Where’d you get the idea from?

I originally planned to write a much different book, something much more serious and literary. It’s a manuscript that I’ve worked on for three or four years and exists on my laptop as a mix of disparate scenes and ideas that have never quite come together. The novel that I had in mind was a much grimmer story, about DC during the summer before 9/11. The book is about people chasing success, unaware that their world is about to be undone.

Finishing that big serious book was my plan. It’s why I decided to leave my government contractor job.

However, I had been thinking about genre fiction (mysteries, science fiction) since they’re supposedly easier to get published. At a screenwriting conference, I heard a mystery author, Andrew Klavan, say that the best way to break into Hollywood was to write a novel. I’ve written a bunch of unproduced screenplays (including MOUNT PLEASANT which won the Film DC Screenwriting Competition) so this idea made a lot of sense to me.

I’ve been writing my whole life – short stories, screenplays, articles – so the thought of writing a novel wasn’t too daunting. It’s a just a series of short stories, I told myself.

About the same time, Ocean Hall opened up at the Smithsonian. NOAA, the government agency I worked for, had supplied artifacts, videos, photos and text for the exhibit. My boss and many of my coworkers had contributed to this project. I had been hearing about it for years.

And I was pretty familiar with the subject matter, having been the Web Site Manager for NOAA Ocean Explorer. I was the project manager and managing editor for the site.  I worked with underwater explorers from around the world, publishing their stories and discoveries on our web site.

So, at my going away lunch, I joked that I was going to write a book called, “Murder in Ocean Hall.” Everyone thought this was pretty funny.

The idea for the plot – an arrogant bastard is killed and he’s so disliked that suspects are many – actually came from an idea I had for a short film for the 48 Hour Film Project. The idea didn’t fit for 48 Hour but it stuck around in my brain. 

The plot amused me, and the idea of using all I had learned about ocean exploration from three years at NOAA really appealed to me. Since the book would be set in DC, I could also satirize the city I had come to love and hate. 

So, as you can see, Murder in Ocean Hall takes experiences and ideas from my life, as well as things I’ve learned, to create a brand new story. In other words, “write what you know.”

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Salman Rushdie was recently awarded a knighthood by Britain, an act which caused more than one anti-Western rant from the medieval ayotollahs of Iran and Pakistan. The usual threats of violence from the usual dark quarter of the world. This honor by Britain reminded these hateful clerics that Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, a novel considered blasphemous (by some) to Islam.

Rushdie has been under a sentence of death since 1989, when the book was first published and the clerics of Iran took offense. Only recently has he felt safe enough to emerge from hiding.

What’s been forgotten over the years is that the hostage-taking Ayotollah Khomeini wasn’t the only one outraged by The Satanic Verses. This excellent article in the International Herald Tribune reminds us that the book was published to great controversy. Like the recent cartoon conflagration in Denmark, not everyone stood behind the right of free speech in an open society.

In a March 1989 Op-Ed article in The New York Times titled “Rushdie’s Book Is an Insult,” Jimmy Carter argued that “The Satanic Verses” was guilty of “vilifying” Muhammad and “defaming” the Koran. “The author, a well-versed analyst of Moslem beliefs, must have anticipated a horrified reaction throughout the Islamic world,” Carter wrote. While condemning the death sentence and affirming Rushdie’s right to free speech, the former president argued that “we have tended to promote him and his book with little acknowledgment that it is a direct insult to those millions of Moslems whose sacred beliefs have been violated and are suffering in restrained silence the added embarrassment of the Ayatollah’s irresponsibility.”

It’s just a novel, words printed on the page, a novel that billions of people will never see or even bother reading. A novel cannot violate a religion. A basic tenet of Western civilization is the right to offend people – we must not go backwards on this.

I had heard of Rushdie in 1989, after reading his book Shame in a modern literature class. The fatwa by Khomeini made The Satanic Verses a bestseller. I remember racing through book stores in DC, looking for a copy. I wanted to buy it to show my support of free speech, to show the Ayatollah that we wouldn’t be intimidated. Your religion doesn’t dictate what I can read.

I couldn’t find one anywhere – it was the iPhone of its day After I got a copy from a friend who worked in the publishing industry, I started the book and found it incomprehensible, a wild magic realism narrative that I couldn’t understand. All this trouble for a book?

Since then, I’ve gone on to enjoy other Rushdie novels, especially the brilliant Shalimar the Clown.

Looking back, it’s tempting to believe that America and Europe supported the absolute right of free speech. However, when faced with the very real threat of violence, people don’t always live up to their ideals and seek to justify censorship.

What will we do when the next of these conflicts arise?  Will we stand firm or compromise our values?

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