Quote of the Day (Richard Ford, on Where Writers Get Their Ideas)

"To my mind, not to believe in invention, in our fictive powers, but instead to think that all is traceable, that the rabbit must finally be in the hole waiting, is (because it's dead wrong) a certain recipe for the williwaws of disappointment and a small but needless reproach to mankind's saving capacity to imagine what could be better and, with good hope, then, to seek it."—Richard Ford, "Where Does Writing Come From?" Granta, Summer 1998

Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction writer Richard Ford is irked by the notion that his own imagination had little or nothing to do with the creation of his characters. So, it turns out, is screenwriter-TV producer Aaron Sorkin.

William Glaberson’s article in yesterday’s New York Times reported that four attorneys are claiming to be the real-life inspiration for the character that helped put Sorkin on the entertainment map: military lawyer Lt. Daniel Kaffee in A Few Good Men.

You can see why they would claim that. What client wouldn’t want his advocate grilling a hostile witness with, “I want the truth”?

Only Sorkin is having none of that, as seen in his disclaimer in an e-mail message to The Times about these claims: “The character of Dan Kaffee in ‘A Few Good Men’ is entirely fictional and was not inspired by any particular individual.”

That sounds like one of those pro forma statements you see at the beginning of novels or end of films. There may be two reasons for this: 1) Sorkin doesn’t want a defamation suit because of a fictional depiction based in reality, as happened when Joe Klein was sued by a Harlem librarian over Primary Colors; 2) he’s annoyed by anything that infringes on his literary autonomy in shaping and reshaping reality to fit his own ends.

I think, more likely, that it is the latter. Like Robert Frost, he believes in telling the truth, but telling it slant.

Or, as Col. Nathan Jessep might put it in A Few Good Men: You can’t handle the truth.