Author Archives: Michael Kardos

A Cup-and-a-Half of Tea

Or maybe two cups. But probably not all three. That’s kind of how it’s looking.

Steve Almond, in Wednesday’s The Rumpus, wrote about the controversy blooming over the book Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time. Almond’s essay provided this useful definition of creative nonfiction: “a radically subjective account of events that objectively took place.”

The subjective parts include our powers of observation and interpretation, not the existence of the event itself. Greg Mortenson, the subject of Three Cups of Tea, knows whether or not he was kidnapped. A factual answer exists. But as the program 60 Minutes set out to show last Sunday night, we don’t know it. How much of Three Cups of Tea was fabricated for the sake of making a better story? Were a few details tweaked, or was there wholesale invention? These questions breed further questions: How many schools were actually built? How much of the donated money found its way to those schools? How much money went to Mortenson personally? How much of the money that people donate to build schools ends up being used to support Mortenson’s book tour? These questions aren’t very kind to ask a man who has undoubtedly done a lot of good for a lot of people. Still, the questions are fair to ask. That’s the practical consequence of lying: the people lied to will wonder how deep the lies go.

Almond provides a likely reason for Mortenson’s alleged fictions:

“It wasn’t enough for Mortenson that he tried and failed to climb a tall mountain, then met some villagers and decided to help build some schools for the local children. He had to gin up the truth.

I suspect he set about consciously refurbishing his story, and told himself he was doing so because a better story would bring in more donations for the kids. I’m willing to grant that his motives for lying were, in part, noble.”

I’m willing to grant it, too—but so what? Don’t we all think our causes are noble?

Nicholas Kristof, in Wednesday’s New York Times, published a relatively gentle op-ed piece about the controversy, ending with an even gentler conclusion:

“Greg’s books may or may not have been fictionalized, but there’s nothing imaginary about the way some of his American donors and Afghan villagers were able to put aside their differences and prejudices and cooperate to build schools—and a better world.”

He seems to be saying that the ends justify the means—that Mortenson’s fabrications, if that’s what they turn out to be, serve a greater good. He also seems to be saying that the truth of a person’s statements in print only sort of matter. These are strange points for a journalist to be making.

Here’s how I see it. When you’re telling stories to friends at the bowling alley over a couple of beers, the truth only sort of matters. When you’re accepting tens of thousands of dollars per speaking engagement from universities across the country, fees that result from a demand created wholly by your published fabrications, and when you’re repeating those same fabrications in person as if they are fact, you’re committing fraud.

I’m not holier-than-thou. But here’s the thing: writing is hard. A key challenge of writing nonfiction is dealing with a true story that isn’t as prepackaged as maybe you wish it were, when facts aren’t uniformly compelling or even relevant, when cause and effect seem tenuous, when you haven’t a clue about your own motivations, when there is no obvious climax or resolution. Our “subjective accounts of objective events” are rendered meaningless when the events themselves are intentionally distorted. Mortensen took the easy way out, allegedly, by treating events as subjective, or at the very least malleable. In doing so he might have created a neater story, perhaps a more dramatic story—but he certainly didn’t make a better one. The better story deals with the facts as they are, not as you wish they could be for the sake of the story.

Otherwise, you’re writing fiction.

There are so many nonfiction writers who are meticulous in the ethics of their art and whose books don’t become #1 bestsellers, because their stories aren’t as blatantly dramatic as Mortenson’s. Their books aren’t too good to be true. But how many fake memoirs do we need before it finally dawns on us not only that a story too good to be true probably isn’t true, but also that a story too good to be true tends to be fundamentally reassuring rather than challenging, and therefore isn’t even a very good story?

One final point. Mortenson is everywhere referred to as the book’s author. He isn’t. (I wrote about this topic months ago on this very blog.) Mortenson is the book’s subject, as David Relin’s introduction makes perfectly clear. So it always strikes me as weird when Mortenson is referred to as the author, and weirder that Mortenson so readily accepts this designation. “When I wrote Three Cups of Tea…” he said over and over during his talk I attended last fall. And each time he said it, the writer in me felt slightly belittled. Writing a book isn’t the same as living an experience. Writing a book involves the act of writing.

If Relin deserved credit for writing the book when it was tearing up the bestseller lists, then he deserves some culpability now for writing a work of nonfiction without verifying the story’s most basic facts. True, the story takes place in remote regions that make fact-checking difficult, but come on. He signed on for the gig, and we’re talking basic facts: was Mortenson kidnapped or not? What year did he first go to Korphe? Maybe Relin got duped. Maybe he knew about the alleged distortions and wrote them anyway. If these major points of the book prove to be lies, then regardless of whether Relin was duped or complicit, he—the book’s author—shares the breach of ethics.

Everyone who reads Three Cups of Tea learns the symbolism of the shared butter tea: the first cup means you’re a stranger, the second cup means you’re friends, and the third cup means you’re family. But families too often bury their secrets and lie to protect one another. Sometimes one cup is better. The writer-reader relationship is a bit like two people sharing that first cup of tea, polite strangers whose burgeoning relationship is based entirely on establishing trust.

