Where Do Novels Come From?

This piece first appeared in the Rappahannock News, June 27, 2024

William Wordsworth said, “The child is father of the man.” William Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” William Brown - my father - said, “Get up, boy. We’ve got places to go and things to do.”

At some point in our lives, most of us experience a dissonance between the forces that drive our decisions on a daily basis and those that push and pull at us, more subtly, perhaps, but persistently, from the reaches of our childhood. They’re usually good for a chuckle or some quirk that our spouses tease us about, but they can also be the stuff of important reflection.

When Rappahannock County and its people came into my life, I was on the far side of fifty, with thirty years of international travel, boardrooms and committee meetings under my belt. I had realized most of the dreams that launched me into adulthood, and the rest had been reworked to the point that they were no longer very interesting. I was pretty good at running the bases in my life, but I had begun to wonder what the game was all about.

I found myself thinking about events that I had paid too little attention to over the years - Vietnam, Kent State, civil rights…. I thought about people whose lives had crossed paths with mine and disappeared in the wake of my own pre-occupations. What drove me to make the decisions I had taken? How might things have gone if I had made different choices?

Like so many ‘came-here’s, I was initially drawn to Rappahannock by its natural beauty, by the way its farms and villages nestled into the land without breaking its spirit. But there was something else: Day-to-day life in the county is closer to the realities of nature and necessity than it is in the buffered existence of mainstream America, and there is a sense of continuity among the past, the present and the future. The past isn’t an envelope to be opened when it suits us; it’s an active ingredient in everyday life.

That sense of being connected and that continuity in time spoke to the gaps I had been feeling in my own life. I had fled farm labor and the jack-of-all-trades chores of rural life as a youngster to become the first person in my family to attend college, and now the memory of those activities returned with a sense of nostalgia. Blisters and a sore back soon fixed that with a dose of reality, but returning to the land ran deep, and being welcomed into the county came with a sense of coming home that had little to do with geography.

I wondered how contemporaries of mine who grew up in Rappahannock in the sixties might have dealt with the issues that surfaced as I reflected on my own life. How might the setting they grew up in have influenced their choices?

To explore such questions, I created a couple of fictional characters. I set them up in their senior year in Rappahannock High School in 1965, and then I took a seat in the stands, as it were, to watch what happened over the next forty years.

Jerry Fletcher’s family had been evicted from their home in the mountains to make way for Shenandoah National Park. They were successful in re-establishing themselves as part of the county’s economy, but Jerry’s bitterness about the eviction has given him a defiant attitude toward authority.

David Williams is the oldest son of a local preacher whose literal interpretation of scripture left little room for intellectual curiosity or for the possibility that values could exist beyond the doctrine he preached. That became the unspoken challenge of David’s foray into the world of the sixties and seventies.

The only thing these two have in common is their love of the Blue Ridge, and the knowledge of who they are, gained from their time in the mountains, is a touchstone in the pursuit of who they will become.

So, the result of all my midlife reflection wasn’t a divorce or a new convertible. It was a series of four stand-alone historical fictions: The Morning Side, Fletcher’s War, Out of Eden, and The Purpose Breaks. There were a few thousand hours of research and editing in there, too, but never mind that. I had a chance to relive some of the challenges and opportunities of the mid to late twentieth century, and to explore how the vestiges of who we were play a role in who we become.

I think it might have been John Fowles who said, “I believe in absolute fidelity to the truth, and to the facts insofar as they support the truth.” I hope readers will find some truth of their own in these stories.

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There’s No Right Way to Write

Most people are familiar with the expression, “If you meet the Budha on the road, kill him”. I recommend the same approach to anything you meet that claims to be the definitive guide to creative writing.

There are important rules of the road, to be sure, and practices that have stood the test of time, but the idea that there is one ideal process is an illusion that sends many a writer off on a wild goose chase instead of owning what works best for them.

The reason no one system works for everyone is simple: A standard formula requires standard ingredients, and there’s nothing less standard than what an author has to work with: their conscious, their unconscious, and the world as they know it. What’s more, getting these three ingredients to work together can sometimes feel like driving a troika whose members have the synchrony of an ostrich, a camel and a crocodile.

It takes a lifetime to get to know one’s own troika, and what works with mine might send yours careening off course. (At the moment, my ostrich wants to take this analogy and run with it, but maybe another time!)

Who Calls the Shots?

Two of these ingredients – our conscious and our unconscious – pose a dilemma for the writer. If we depend too heavily on the conscious, in the sense of charging forward with images and ideas we have in hand, the best we can hope for is the written equivalent of elevator music – a nice, fleshed out-version of the story line, with perhaps a touch of clever.

I ‘found’ a poem some years ago in The French Lieutenant’s Woman (pp 95–98), that gives John Fowles’ take on this aspect of writing:

The novelist you say knows all;

Only pull the strings and puppets will behave.

