The LOST Explanation

Barcelona, SPAIN April 2001

It is difficult to explain how LOST was written. The whole thing started in Barcelona in June of 1999, shortly after I graduated from Lafayette College. I remember sitting outside on Las Ramblas right next to Placa Catalunya at a bar called Café Nuria. I was on about my eighth beer of the afternoon and was waiting for my Cuban friend Lazaro and the Catalan girl whom I was seeing at the time, Irene. I was trying to write something, the start of a new novel or something, and I was sort of just doodling in a small notebook and throwing around different phrases.

If anyone out there has read Pulling A Train, you might notice I have quite a bit of difficulty when it comes to a fluid start to a novel. On top of that, I did not have a subject for the novel, making it even more difficult to come up with a brilliant opening. I stopped trying to write for a moment and ordered my ninth beer, and turned around to watch the crowd walking down Las Ramblas. Suddenly, with a flourish, I became very angry. There was a group of about eight Americans with hats, cameras, and Hawaiian tee shirts. They were extremely loud, harmlessly obnoxious, and I wanted to beat the shit out of every one of them right then.

However, I am not the strongest of fighters, and even one on one I might have lost to each and every one of them, and there was certainly no way I was going to take them one against eight. So I turned around and looked back at the page, and started to transfer my anger through the written word. I wrote the following line, which some of you may be familiar with:

“I never saw the best minds of my generation…”

Then I continued to write the first page of LOST, which today still stands almost word for word from what I wrote that afternoon on Las Ramblas as Chapter 1 of Book I.

Armed with this one page of what I considered to be brilliant, I returned to the United States. I ignored everything else that I had written while I was in Barcelona and Prague in June of 1999, but soon set to work on building on the rage and anger and wonder that the first page had created. It went well. I wrote Book I in late June and July and was quite satisfied with what I had created. I had no idea where the thing was going, but I knew it was going well, so I continued to write.

I mostly wrote outside, underneath the deck of our house in New Jersey, right next to the sliding glass door of our walkout basement. I liked the freedom and fresh air, and, more to the point, I could not smoke cigarettes inside the house. I spent my mornings caddying and my afternoons and evenings drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, and writing continuously on an outdated laptop that barely even worked.

My social life was more or less a joke, but I did not want a social life. I spent all of July writing. My brother, my frequent party companion and best friend, was on an outward-bound program in Costa Rica and I was in the house more or less alone, save on rare occasions when my parents would venture into the basement to see what I was up to.

“WRITING!”

My other best friend, my cousin, occasionally got me out of the house and away from the golf course to hang out with some of his friends (also my friends, I suppose), and I even remember dating a girl named Courtney who was at least five years younger than me and about to enter the university (she was, I admit, very young, but I assure you she was gorgeous…I think…). But I more or less wrote, and wrote some more, and became furious with the world. My cousin’s crowd was a preppie one, very similar to the crowd at Lafayette, and I was giddy to take revenge against the world that I was born into and lived in with my pen.

The novel started taking place at the fictitious ‘Easton University’, an obvious reference to my own Lafayette College, but a dreamed up world nonetheless where I could vent on everything I hated about my college, which was, well, everything. It was a scathing criticism of the brimming confidence of the young, blue-blooded, American upper class, and with their feeling of invincibility and their snobby, conservative rhetoric. It was fun to write, and I made a point of completely trashing everything and everyone, with the non-to-subtle approach idea maybe the novel (which still had no name) would one day make me famous and would be stuck in the faces of all the Cro-Magnon’s I graduated with. Which was not necessarily a noble literary effort, but it served as motivation nonetheless.

My brother returned at the end of July, and we all went to Nantucket together to catch some Strangefolk shows, and on the way back, quite simply, I fell in love on the ferry. The girl I fell in love with was much more interesting to me than continuing my now stale novel (I had finished the University section and had no idea what came next), so I spent a lot less time writing and a lot more time in New York City with the girl I was in love with. Plus, my brother was back and we were throwing parties, mostly just for the two of us and our cousin, every night that I was not spending time in the City. Writing was taking a back seat; I was tired of it and happy to actually be a socially breathing person again.

The main problem when it came to the slowing of my writing, however, was not the constraint on time. And it was not writer’s block. I have never had writer’s block, though maybe somebody else would call it writer’s block – it was instead an odd feeling that I had no idea what came next in the novel. I just had no idea. I had lots of ideas of what to write, and was not blocked, but I was not sure what was fitting for the novel, which I had long since dubbed LOST as a temporary title, and what was fitting for later stories. I had also decided that I was going to be a writer.

For inspiration, as September rolled around and my girlfriend began attending UPENN for her sophomore year, I began re-reading the first page of the novel that I had written in Barcelona. Over and over again I would read it. And then it hit me: I was a fucking moron. I was one of the greatest idiots to ever roam the planet. My brain was so limited in its capacity that I had not even realized the obvious. This novel, this LOST, was about me, and though it was fictionalized and changed most all of the facts and merged characters (and indeed made up characters that never existed) and blurred the truth to fit the emerging plot, it was still following, more or less, the days that I spent at Lafayette College. Still, where would it go next?

