Since I finished writing Murder in Ocean Hall, I’ve gotten questions from friends and family regarding the book. Creating something from nothing seems enough of a magical act to inspire some questioning. The question I’ve gotten most is:

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.”

Andrew Klavan has an interesting article in the Washington Post called 5 Myths About Those Tinseltown Liberals.

I listened to Klavan speak a couple months ago at a conference. He’s a very good speaker and an excellent writer. While he’s the author of the mysteries True Crime and Empire of Lies, he’s perhaps best known as the author the controversial, sure-to-enrage op-ed examining the similarities between George Bush and Batman.

In his recent myth-busting article in the Post, he eviscerates the pieties and hypocrisies of Hollywood. The most damning, in my view, is the inability of Hollywood to tell a contemporary story of good versus evil. While these types of stories are condemned as being simplistic (the world is much more complex, they say), the audience has a deep yearning for such classic tales. Yet, as the rash of anti-Iraq movies demonstrates, studio executives are profoundly uncomfortable with Americans (especially the military) being the heroes. Rather than being the cavalry, the appearance of the Americans or the American flag often foreshadows dark conspiracies and treachery (see Syriana, The Bourne Ultimatum). This stems from cultural and moral relativism, the belief that all cultures and belief systems are equal and deserving respect. It’s a creed that doesn’t want to make judgements and is, at best, profoundly ambiguous over the role of American power in the world.

Yet, audiences turned their backs on Redacted, In the Valley of Elah and the piously silly star-vehicle Lions for Lambs. Instead, they gave their money to The Kingdom, a movie which more people saw than all the anti-Iraq movies combined. The Kingdom featured a mumbling Jamie Foxx as a FBI counter-terrorism agent chasing terrorists in Saudi Arabia. It’s a standard thriller, highlighted by explosions, car chases and some overacting. Variety called it “quietly jingoistic” and said it lacked the complexity of Syriana.

Yet, despite its flaws, The Kingdom was a success. Why? Because good-versus-evil is an archetypal story, one that has been told around fires since the dawn of civilization, one that anyone, even a child, can understand.  Recently, watching a movie with my five year-old nephew, he got a little bored and asked, “Who’s the bad guy?” I thought it was interesting that he believed that all movies had bad guys. And that he needed people to root for and against if the story was going to work.

There was a time when Hollywood followed classic story structures, including black and white stories of good versus evil. However, as Klavan demonstrates in his article, the ideologically-driven industry of today frequently abandons good storytelling to lecture the audience. And if there’s one thing that Republicans and Democrats can agree on is that they don’t go to the theater for lectures.