From: Jasper
Date: Sunday, June 24, 2007
Time: 12:09:39 AM
Jean, … The writing process is different for different people and for different kinds of writing projects. For me, the objective dictates the structure and the structure dictates the priorities in completing it. Polishing it always comes last and only when time permits after the main ideas are in place. I still haven’t gotten around to tidying up Killing the Goose… or the last book in the Random Factor trilogy and I had to send The Invisible Warriors and Iago to the printer before I could catch some embarrassing errors in them. ………….Big publishers don’t normally have those kinds of problems because they have teams of proofreaders and editors working with authors to insure they are cleaned up – unless they, too, have to rush a book to the printer. I don’t know how it was with Pablo Fenjves and ReganBooks in their If I Did It project but I did get some strong impressions. …………The TMZ version of the book looked to me like the last draft Fenjves had time to make. That could mean an early draft, lots of them or a big revision too close to a deadline. It reminded me of model cars we built that were total crap for the same reasons. …………..The entire book is fiction with a few facts thrown in here and there. The same thing can be said for Alice in Wonderland. You can tell that O.J. told Fenjves things that appear in the book. On the other hand, Fenjves takes such creative license with long passages of DIALOGUE in every chapter that you have to guess what O.J. said, what Fenjves paraphrased and what Fenjves made up hole clothe. It’s not like a book where a ghostwriter tape recorded the person he’s ghosting for, quotes some lines verbatim and runs off a few lines of close proximity he-said, she-said, I-said verbal exchanges. It’s too much like a screenplay not to have been written with a screenplay in mind. ………..All screenplays are fiction. Even a screenplay “based on a true story” takes liberties with facts for practical reasons of time, budget, simplicity, marketability, literary “flow” and dramatic effect. If I Did It shows that all of these reasons apply in spades. …………The reason I blame Judith Regan for this mess is because it was written at her direction on a foundation of bullshit. Fenjves had the task of building HIS story from O.J.’s perspective in a way that trapped O.J. into “confessing his guilt.” Regan was supposed to spring the trap in her prepublication interview with O.J. on Fox. However, Fenjves ran into an insurmountable problem in getting whatever O.J. told him to fit any rational scenario of guilt and Regan rushed the book into print before it was ready. The problem for Regan was, what if O.J. didn’t do it? What do you get then? You get a horrible joke called If I Did I by Pablo Fenjves and Judith Regan. –Jasper