But, fill a book with reasons -

Vanity, amusement, curiosity -

Why novelists write

All true but not true of all

Only one is shared:

To create worlds as real as the one that is,

But other.

 

The world is organism, not machine,

Independent of creator –

A planned world, a dead world –

And characters begin to live that disobey.

The only good god is freedom

That allows other freedoms to exist;

And standing next to God,

The novelist.

The author as scribe with a front row seat, capturing what happens when characters get a chance to be themselves; certainly not the conventional image of the author as an omnipotent commander.

It wasn’t uncommon during the years I was writing the Two Roads Home series to be replaying dialogue in my head and have one of the characters go off script, or to have something unforeseen happen in my mind’s eye that changed the course of the story. It felt very much like being along for the ride instead of in the driver’s seat, and with my ego shunted unceremoniously aside, those have been among the most exciting, rewarding occasions in my writing experience.

Let’s not kid ourselves, though: depending on the unconscious to deliver the goods through imagination, dreams or free association can leave us either waiting for Godot, or trying to make sense of a jumble of images and ideas with as much order as the flotsam along a high tide line.

The Muse Helps Those Who Help Themselves

Frida Kahlo said, “I am my own muse.” Wow! Most of us can’t let go of the idea of some external embodiment of inspiration but even with such a symbol, the goods come from within. The trick is to find that condition, those circumstances, in which we can tap into both the conscious and the unconscious.

How do I remain proactive in the writing process but not kid myself about what I can do without the help of resources beyond my control? What does it take to make the unconscious feel welcome? I have found three helpful tools: repetition, receptivity, and research.

       i.          Repetition.

What do attorneys, detectives and psychotherapists have in common? They ask you to repeat your story, sometimes over and over again. Unless you’re suspected of deceit, they use this method because they know that, as our mind settles into a subject, it begins to recall more detail and make more associations – not unlike one’s eyes getting used to the light in a dark room.

It’s not unusual for me to reread a passage – even an incomplete sentence – or play a scene over in my mind twenty times. Frustrating as hell to end up in the same place again and again, but sometimes the tumblers drop and my ‘out of nowhere’ delivers a different word, a different view, a different thought about what’s going on. Or it might just say, “Just a minute; the problem is somewhere else.” Either way, it pays off with a richer outcome.

     ii.          Receptivity.

The muse is unlikely to want to share your head with a neighbor’s lawnmower or Breaking News on CNN. And it takes more than a cup of coffee to make way for her if you’re tired or preoccupied. I’m not talking about retreating to an ashram; just give the writing process the same attention and alertness you’d give any other important mental exercise.

You’ve probably noticed that there are particular times or places in your day when ideas are more likely to come out of nowhere. For me, it’s in the moments after I first wake up. Linger a few moments in those times and places, and keep a pen and notepad nearby.

And there’s something else about this receptive state: you can’t turn it on and off like a light switch if the phone rings or your partner reminds you about some errand you promised to run. How you negotiate that particular issue is another story, but minutes become hours when you’re in that space. So unless you want to become Exhibit A for ‘writers are selfish’, some bargaining with others in your life is in order.   

   iii.          Research.

The world as defined by our knowledge and experience is a shallow version of what actually surrounds us, whether we’re talking about philosophy, internal combustion engines or whole wheat bread. OK, some of our dioramas might have Smithsonian detail, others may resemble first grade homework assignments, but there’s always room to broaden and deepen our awareness of any part of the world we live in.

It’s all well and good to be guided by the axiom to ‘write what you know’, but that doesn’t rule out taking the time to learn more about it. In fact, digging around at the edges of the familiar has been so productive of ideas and images for me that I’m tempted to make an axiom out of it.

I think what happens in this process is not only the discovery of new facts and perspectives, but it’s almost as if it sets in motion a parallel rummaging among the synapses of our brain, and associations are exposed that lead us to memories and instincts that we may not recognize, or that may even have preceded us.

So, click on items around the Google entry you started with, chase synonyms, contemporary events, names – let curiosity call the shots and see where it takes you. (This is probably a good point to recall the note above, about minutes becoming hours!)  

At some point you’ll have to reign yourself in and get back to the query you started with, but what some may call distraction can be the source of new levels of authenticity and insight in your work.

The Emperor’s Clothes

A brief note in passing: if you use some form of chemical inducement in your courtship of the muse – a drink, a smoke, or whatever - be sure to look carefully at the gifts from your trip before you share them too widely. Your insight or inspiration could have felt in the moment like a whole new wardrobe but, in the cold light of day, the emperor may be as naked as a jaybird.

Finally,

I think a piece of writing has three lives:

• One that matures with the light of day - its clarity, scope and coherence;
• One that evolves with the writer’s discovery of themselves – its validity and insight;
• One that finds its place on the shelves of time – its relevance.

… and the intriguing thing in terms of process? They are all unfinished business.

 

Jim

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