Writing & Craft

Ten years of blogging: Writer’s block

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John Turturro in Barton Fink

Previously: An all-too-familiar utopia

From a novel-writing perspective, 2018 and 2019 was a creative interregnum. After publishing Hagar’s Mother in late 2017, I found myself juggling energy between two books. One was the third installment of the Bridge Daughter series, the other a futuristic detective novel where society has essentially become a giant social media simulation. While working on the former, 2018 fizzled away with a fearful lack of progress. As 2019 marched on, a slow panic developed inside me. Would I burn off a second year with nothing to show for it?

I learned a hard lesson: Writer’s block is real. Before this, I’d read articles by well-known writers who either denied it existed, or called it a semi-phony condition covering for laziness. The cure for supposed writer’s block, they explained, was to turn off your Internet, silence your phone, and write.

The early chapters of the Bridge Daughter sequel emerged in fits and spurts. Like a teenager learning how to drive a stick shift, I couldn’t find second gear and launch the story forward. Eventually I admitted that I’d hit something like writer’s block. I recalled what the Coen Brothers did when they were blocked developing Miller’s Crossing: They wrote a movie about writer’s block, Barton Fink.

While I didn’t go that meta, I used the problem to pivot to my science-fiction detective novel. Encouragingly, I was far more productive. It was also a much longer story. As a tightly-wound mystery, it was vital the chronologies of the different characters matched up, as story events were occurring in the background that the detective only learned about later. This required a fair amount of revision to clean up and synchronize.

The pivot did unblock me, and in a big way. During a stay in Tokyo at the end of 2019, I finished the remainder of the third Bridge Daughter book over a six-week sprint. Unlike the grind of the detective novel, Stranger Son spilled forth all at once. It and In My Memory Locked were published in 2020.

Photo of cappuccino with leaves drawn in the foam
Cappucino by Scott Rocher (CC-BY-NC 2.0)

The other writing outlet I used over 2019 to break my writer’s block was this blog. It’s no surprise my focus that year would be on the writing process itself. I blogged about keeping a writing notebook on your phone, story revision, story structure, and even on (bad) cover letters. Basically, any problem I faced while writing, I at least attempted to compose a post about it. (Most were never published, trapped forever in my blog software’s Drafts folder.)

So desperate to write anything to keep the blood flowing, I even wrote about writing in cafes. It couldn’t have been more flagrant: Sitting in a cafe, desperate to jump-start the creative engine, I started writing about what I saw around me. What began as a lark grew into a lengthy diatribe on the different cafes I’d written in over the decades, and the varieties of cafe patrons and owners I’ve had to put up with.

The cafe I wrote that post in was near-perfect for my writing habit. Plenty of seating, open late, electrical outlets, free Wi-Fi, good drinks, good food, reasonable prices, a cozy college student vibe—and a mere one block from my apartment. That’s why at the end of the post I didn’t reveal its name. I feared it would be discovered and ruined.

Well, not long after posting, the cafe changed owners. One by one, the wonderful perks disappeared, prices crept upwards, and hours were reduced. By the end of 2019, I was on the hunt for a new cafe.

A few months later, my preference for writing in public spaces would become a very distant problem.

A quarter-century writing in cafes


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Ten years of blogging: An all-too-familiar utopia

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Rod Serling, 1959.
Rod Serling, 1959. Serling penned the early drafts of the script for the Planet of the Apes film.

Previously: A literary eulogy
Next: Writer’s block

Earlier when I’ve paged through my past blog posts to locate my favorite for a particular year, one usually jumped out at me. For 2018, I find myself torn between two favorites. The tiebreaker in a case like this is: Do I have anything more to say on the subject?

On one hand is my write-up of Cat’s Cradle, a book I’ve adored and been fascinated with since I was young. I could easily write another 5,000 words on the many dimensions and subtleties of Vonnegut’s greatest work—yes, even greater than Slaughterhouse-Five. For the purposes of this series (a look back on my favorite posts over the last ten years), I’m willing to stand pat. My 2018 post doesn’t express everything I could say about the novel, but it touches on what I think are its most salient aspects.

Cover of "Cat's Cradle" by Kurt Vonnegut
1970s edition I purchased in junior high school. I still have it on my bookshelf.

