Half the Battle: Part II (of 8)
[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: Yo Joe!
II: Walking Away Into A Novel
I don’t know when I began imagining a novel about the secession of Vermont from the United States of America, but I do know that I’ve been curious about the topic since December 2005, which is when I discovered The Second Vermont Republic, an organization dedicated to the creation of an independent Vermont republic.
From the first, the notion of secession excited me. I liked the revolutionary aspects of it, as would any boy raised to revere the American revolution, but I also liked the danger of it -— not the danger of violence, but the danger of trying something new. The thought that 600,000 people would have enough faith in themselves to walk away from the comfort and luxuries of an empire thrilled me so much that I wanted it to happen now. Had I been an activist, I might have contacted The Second Vermont Republic and begun working on behalf of the movement.
But I’m not an activist. I’m a fiction writer. So I sat down at my computer and started writing.
The result was a short story entitled, “If you walk away, I’ll walk away.” Though only twenty pages long, the story was divided into four sections, contained six major characters, took place over three different time periods, and was written in such a way that every paragraph focused on a different time period and character. Its climax occurred in a single sentence, when the time periods all swirled through the exact same words: “You are going to change things.”
Up until that sentence, the story pulled readers in three different directions, and while those six words brought them back together, they did it like an hourglass brings its disparate sands together: they pass through the same space at the same time, but without ever combining into a single “thing.” After that sentence, the story sent the readers back in three different directions, none of which lead to a central point. The readers had been through the crux, and that crux was the dizzying moment that is secession. What happened next was up to them.
Looked at in the context of my earlier writing, “If you walk away, I’ll walk away” was a significant improvement. While it retained the G.I. Joe notion of building to a single moment (a hallmark of all my writing to date), it did so in a voice that was not immediately traced to the books I was reading at the time. There was verve to the writing, a sense of momentum that might even be called spirit. Additionally, thanks to my undergraduate studies in philosophy, there was a fuller development of the metaphorical structures undergirding each characters Weltanschauung, which created a more cohesive world.
But looked at in the context of the artistic experience I want to provide as a writer, the short story was a failure. It rose and fell and spun and swirled, but there was no satisfaction at the end, not because the narrative didn’t tie everything up, but because the narrative didn’t take the story as far as it wanted to go.
If I was going to do my story justice, I needed to make it a novel.
[Continue to Part III: Three Times Lost]