WRITING AND THE LONG CON
1
Everything I know about the Long Con I learned from David
Mamet. He’s always been fascinated with the Con, both short and long, in his
plays (American Buffalo, Glengarry Glen
Ross) and his films (House of Games,
The Spanish Prisoner). As a short, general description, here’s Mamet in an
interview with Filmmaker Magazine in the spring 1998 issue:
“The Spanish
Prisoner con is still being
done today. It’s a fairly long con and involves getting a substantial amount of
money off a person and putting the person ‘on the send.’ Making a connection
with the guy and sending him off to get some money and come back. That’s the
long con. Of course, I’ve seen a lot of the short con. In New York, a short con
takes place on a street corner – someone’s trying to sell you a stolen watch or
a set of stamps or get you to lend you money to X, Y or Z. I think everybody’s
fascinated with cons. There’s something fascinating about people not being who
they are, and our capacity to use our intelligence to try to anticipate where
they’re going, and then failing and being tricked. That’s like magic. Most
people like magic.”
Our usual experience of the Short Con is being approached on a street corner and asked for money. Some of these are desultory (‘Hey man, got a quarter?’) and some are more complex and personal, involving long stories about sick mothers faraway and the need for a bus ticket to get back home. For most of us, the Long Con is only something we’ve heard about: the poor schmuck who gets an email from a Nigerian prince and sends him $1000, believing ten million will be deposited in his bank account the next day. These are Long Cons because they involve multiple interactions and complex instructions.
The essence of any Con, as explained in Mamet’s House of Games, is that the con artist reveals his vulnerability first, he gives ‘the mark’ his confidence. The guy who needs the bus ticket, the Nigerian prince, they have a problem, they are in need; they draw us in, if at all, both by being vulnerable and by giving us something in return. In the case of a bus ticket, it’s simply the chance to feel good about ourselves because we’ve helped someone; with the Nigerian prince, a complex relationship is established and we believe we’ll get something for nothing.
The other essential element of a Con is relationship. Regardless of whether the connection is objectively true or false, there must be a sense of it between the con artist and the mark, and this relationship is initiated by the con artist in the form of vulnerability or ‘confidence’.
All writing is a con. As writers we
manipulate a confidence we’ve chosen, whether real or imagined, in an attempt
to engage the reader. Often, we as writers feel this as a vulnerability, a
fragment of ourselves we are revealing; nearly as often we’re not aware of
exactly what we are revealing.
At the center of every story is a
confidence: the characters, the plot, the subtext, we are trying to sell to the
reader in order to entice them. What we
want from this exchange first is attention, the reader’s attention to the
piece, then response (be it conversation, accolades, or cash).
Either way, what we are doing is
lying to the reader. But lying in a way we believe will engage them. We may
even hope our lies approach a different level of truth, in the same way that a
series of negative numbers multiplied together creates a positive number.
By deciding on a structure, by
limiting the number of characters, by narrowing the focus here and expanding it
there, by choosing some details over others, we are not interested in the truth
in any usual sense of the word. We are working to create the truest lies we can
imagine.
The least involving Short Cons are only interested in effect and result. The guy who asks ‘Hey man, got a quarter?’ doesn’t really care to have any kind of relationship, he’s not even interested in human interaction. He’s only interested in his quarter.
The most involving Short Cons are composed of more or less elaborate stories that, at the very least, allow the con artist and the mark to interact on a human level, regardless of whether the story is true or not. It is already a more complex relationship. In the best Short Cons, you can’t see the lie, you can’t know whether the mother really is dying of lung cancer and the bus really does cost $35. These details are important, by the way. Every detail of the Con is crafted for maximum effect. Too few and it doesn’t seem real. Too many and you lose the mark in statistics.
A single piece---a short story,
essay, poem---is a Short Con. A brief interaction in which that balance of
detail and the lack of it is tantamount. The single piece can be based on a
simple confidence, a single vulnerability. A book---a novel or collection---is
a Long Con, revealing a series of confidences or vulnerabilities as the reader
leaves and returns, leaves and returns. The Long Con of a book is about the
relationship between the artist and the mark.
Because the Long Con is what we’re
aiming for as writers, we want our mark coming back; we’re not happy with a
single interaction. We want our con to be compelling enough that, even if the
mark wanders off, they’ll circle back around our way again.
If this arrangement is going to
work at all, we must imagine our reader, our mark, before we meet them; or, at
the very least, believe that they are out there somewhere and we will find
them. We use our own vulnerabilities in this process, whether they are false or
true, incidental or committed. Those vulnerabilities may be simple and
technical (Am I good enough?) or they might be deeper and more personal, as
when we consciously explore elements of ourselves (which all our writing does
in one fashion or another).
We use these Short Cons to build toward the Longest Con, the Big Score shall we say, which is our personal body of work. This is the true Long Con for the writer, the con requiring vision, vigilance, and courage.
We are the ones guiding this Con. Where are we, as the artist, going, and what do we want from it? It might be something we only ever need articulate for ourselves, but we must articulate it.
-Steve Mitchell
