjoyed writing Madhouse Fog.  I set it up to be a liberating experience, a novel written mostly for fun, and that’s how that first draft felt.

I started writing it in January of 2007.  It was a time of limbo in my life.  In November of 2006, Manic D Press had agreed to publish Train Wreck Girl.  When I’d talked over publishing schedules with Jennifer at Manic D, we’d decided that the book would come out in the summer of 2008.  It was too late for the book to come out in the summer of 2007, and I could only tour during summers.  So that novel was written, sold, and sitting on ice for a year.  I’d also decided to go back to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D.  All of my applications were submitted.  There was nothing for me to do but wait on those.  My teaching schedule was hectic that semester, as it is every semester, but I didn’t have to be on campus on Mondays or Wednesdays.  Writing on novel on those days seemed like a good idea.

I wanted to do something different, too.  Before I had an idea of what I wanted to do, I had an idea of what I didn’t want to do.  Specifically, there were two things I wanted to avoid.  First, when I wrote Train Wreck Girl, I had an outline.  I had a few of them, actually.  I wrote the bulk of that novel in the summer of 2005 and I followed an outline pretty closely.  In the summer of 2006, I decided that the outline made the ending too predictable and serious changes had to be made.  I wrote a new outline and rewrote the second and third two-thirds of the novel.  When I got to the end this time, it occurred to me that, if I were the main character, I would act differently in that last chapter.  I broke from the outline and did what felt organic.  I thought it strengthened the novel.  I told myself, “That’s it.  No more outlines.”  With Madhouse Fog, I figured I’d take it all the way in that direction.  Not only would I write without an outline, but I’d write without a clear idea of what was supposed to happen.

The second thing I wanted to avoid was writing for an audience.  Any audience.  I’d been writing for Razorcake for six years by then, and for Flipside for five years prior to that.  I’d published hundreds of pieces in punk rock zines.  I felt I knew my audience and wrote in a way that was very much tailored to fit that audience.  There’s something comforting in that.  I didn’t necessarily want to give that up.  I’d keep writing in that style for Razorcake.  I just felt like, with this novel, I wanted to expand beyond that.

At the time, I couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that a gulf existed between the novels I wrote and the novels I loved to read the most.  Then (as now), if I were asked to name my favorite author, I couldn’t do it.  If I were asked to name my favorite two authors, I wouldn’t hesitate.  Haruki Murakami and Thomas Pynchon.  At the time, I’d read everything published by Thomas Pynchon and everything by Murakami that had been translated into English.

I asked myself, what if I could write my own Murakami novel?

Well, first I knew that I couldn’t.  My voice is my voice.  No matter what I think I’m doing when I write fiction, no matter how different I think the main characters are from me, they always talk just like I talk.  I think that’s a good thing.  I like the way I talk.  I’ve spent decades fostering this voice.  I don’t want to lose it.  And, luckily, I couldn’t lose it if I wanted to.  So if I tried to write my own Murakami novel, the first thing I knew was that it would really be a Sean Carswell novel.  Just as Drinks for the Little Guy was supposed to be my rendition of Tortilla Flat and no one picked up on that (except for Bob, the former drummer for the band Tiltwheel); just as Train Wreck Girl was my version of Chester Himes’ A Rage in Harlem and not even Bob picked up on that, this would be my version of Murakami knowing full well that it wasn’t going to be that much like Murakami.

But I also knew a lot about Murakami’s process.  I’d read about him writing his first couple of novels while standing at his kitchen counter after work.  He’d written his third novel, A Wild Sheep Chase, without any sense of where the novel was going.  Reading the first half of that book, it’s clear to me that he’s trying to find his plot and that his unnamed narrator is groping for a story to situate himself in.  I figured I could start there.

I started working on it the week before the semester began, somewhere mid-January, 2007.  I had a clear idea of where I wasn’t going to go with the book, but no clear idea of where I was going to go.  I also had no pressure.  The big events of my life were nestled in the past or waiting for me in the future.  I had this nice little pocket of time that was just for me.

I started typing and hoped it would turn into writing.

There’s a new trailer for my upcoming novel.  You can watch it, then learn how it came about.

The Making of a Trailer

Book trailers are strange beasts.  I’d never done one before.  And, to be honest, a couple of my books are older than the tradition of book trailers.  I wasn’t planning on doing one for Madhouse Fog, but a few things fell into place.

First, I was down at Razorcake HQ one day.  Most people go to the HQ to work.  I go to hang out and make sure no work is getting done.  While I was hanging out, I met a filmmaker named Jennifer Swann.  She was there to do some video editing for the Razorcake YouTube page.  She and I got to talking.  I asked if she’d ever done a book trailer.  She’d never heard of them.  I showed her a couple, then asked if she was interested in making one.  She said, “Sure.”

I wrote the narration and tried to narrate it myself.  It didn’t sound right.  My voice didn’t sound like the voice I’d imagined for the narrator of the novel.  When I wrote the book, I didn’t have anyone’s voice in mind.  I just knew that the narrator didn’t sound like me.  I talked it over with my wife.  She suggested that I rope a friend into doing it.  I did.  I fed my buddy John Guelcher three beers and made him read the same page into a microphone seven or eight times.  I took the best parts from each reading and mixed them into one file.

I’d also been playing music with some friends who live locally.  They were more expensive.  I had to give them both beer and whiskey.  We hung out one Saturday, during which I taught them the song that I wanted them to play, we practiced it, and we recorded it.   Like John’s recording, our recording went through seven or eight takes.  My buddy Doug mixed those eight takes into one solid one.  He added John’s narration on the top.

We gave this all to Jennifer, and she put together the footage.

And so I learned this: if you want to put together a DIY book trailer, you have to have a lot of talented friends who will tilt windmills with you.