Fiction as Process and Product

Hamill Considers  Role of Journalist and Novelist

By John Madigan

For every fact a journalist uncovers, there seems to be an equal if not greater amount of fiction waiting beneath it, begging to be revealed. 

And the best fiction is often that which brushes off those dusty facts and summons the imagination's powers to turn the possibilities it finds into the truths we know.  New Yorker Pete Hamill has been discovering these truths for more than 40 years as a writer for The New York Daily News , The New York Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Newsday.  Hamill's work for these publications has fueled his achievement  as acclaimed journalist and bestselling author. His words have genuinely captured the spirit of New York City and defined its character as well as any writer of his time. 

His latest novel, Forever, brings Hamill's vast understanding of his native city across a span of four centuries.  It is a sweeping story filled with discovery, love, diversity, tragedy, endurance and hope.  All must be navigated by the character of Cormac Samuel O'Connor, an Irishman, whose curse is never to leave New York.  For the tale, the author relied his experience as both journalist and fiction writer. And the balance between these two roles, allowed him to turn the possibilities into truths. 

Journalist Becomes Novelist

For Hamill, there is no better training for fiction writing than journalism.  The former feeds off the later.  He explains that with journalism, what's news one day becomes history the next, but with literature it's different.  The news doesn't just disappear.  "I think Ezra Pound said it best, that 'Literature is news that stays news,'" he says. "The what-ifs of the newspaper become the basic structure of fiction." 
 
As a reporter, Hamill used to cover the police, tracing murders and other crimes.  In reporting, he was wrestling with the reality.  But what stuck with him was not necessarily the whos and whats, but his own sensory experience.  On seeing murder victims, he says it's certainly not what you get in the movies.  "You get to know what a real corpse looks like, smells like." 
  
Of course it would have been impossible in all his years of covering the brutal and the grotesque for Hamill to remember every detail -- and rather disturbing, as well -- but turning reality into fiction is a craft he has been honing for years. 

He finished his original draft of Forever  on Sept. 10, 2001.  One day later, Hamill knew he had to re-write the book.  He understood that he couldn't cover 250 years of New York history and then leave out the single greatest tragedy the city and country had ever seen.  But he didn't just want to simply add it on at the end. He couldn't.  The story would suffer.               
        
"So I had to go through from the very beginning, like music leading to a certain crescendo at the end...I didn't want to make it obvious," he recalls. Hamill  knew he needed to pull the thread all the way through from beginning to end.  The facts were already there, since his hero Cormac lived with a view of the WTC outside his window. The woman he loved at the time even worked in the North Tower.  But the greatest challenge for Hamill was separating his own feelings, his own perspective, from that of Cormac's.  "It was very difficult writing," he explains. 

Not wanting to make the ending obvious, Hamill swears he must have re-written it 15 times before it was to his liking. 
     
Playing Roles

Considering his roles of both journalist and fiction writer in general, Hamill says that although the two are closely complimentary, they are not the same.  With 9/11, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, Iraq and North Korea, Hamill explains that, "People don't want this stuff.  All the people I know are for Afghanistan, but against Iraq...they wonder why are we going to Iraq; did we find Osama bin Laden?" 

As a journalist there are limitations in presenting the facts of these or any other issues.  Hamill believes in the classic role of the journalist: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  But it is in fiction that the limitations are lifted and where the author feels free to let himself go, Hamill points out.
        
When determining where to begin a novel, Hamill says he doesn't make an outline or sketch what he will write.  He feels the work will suffer, will be flat, if he does. "And then it's no fun," he emphasizes. 

When he starts, Hamill merely has an idea of where the beginning of the story will be and where it will end up.  What lies in-between comes only as he writes.  "It's as if I'm leaving New York to drive to San Francisco. But by the sixth day I don't know where the hell I'm going to be...I might end up in a cave somewhere, you know," he laughs.   
      
Preliminary Work and Reverberations of Forever

But with the freedom of writing fiction -- and writing it successfully -- the journalist in Hamill has found that long hours of research are necessary.  Reading history on New York has long been a hobby for Hamill, in addition to the literature of the times.  Poetry and prose reveal culture and character that the history books cannot give, he says. 

Hamill also invests a great amount of time in interviews, conversations  and simply walking the streets.  The research is important, but must not dominate the fiction.  "It must be used as a supplement to writing," Hamill says.  "You have to let it all marinate."   And somehow, between all the research, the journalism, the conversation, the marination, and every experience of the author, we get a novel.  
   
With Forever, Hamill marinated himself into a wholly complex and wealthy depiction of a character struggling not only to endure, but to progress in the face of a hefty dose of tragic destiny. 

Throughout the novel, Cormac is balancing between an endurance and acceptance of fate. At the same time, he must make something out of what's left for him, however diminished and rundown it may be.  "There is a certain level of fatalism in Cormac that speaks to the here and now,"  Hamill explains.  

An image of Cormac's father melting down broken tools and weapons to create something new is a mental legacy that Cormac embodies throughout his life journey.  And it's that image of the melting pot that speaks to a greater endurance for Hamill.  "It's just like New York, this long weird forge of ours. You bang it all together. And that's what you get on Sept. 12."  Fellowship, perseverance and progress unite in a multiplicity of ethnicities, ages and sexes amid the rubble of a terribly real tragedy. 
  
And through it all, Hamill brings alive the character of New York -- the only companion who's final fate Cormac does not live to see.  It is a city whose character this author has definitively breathed life into for years, descending to its lowest depths and pruning its highest branches.  Hamill's goal has always been to depict the evolution of New York, as it has been, is, and perhaps will be. Forever  achieves this goal with resounding success.