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Ok, it’s just Day Two of this Self-Pity Blog and it’s already getting scary. I’m still trying to assemble all my notes and I discover there’s already an Amazon page! And a Facebook page! Guess I better get to work.

SO here’s the situation: My wonderful agents, Gail Ross and Howard Yoon, hooked me up with a bright, literate, absurdly knowledgeable former oil rig captain named John Konrad. John was personally connected to a lot of the people who were on the Deepwater Horizon on April 20 when a well 18,000 feet below the surface blew out, killing 11 of the rig’s crew and eventually destroying and sinking the rig, resulting in the worst oil spill, by far, in U.S. history. John and I spent a couple of weeks on Skype together cooking up a 15,000-word proposal for a book that would be a non-fiction suspense narrative that placed the disaster in the full context of the essential, little understood culture of offshore oil exploration. We ended up with HarperCollins editor David Hirshey, a writer himself and the man behind the great Esquire Dubious Achievement Awards in the 1980s. The book’s working title is “Fire on the Horizon” and it’s already got a mention in a New York Times roundup of upcoming blowout books. That’s the good news. Bad news: the book needs to be written — and edited — by Nov. 1. That’s why I’d hung a “Gone Writin'” sign on this blog. But Weingarten persuaded me that I ought blog about the process of reporting and writing such a big project on such a small deadline. “Just write a snippet a day.” he said. The first snippet begins now.

71 Days Until They Rip This Book Out of My Virtual Typewriter

When I close out this blog item, I am going to begin to address the 50,000 words of notes that I’ve strung together  for what amounts to the middle sections of the book. I’ve been looking into all the stuff I’ve amassed, and when anything related to a specific point in time — from the moment the Deepwater Horizon began its life in the shipyards of South Korea to the moment the well was finally capped after spewing millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf for three months — I’ve put it into the appropriate spot on a timeline. Now I’m going to begin to go through that material and try to shape it into narrative.

I’m not really sure how that will go, or if it will end up retaining the shape I’ll give it. But when you have so much to work through on such a tight schedule, you don’t have the luxury of waiting until you know exactly what you’re doing before you begin doing it. In other words, Nike was right.

I feel guilty in advance that I will not be posting many (or any) blog items in the next few months. I’ve signed a book contract with an insane deadline. So if you can spare a thought for me between now and Christmas, imagine me hunkered down over my laptop, my wife approaching from time to time to wipe the sweat from my brow with a limp rag and whisper words of encouragement. Wish me luck.

I’ve been getting a lot of rave comments on my blog posts recently. Consider this one I got today: “Congratulations for that marvelous blog post! I found your post very interesting, I think you are a great author. I will make sure to bookmark your blog and will come back quite soon to your blog. Keep up your brilliant work, I hope you will have a great day!”

But that wasn’t all. There were dozens very similar in theme. They all just loved my blog posts. Loved them! They definitely were going to return to my site and/or bookmark the page! They hoped I would continue the excellent work!

Odd, I thought, that none of them actually mentioned the subject of the blog they were raving about. And then there were some that, though they really were trying to be complimentary, got a little tongue-tied. Maybe they found my rare gift for expression a little intimidating, and who can blame them? Consider the sweet intent of this poster, who was clearly overcome with awe: “thanks to your ideas , i¡¯d adore to adhere to your weblog as usually as i can.possess a good day.”

Just reading that put me in possession of a very good day indeed!

Until, I noticed something odd. All these comments were posted by people with screen names such as “moviesforfree” or “Viagranoquestionsasked” or “healthandskinnyfast!”

Ok. Now I get it. Really quite clever: To a spammer, everything is just another opportunity to throw trash on someone’s lawn, to scatter their message like a maple tree scatters its annoying tons of helicopter seeds. Comments on websites were just another free billboard.

Here’s the clever part: To avoid spam, most bloggers have to approve comments before they go up on the site. So instead of sending a comment that says, “Get Viagra through the internet at discount rates!” — obvious spam, wouldn’t be approved — they imbed their true message in their return address, send some automated rave about the blog, then sit back and let the ego of the blogger do the rest.

(Of course in some cases, being from, say, Nigeria, they first must run their generic compliment through an online translator, which accounts for my possession of a good day.)

From now on, I think I’ll check my spam filter as usually as I can.

