Fletch Would Have Wanted it This Way

by Jane Doe

Gregory McDonald, author of the Fletch detective novels, passed away on Sunday at the age of 71. And I tip my invisible L.A. Lakers cap in his honor...

Because his Fletch once helped me horrify my creative writing professor.

It was college in the early 90s, and in my fleeting spare time, I greedily devoured the Fletch series like ramen noodles. Gregory McDonald's style was one I hadn't seen in mystery stories before-- bare bones, crisp narrative, plot twists like pretzels, and dialogue so sharp you could shave your legs with it.

By my junior year of college, I'd read most of the books-- a pleasant respite from the literary and cultural theory that was currently trendy in my classes.

The professors we had then preached largely the same post-modernist ideas. That authorial intent didn't matter; it was what the reader brought to the text that counted. It was the reader's perceptions and interpretation of the content that ultimately "wrote" the final story. Not the author's brain or passion or sweat or scenes planned out on 3X5 index cards.

As a fledgling writer, I found that view fairly depressing. With a crushing courseload and my mother unwell back home, writing was one of the few things I'd thought I could control in my life.

Also, to say you wanted to write mysteries or humor for a living... well, you might as well have come to class with a serious case of leprosy and tried to shake hands.

We were supposed to be Digging Deep. Resolving Traumatic Conflict. Suffering for our Art. And tapping into the Inner Angst As Related To the Human Condition Which Also Coincidentally Wins Literature Prizes.

If we didn't have Inner Angst to tap into? We could rent some cheap from the local coffeehouse. The grittier, less likable and more non-conformist the better.

Soon the class was filled with gritty, unlikeable non-conformists all making their Inner Angst outer. Which is challenging when the greatest grit most of us had experienced in life was the questionable clean of the dorm bathroom.

Me, I just wanted to write what made me happy.

Year after year, Ernest Hemingway was held aloft to us as the writer we should all aspire to be. Many a semester, we read "Hills Like White Elephants," a sparsely-written short story where characters speak in near-riddles, and nothing appears to happen but we know it does because we're graded on it.

And in no time at all, most of the class had evolved to become cryptic, gritty, unlikeable non-conformists.

Students who wanted to keep up their QPAs just needed to learn how to Not Conform along with the other kids.

Bull-fighting scenes were optional.

Unfortunately, I was terrible at Not Conforming as part of a group, particularly when it involved delving into my dark, seedy emotional turmoil I didn't have. In retrospect, I should have just written something so obscure even I didn't know what it meant. But I never thought of that-- I was too inspired by all the wrong things.

Gregory McDonald had helped me detect a passion for punchy dialogue... Jean Shepherd stoked the fires for childhood nostalgia.... And Douglas Adams had shown me where my towel was. There was no going back.

So I wrote a simple humor tale about a kid forced to go camping with his family and...

I had to see my professor for review.

Carrie, as we'll call her, was a doe-eyed grad student who earned her teaching position because of a Literary Award she'd won and probably-almost-certainly-not-because-in-part she was dating the head of the creative writing department.

She blinked those doe eyes at me as she said she wanted to talk about my work. And I remember, in this interview, she asked me a number of very important questions.

"Where is the story here?"...

"What does the character truly want?"...

"Where is the crux of the conflict?"...

I can tell you right now that "not wanting to go camping" was not the right answer to these questions.

Suddenly, she was explaining to me that my "real story" here was not about going to camp at all, but about the difficult interpersonal relationships between my main character and his mother...

And that this story could be "better realized" if it took place before the camping. So the camping scene needed to be removed and--

"Er, the whole story pretty much is a camping scene," I reminded her.

"Right, that'll have to be cut. Also, your use of language really needs to be thinned out. Have you ever read Hemingway? Because his style is perfect for--"

And that's when I sort of lost it. I had a head cold, I was losing my voice, and my Maximum Hemingway Threshold had been exceeded.

"If I'm going to read writing with thinned out language," I rasped, "I'd much rather read Gregory McDonald's Fletch books!" I proclaimed, thinking I was taking some sort of grand stance for genre writers everywhere.

Leprous hand? Extended! And poke... poke... poke.

Oh, the look on her face... Munch's "The Scream" shows greater composure. Her jaw dropped, the doe-eyes were in headlights. I could hear her brain whirring as it tried to process what I'd just said, and who the heck Gregory McDonald was.

In fact, if I'd been Fletch myself, I wouldn't have gotten any better reaction.

Of course, if I'd been Fletch, I also would have been wearing a rubber nose, novelty teeth and enjoying classes using the name "Emma Dickinson-Bronte." My whole tuition would have been charged to the Underhills' bill, and I would have left this little tete-a-tete through the window.

But still... It was a strangely satisfying moment. Less satisfying was the "B-" I received for the course-- in retrospect, the logical reaction to my blasphemous outburst.

And my rewrite? It contained 100% manufactured post-modernist literary angst, and zero nostalgic camping.

She liked the story well enough.

I hated it.

I spent that summer vacation trying to figure out who I was, and whether I really wanted to write at all ever again. I wasn't faring well being Ernest Hemingway.

Years later, the 90s post-modernist movement faded significantly. Gone the way of harem pants and Milli Vanilli.

But it was bound to happen, wasn't it? After turning out 30 Ernest Hemingways per creative writing class, publishers eventually must have been up to their matador hats in cryptic, unlikable non-conformists.

So today, while I think I would have approached the whole class differently, I thank Gregory McDonald for giving me the courage to step up for the genre crowd. Trends are fleeting, but character isn't.

Sometimes you might wear a rubber nose and novelty teeth for a while... but under it all, you still have to be you.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Vote for Of Cabbages and Kings at Humor-blogs.com. Or check out Humorbloggers.com and see how many people can quote the Fletch movies scene-by-scene.