The other post from 2018 I’m proud of regards Planet of the Apes—the original 1968 film, and not any of the sequels in what has become a rather exhausted movie franchise. I opened that write-up copping to the film being “a guilty pleasure,” that it is

campy, riveting, preachy, and provocative— Franklin J. Schaffner’s sci-fi classic is the very definition of middle-brow entertainment, in that it pleases the senses while challenging the mind.

It turns out that, yes, I do have a little more to say on the subject.

Often when I gear up to write about a book, I’ll go back and re-read it so it’s fresh in my mind. For my Apes post, I didn’t re-watch the movie, but rather read Pierre Boulle’s original 1963 novel, which I’d never picked up before. I didn’t spend too much time discussing the book, though, since my focus was on the film. That’s a shame, because the novel is quite the curiosity.

Boulle dismissed attempts to label his Apes as science-fiction, preferring to call it a “social fantasy.” The term comes across like a hipster pose, but it makes sense. Much as Gulliver’s Travels isn’t really about seafaring, the interstellar aspect of Apes is a literary contrivance for explaining how his character Ulysee winds up in a society run by simians.

Structurally, the book reads something like utopian literature. In works such as Ecotopia, The Dispossessed, or, obviously, Thomas More’s Utopia, the narrative is not centered around character(s) dropped into a tight situation and navigating conflicts toward some kind of resolution. Rather, utopian works spool out pages of exposition to detail the clockwork innards of a fictional society operating on principles quite different from our own.

Cover of "Planet of the Apes" by Pierre Boulle

Boulle likewise spends many precious pages explaining how the simians live, work, compete, and cooperate. So, is Planet of the Apes a utopian novel? It’s not so simple. As with the film, the human astronaut Ulysee is feared by the simians, who view his existence as a threat to their comprehension of the universe. Their plans for him are not kind.

While that might make the book sound dystopian instead, that’s a difficult label too. Prior to Ulysee falling from the sky onto their planet, things seem to be going pretty well for the apes. Their society isn’t bleak or oppressive or authoritarian. They merely have an all-too-recognizable reaction to the unexplainable, this human that talks and reasons, a creature they normally hunt for sport and trophy.

The genius of Boulle’s book is that it’s structured like a utopian novel, but instead of describing an alternate society, it describes our society, with humans swapped out for apes. (Unlike the film, the apes of the novel live in a mid-twentieth century world, with cars, telephones, and even tobacco.) Boulle’s clever twist permitted him to write about our world as though it was an exotic place. In the terminology of critical theory, it defamiliarized our society. That, in turn, permitted him to write about us from a distance. As with the movie series, the ape device became a powerful fulcrum for criticizing all manner of human activity, from animal cruelty to racism, from religion to capitalism.

I remain surprised how under-appreciated the book is today—another sad example of a successful Hollywood adaptation smothering out its source material.

From Chimpan-A to Chimpanzee: The Swiftian genius of Planet of the Apes


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Rethinking realism

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Close-up of man's face from "The Arnolfini Portrait" by Jan van Eyck

Not rethinking realism, as in rethinking philosophy’s single, objective reality, hard as rocks and nails. No, I mean rethinking realism in the sense of questioning the elevation of literary realism over the many other forms of fiction.

Realism has long been the go-to form in literature for telling a story a certain way. An entire literary style—Naturalism—sprung from the sense that Romanticism had gone too far and produced a literature divorced from the world as commonly experienced. The pendulum later shifted the other direction, and for a period of time realistic literature was derided as bourgeois and reactionary. Since World War II, with the rise of creative writing programs and a reinvigorated enforcement of upper-class distinctions, kitchen-table realism has returned to the pinnacle of literary loftiness in America.

So it’s funny to me that realism is also so important in popular entertainment. This is nowhere as true as with television, which is obsessed with depicting reality—from the “you are there”-style news reporting to game shows branded as “reality TV.” When the writers of TV’s M*A*S*H killed off Col. Henry Blake in a season finale, they were inundated with letters from outraged viewers. The Emmy award-winning writing team’s response was, “Well, that’s reality.” American auteur Robert Altman famously ends Nashville with an out-of-the-blue assassination of a central character. Why? Because, he explained, that’s reality.

It’s not that these plot points are faulty or wrong-headed. My complaint is that the excuse—”It’s reality”—is a lazy defense of artistic choices. Writers should cop to their decision rather than take the passive route and saying reality made the choice for them. Writers should ask themselves if a “realistic” moment is adding to, or subtracting from, the story.