Michael Kardos (michaelkardos.com) was raised by wolves and speaks eleven languages. He has landed on the moon. Twice. He discovered uranium and the polio vaccine, popularized the expression “Boo-ya,” and wrote the book of stories One Last Good Time, which is wholly fictional and contains absolutely nothing factual whatsoever. It is available at your favorite online bookseller and a few brick-and-mortar ones too. Really.

It's Dorky Day!

April 1^st seems as good a day as any to celebrate Dorky Day, which, it should be known to all—not only to those who’ve read William Kotzwinkle’s 1979 novel The Fan Man or its condensed version, “Horse Badorties Goes Out,” which appeared in Esquire in 1973—is that special day when you walk around saying “dorky dorky dorky” all day long because that’s what The Fan Man’s protagonist, Horse Badorties, does on Dorky Day, just can’t stop saying “dorky” (whether because of too many “Acapulco artichoke hearts” or because of the OCD tendencies or both), in what is one of those wonderful moments in a wonderful (in my view) book, the sort of book that you read and think, “You’re allowed to do that in a novel?”, even if the thing you didn’t know you were allowed to do, had never even considered doing, was to fill up a whole page with nothing but the word “dorky,” like Kotzwinkle does, which is one of the reasons why the man who wrote the novelization of the movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, its book-only sequel E.T. The Book of the Green Planet, and, of course, Walter the Farting Dog, is also the author of one of my all-time favorite novels, a novel with supreme silliness, a kind spirit, and I-can’t-believe-he’s-getting-away-with-this-in-a-novel-ed-ness, like, for instance, its opening paragraph, which reads:

I am all alone in my pad, man, my piled-up-to-the-ceiling-with-junk pad. Piled with sheet music, with piles of garbage bags bursting with rubbish and encrusted frying pans piled on the floor, embedded with unnameable flecks of putrified wretchedness in grease. My pad, man, my own little Lower East Side Horse Badorties pad.

as well as the chapter taking place on Dorky Day, which begins with the following paragraph:

“Dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky…”

this evidence probably being the exact opposite of the evidence I should be supplying to support my claim that Kotzwinkle’s novel about a street bum who becomes maestro to a Love Chorus of fifteen-year-old chicks rises above its gimmicks, if you will (though I won’t), to become something beautiful and beautifully comic and comically weird, one of those novels I find myself passing along to friends who need it, just as a former teacher once passed it along to me—which leads me to my reason for writing this post, which is to ask you to please share a favorite “lost classic” book, one that we probably don’t know about but should, a request I’m making because the sharing of good books is very much in the spirit of Dorky Day, which today happens to be, dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky.

Michael Kardos (michaelkardos.com) is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Good and Bored

My brother-in-law is a kindergarten teacher. He’s one of those guys that kids–all kids–immediately like. Over the winter holidays, he, my sister-in-law, my wife, and I were all hanging out at our house when he said the most interesting thing. In his view, he said, little kids today aren’t bored enough. It’s when kids are bored, he went on, that their imaginations kick into high gear. 

“Think about it,” he said.

So I did. I thought about being a kid, being bored–which sometimes I was–and the games I created to fill the time (three pennies and any solid surface became a baseball game), the stuff I drew (mazes on increasingly large sheets of paper), the business I started (Hot Wheels car repair shop), and the stories I wrote (you don’t want to know).

Does boredom spawn creativity out of necessity? There does seem to be a sort of inventive thinking that comes from having to do nothing, or close to nothing, for an extended period of time. I used to dream up story ideas while driving. I began to rely on highway hypnosis to help me solve problems with whatever story I happened to be working on. Now that I live in a small town and don’t drive nearly as much, I’ve lost what was once fairly reliable access to my unconscious.

I also wonder whether our new ability to keep in touch with others all the time via Facebook/texting/etc. is reducing our periods of boredom and, in the process, our periods of forced creativity. When was the last time you sat around and felt bored without reaching for your phone or going online? Or is that no different from flipping on the TV, an option that’s been around for decades? (Then again, we didn’t carry televisions around with us 24/7.)

And with those questions, I’ll stop writing–lest you get bored.

Michael Kardos (michaelkardos.com) is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

You Won't Find This Post on a Bookshelf

Back in a magical time called the 1990s, there were places called bookstores where you could enter and browse the shelves for books. In the early and mid 90s, years before I ever considered attending graduate school or taking my own writing seriously–when I was a reader, pure and simple–I often rode the New Jersey Transit train between Metuchen and New York Penn Station. There was a used bookstore just a couple of blocks from the Metuchen station, and I would go there beforehand, browsing–taking my time–for a book to read on the train. When I browse my own bookshelves now, I see many of the books I bought there for no other reason than that I liked the title or the blurbs or the first page or two, or because I judged the book by its cover. There is Paul Auster’s novel The Music of Chance (a good book with a bad ending that a somewhat interesting movie somehow improved upon); there is a book comprised of two novellas (novellas!) by Josef Skvorecky called The Bass Saxophone (A musical instrument in the title nearly always grabs me—plus, what the heck is a bass saxophone?); there is Rayond Carver’s book of greatest hits, Where I’m Calling From (I’d remembered that my sister had taken a creative writing class as an undergrad at Duke, and they’d read some Carver, and the endings were supposed to be strange; they either make you say “Wow!” or “Huh?”  and I wanted to see what they made me say.); there is John le Carré’s “The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,” a novel I knew about and thought I’d like, which I did, though not as much as I’d expected to.

