[Note: The following series, Half The Battle, is culled from a long paper I had to write reflecting on my entire experience in Goddard College's Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. It focuses on my creative thesis, a novel entitled, Gods of the Hills: An Act of Secession. I had hoped to blog regularly about the process of writing the novel, but I didn't update as often as liked. This series is how I'm making up for that. I hope you like it.]

Part I:
Yo Joe!

I remember sitting in my bedroom with one of my buddies. We’re surrounded by dozens and dozens G.I. Joe guys. We are probably six or seven years old, but the truth is I played with G.I. Joe guys until I was eleven or twelve.

I don’t know how other people played with their G.I. Joe guys, but for us, it wasn’t about engaging the action figures in some kind of Armageddon-like battle; rather, it was about coming up with new ways to position them around my room.

I had over fifty G.I. Joe guys, so the process could take a while: Lady Jaye on the post of my bunk bed; Clutch in his jeep in the hallway; Snake Eyes beneath the foot of my elephant-shaped toy chest; Barbeque stuffed inside the tape deck of my brother’s stereo; Cobra Commander in one of the cubbies in the closet; Major Bludd in the kitchen of my mother’s doll-house; Alpine in the hollow of the window shade; Dial Tone, Flint, and Beach Head in the folds of my brother’s comforter; Grunt dangling from the bunk-bed ladder; Hawk balanced on top of the door; Low Light, Roadblock, and Mutt (not to mention his dog Junkyard) in the Cobra H.I.S.S.; Cover Girl in her Wolverine; Destro, Baroness, Serpentor, and Storm Shadow in the Cobra Terrordome; Tomax and his twin brother, Xamot, in the Cobra Stinger; and dozens of others placed in dozens of positions, but not one of them in just any old position: each action figure went where it went because of the story we were trying to tell; and my buddy and I both understood what each character hoped to achieve in the impending battle: Snake Eyes had to rescue Scarlett; Cobra Commander had to convince Destro to trust him; Tomax wanted to double-cross Xamot, while Xamot wanted to kiss Lade Jaye; Hawk wanted to blow up the Terrordome; etc. We weren’t gods sprinkling G.I Joe guys willy-nilly around the world of my room. We were authors positioning our characters in the exact positions where the story needed them to be.

I think that was the real beginning of my writing career. It wasn’t about words or themes or plots or paragraphs. It was about one thing and one thing only: the process of play.

“The play is the thing.”

I link play to the concept of joy. It’s catching fireflies, shooting baskets, coloring in coloring books, balancing along curbstones, twirling up the sidewalk, sliding down the stairs on my belly, climbing trees, licking the bowl, splashing my brother, swinging higher and higher, tagging and running, hiding and seeking: play.

But I also link play to the structural concept of looseness: the skyscraper with enough play to sway in high wind; the suspended rope. I extend this sense of play to the give and take between forces, and to the empty space that is the field of play.

There are other meanings, of course, but when it comes to my fiction writing, these are the important ones. For me, fiction writing has always been a process of creating the special kind of joy that comes in the exploration of an open field.

In this context, playing G.I. Joe meant delimiting a field of play by arranging our forces in very specific ways. In practice, it meant arguing with my buddy about why Gung-Ho belonged, not driving the SHARC, but guarding the front door of my mom’s doll house. It wasn’t about physically playing with the action figures; it was about imagining what brought them to that spot, and then coming up with what happens next.

It was that last part that always got us. As much as I loved playing G.I. Joe, I didn’t have much fun actually moving them around. We’d spend an hour and half setting up the guys, but the “what happens next” only took us ten or fifteen minutes at most, and more often than not, we’d stop halfway through, take out the Legos, and move on to another game. It was more fun to build a single moment than it was to put it in motion. This inclination, perhaps more than anything else, explains the content and style of my creative thesis, Gods of the Hills.

[Continue to Part II: Walking Away Into A Novel]