Anyone who’s attended a creative writing class, workshop, or MFA program is familiar with the high ground presumed by realism. The trendy term is “psychologically realistic fiction.” In writing programs, names like Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolff, and Tim O’Brien are tossed out as the zenith of American writing. Students are explicitly encouraged to emulate them, and their importance is implicitly signaled by their repeated presence in syllabi and required-reading lists. (I’ve read “The Things They Carried” at least eight times over the course of decades of writing groups and classes.) These authors are lionized for many reasons, but importantly, they all wrote about reality.

(There are two exceptions worth mentioning: One is magical realism, although its high regard in writing programs is tied up with identity politics. The other is Borges, whom I jokingly refer to as science-fiction for MFA students. It must be noted that both exceptions originate from outside the United States. Kafka, incidentally, is read and praised in writing programs as well, but not in such a way as to encourage emulation—I suspect my instructors liked the idea of Kafka more than Kafka’s output.)

Look at how so much literary fiction operates. Protagonists tend to be thoughtful, rational, and deliberative—often, they exhibit little to no affect. Characters in opposition tend to be boorish, thoughtless, and emotional. Dialogue is either flat and unadorned, or snappy, like the patter of a stand-up comic. Scenes flow as one character uttering a brief line, followed by paragraphs of rumination. The other character responds, and more paragraphs of rumination.

The prose might be good—it might even be inspired—but is this realism? Going through contemporary literary magazines, reading one story after another, I’m not sure one will find a lot of psychological realism, in the sense of psychiatry’s DSM-5.

Genre fiction is not immune either. Too often connoisseurs of hard-boiled detective fiction and tough-guy novels claim their favorite authors are superior because of their attention to realism. Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder” is wonderful and insightful criticism, but at its heart is a trashing of the classic British mystery because “fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.” It’s one of the few arguments in the essay that I question.

Janet Burroway wrote, “Sometimes reality doesn’t make for good fiction.” It’s a tough lesson to learn, and one that even seasoned writers fail to grasp.

After all, there is no widely-accepted maxim stating the primary purpose of story is to reproduce reality. Fiction is supposed to be an expression of a writer’s inner state, not a dry report of the who, what, where, and when. Besides, why do we need to reproduce reality with such fidelity? We’re soaking in it. If you want reality, put down your phone or leave your computer screen. You have returned to reality, effortlessly.

In a writing class I attended, one of the students was a fan of horror, particularly H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow. At an end-of-semester presentation before the class, he expressed frustration at the hard-realism reading list we’d been given, and of the months of instruction requiring him to write in similar form. “Reading about reality is like reading about your job on your day off,” he told us. There’s something to that.

Story creates a transcendence within the reader. This transcendence defies reality while mimicking it—reality is Play-Doh in the hands of an adept writer. From hard realism to squishy-soft fantasy and everything in-between, great writing takes me to another place and time, a chance to live another person’s life. Books are “portable dreamweavers.”


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Ten years of blogging: A literary eulogy

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Cover of Peking Story, by David Kidd
David Kidd

Previously: Portable dreamweavers
Next: An all-too-familiar utopia

Blogging in 2017 was again marked by another foray into the world of Kindle Scout, this time for my Bridge Daughter sequel Hagar’s Mother. That year I also ran a three-part series discussing the crossover between writing fiction and writing code, and some short entries on how I use a writing notebook when preparing to write a novel.

Panel from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics

The most popular entry from 2017 was, by far, on Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I first read this groundbreaking book in the 1990s, and have reread it at least three times since. McCloud wrote (and drew!) more than a treatise on how comics work. It’s a manifesto praising comics as the ultimate communication form ever devised. As I wrote, McCloud is “not merely comics’ Aristotle and ambassador, he’s its evangelist. Understanding Comics may be the first foundational lit crit text written by a fan boy.” I followed up a month later with “Blood in the margins,” which takes some of the lessons McCloud offers and back-ports them to fiction.

Peking Story by David Kidd

The 2017 entry I’m most proud of is on David Kidd’s memoir Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China. Originally anthologized in 1961 under its original title All the Emperor’s Horses, David Kidd’s classic is one of those remarkable nonfiction books that’s largely flown under the cultural radar. I have a theory why.

