When a novel begins to be read fairly widely, its author’s anxieties surface. How will the book be perceived? Will one motif peg the book in a category that isn’t quite accurate or intended? My biggest anxiety about The Navigator has always been that its arching theme of war and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) would dominate a breathless modern thriller centered on finance and politics.
I went to ThrillerFest VIII a couple of weeks ago. My first writers conference, it had the feel of a terrific Manhattan reunion with old friends, most of whom, in reality, I’d just met for the first time. Thriller writers experienced and novice, small press and big, famous and obscure, bestsellers and barely-sellers. A marvelous equanimity prevailed with a graciousness that, although certainly not devoid of ego, was open and refreshing. Authors shared every idea, no holdback. I was there because I was asked to be on a panel. Another arrival moment.
My panel was “Are You Combat Ready?” Understand, combat readiness means something different to me as an old Navy pilot than it does to me as a creative writer. The point of this panel was to instruct novelists how to use combat in their writing—combat considered in its broadest definition, including not only war, but also police work, shootouts, hand-to-hand fights, firearms, and all manner of other weapons.
I went with the core concept, real war. I offered seven guidelines for writing about combat in fiction. Here’s what I said.
Don’t you dare glorify combat. There’s a trend in thriller fiction to portray combat as glorious, romantic, desirable, adventurous, noble, provocative, and enhancing to characters’ moral well-being. All of this is bullshit. Using combat this way in your writing not only de-credentializes war’s effects, it encourages and feeds the beast. As writers we have a societal responsibility to show war the way it is: ugly, the harshest undesirable in the human experience, and with the greatest cost. The best war fiction is always anti-war fiction.
Tell the gory truth and its emotional consequences. Verisimilitude is required. Combat is overwhelmingly confusion. People screw up. Sometimes they screw up a lot. Good men and women die and come out of combat un-whole in so many ways. So do civilians. Participants in combat take actions that have consequences they live with for the rest of their lives. Survivor guilt is very real.
Fear has multiple axes of discontinuity. There’s a shooting scene in The Navigator where two of my characters come under fire. It’s told in the point of view of one of them while it’s happening. Time slows down and the narrative becomes slightly surrealist. He doesn’t realize that something he thought was just a thought is something that he said. It’s as though everything in the wide span of experience is ratcheting, discontinuous, skipping, with technical difficulties. Driven by fear.
Once you’ve been to Hell, you get to make and live by your own rules. Combat liberates characters in fiction because it changes and unburdens their lives otherwise constrained. Men especially sometimes live loud after becoming combat veterans, which is particularly good for the thriller form. The way your characters walk among the non-combatants can be energized by their surviving the worst of life, and their pain can open up your creativity and expansive imagination. Use this dynamic wisely, because only the combat experienced understand it most intimately.
Behavior before combat is no predictor. Setups, character development, and signaling are all crucial to good thriller writing. They are dangerous and often wrong when dealing with combat. Nobody knows how he is going to react in combat until he gets there. Until it happens. Thrillers use dramatic irony, where the reader and the dispassionate narrator know things that the character in the middle of it all does not. Combat in fiction is all about surprise, the unexpected, the profane intruding.
The effects of combat are much more interesting. Combat itself, combat qua combat, is fairly worthless in fiction. The best combat fiction is about the effects of war, its consequences on lives and in society. All of the war in The Navigator, its Prologue, is 1,900 words. And even that occurs after the shooting has stopped. However, what happens there takes on a meaning pervading and driving people’s lives during the next six decades. This is the way human experience works. The best fiction reflects that dynamic.
There is no moral equivalent of war. The phrase “moral equivalent of war” comes from a 1910 essay by William James, after a lecture he gave at Stanford University in 1906. The concept as James described it is almost always used wrongly or out of context, and almost never by people who know the essay, a pacifist manifesto that I don’t agree with but profoundly respect. “History,” James observes, “is a bath of blood.” “Squalid war” becomes reality. As writers we need to understand our role in preventing that reality. Combat belongs in our work. But only as tragedy.
