I walked faster along the trail. To my relief, the sounds behind me stopped. I breathed easier, only to stop breathing altogether as I heard the approaching snap and crunch begin again, but this time in front of me. I froze as if paralyzed. Adrenaline gave me motion. I backed up. And froze again as I heard someone behind me. I turned in a circle, on guard against every flank.
And blinked in surprise when I found a desk and a typewriter before me. The intense, vivid, visceral experience had been a daydream, or a better description would be a daynightmare. I had so disappeared into my psyche that I had lost touch with my surroundings. Imagination had felt more real than reality. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. It made me remember what Klass had said: "Your true fear is like a ferret darting within the tunnels of your psyche, desperate not to be discovered."
But sometimes it might be possible to get close to it, I realized. The daydream had certainly scared me. What was it about? What was going to happen next? The urge to know the outcome made me realize how much my earlier stories had lacked forward motion. Suspense. A fresh vision. I didn't know any fictional situation like the one I had just imagined. James Dickey's Deliverance would be published three years later. That 1970 novel about terror on a backwoods canoe trip amazed readers with its new approach to fear. But in 1967, before Deliverance , I felt on my own. By surrendering to my problem of how to be a fiction writer, I had in Zen fashion allowed my problem to solve itself.
Feeling vitalized, I immediately set to work to write the story so that I could find out what happened next. I called it "The Plinker," referring to a man who goes off one morning to do some target shooting (the slang term is "plinking") and discovers to his horror that someone else is in the woods and is interested in a different kind of target shooting. The story was written long before serial killers and stalkers became the subject of fiction, and when I gave it to Philip Klass, he must have sensed my excitement because he read it much sooner than he had the others I had given him. He phoned and invited me to join him at a coffee house at 4 p.m., and thus began one of the most unique afternoons, evenings, and nights of my life.
First, Klass told me he was amazed that I had written a story so different from the others, one that had strongly engaged his attention. Then he asked if I'd been reading Geoffrey Household. I shook my head no. Geoffrey who? The British suspense writer, Klass answered. Household's two most famous novels were Rogue Male (1939) and Watcher in the Shadows (1960), the former about a British big-game hunter who stalks Hitler on the eve of the Second World War. Later, when I read Household's work, I did recognize a kinship. Household's fiction was best when it dealt with threats from unknown forces. The more frightened and vulnerable the heroes were, the more I identified with them. That ferret in my psyche again.
My ignorance about Geoffrey Household revealed another of my limitations.
I hadn't read any suspense fiction or popular literature of any kind. As a teenager, I had been motivated to become a writer because of my fascination with Stirling Silliphant's scripts for the 1960-64 television show Route 66 in which two young men drove across the United States in a Corvette, searching for America and themselves. Silliphant combined action with ideas. But my desire to emulate him had led me more toward ideas than action. After years of studying literature in college, I had become so saturated with Hawthorne, Melville, Faulkner, and other classic authors that my fiction felt stale and imitative, literary in the worst sense of the word. But not anymore. I remembered the thrilling contemporary feel of Route 66 and why I had wanted to be a writer in the first place. I resolved to read as many current novels, popular novels as I could, beginning with Household because if I was going to write action stories with a difference, then I had better find out what the best action writers had already done so that I wouldn't repeat what they had already accomplished.
At the coffee house, Klass and I discussed these issues and were surprised to discover that three hours had passed. It was now 7 p.m. I was due home for dinner, but Klass asked if I'd be willing to go to his apartment, meet his wife, and continue the discussion. After months spent trying to get Klass's attention, I felt my heart leap at the invitation. Quickly I phoned my wife and explained the situation. Klass and I then went to his apartment, where our discussion became deeper and more intense.
The best fiction, Klass maintained, came from a writer's compulsion to communicate traumatic personal events. Often the writer had so repressed those events that the writer wasn't aware of the source of the compulsion. But whether consciously done or not, this self-psychoanalysis made a writer's work unique because the psychological effects of trauma are unique to each person. You could tell the bad writers from the good writers because the bad writers were motivated by money and ego, whereas the good writers practiced their craft for the insistent reason that they had to be writers, that they had no choice, that something inside them (the ferret) was gnawing at their imaginations and the festering pressure had to be released. Often daydreams were a signal of those pressures, Klass felt, spontaneous messages from the subconscious, subliminal hints about stories that wanted to be told.