Kidd was an American, born and bred in the Midwest, who traveled to China at the end of World War II, where he married into a prominent Chinese family. When the book opens, he joins them behind the walls of their mansion compound, where they sip tea and reminisce about their family’s illustrious past. Meanwhile, the Communist insurgency is beginning to assume control over the country. Kidd pines for China’s past and mourns the loss of its ancient cultural traditions to the incoming revolutionaries. This is why I call the book “a literary eulogy.”

On the surface, it’s a wonderful book, with economical prose both graceful and straightforward, and lots of well-drawn authentic detail. Structurally, it’s as classical in its design as the Parthenon. As far as I can tell, it’s the only book Kidd authored, but what a book to rest your laurels upon.

As I wrote, Kidd was an unusual narrator for his memoir: “There are moments that read like a Graham Greene novel, the world-weary British expatriate turning up his nose at the dreary reactionaries and their anti-imperialist manifestos.” An uneasiness grows as you read between the lines. You sense that Kidd is, on one hand, a snobby and mildly myopic WASP, and on the other hand, an unrepentant Sinophile infatuated with China’s exotic past. His new in-laws, while not nearly as wealthy as their forebears, live a rather luxurious life compared to the peasants in the fields and the servants washing their clothes. Kidd seems as blithe to to the inequities as his in-laws are. When I reread Peking Story for the blog post, I kept wishing Kidd would at least once acknowledge the disparity. The acknowledgement is never really offered.

And that, I think, is the stain that prevents Peking Story from becoming a true classic of nonfiction or New Journalism. It’s not due to political correctness gone amok, but a lack of social awareness that modern readers expect from authors. Kidd should be the outsider peering in, but no, he is such a Sinophile, he eagerly jumps onto the garden divan to loll about with his new Beijing family. Even Fitzgerald—who never met a person of breeding he couldn’t write about—had the necessary introspection to offer the reader asides on the absurdities of the ultra-rich.

As much as I admire Kidd’s masterpiece, I can’t help but sense that the shadow casting a pall over it is not from what he wrote, but what he left unsaid.

Twenty Writers: David Kidd, Peking Story: The Last Days of Old China


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Ten years of blogging: Portable dreamweavers

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J. Hillis Miller

Previously: An unusual parable
Next: A literary eulogy

2016 was a busy year for blogging. Amazon accepted Bridge Daughter for their Kindle Scout program, which entailed a month-long nomination process before they agreed to publish it. It was the start of a fairly intense roller coaster ride, most of which I captured in blog posts along the way.

Amazon’s imprimatur on the novel opened many doors. With a single email sent on a single day of the week to a mere sliver of their customer base, Amazon could generate hundreds of book sales, as though rubbing a lamp to summon a djinn. Amazon’s backing also led to a movie production company inquiring about film rights. They read the book and they asked questions, but ultimately they passed.

(Amazon dismantled the Kindle Scout program in 2018, which I still consider a tragedy.)

Of the long-form blog entries in 2016, I produced three that I remain proud of. I’m torn which to feature here. My account of Don Herron’s Fritz Leiber tour still evokes nostalgia. Don Herron is the creator of the classic Dashiell Hammett tour in San Francisco. Getting a chance to meet Herron and take his lesser-known Fritz Leiber tour was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as he no longer leads it save for special occasions.

Another piece I’m proud of is my review/analysis of the Generation X cult classic Slacker, one of my favorite films. This entry has an untold side story: A few months after posting it, an online film aficionado site on Medium asked if I was interested in adapting the review. Unfortunately, what the editor wanted me to write about wasn’t what I found interesting about Slacker, and the opportunity fizzled out.

On Literature by J. Hillis Miller

The third is a blog post I keep returning to as a kind of manifesto: “Fiction as a controlled experiment,” a write-up of my thoughts on the book On Literature by J. Hillis Miller.

Miller was a scholar at Yale and U.C. Irvine, and known for promoting deconstruction as a means of literary criticism. I discovered On Literature on a shelf of used books in a Tokyo bookstore, and assumed it would be thick with postmodern terminology and abstruse theories. Instead, On Literature is personal and ruminative. Parts of it read like a confessional. Miller admits to a lifelong love of reading, and writes in glowing terms on several children’s books he marveled over in his youth.

