Subject, but i know perfectly well that if they did not have tests or papers, if they were not held accountable, none of the seats would be empty. None of you have to be here, but you did come, so i find that very flattering. I could, i suppose, give you a test at the end. The title of my talk, which i forgot until jamie just mentioned it is the unknown aaron burr. I will read a bit about my book about aaron burr. The title of my book is called the heartbreak of aaron burr. Whole story you the without giving away the ending. I dont want to give away the ending because its not just that i want you to buy the book and read the book and enjoy it and hang around till the end, but it has to do with the reason i wrote the book in the first place. This goes back to my experience of writing, my experience of reading and in particular, my experience of listening to a question that my mother has been for the last 23 or 24 years. The question i will get to in a moment, but it goes to the heart of why people write and why people read. Theach history at university of texas and i teach writing. I teach writing to graduate students. The graduate students in my writing seminar also completed a couple days ago come from history. They come from communications, journalism. They come from the english department. They come from fine arts. They are students. They are apprentice writers. And they are working on developing their craft, their skill, their art in various genres. Some of them, that historians are going to write nonfiction. Journalists are going to write nonfiction of a somewhat different view. But i also had novelists. I have poets, playwrights and screenwriters. And they are sharing to accomplish Something Else. Except one of the things we talk about his what we are all trying to accomplish. This gets to the question of why people write and why people read. I could put the question to you. Youre all readers, i assume. You probably would not come to an event like this if you did not read. I could ask you, why do you read . In fact take that question and , hold onto it because there will be a questionandanswer time at the end. And typically the questions come from the audience. The answers are supposed to come from the speaker but we can turn , it around. If you care to volunteer why you read later, id be happy to hear what it is. But i will tell you what kind of reactions ive gotten over the years when i pose this question to various audiences including my students and including my mother. I had time waiting for the lecture, i was talking to my mom who is in oregon, and i am pleased to say, she is doing very well. She is 86 years old. Thank you. I will tell you that i couple of you applauded. Is that for the fact that she reached 86 years old, still in good health, still interested in my writing . All of the above. Anyway, about 15 years ago, i was teaching in undergraduate history seminar. It was for seniors, history majors. It turned out that the 15 students in the class were all history majors, but half of them are english majors as well. They redouble agers. And it just so happened that that is the way it fell out. The students were reading various great works of history but the particular genre that i , chose for that semester was great biographies, including autobiographies. So, they read selections from boswells life of johnson and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the confessions of Saint Augustine and julius caesars commentaries on the war. One work that particularly caught their attention was the autobiography of benvenuto cellini. How many of you have read it . You should all read it. Its fantastic. The thing that makes this so interesting is that it is a work of supreme egotism. Cellini is convinced that he was the greatest artist that god ever put on the earth and it comes through on every page. But he tells the story in a charming enough fashion that you are not really put off by this. You are willing so i have the to go so i have the along with it. Students read a selection where cellini is creating one of his masterworks and he becomes very frustrated with the technicians. Mold, cast the original and now it is left to the technicians to melt the bronze and pour it in. Its a very complicated mold with a statue of hercules with the head of medusa in his hand. It is really complicated, because it has to go from the heel all the way to the tip of his arm, through the snakes coils and everything. He chose this wonderful story about he is on his deathbed. The technicians cant get enough fire gang get the fire hall enough, so they start airing the panels off the walls and throwing that in. His fever is raging while the fire is burning and they pour it in, and he collapses on the floor. He wakes up four days later not knowing if he is dead or alive and he realizes he is alive and it occurs to him, how did it turn out . They knock the mold off and it is this really an masterpiece. The end of the story is, no one could have done it but me. The students dont know quite what to make of this. So i asked the students, you know, any time there is a work presented to you as being true, you have to ask yourself whether it is in something you read or something you encounter in daily life or some political speech that a candidate gives, do you believe them . You dont have to take things at face value. Do you believe this story . I asked them, how would you corroborate a story like this or any story . I mentioned to the students that any time you encounter anything, you need to ask, is it true . This is especially true these days, when my students get so much of their information off the internet. It has always been an issue when you pick up a book out of the library. Just because it is in the book do you believe that . , i will tell you that one of the lessons my students learn and this is a very good lesson for them is, after a while, come into the class and think im just their teacher. Eventually some of them catch on that i have written some books, and, it is an interesting lesson for them to realize that the person who is standing in front of them because most of them havent confronted an author before that i say stuff and im the guy who wrote this stuff in the book and they recognize when im talking i try to get it all as accurate as i can, but ordinary people, you try to get things right, but some of the stuff you get wrong. They realize its an ordinary