Fifty Six Years Is Enough

            Watching (and thoroughly enjoying) Elementary last week set my mind drifting to the question of copyright. How wonderful, I thought, that the character of Sherlock Holmes, having achieved literary immortality, is now in the public domain, allowing a new generation of writers and filmmakers unlimited freedom to adapt Holmes and Watson to the modern era or invent new stories featuring them in their own time.

            It turns out that, as Humphrey Bogart said in Casablanca, I was misinformed.

            A couple of days later, I came across an article in the Times about how the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle has been aggressively collecting licensing fees from authors and filmmakers wanting to use Holmes (and/or Watson) as characters, even though most of the stories were written before the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The reasoning is that ten of them were first published in the U.S. in 1923, are still subject to the copyright law, and, being part of an entire body of work featuring the character of Holmes render the character still protected. That argument is now being challenged in court, and it will be fascinating to see how it turns out.

Fourteen Years Is Not Enough

            America’s first copyright law was passed in 1790 and provided that an original work could be copyrighted for a period of 14 years, with an option to extend the copyright another 14 if necessary. In 1909 the law was amended (not for the first time) to make the copyright period 28 years with a 28-year renewal. Beginning in 1976 the periods were progressively extended to the point where a copyright is now good for 95 to 120 years, with no need for renewal.

            At the risk of sounding like Glenn Beck, I think they had it pretty much right in 1909. If the 28-28 rule were still in effect, readers everywhere would benefit from cheap editions (print and online) of such books as A Farewell to Arms, The Great Gatsby, Gone With The Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, and more than half the writings of Agatha Christie.

            Copyright law, as originally conceived, had two purposes: to protect the authors of creative work and to ensure that that work eventually entered the public domain and became broadly available to the public and subject to use and interpretation by other creators. Instead, we have such absurdities as the just-released Oz the Great and Powerful being unable to use Dorothy’s ruby slippers because they are deemed to be protected under the copyright of the 1939 Wizard of Oz.

When My Ox Is Being Gored

            Last year, I published my first mystery novel, so I suppose I should be grateful for the benefits of a 95-year copyright, in the event the book really takes off at some point along the line. I still think it’s ridiculous. That’s three times longer than I have any reasonable expectation of living, and my only son would be 117 years old when the copyright expired. A 56-year copyright would have been just fine, even if it leaves Nick without royalties at the age of 78. I expect he’ll be able to take care of himself at that point.

            If my book were to go into the public domain in 56 years, there’s a chance that someone might discover it, bring it back to life in a cheap e-book edition, and get some new readers for it, in some way keeping my memory alive. When I’m dead, that would be more important than getting some hypothetical royalties into the hands of a geezer great-grandchild I never knew.

           

           

Creating the Paracosm

            Psychologists say that most children at some point create an imaginary world, known in the professional literature as a paracosm, where they feel more comfortable. As they grow older, most of them eventually abandon the worlds they have created and deal exclusively with the one at hand.

            Those who don’t grow up and abandon their paracosms typically end up behind bars or writing fiction. Reasonable people can disagree over which outcome is less damaging to society.

            Having written fiction, I must confess to feeling a bit of envy for the child creating a paracosm. It doesn’t necessarily have to make sense internally, the rules can change from time to time, and it doesn’t have to be shared with someone else who can criticize it. Working in a genre like mystery, where the rules are strict enough as it is, the freedom accorded the child creator is almost unimaginable.

Playing God on the Computer

            As has been often noted, a fiction writer gets to play God. The author can decide who lives, who dies, what happens and what the ramifications are. When I’m writing a book, I can decide whether a character lives to 90 in robust good health or dies in a shootout. I can move someone out of the way temporarily when it suits my purpose or throw them over a waterfall and get rid of them for good. Though, come to think of it, that last one didn’t work too well for Conan Doyle.

            Those machinations, however, don’t make sense or have emotional resonance unless they occur in a created world that feels real to the reader. Creating that world — a world drawn from our own but not quite exactly like it — is a real challenge for an adult author.

            A number of people who have read my mystery, TheMcHenry Inheritance, have asked for instance if some of the settings are this or that real place. I typically stumble for an answer on that one, saying something like, “Well, they’re obviously drawn from real places, but they’re elements of several different ones plus some stuff I made up.”

            That applies to everything — not only the geography, but the people, the situations, the weather. To give just one example, the book takes place in September of 1993, and the dates in the book are exactly as they were for that year.

No Rain in the Forecast

On the other hand, there’s a major afternoon thunderstorm on Thursday September 9. I didn’t even bother checking weather records to see if there were thunderstorms in the High Sierra that day. I needed one to advance the story, so in the paracosm that is Summit County, California, on the east slope of the Sierra, there was one. Any connection to the real weather of that day is purely coincidental.

For me, one of the hardest things about writing fiction is getting into the zone where my imagination is, for the moment anyway, living inside the paracosm I’m creating. I typically have to work myself into that position before I actually start writing, and when I’m there, good things happen; the characters and the story take on a life of their own.

This summer The New Yorker published some excerpts from the diary of fiction writer Mavis Gallant, and one of them resonated with me. “No one is as real to me as the people in the novel. It grows like a living thing. When I realize they do not exist except in my mind I have a feeling of sadness, looking around for them as if the half-empty café were a place I had once come to with friends who had all moved away.”