What caught my attention the most, however, is when he confesses to viewing a work of fiction as a “pocket or portable dreamweaver.” He describes books as devices that transport the reader to a new “hyper-world” for them to experience. The way he describes it reminds me of the linking books in the classic video game Myst.

Myst linking book
Myst linking book

This quaint vision of narrative is unfashionable in the world of literary criticism. Miller’s vision is also, in my view, charitable to lay readers, who are less interested in high theory and more interested in enjoying books, and curious why some books are more enjoyable than others.

But I do think this vision—”a pocket or portable dreamweaver”—is also a useful guide for an author developing a story or a novel. Miller insists a work of fiction is not “an imitation in words of some pre-existing reality but, on the contrary, it is the creation or discovery of a new, supplementary world, a metaworld.” That is what the creation of story is—not merely revealing or reporting an already existing world, but creating a new one in the author’s mind, and, in turn, recreating it in each reader’s mind. These multiple worlds are similar but never exactly the same.

Miller died in 2021 due to COVID-related issues, one month after the death of his wife of over seventy years. Reading On Literature makes me wish I could have enrolled in one of his courses. Whereas so many of the European deconstructionists seemed intent on subverting the power of literature, Miller was plainly in awe of the written word, and strove to promote it. We need more readers like him.

Fiction as a controlled experiment


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Ten years of blogging: An unusual parable

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Photograph of Dashiell Hammett
Dashiell Hammett

Previously: The mysterious B. Traven
Next: Portable dreamweavers

The year 2015 was more productive than the prior for blogging. I managed to eke out twenty-six blog posts, or about one every two weeks. In the world of blogging this is nothing to crow about. I never intended for this blog to be a daily writing exercise, though. I sought to stretch myself in terms of research and preparation for the longer pieces, and to produce longer work that stood on its own, rather than be impressive in its volume.

It was also an eclectic year. I wrote a piece on Japan’s sakoku (its two-hundred and fifty year period of isolation) and rangaku (literally, “Holland learning”). I had no business writing this. I’m not a domain expert on the subject, and my experience is based solely on some personal research and visiting Dejima, the artificial island in Nagasaki where Dutch traders bought and sold goods until the end of sakoku. 2015 is also the year I started writing about story structure and fiction workshopping, topics I feel more at ease discussing.

Humphrey Bogart holding the Maltese Falcon (film prop).
Humphrey Bogart and “the dingus.” (CC BY-SA 2.0)

By far, the most popular blog post of that year, and for this web site’s existence, is “Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon).” This long post gave me the chance to air a theory I’d developed on the Flitcraft Parable, a brief tale private eye Sam Spade tells femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy in an early chapter of the infamous detective novel. It’s an odd digression for straight-talking Spade to make, and an odd digression in general, for the novel is a model of brisk narration and economical prose. As I wrote in 2015:

One cannot imagine the Flitcraft Parable finding a place in pulps like Black Mask, magazines that instructed their writers “When in doubt, throw a dead body at ’em.” No gun is leveled, no whiskey is poured, no dame is saved. In The Maltese Falcon Dashiell Hammett crafted the most iconic private detective novel ever, the singular representation of an entire form, and yet in it he wrote the most unorthodox story of detection ever.

And that is an important point about the Flitcraft Parable, for it is a story about a rather simple bit of detection Spade was hired to perform many years prior to the events of Falcon. There’s not of a lot of chin-scratching in the parable itself. Rather, the chin-scratching comes later, as Spade attempts to explain what it all means, while O’Shaughnessy characteristically shrugs off its significance.

Like the parables of Christ and the Buddha, the Flitcraft Parable’s shape and ending is ambiguous, and its meaning elusive. Even the reason for Spade telling the parable is debated. I won’t cover it all here, it’s best explained by my post.

By far, the most substantial criticism I received for it was that I’d over-thought my reasoning, and that there was no proof Hammett knew of Charles Sanders Peirce’s work (which I think unlikely). I posted a follow-up in November 2015 giving an alternate, but related, explanation of the parable.

Twenty Writers: Dashiell Hammett, The Flitcraft Parable (from The Maltese Falcon)


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Ten years of blogging: The mysterious B. Traven

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T. Torsvan, 1926. This photo was taken in Mexico without his knowledge. It’s widely assumed this is B. Traven.