person who wrote this book. Now i will tell you that some of them are mildly impressed when they discover ive written a book or one book or another. But really gets street credibility of my students is when they see me on tv because all of a sudden hes somebody. Anyway, the students all agree that this is a fascinating story and they say, great story, great drama, great characterization on and all this. It occurred to me at that point to ask a question that had never occurred to me to ask before because i thought i knew the , answer. I said, suppose you had read this story suppose id erased the name name of the author. Suppose i hadnt told you whether this was a true story or a fictional account, whether this was something that actually happened, or something that Somebody Just ate up. You didnt know this. You just read the story and you all agreed, great story, great story. Now, suppose after having read the story, i presented you with one additional piece of information. The additional piece of information was you know what, that great story you read actually happened. Its a true story. What would that do to your evaluation of the story . Would it make it a better story or no different . Well, i was flabbergasted by the response, and i was flabbergasted by the response because i didnt give the third alternative, which hadnt even occurred to me to ask them. The third alternative is that it makes it a worse story to know that it was true. Now, i guess i hadnt really confronted the degree to which i am a nonfiction kind of person. It seemed to me if you go to a , movie and its a great story based on a true story, that seems to be a marketing pitch. The Marketing Department thinks that makes it better because , they certainly advertise it. Well, of this group, when asked the question, how many of you think that it would make it a better story . About half of the students raised their hands. I was surprised it was only half. Was i think seven out of 15. Then, of the other eight, i think five of them said no different. A good story is a good story. But then three of them were the ones who really amazed me by saying, it made it worse. And i was trying to figure out why in the world how in the world it could be worse. And i thought about this for a long time. I will tell you the answer that i came up with because the answer that i came up with is related to the question that my mother has been posing to me how to me all these years. I mentioned that i teach writing and one of the things that i convey to my students, my apprentice writers is that above all, writing is an act of communication. If you are going to communicate effectively with your readers, you have to have some idea who your readers are. What expectations they have, what knowledge they bring to the subject. Unless you have a reader in mind, you cannot hope to convey whatever youre trying to convey effectively. So every reader excuse me every writer has to have a model , reader. You know, the reader in the back of your mind, that sits on your shoulder the reader you are , imagining is going to read your stuff. So youll know, is this too much information, too little information, is the reading level about right . It is quite different if you are writing for young adults or which are adults. Anyway, so for years and years i had the very good fortune to have the best possible model reader, namely, my father. And when i say the best possible model reader the first couple of books i wrote were written for the purposes of getting a job at the university and getting tenure. So the audience there was the academic community, the specialists who wanted to know that this is cuttingedge in a particular sub discipline i was writing in. After i accomplish that i , decided i wanted to reach out to a larger audience. An audience very much a suppose like you, people who are not probably specialists in history, people who have a general interest in the world, who, some who come with some experience, who come with some background in reading, but just want to know more about their world. My father fit this category very well. He was a selfemployed businessman. He had run a business for his entire working life. But then he retired and in his retirement he started reading more than he had. While he was working, he rarely read books. He read the wall street journal. He read fortune magazine. He read business staff. He had a cutlery business. He read iron age. I grew up reading iron age. An interesting magazine. I dont know if it still exists. But in his retirement he wanted to read he liked to read history. He liked to read biography. He liked to read the kinds of books i was writing. He read every book that i wrote. I know this because he would offer his critique of my books. And he was pretty candid. When he liked something, he would say billy, you did a good , job on that one. When he did not like it, he would say billy, not your best. , i learned my fathers standards from watching him eat meals that my mother would cook for him. A traditional relationship. My father died four years ago. For the entire sixty years of their marriage, my mother would cook breakfast for my father and dinner for my father. She refused to cook lunch for my father. He was expected to be working and find his own lunch. She put it, i married your father for better or for worse but not for lunch. Upon my fathers death, my mother announced that she was retiring from cooking and she has not cooked ever since. She eats out. Anyway, my father would read my books excuse me, and he showed me how to deal with their meals that he wasnt particularly fond of. He was very diplomatic about this. If my mother liked made something that he liked, he would say, that is wonderful. If she tried something new that didnt work out so well, he just wouldnt say anything and my mom understood from that means ok, no comment means dont do it again. It worked out very well. Anyway, my father was more forthcoming with me. He would tell me, the first three chapters are ok, but it bogs down after that. My father read every book i wrote. My mother tried to read each book that i wrote. She says that she finished two of them. One was on Benjamin Franklin. The other one was on California Gold rush. Now, im not really sure she finished those, but as a dutiful son, far be it for me to cast aspersions on my mother. She says she did, she did. But it was very clear that getting through