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CHAPTER FIVE: Legwork
- University of Georgia Press
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The Proposal When I first considered writing a book about the Tasaday hoax controversy, I needed to write a proposal. By no means do all books, articles, or essays need proposals. As David Shields said to me not long ago, “Many of the books you and I love would have made no sense as a proposal.” And he’s certainly right. There are few if any editors who would have jumped at Geoff Dyer’s book Out of Sheer Rage before it was written. Now he’s well known enough that a proposal for this book might fly, but at the time it would have sounded absurd to most publishers: I plan to write a book about trying to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. But some books depend on proposals to be written. As publishers are in the business of selling books, they want to put their money behind books they think will sell to as many people as possible. The first thing you need to consider is whether or not your idea is suitable for a proposal.HerearebriefdescriptionsoftwobooksI’vewritten:“I’mgoing to write a book about a ‘tribe’ in the Philippines that was discovered in 1971 and hailed as the ‘ethnographic Find of the Century,’ only to be derided fifteen years later as one of the biggest hoaxes of the century.” And, “I’m going to write a book about my older sister Nola, who was a diagnosedschizophrenicandwhodiedofaprescription-drugoverdose when she was twenty-five.” As a reader, the second idea might well appeal to you more than the first, but the concept of the first would catch a publisher’s attention much more readily than the second. The second book was undoubtedly dearer to my heart than the first, though I spent Chapter Five Legwork Legwork 169 twice as much time on the Tasaday book as I did on my book about my sister. I knew going into my book about my sister that a proposal would have seemed ridiculous—if it was going to be written, I would have to write it for no other reason than I wanted to write it. Likewise, my book Nola was a reflective memoir, not an immersion memoir, and so it simply demanded that I sit in my chair every day and write, while the Tasaday book would demand many interviews with authorities on the subject the world over. In order to cover my travel expenses and to sound credible enough to secure those interviews, I needed to sell it to a publisher. I came to the story of the Tasaday with no strong preconceptions except the hunch, based on the flimsy news accounts I’d read, that they weremostlikelyahoax.Thisopen-mindednesswasprobablythesingle most important factor that allowed me to gain access to almost everyone involved. I was not an anthropologist, though I’d studied anthropology in college. I was not a journalist, per se. I was not the friend of anyone involved. Still, I was by no means a Tasaday expert. I didn’t even have much of a track record as a nonfiction writer. At the time, I had published five books, and only the book about my sister could be truly considered a work of nonfiction (I had also written a craft book, but this was concerned with fiction). So I had a fair amount of convincing to do. I should say that in this case, the help of my agent, Jennifer Hengen, was invaluable. She was able to arrange a conversation with an editor who was intrigued by the idea. We chatted for an hour or so and then the editor told me to spend the summer writing a proposal. One of the crucial aspects upon which the success of my proposal hinged was my access to experts on the subject. I didn’t know any Tasaday experts. So I entered Tasaday in my pre-Google Web browser, and a name appeared: John Bodley. At the time, I lived in Bellingham, Washington, and Professor Bodley also lived in Washington. He taught over the mountains at Washington State University in Pullman. I quickly dashed off an e-mail to Professor Bodley and asked him if he would be willing to chat with me about the hoax controversy. Almost immediately I heard back that [44.192.75.131] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:56 GMT) 170 Chapter Five yes, he’d be happy to talk with me about the Tasaday. I had no idea at the time how...