Half the Battle: Part III (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
III: Three Times Lost
In my first letter to my advisor, I explained that the front-most idea I wanted my novel to convey was that the higher-level entity we call society does not exist except in the unique individuals who support it. “The individual does not belong to Vermont,” I wrote, “but rather, Vermont belongs to the individuals. Vermont is not this grand thing under which individuals must serve; instead, Vermont is this grand thing that individuals must continually build. It is the effect of our actions. We cause Vermont.”
I devised a strategy to help convey this theme. The novel would center around Tradeoff Vicar, a professional blogger whose writings would inspire Vermonters to secede from the United States of America in order to form a more-perfect society, a man who, seven-generations hence, would be revered as a true and bona-fide hero. In inspiring his neighbors to act, Tradeoff Vicar would cause a free and independent Vermont.
But there would be more to it than that.
Most of the book would be set in that seven-generations hence, and it would focus on an eight-year old girl named Eliza Best, a descendent of Vicar’s who is on a journey to discover “the truth” of her ancestor. At the time of my first packet, I had no idea whether her journey would be successful, but to convey the truth of Tradeoff Vicar, I dreamed up a convoluted scheme./p>
I would present the events in a nonlinear fashion, but linearly speaking, the story would have three parts: “Tradeoff’s Tale,” “The Revolution,” and “Eliza’s Tale.” The first section would be the approach to-, the second would be the activity that took place during-, and the third would be the aftermath of-the secession. I would present many of the scenes in “Tradeoff’s Tale” as “history” (in the official sense) during the second and third parts, but other scenes, written in the present tense, would refute that history by familiarizing the reader with a version of Tradeoff Vicar who is too fearful to physically join the revolution, and whose writings have little-to-no effect on the revolutionaries. This “undiscovered truth” would convey that it was not Tradeoff Vicar who caused Vermont, but individuals living with a revolutionary impulse.
This grand plan fell apart during a bout of terrible self-loathing that took place between the first and second packets in my first semester, self-loathing whose cause (though I wouldn’t realize it until the doubt had passed) was my overall strategy for writing — not my plots and themes, but my writing.
In an annotation in the first packet, I used George Orwell’s 1984 to describe my writing strategy:
The difference between [Orwell's] Newspeaker and the fiction writer is that the Newspeaker refuses to struggle with ambiguity while the fiction writer must defeat it. Where the Newspeaker accepts the loss of distinction between finer details and allows a crowd of concepts to gather under the umbrella of a single word, the fiction writer must be strong in her determination to verify only that which is absolutely necessary, to push through the crowd and discover the name of that single, essential pole that alone supports the word.
Note the aggression in the metaphor. Is it any wonder this pacifist suffered a bout of self-loathing? No, if I was to live with my writing, I would need a wiser approach. I couldn’t chase down my words like a soldier chasing down an innocent. If I was to write of nonviolent secession, I had to be strong enough to stand my ground and let the words come to me, not with the puffed-up pride of a stubborn man, but with the humble confidence of a Buddhist monk.
This method of writing was not foreign to me. During my undergraduate career at Green Mountain College, I explored the concept of Zen writing in both content and form, and though it helped me explore the nature of poststructuralist philosophy, I never attempted it in the realm of fiction.
The thought that I could embrace this most enjoyable manner of writing while also pursuing the objectives of my novel filled me with confidence and verve. I tore apart my grand plan with great delight, and then replaced it with another: not only would there be no hero in my book, there would also be no central character.
When I positioned Tradeoff Vicar as the central character around whom the web of history would spin, I sacrificed everything else I wanted to do with the novel to the dogmatic theory that readers require a main character. I had rationalized the sacrifice of my aesthetic values by choosing to expose Tradeoff Vicar as an historic illusion (the focus of “Eliza’s Tale”), but it wasn’t enough — if anything, my plan to “expose” Tradeoff Vicar was rude, because one of the themes in my novel was supposed to be that we all perform as the central characters in our own myths, and to expose Tradeoff Vicar, or anyone else, as anything but a central character would just be impolite. I would make everyone a central character, and in that, I would make no one.
The idea that everyone is a central character living out the myth of their own lives is the general theme of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and in my reading of the Bible, this idea is supported by Jesus Christ’s conscious fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies. If a single Jew in the middle of Dublin can be the hero of his own odyssey, and a single Jew in the middle of the desert can be the living God, then everyone everywhere can be a hero and/or a god.
The new plan was as convoluted as the first, with each chapter serving as the basis for its own mythology. In one scene from “Eliza’s Tale,” for example, I would mention a character named Symeon the Loner. In a later scene, the reader would meet this Symeon, and by the end of the scene, the reader would know him in a personal way, but only in a personal way — knowing who Symeon is would not explain what he had to do with the storyline. The entire book would work this way. Each scene would develop a character, but no scene would develop the plot. My goal was to make it so readers would not be able to whittle the book down to “The Story of Eliza Best” or “The Story of Tradeoff Vicar” or even “The Story of the Vermont Secession.” It would just be…Gods of the Hills.
Then something happened. During the third packet of my first semester, I was struck by the inspiration to start a new novel altogether. Like most artists, inspiration strikes me all the time, but like most lazy artists, I absorb the blow, and move on with my day. But this one struck with such force that it blasted Gods of the Hills from my eyes and left me with a crystal clear vision of the post-apocalyptic world of [redacted]. For the rest of my first semester at Goddard, I would try to “clarify my dark vision” and leave Gods of the Hills germinating.
[Continue to Part IV: An Adirondack Chair, a Third Eye, and a Skrinkle Lee]