“And when that time comes, we are there to help. We are there to help them from our heads & our 
s.”
CLEAN [Bud]
The Art of Fiction, Part One
Steve
Martin had a new book out; a bad bug forced Joyce Carol Oates to cancel her interview with him at the Central Library in LA. Oates had recently compared him to Edith Wharton, and Steve was looking forward to the Q&A.
JCO was one of those writers Bud was certain he would never read yet perversely enjoyed reading about. Everyone knew she had written a thousand books; a slow reader to begin with, Bud just couldn’t see the point. Besides, he hadn’t even read all of Dickens, and Dickens was in his Top Five. (It took a full 40 years for Bud to admit to himself that he would never — never, ever — read Proust. Capote supposedly never did either.) Still, he drew ironic comfort from the Believe-it-or-Not! aspect of Ms Oates’s tsunami œuvre, & the trademark shtick pathology behind its creation. Which was somewhat of a shame (Bud thought charitably) because it wasn’t so much the books that were being reviewed anymore, as it was the Brobdingnagian output. Every writer deserved a fair shake, yet he supposed the mother of so many oaters only had herself to blame. JCO often wrote under pseudonyms; you couldn’t keep up with her nom de spew’ems either. Maybe that was sort of the whole point — staying ahead of your readers and critics. It was better than staying behind them, which is what Bud Wiggins had done.
. .
He was turning 60 this year. A screenwriter since his mid-20s, Bud had a sole “written by” to his name, a co-credit (one of four others) on a forgotten horror film of the late 80s. When he turned 55, out of desperation, Bud took an early retirement, allowing him to collect a pension of $1,140 a month. The beauty was that WGA rules allowed him to continue to work, without being penalized. In fact, any income received post-pension would automatically be applied to a second retirement, collectible when he turned 65. The problem was, he was virtually unemployable. Until he found a job, he would have to keep living with his mother in the below-Wilshire apartment he grew up in as a boy. Dolly had lived there since the divorce, practically since Kennedy was shot (when the rent was $235 a month). Her husband Morris — Bud’s father — killed himself back in ’77.
A few years ago, with the help of a therapist, Bud Wiggins arrived at the mature, painful conclusion that he lacked talent as a screenwriter. He’d been given so many chances to soar yet each time fell to earth. And now, through an uncertain alchemy, he transformed defeat into liberation — the liberation that came with admitting he was finished, done, his sojourn in the Business was over. Of late, mortality was very much on his mind. Just how did he want to spend the years he had left? He decided at last to try his hand at what he felt he’d been put on earth to do — novel writing. Bud smiled to himself at the inept timing of his strategem: fiction was becoming a dead thing before his & the world’s eyes, a faster death than anyone had imagined or been prepared for. But what could he do? You can’t fight the feeling.
It used to be a cliché that actor-waiters, CPAs and dentists were all working on screenplays; then came the old joke “… but what I really want to do is to direct.” Now it seemed that no one cared about writing scripts or directing. They only wanted to be novelists.
Novels were the new screenplays.
. .
Truman Capote was such a fan that he famously declared Joyce Carol Oates to be “a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium.”* Bud wasn’t as opinionated. He did like the idea of writers whose work, either paraphrased or quoted, existed only in reviews; it had a Borgesian (Bolañoesque?) ring. Maybe he’d try his hand at a short metafiction with that theme.