The third Post Hunt was unleashed on the unsuspecting (and in some cases, very suspect) masses Sunday. It was the biggest crowd for any Hunt ever — we guess around 12,000.  Gene Weingarten, Dave Barry and I have done some uncountable number of these, originally in Miami, and now both in Washington and Miami. You can go here to get the full explainer and here for our recent chat about it, but basically we invent a series of absurdo-comic puzzles and interweave them with the landscape of downtown (in this case) DC. Each time we meet to begin planning, months in advance of the eventual event (eventual event!), we initially are overwhelmed by the feeling that we’ve already come up with every possible puzzle scheme and can’t possibly think of anything new. It is a sad true fact that once Dave and I spent at least an hour coming up with a puzzle idea in great detail before we suddenly had an uncomfortable feeling. We googled our own idea and yikes!, we had come up with the exact thing years earlier.

But eventually, after blank hours in which the height of our creativity involves finding new ways to make fun of each other, we begin to hit on some concepts — ” ‘cepts” as they’re known in the trade. These are far from completed puzzle ideas; rather they are pieces of mechanism, a spring or trigger or lever around which an eventual puzzle can be created. The trigger idea could be anything. For instance, it could begin with this from one of us: “We should think of a puzzle where the key to the solution was the way something tasted.”

So that would be the beginning — just a thread we could pull on until the fabric of the universe would begin to unravel a bit. The beauty of it is once we have some very simple core idea, however undeveloped, each bit of progression toward a complete puzzle is a straightforward exercise in problem solving. The issues are largely practical and technical, as opposed to anything requiring creative genius.

The taste example is a real puzzle from the 2008 Hunt in DC’s Penn Quarter, which included Chinatown. Looking at its formulation  demonstrates how what in the aggregate might appear to be a great leap of imagination is in fact something which grows step by pragmatic step. In this, it has been a powerful lesson to me that applies to all sorts of creative thinking, and in particular, to plotting in fiction or screenplays.

Going back to the beginning: Because of where we were standing when we came up with the idea of a “taste” puzzle, in plain view of the Chinatown arch, we naturally went to . . . fortune cookies. Right away, we knew they’d be perfect because of the usual nondescript taste. Any distinct flavor would stand out clearly.

Just as quickly, the technical problems emerged: could we actually find someone who could affordably mass-produce, say, blueberry-flavored fortune cookies? And if they could, could it be done so the cookie itself would look identical to the usual? Blue fortune cookies wouldn’t do.

And then, a strategic rather than tactical issue: Once we had odd-tasting cookies that looked like normal ones, we had to determine how we could cleverly relate that to a number — necessary because all solutions to Hunt puzzles are numbers.

The obvious solution: Fortune cookies have fortunes. We could insert fortunes that had a list of words, each with an associated number. One of the words could be blueberry.

But that would be too easy, too obvious. It would destroy what we liked about the taste element: people would not be looking for a normal appearing fortune cookie to have a novel taste. They’d have to get that, contrary to their expectation. Anything ham-handedly drew attention to the idea of flavor — ie: blueberry on a list of words — would destroy the stealth aspect of the puzzle that initially appealed to us.

So how could we use the idea of flavor for a puzzle without ever drawing attention to it in any direct way?

Well, we still had the mechanism of a fortune inside the cookie. But we had to use the fortune to focus the Hunters’ attention AWAY from the cookie, and away from the issue of flavor.

So, the next step in our pragmatic chain: The fortune could refer to some element completely unrelated to the fortune cookie, something in the Hunt magazine.

One of us came up with the idea of: Movie Titles. There were movies that subtly incorporated flavor words. Clockwork Orange, for instance. Woody Allen’s Bananas. The Marx Brothers in Coconuts.

But how does that get a number?

The movie times listed in movie listings are, very conveniently, numbers.

Somehow the fortune could direct you to a listing of movie times in the magazine, and the flavor of the cookie would tell you WHICH movie time was the answer.

Still, we needed it to be subtle. The fortune couldn’t just be: See page 23.  That would be lame and again, destroy the appeal of the puzzle.  So we thought about fortunes, and the way so many of them had a fortune on the front, and something else on the back of the little slip of paper.

“Learn Chinese!” many of them say, then present a Chinese character with a translation.  What if the Chinese character was simply the Mandarin word for “cinema”? Hunters studying the fortune slip minutely, who had been warned to look at everything in the magazine as a potential clue, would eventually make the connection between the Learn Chinese! vocab word, and an ad for a fictional downtown art cinema with a list of flavor-word related movies.

