Real People/Fake Stories

[la_fields]

I was interviewed about storytelling by a pair of comedians! The topic: Fiction Writing Around Real People. Highlights include:

• Gay Sherlock Holmes, gay Abraham Lincoln, gay everybody (with citations)
• Creating sympathies for murderers by following the example of Mr. Clarence Darrow in the Leopold and Loeb case
• What happens when you're caught reading in Florida

Also touched on: If you don't have something nice to say, maybe don't say anything at all, because public reviews become the property of the person you dislike.
This was delightful, thanks y'all! Find more of Drew and DJ online.
Hear and see the interview on YouTube here.
Full notes:

My name is Lauren, but I publish under my initials L.A. Fields. I refer to myself as a Jill-of-all-trades for writing because my books include: novels and short stories, contemporary and historical, scholarship and erotica.

The topic I’d like to discuss today: Fiction Writing Around Real People. One method involves fictionalizing real people, and the other involves putting real people into fiction.

• First up, Homo Superiors: a retelling of the Leopold and Loeb crime of 1924, set post-cell phones and pre-COVID. They were teenage thrill killers who murdered a 14-year-old boy to see if they were smart enough to get away with it (and spoiler alert: they were not).
  
  
  • While writing this book, I went to Rosehill Cemetery in Chicago to find the victim’s mausoleum, which is chained shut against looky-loos like me. BUT it’s also decorated with tiny toys, flowers, and remembrances from other visitors, so we’re not all bad. I also found the parents of both killers, to whom I apologized for essentially digging up these graves again, and giving an infamous case more oxygen. Full disclosure, I did have my picture taken sitting on the Leopold obelisk and the Loeb bench but hey-cemeteries are for the living, not the dead.
  • In my book Homo Superiors, their family structures are the same, the names are similar (instead of Leopold and Loeb it’s Kaplan and Klein). But typewriter letters become texts, and I felt a lot more comfortable taking artistic license. For example: Leopold’s mother died on him about the same age as mine did. I felt freer to invest some of my feelings into a character based on a real person, without attributing those thoughts to him specifically. Interesting fact: Leopold was actually very litigious about another fictionalized book published during his lifetime, Compulsion - he obnoxiously took notes during the legal talks in a dead language (Sanskrit) so that no one else could read them. That’s a fact I included in my book, because it’s quite a personality trait.
  • I was also delighted to include a dirty detail from a sidebar conversation in the courtroom transcript. Turns out, there were a few unsatisfactory blow job attempts between Leopold and Loeb, who had a sex-for-crime pact. Because of me, that tidbit is now in the greater LnL canon of adaptations - no one could have heard this fact at the time of the trial, and none of the historical books have so far included it because they aren’t in it for the right scandalous reasons like I am. In fact, the women reporters in the roaring 20s were forced to leave the courtroom when any sex topics came up, but not the murder details. Go figure - in Al Capone’s Chicago they thought talk of genitals would make the gals faint, but not gruesome killings.
  • This writing method is like one of my all-time favorites: Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse. That novel has characters based heavily on serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Nilsen, but fictionalized so they could meet and cause even more trouble. Basically: you take the best, leave the rest, and enjoy full artistic license because you’re not a reporter or a historian, you’re just here to have a good bad time.

So that’s Method Number One!

• Next up: My Dear Watson, Gay A Day, and Mrs. Watson: Untold Stories.
• My Dear Watson came first, and has a Sherlock Holmes who exists in the real world with Oscar Wilde and gross indecency trials, not the magical world of Dorian Gray and cursed portraits. Next came the Gay A Day book, mini bios of LGBT folks from history, capped at 200 words each - just little bonbons of information. Since I couldn’t fit all my favorite history details into the Gay A Day coffee table book, I put some of those real people into the fictional frame of the latest book of connected shorts: Mrs. Watson: Untold Stories. In Mrs. Watson’s diaries I could feature all the gossip that was just too good to let go! For example:
  