a work of nonfiction was a task for my mother. She read out of some sense of duty to me. And every time after i wrote it after i wrote a book, she used to say she had it by her bedside and she would pick it up and read a few pages and it put her right to sleep. Well, anyway after each such she gave upnd after trying to finish it, she would say, bill when are you going to , write a novel . I tried to ask going, mom, i like good stories. I write history, because i think historys stories are theres stuff that happens that you just couldnt make up. Her reaction to that made me realize that was the point. , the point of novels is quite different in one basic way. I am going to contend that in a more basic way it is the same, but it is quite different from the writing of history, and this gets i would ask my mom, so what is it about novels that she that you like that makes them preferable to history . And she said, well, one of the things i like is that i get inside the heads of the characters in a way that i dont when i read works of history. And i had to grant that that is generally true, because if you adhere to the typical standards of history, where we dont get to make stuff up, we cannot motives, ideas, to our characters, unless somehow, we can get them to say it. Unless they write it down. We cant just out of the blue say that on the morning of july 4, 1863, Abraham Lincoln woke up in a fine mood unless he told , somebody who wrote it down or wrote a letter. When you write novels, thats exactly what you do. But i said, mom, i have been working my way around that problem by writing biographies. Because with biographies, they are all about character. And i do get inside the heads of my subjects because they do tell me what they are thinking. They write letters. They write diaries. She says okay, yeah, but theres Something Else that i like about novels. And that is, there is a romantic interest in novels. We can find out about the love lives of our characters. And i said yeah, that is true, too. But, with certain works of nonfiction, with certain biographies, you do get right to the heart of the matter. Well, not entirely, because once again, we are constrained by what our characters say, what they write down. And here is where the paths start to part, and i would ask you, do you write down your deepest thoughts . Do you write down your candid emotions . Some of you do, but i would bet that most of you dont. And even those of you who do, probably dont do it in a form thats going to survive 100 years, so historians coming along in the next century can have access to it. So, it is indeed true that it is hard to write about the love lives of our characters in a nonfiction form without injecting our way into their lives in a way that history writers do not get to. In the lasto this biography which i wrote which , was about franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, a very large part of the story is about the relationship between the two. A complicated relationship. A relationship that involved all sorts of things, besides and in addition to love. One that was fascinating, but one, again, i dont think you could make this up. This gets to the heart of the difference between novels and nonfiction. And here i will throw in the category of movies. Movies that are not documentaries. And that is precisely this, that the whole idea of of a novel is to pull the world together in a way that makes sense, in a way that has a particular story, that has a form. Novels are not just any old thing written down on the page. Novels have characters they , typically have a protagonist. Novels have conflict. There is usually an ascending arc of the conflict and the drama, and here is the critical thing novels, like most movies, have a resolution of the conflict. At the end of the book, at the end of the two hours of the movie you know how it turned , out. Now, nearly everybody who reads novels recognizes that that is not exactly the way the world is. The world isnt quite so tidy. The world is much messier than that. And i am going to throw out some thing to you and you can agree , with that or disagree with it. If you disagree vehemently, say questions and of we will talk about it some more. But i would suggest that people who im going to get pretty inflammatory in the moment. The people who prefer novels to to history are people who like their stories tidied up. They like stories to come to some kind of conclusion. It doesnt have to be a happy ending, but it has to be an ending, whereas, most history doesnt really have an end. Life does not conclusions. We strive for closure. But most of the time we dont get it. Life just kind of goes on and you go to the next thing. Well, that is part of what my mom admitted to. But what she really said i said mom, how about historical novels . How about the novels that are connected to history . She liked those okay. But she said the best novels i like are the ones that just dont have any connection to reality at all. I scratched my head over that until she said, i get enough reality in my daily life. The whole reason i read books and the whole reason i go to movies is to turn off the real world for a while and go someplace that is not at all connected to the real world. And it was this that finally made me realize what those students in my seminar were talking about when they said it made it worse to know that it is true because they really wanted a separation between their stories, their entertainment and the world. Now, thats not really fair to the students to say their entertainment as though merely entertainment, because of course , people have been justifying for years, for centuries, although well, i write in undergraduate writing seminar. The students read great works of history from herodotus to the present. One of the things they discover some of you already know this that novels were invented until 400 years ago. And before then, there was this there was not this distinction between what really happened and what was clearly made up. Anyway, so ive been thinking about this distinction between novels and history. I have been listening to my mother all these years, saying, bill, when are you going to write a novel . I wanted to please my mom. Just once. Shes not going to live forever. I actually tried to write. I finished a couple of novels. They are sitting in my drawer at home. I havent done anything with them yet. But meanw