Our puzzle was nearly complete, but then we got a sample box of our altered cookies. Coconut was colorless and available, but the taste was fairly subtle. Which was good, and bad. Good because people would have to really pay attention to recognize it, and then the force of revelation would be all that much more satisfying. Bad because maybe it wouldn’t be fair to expect people to notice the taste out of the blue.

We still had the fortune itself — we hadn’t used the actual little homily familiar to all. If it could sound like a typical fortune, but somehow reference flavor, we’d be in business .

Then it just appeared, as if by magic: “He who has discerning taste will know success.”

Easy as coconut pie.

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Stieg Larsson is the universe’s hottest author at the moment. His three-novel series that began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has become a kind of Harry Potter phenomenon for adults. Larsson died at 50, before any of the novels were published. But he told friends he knew his books were going to make millions. They laughed at him, of course. Even the greatest writer ever born would be a fool for being so certain of financial success. But according to some who knew him well, Larsson wasn’t a great writer, not even a good one.  Consider this compelling testimony in the Times today:

Anders Hellberg, who was Larsson’s colleague in the late 1970s and early ’80s, goes even further and claims that someone else must be behind the Millennium books: Larsson himself was simply not good enough a writer. Larsson worked then as a graphic designer for Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, or T.T., a Stockholm news agency that is the Swedish equivalent of The Associated Press. He occasionally wrote longer pieces for T.T., as well as captions, and would ask for advice about his writing. “It was not good; it was impossible,” Hellberg, now a journalist at Dagens Nyheter, the largest and best of Sweden’s several morning papers, told me. “Every professional writer knows these things: you look at a text, and you can see this is terrible. Some texts are a little messy, but you can work them out; but here nothing was good — not the syntax, the way of putting things, nothing.”

I know exactly what Hellberg means. As a professional writer, you can spot raw talent, even when cloaked in a trash heap of awkwardness and lack of experience. But it’s even easier to spot NO talent. It just leaps out at you. Imagine a concert musician listening to your Uncle Charley playing chopsticks on the living room piano. There’s just no mystery there.

But . . . I have seen people who were beautiful, even famous, fiction writers turn around and write stiff, soulless and downright stinko non-fiction pieces. I always assumed the explanation was that they were used to having any detail they could imagine in their fictive paint box. But when they sat down to write non-fiction, they were blindsided by the sudden lack of source material. They had no idea how to go out and research-report a subject thoroughly enough to replace the kind of information they could simply call up out of inspiration when writing fiction. As a result, they were firing blanks in non-fiction, and their entire writing machinery broke down for the lack.

So it’s possible it can work the other way: someone who was never any good at writing journalism is transformed when he’s no longer limited by the facts. At least that’s what I’m going to believe, because thinking that there’s some secret author out there using Larsson as a beard is way too Shakespeare vs. the Earl of Oxford for my tastes.

Good reviews are always nice, but the most gratifying reviews not only praise, but make it clear that a professional reader has found in your work exactly what you had worked so hard to put in to it. That’s what this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review does for Scott Higham’s and Sari Horwitz’s “Finding Chandra.”

When we began to shape the manuscript last spring, we knew that the biggest challenge we faced was the fact that our story had already played out twice, first in the media frenzy surrounding the case in the spring and summer of 2001, and then in the multi-part newspaper series on which the book was based. But I knew we still had an opportunity to make it seem new. So often when the parts of a story are dissected and minced under a microscope, everyone loses sight of the big picture, the context in which the parts belong, and make sense. Plus, Scott and Sari had some fabulous new reporting that got at the underlying forces which made of this sad case a tragic farce. We spent a lot of time and energy figuring out how to create suspense in a story of which the outline was so well known.

So it was especially gratifying to see the review Sunday, especially the following excerpt:

“[Finding Chandra] builds suspense through the careful articulation of the things that the police and the media botched, and through the revelation of how various players in the case had a hand in their own undoing. It’s an impressive feat of reporting and storytelling, full of the kind of plot elements that seem unbelievable and are made all the more engrossing because they’re true.”