  
  • In Mrs. Watson: Untold Stories, Holmes and the Watsons talk of the Oscar Wilde crew, quoting letters, court transcripts, and newspaper clippings. One sweet bit of information involves Oscar’s very good friend Robbie Ross, who’s entombed with him in Paris - when Ross died of heart failure, it was after a lifetime of managing Oscar’s estate for his wife and children, and mentoring other young gay men in the arts. One of those men was poet Siegfried Sassoon who remarked of Robbie’s death: “It was the only time that his heart had ever failed him.”
  • In another story, Holmes meets A.E. Housman, and portions of that conversation are taken verbatim from letters and biographies. True details like: despite being a very strict Latin professor and extremely paranoid about his privacy, Housman wrote highly sentimental rhyming poetry for his friend and unrequited love Moses Jackson. He also liked dirty jokes! He laughed intensely when one man forgot to pack spare pants to give a university lecture, and had to borrow a pair from Housman that needed to be split up the back to fit. On his deathbed Housman was told a joke by the doctor and said as his more-or-less final words, “Very good. I shall have to repeat that on the Golden Floor.”
  • My Sherlock Holmes also knows what many still don’t know about Lawrence of Arabia, which is that he hired men to come whip him while he exercised naked under some elaborate “my uncle made me do it!” scheme. Very big masochist, perhaps why he did so well in the punishing desert.
  • In a different story, Holmes tells of Abraham Lincoln’s best friend Joshua Speed, who picked up that beanpole bumpkin on his first night in town. From Speed’s own version of events: Lincoln arrived at Speed’s general store asking for credit because he couldn’t afford a bed. Speed basically said my “my bed’s right upstairs,” and Abe dropped off his bag and came back down to say, “Well Speed, I’m moved.” I bet he was, and what a sweet meet-cute moment! I also included details of some other men Lincoln shared his bed with-like his presidential bodyguard who “[made] use of his excellency’s nightshirt” on more than one occasion when Mrs. Lincoln was away.
  • My Holmes also points out that there’s one special edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass which has little sperms drawn on the title page, and that when Lincoln once saw Walt Whitman walking all proud and languid across the street from the White House he said distractedly, “HE looks like a MAN” (emphasis Abe’s).
  • I grouped the Mrs. Watson stories into little themed sets like:
    
    
    • Gay and lesbian kings and queens who are discussed over a chess game. If you’d like to know what’s gay about the King James Bible … it’s King James.
    • Another story talks of suicide with people like poet and rough trade enthusiast Hart Crane who - after getting beaten up for propositioning the wrong guy - jumped off a boat to his death exclaiming “Goodbye everybody!” Also mountaineer-in-skirts Freda du Faur who stuck her head in the oven after her lover was killed by cure-the-gay shock treatments. There are still two mountains standing in New Zealand that Freda climbed first and named after herself and her lover, Muriel.
    • In another story we take a trip to the symphony to hear Tchaikovsky and learn that he was in love with his own nephew. He once wrote to the boy saying, “If you do not want to write, at least spit on a piece of paper, put it in an envelope, and send it to me. You are not taking any notice of me at all. God forgive you-”
    • There’s a Halloween story for the deeply closeted Bram Stoker who, funnily enough, married a woman once engaged to Oscar Wilde which, yikes! That was like a Judy Garland streak of gay suitors for poor Florence, that’s tough.
    • Another story talks of ‘Boston marriages’ which is when two unmarried women set up household together. In that one, the Watsons learn of Anne Lister aka Gentleman Jack, who has her own HBO series now, recommending that to everybody. They learn of Nell Pickerell aka Harry Allen or Harry Livingston - pool sticker, brawler, and champion wooer of women if the papers can be believed (and they actually can’t). They learn of Albert DJ Cashier, born Jennie Hodgers, a Civil War veteran who died in an asylum for women because doctors insisted he was crazy when they found out - Albert’s death came from a fall after he tripped on the hem of a dress they made him to wear. But he still had a funeral with full military honors supplied by The Grand Army of the Republic, that notoriously woke military.
  • This writing method is like the books I’m reading now, Narratives of Empire by Gore Vidal. That series features American historical figures like Lincoln and Aaron Burr. At the end of Burr, Vidal explains, “I have tried to keep to the known facts. In three instances, I have moved people about [but] Otherwise, the characters are in the right places, on the right dates, doing what they actually did.” I did about the same in my historical novels, including going so far as to look up the museum pieces on display, and a hotel’s exact menu, on one very particular day in the past.

So in conclusion: Fiction Writing Around Real People, there’s two examples of how it’s done.

Find L.A. Fields wherever you get books (GoodReads, Lethe Press, Rebel Satori Press). Reach out to author_lafields on Twitter, and la_fields on Instagram.