Previously: Introduction
Next: An unusual parable

This blog launched on the first of August, 2014. It was not a big year blog-wise, but I still managed to put out eleven posts (one of which I’ll return to later this year). Worried I would run out of ideas, I devised “Twenty Writers, Twenty Books,” a series where I discuss the books and authors that have left a deep impression on me. (So far, I’ve only managed to finish twelve of the twenty writers. To look at it another way, this writing project is still generating blog posts ten years later.)

Those last months of 2014, my focus was fixed on the finishing edits of Edward Teller Dreams of Barbecuing People, the first book I put out under Kindle Direct Publishing. The novel’s opening line (“The Petrenkos were barbecuing people”) was first typed by me in 1999. After fifteen years, countless drafts and rewrites, and a couple of near-misses with agents who were interested but couldn’t get behind the book, I gave up trying to find it a home. I even considered giving up on writing altogether. Thankfully, I reconsidered, put it on Amazon, and began working on my next novel. (The whole tortured history can be found at The Tusk.)

But my favorite blog post from that first year is without question “B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the first entry in my Twenty Writers series. Oddly, it’s one of the newer books on the list, in the sense that I had read it only a few years’ before (whereas most of the other books on the list I discovered earlier in life). Sierra Madre made an indelible mark on me. It made me think about why an author writes a book, and not merely how—but I was doubly fascinated by the mystery surrounding the identity of its author.

It turns out that while the book and John Huston’s movie are incredibly well-known, the true identity of the author has been largely shrouded in mystery to this day.

Hal Croves, 1947. Taken while on the set of John Huston’s adaptation of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Humphrey Bogart speculated Croves was actually B. Traven.

I love a good literary mystery, and the mystery of B. Traven is one of the best of the 20th century. While researching the blog post, I read numerous online sources and articles, two books on the subject, and even scoured old editions of Treasure, including the rather optimistic (and rather incorrect) introduction to a 1963 Time-Life edition which declared the matter of his identity settled.

One notable outcome of the blog post was former Chief Executive of BBC Broadcast Will Wyatt reaching out to me via email in 2015. Wyatt wrote and developed the BBC documentary B. Traven: A Mystery Solved and its companion book The Man Who was B. Traven, titled The Secret of the Sierra Madre in the United States. (A transfer of the BBC show can be found on YouTube.) Wyatt’s gracious email pointed out that no one to date has refuted his theory of Traven’s identity. By utter coincidence, I had just weeks earlier discovered a copy of the UK edition in one of the last great used bookstores, Phoenix Books of San Luis Obispo. (I’ve long intended to write a post about The Man Who was B. Traven, but never followed through.)

Coincidentally, as I was writing this post in late December, Wyatt again reached out to me via public comment. He once more defended his work, but also challenged the other theories of Traven’s identity, most of which are based on speculation or hunches. Due to his comment, I’m updating the 2014 post to better explain Wyatt’s research, which was previously only alluded to briefly.

As I replied to him:

Perhaps not reading your book first was a mistake on my part, but I, a mere fan of Traven’s books, and writer of the occasional novel that does not sell in high volume, did not intend [the 2014] post to be the final word on Traven’s identity.

Rather, this post was intended to cover the breadth of the theories out there, farfetched or otherwise, and to give a general feel for Traven’s most likely background. I also wanted to explain why I find so much inspiration in Traven’s works, especially The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

Alas, all this came too late for the original 2014 post, which relies on Michael L. Baumann’s B. Traven: An Introduction (1976). Baumann treats the question of Traven’s identity as a mystery of literary analysis, which lines up with my interests in the subject. As a German-speaking German-American, Baumann discerns that Traven’s work was most likely written in that language and then crudely translated to English for an American audience. He also offers a clear-eyed interpretation of the themes and political bent of Traven’s novels.

Since I wasn’t interested in proposing a candidate or “solving” the mystery, Baumann was a good primary source to work from. I only wish I could have delved more deeply into the breadth of the Traven theories proposed to date. The tornadic multiplicity of names and initials and pseudonyms linked to Traven is bewildering, fostered by Traven’s generous use of them to cover his tracks.

My fascination is not to keep the mystery alive, but to turn the mystery around and face the mirror at the reader, to give a name to the insatiable curiosity Traven inspired—to remind us there was a time when authors shunned publicity (“the creative person should…have no other biography than his works”) rather than relentlessly strove to build their personal brand.

Twenty Writers: B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre


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