A few weeks ago I noticed a green anole squeeze into the driver-door outside mirror of my car.  It did not occur to me that he actually lived in there until this past weekend, when I took a four-day, three-night, 1200-mile book tour road trip from my home to a gig at Florida State College in Venice, Florida, and then on to an appearance at the Miami Book Festival and back home again.  This little fella, whom I came to call “Larry,” went along for the ride, sunning himself at times at 70 miles per hour on the Interstate.  He and I safely returned home but not without a couple of extreme-sport adventures.  Twice Larry emerged entirely and flapped wildly in the wind like the green flag of a banana republic in a hurricane.  The first time, before I could figure out what to do, he reconsidered the move and was able to crawl back in to safety.  The second time, about fifty miles from home, I noticed him out there clinging by one foot and clearly about to fly away.  I rolled the window down and grabbed him.  (I have perfected a gentle-grab technique over the years with these guys, who often wander into my two-cat household at their great peril.)  I pulled over and fortunately had a small box in the back seat that kept him safe until we got home.  When I opened the box beneath the live oak at the end of the brick walkway to my house, he strolled casually out with what can only be described as an I-meant-to-do-that attitude.

Any writer who, midway through his publishing career, makes his way to Hell, the straight way of his life having been lost, must go there in the footsteps of Dante Alighieri and his man Virgil.  I first read Inferno on the balcony of my room at the Metropole Hotel in Saigon in 1971.  It was the splendidly odd translation of Dorothy Sayers, appropriate, I thought, since she commenced it underground during the Blitz.  The horizon before me at night crackled in that season, and it was hard to say whether it was thunder or bombs.

I was struck by the celebrity culture of Hell.  Dante filled the place with the famous, from history and from his own time.  It has always been thus: celebs live lives writ large, and since their sins are the common human ones, regular folks’ similar sins seem loftier somehow, part of a larger cosmos.  On the balcony of the Metropole, I pondered the contemporary cast bound for or recently off to the fires: Dick Nixon and Spiro Agnew, William Calley and Charlie Manson, Joplin and Hendrix and Morrison, Brezhnev and Mao.  Heavy on the seventh and eighth circles.  All of this was the first seeding of my own vision of Hell.

And then, much later, the 21st century happened.  The inspiration of most writers is in some way a response to the zeitgeist.  The political wars of the 20th century had quickly turned into religious wars in the new millennium.  And it struck me that every human being who has ever walked the face of the earth has had millions and millions of others who devoutly expected that person to end up in Hell.  I thought:  okay, everyone’s right.  And I knew I would overstuff the underworld in a novel to capture this present state of things.

But fiction is built on character.  And that most crucial novelistic inspiration had to wait for a few years. In 2005 I wrote a screenplay for Robert Redford.  He wanted to play an aging TV network anchorman.  I got the job and for research hung out for a while with Peter Jennings and Brian Williams.  That screenplay was my ninth for hire in twelve years, and though they were greatly admired, which kept me getting hired, not one of them has found its way to the screen.  I’ve been in Development Hell for more than a decade. But this last time I learned a great deal about network anchors, and Hatcher McCord, the anchorman for The Evening News from Hell, started talking to me.  And—crucial for fiction—he spoke to me of his yearning: to find out why he was there, to figure out, indeed, who he had been in life, who he was now.  Fiction is the art form of human yearning, and Hatcher presented me with the nearly universal yearning in characters in literary fiction—the yearning for a self, for an identity, for a place in the universe.  After that, I just had fun.