Compiling that list, it occurs to me how haphazard my selection process was—which is exactly the beauty of browsing. The matrix of book-browsing with intent to buy includes your mood that day, the weather, the place you bend down to tie your shoe.

Browsing in a bookstore was once a luxury; now it’s a rarity. Book selection for me rarely includes the tactile anymore. The stores aren’t around. I’m busier. There’s a thing called the Internet. I know about more authors and books and am more active about seeking them out. And I have friends who are much better read than I am and who are always ready with suggestions.

The three most recent books I’ve read include:

The Day After The Day After, a memoir by Steven Church
How I found out about it/Why I chose to read it: My friend William Bradley recommended it as one of the best memoirs he’s read in a long time. (A nonfiction writer himself, he reads a lot of them.) Also, it’s about, among other things, filming the made-for-TV nuclear holocaust movie The Day After in his hometown of Lawrence, Kansas.  That movie scared the hell out of me when I was a kid, so I was eager to read about some other kid with that particular pre-teen fear of nuclear-annihilation-before-ever-kissing-a-girl.

The Illumination, a novel by Kevin Brockmeier
How I found out about it/Why I chose to read it: I’d previously read Brockmeier’s novel A Brief History of the Dead and his collection A View From the Seventh Layer. This was a book I specifically sought out upon publication a couple of weeks ago.

The Thin Man, a novel by Dashiell Hammett
How I found out about it/Why I chose to read it: After giving a reading a couple of weeks ago at Freebird Books in Brooklyn (yes, an independent bookstore!) I had the rare opportunity to—you guessed it—browse. I’d read The Maltese Falcon but nothing else by by Hammett, and I had a flight the next morning back to Mississippi…

My question to you, in this largely post-browsing age: What are the last few books you read? How did you come to know about them? Why did you choose to read them?

Michael Kardos (michaelkardos.com) is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.

Who Am I?

Indiana Jones and the Pyramids of Freytag

I’ll confess that the nerd in me (which, admittedly, is nearly all of me) felt a little like Indiana Jones when I unearthed a user-friendly, online translation of Gustav Freytag’s 1863 book Technique of the Drama. I’d long known about the “Freytag Pyramid,” that famed bit of geometry used to explain the shape of much contemporary fiction. I’d known, too, that the original Pyramid as theorized by Freytag had nothing to do with short stories or novels, but rather with Shakespearean tragedies. So it was with Dr. Jones’s blend of inquisitiveness and trepidation that I began to read Freytag’s work. There were no snakes! No giant boulders! In fact, I found Freytag to be lucid and inviting, and his work did, as advertised, seem awfully relevant to the structure of fiction. No wonder we stole his Pyramid.

I’ve always been drawn to structure. This might be partly my own insecurity. The blank page—or computer screen—is daunting. Structure for me is like a life preserver, something to cling to. And while I certainly don’t think about all of the stories I write in terms of rising action, climax, and denouement, I do sometimes think about them in those terms. If a draft of a story feels flat, it’s worth asking myself if it has a climactic scene, for example. And if not, why not. Does it not need one? Am I doing something subversive or risky? Or am I simply avoiding writing the climax of my story because I know it will be hard?

I was heartened to hear, back when I was in graduate school, Michael Chabon talking about the creation of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. I’d always thought of that novel as, among other things, a clever retelling of The Great Gatsby. Chabon explained to the group of us that he did look to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby while figuring out his characters and narrative approach, but also, importantly, its form. Both novels take place over the summer months of June, July, and August, and this three-month structure contributes to their narrative balance and elegance.

This shape just happens to resemble the traditional three-act structure of many, many films and is explained in great detail by screenplay instructor—and, to be fair, theorist—Syd Field in his book The Screenwriter’s Workbook and others. It’s worth noting that the “disaster” at the end of the second act of a screenplay feels nearly synonymous to the “crisis” in the adapted Freytag Pyramid, the one we talk about when discussing short stories.

All of which is to say that I like thinking about structure when I work on my fiction. I find that when I pay conscious attention to structure, my writing paradoxically becomes freer. Nothing is more structured than a sonnet; yet think of all the sonnets that have been written, how different they are from one another. That, to me, is what an elegant structure can do: provide a solid foundation to minimize the chance that the thing we work so hard on won’t come crumbling down on our heads with the gentlest breeze.

So here’s what I want to know: at what point in the writing process, if at all, do you consider structure? Are you a planner, or do you go primarily by feel, or something else? Also, do you have a favorite story or novel, structurally speaking?

Michael Kardos is the author of the story collection One Last Good Time. While earning his Ph.D. at the University of Missouri, he served as Contest Editor for The Missouri Review. He currently co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University. His website is michaelkardos.com.