I laughed at myself as I sat under the deck on a brisk September evening at just around midnight. I typed the following words. “Forgetting Again.” It was to be the title of Book III, and I began writing a transition that would take the main character to Barcelona, and later to Prague. Again, I would fictionalize everything that happened, and as the novel went along, I exaggerated and went further and further from the truth, making it, today, a complete work of fiction, but it followed the parallel life that I had already led. So I knew what the next location would be in the story, though I never knew what exactly was going to happen until I actually wrote it.

In this way, I punched myself in the face. It had been there all along. My life was the outline to LOST, and my creativity is what would fill in the outline. For example, Caleb Trafton goes to Barcelona. Caleb Trafton meets the following people. What then? Well, start writing you idiot. You have the outline, who cares if you don’t know what happened!

And so I continued to write, and as October came, I was writing furiously. I had reached nearly four hundred pages, nearly a hundred and seventy pages in a little over three weeks in September and October. There was another creative lull and I wrote more slowly until about mid-November. It could be described as a breath of fresh creative air, taking a step back before you have done too much or advanced your novel faster that it needs to be advanced.

Another point: I wrote mostly in Philadelphia after September. My girlfriend’s apartment in Philadelphia was much more conducive to creativity than my conservative home in New Jersey. No offense to my parents, who are perhaps the most supportive parents on the planet, but they know as well as I do that an apartment of college students is much more understanding of a drunken writer who smokes cigarettes all day and rarely showers than my parents could ever be. I mean, it makes sense.

Though my girlfriend did not necessarily like the state that I was in when I was writing, i.e. out of my mind and with hair sticking straight up and unaware of the world around me, she supported me. Somehow, she supported what I was doing, and did not mind that I was continuously, as she put it, “eating her house.” I was indeed eating her house, making myself a literary slob as she studied, went to classes and the gym, but it was feeding my creative energy, and as November came around, I was finally flying towards the end of the novel.

It was pretty simple to write it, it was just time-consuming to get it all down, because it was clear that the final product would be at least six hundred pages. It was clearly taking shape, much more so than Pulling A Train even did, including flashbacks to explain what it was that was so bothersome to Caleb and why is outlook was what it was. But I just needed to spend the time on it. I did. On December 22nd I took the keys to my girlfriend’s Philadelphia apartment and went down there alone. She wasn’t even there; she was in New York. I was alone, two days before Christmas, and I finally finished the thing. I wrote the last line and then started writing another line, and then I paused. I pressed delete three times and looked at the last line and realized that the thing was finished. It was done. I had tamed the monster, and I did not even know it was going to be over until I had written the last line.

I have no idea how most writers work, and I have a very difficult time presently figuring out how I work as a writer, but this was a shock to me that I did not expect. I wrote a line, and all of a sudden the novel was over. I will not say the last line here because it is sort of a spoiler, but I was shocked that what I had been working on for six months and was the crowning achievement of my life was suddenly over. Just like that, I hit “save” and it was done with.

Or not. Not really. LOST was not really done for another four months. I took my girlfriend to Prague in January and she read most of the novel while we were there and before we were there. She had been reading it on and off since I had started it, in excerpts and from reading, what they would call in the film world, “dailies”, but this was her first extensive read. She was horrified, if I remember correctly. I believe that she was impressed, but she was shocked that I was calling it a final product, and that I used the word “finished” when describing my work on the novel. She was right. The manuscript, while obviously a significant achievement, was ridden with grammatical errors, contradictory facts and events, and, in what has become one of my trademarks, repetition. It needed to be edited and cut, she told me. I told myself the same thing, but I hated both her and myself for saying these things to my mind.

“NO!” I continued to say in utter horror. I had spent so much time on this thing, and now I wanted it to be over. Six months of writing, though not continuous writing, was enough for me. I wanted to move on. But it was far from over. I had not known editing. I had written Pulling A Train, and, believe it or not, it was never edited until my mother edited a year or two after the fact. LOST was far from over.

I spent about three intensive months, from the end of January until the end of March, editing the thing. It was a disaster. It took forever, definitely longer than it took to write, at least in actual hours.

The next process, once I finished editing, was to find a literary agent to represent LOST, and that took another seven or eight months. So it was about a year and a half from the day I wrote the first page of the LOST in June of 1999 until the day I found a literary agent in November of 2000. It was about seven and a half moments of original writing, three months or so of editing, and another half a year or so to find a literary agent. All and all not a very fun process, but perhaps soon it will become a rewarding process. All signs are pointing up and I’m crossing my fingers.

The most important part of the process, I believe, besides writing the goddamn novel in the first place, was careful editing. I will forever thank my girlfriend for her insistence that I edit with an intense vigor. One of the comments that my agent made to me was, “it is basically a publishable manuscript as is, I wouldn’t change very much at all.” I believe that the only reason I got an agent for LOST in the first place is because it was so polished when I sent it out, and I think the most important moral of this tale is that editing is just as important as writing. But I could be wrong, as I often am…