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"  &amp;quot;Suddenly a ball of fire explodes across the screen and when it clears you see me, or whoever they get to play me, shooting toward the heavens, rising higher and higher, all lit up in flames like a human Roman Candle.&amp;quot; Why he wrote the last line: This sentence came to me as I was writing the fifth chapter of my new novel, A Fine Madness, only I knew it didn&amp;#039;t belong in the fifth chapter but rather the first, on the opening page, where I decided the story should begin with the explosion that propels its main characters, Sally and Bobby, into prime-time notoriety on everything from YouTube and CNN to America&amp;#039;s Most Wanted.  What&amp;#039;s the novel about? I&amp;#039;ve never liked this question. It requires me to reduce the story to its basic elements, to strip it naked. And when you do that, you lose so much of what drives the story, what makes it worth writing and caring about. It&amp;#039;s like pitching an idea to a producer, which I&amp;#039;ve done quite a few times and never very successfully, though between books I&amp;#039;ve worked in Hollywood off and on for over twenty years. Typically all the producer wants are the key points of the plot, but the beauty of good writing is in the details. You put one after the other and build on them until you have a strong book or story.  Even though I&amp;#039;m not big on the question, I&amp;#039;ll give answering it a shot: The novel&amp;#039;s basically about two bright kids who fall in love in college, become addicted to methamphetamine, and set up a lab in student housing. Things go terribly wrong, and the entire apartment complex is burned to the ground. They survive, though a friend of theirs does not, and before you know it Sally and Bobby are wanted on a series of charges ranging from murder and manufacturing of a controlled substance to fleeing arrest with special circumstances because they temporarily escape to Mexico. &amp;quot;At what point,&amp;quot; Bobby, the narrator, says, &amp;quot;did we veer so far from the path of the good and moral that we all but destroyed any possibility of a peaceable surrender?&amp;quot;  Their lives, as they once knew them, are destroyed, and so with the money from a steroid smuggling deal with the Mexican Mafia (Bobby absconds with the proceeds), Sally and Bobby buy a Winnebago and travel the California coast, cooking meth, and selling it to a lawyer who&amp;#039;s a high ranking officer in a biker gang. Since Sally&amp;#039;s dream of one day being a famous actor (she was a theatre arts major) is ruined, and because Bobby feels responsible for their troubles and loves her deeply, they begin making their own movies, filming their crime sprees to showcase Sally&amp;#039;s genuine acting talent. They&amp;#039;re a modern day Bonnie and Clyde, hunted by the FBI to the ATF to your run-of-the-mill state troopers. It&amp;#039;s a wild romp with plenty of twists and turns along the way. I&amp;#039;m drawn to the darker side, but I also like to think I&amp;#039;m able to see and appreciate the joy, beauty and humor in life that transcends the tragic. I don&amp;#039;t always know exactly where I&amp;#039;m going when I sit down to write, and I&amp;#039;m happy if I get a page or two in any given session. The next day I look over what I&amp;#039;ve written, and often as not throw it in the trash where it belongs. But that&amp;#039;s the catch. In order to get to the good stuff, at least for me, I have to write through the not-so-good stuff, or just plain downright shitty stuff.  In the many places I&amp;#039;ve lived over the years, I always find myself setting up office in basements or the lower, colder rooms of a house. My computer always faces the wall. I want no windows, no distractions or pretty pictures, and for the last eight months I&amp;#039;ve played nothing but Bruce Springsteen&amp;#039;s Greatest Hits on my disc drive while I&amp;#039;m writing. Aside from being a Springsteen fan, I can&amp;#039;t stand the quiet when I work. I need to fill the silence as I do a blank page. I write in the morning before the day&amp;#039;s burdens and problems begin to mount. When I was a Visiting Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers&amp;#039; Conference, I had dinner with the program director&amp;#039;s wife, who&amp;#039;d read my first novel, Hot Wire, which is about growing up tough in L.A. and is full of drugs and booze and crime. She asked me how I&amp;#039;d done my research, and the only way I could respond was honestly. I told her I didn&amp;#039;t have to do any. I&amp;#039;d lived that life. She didn&amp;#039;t say another word to me that night, and it kind of hurt. But I&amp;#039;m 50 now, more jaded if not wiser, and when I&amp;#039;m asked about my drug and alcohol addiction I&amp;#039;m no longer ashamed. Regretful, yes, and most certainly deeply sorry for those I&amp;#039;ve hurt. But shame is risky. Shame could drive me back to the bottle, powders and pills. In my memoir, The Los Angeles Diaries, I describe what it&amp;#039;s like to first fix heroin at 14, to drink myself into oblivion as an adult, to binge on meth or coke or anything I got my hands on, and to watch my brother and sister take their lives as a result of their own struggles. Cheery stuff.  I&amp;#039;ve been diagnosed by three psychiatrists as manic-depressive with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and so I take a powerful antipsychotic drug, a small dose during the day and a big one at night, so that it knocks me out and I don&amp;#039;t have the nightmares that have plagued me the better part of my life. But I wake up groggy, so to counter that in order to write, I double my dose of Wellbutrin (an antidepressant with stimulant qualities, and, I might add for the men out there, little to no sexual side effects as with so many SSRI&amp;#039;s), drink two cups of coffee, a third while I&amp;#039;m writing, and a scoop of No-Explode, which is another stimulant concoction typically used pre-workout for weight lifters and body builders. The thing is, although I&amp;#039;m clean and sober and have been for some time, I need my mania to write just as the narrator in A Fine Madness needs his to live to tell the tale. ...his raptures were, All air, and fire, which made his verses clear,  For that fine madness still he did retain,  Which rightly should possess a poet&amp;#039;s brain. --Michael Drayton (1563-1631)  (Note: This quote from Drayton&amp;#039;s poetry was taken from Touched With Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison.) As told to Anya Yurchyshyn  About the author: James Brown is the author of several novels and The Los Angeles Diaries: A Memoir, named a Best Book of the Year by Publisher&amp;#039;s Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Independent of London. His personal essays have appeared in GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and Ploughshares and anthologized in Best American Sports Writing of 2006 and Fathers and Sons and Sports: An Anthology of Great American Sports Writing, out in May from ESPN. He teaches at California State University, San Bernardino. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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