As

So a reporter is interviewing a Thai general, who is shot right before his eyes, and THIS is what he writes? Back in the day, we coined a word for this bizarre phenomenon, when a reporter who personally experienced some dramatic, even traumatic event, proceeds to write his story as if he were piecing it together from sketchy third-hand reports. We called it “foreign correspondent’s disease.” And we meant no disrespect. It’s just that reporters who race around from war to disaster  are used to spreading themselves so thin over the Hindu Kush-es of the world, covering such volumes of human calamity on very short deadlines, that they tend to write as if by telegraph. Leaving themselves out of it is a kind of code of honor, to a fault.

Sure, first-personism can be abused and way overdone, but maybe we can settle on at least this modest formulation: If you happen to be an eyewitness to history, try not to shut your eyes.

Story Surgeons’ first editing project to hit the book shelves is now out: Finding Chandra, by Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz , has already garnered some excellent early reviews, and it’s about to get a good dose of national attention. Serialized in The Washington Post already, the book on the strange and terrible saga of the Chandra Levy murder case is headed for some of the big morning shows and People magazine, among other things. Scott and Sari are such pros, and great to work with. We did it mostly over g-mail and the phone, but we finished up in an all day session on my back porch last fall, all three laptops plugged into an extension cord that ran out my back door, as we wrote the last chapter together over coffee and scones. It will be what I always remember when I look at the book on my shelf. The climax to the day came when the last few paragraphs of the book materialized unexpectedly. Sari mentioned that the last time she’d visited Chandra’s mom, Susan Levy revealed she STILL believed Gary Condit was involved in the crime, despite the arrest of an immigrant drifter. As Sari described that interview, she mentioned something that happened that absolutely screamed out: “SURPRISE ENDING.” I won’t describe what it was here, because I don’t want to spoil it, but when I heard Sari’s account, I practically shouted, “Put that in!”

They did, and you ought to check it out. The whole book reads like a great suspense thriller/psychological drama. Often when you are working on draft after draft of a long project, it can get to be something of  a chore reading through one more time. But with this project, every time I went through it I was almost shocked at how quickly it read. In the end, they made the writing seem effortless, and that’s how it is to read.

It’s a well-known writerly fact that the prime driver of reader interest is conflict. My college writing professor always used to say that if you wrote about an old man who needed absolutely nothing more than a porch and a sturdy rocking chair, everyone was bored. But if the only thing that old man really needed beside the rocker and a porch was an old woman who just couldn’t stand to see him sitting there rocking all day, then you had something.

But conflicts are such a useful tool because they are, by nature, dynamic. They are the itch no one can keep from scratching. And the more we scratch, the bigger the itch gets. And it doesn’t just get itchier, it MUTATES!

Consider a real-life situation.  I take my dog for a walk through the neighborhood. As I wind down a long street toward the cul-de-sac, I see a woman frantically waving her arms and yelling something I can’t quite make out. I walk a little closer until I can see her desperately holding onto a leash, a feverish dog tugging at the other end. And now I can hear her. She’s saying over and over: “Get away! I can’t control the dog!”

So even though it breaks my dog’s heart, I pull her up short and drag her back home before she’s completed her appointed rounds.

A few days later, same walk, same woman. Once again she’s waving her arms and screeching for me to get away. Again I pull my dog up short. But this time I’m angry. What does she mean she can’t control her dog? If she can’t control her dog, what’s she doing walking around the neighborhood with it? She expects to just lurch down the street and have everyone flee before her?

I make up my mind that the next time I run into the woman with the runaway dog I’ll say something. I rehearse it in my mind. “Look, lady, if you can’t control your dog you shouldn’t be walking it around the neigborhood.”

A smallish, every day conflict, the kind life is rife with. So as a writer, how do you leverage the situation, mutate it into some unexpected direction?

Philip Roth wrote in the voice of his fictional alter-ego, novelist Nathan Zuckerman, a lament that has always reverberated in my mind: “If only I could invent as presumptuously as real life! If one day I could just approach the originality and excitement of what really goes on! ”

What is the human imagination, in other words, in comparison to God’s imagination?

Back to our story. A few days later I’m coming down toward the cul-de-sac and there is the out-of-control lady again. She starts the usual screaming, the hand waving. This time I keep coming, trying to get close enough to deliver my message. “Look lady,” I begin. But she just screams more frantically. “I have a bad arm!” she shouts. “I can’t control the dog!”

“Then you shouldn’t be . . . ” Before I can get the whole sentence out, the dog lurches, the woman yelps and pitches forward on the swale. The dog is snarling, furious, churning its legs and dragging the woman and her bad arm along the ground.