[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
IV: An Adirondack Chair, a Third Eye, and a Skrinkle Lee

I found myself in an Adirondack chair. It was summer. I was in the upper gardens of the Goddard campus, and a slight breeze blew the opening of my novel onto the screen of my wife’s laptop. It was nothing really, just a small opening that a breeze of inspiration could blow through, and a few words to shore it up. It came in the form of a man sitting in an Adirondack chair in the upper gardens of the Goddard campus, except the man wasn’t me, the gardens weren’t at Goddard, and it was all being seen by a beautiful black woman who never walked by. I started with the truest thing I knew, and then let the breeze of inspiration carry it up into the fictional plane.

I didn’t know where my inspiration would take me, but I didn’t worry about it. I’d just had a conversation with my advisor, Kyle Bass, and we’d decided that, after the false starts in my first semester, the second semester would be devoid of a grand plan beyond the goal of sending a chapter per packet (packet 1=chapter 1; packet 2=chapter 2; etc). Kyle didn’t care which novel I worked on, but I had to limit myself to just the one: [redacted] or Gods of the Hills.

After much discussion with myself, my wife, and Kyle, I decided that, since I’d entered Goddard with the goal of writing about the secession of Vermont, it’d be wrong to abandon the project so early in the game. So when I sat down in the Adirondack chair, and felt the breeze blow the world through my senses, I didn’t worry about anything. I just put wings on my fingers, and started typing.

And in the process, I officially began my book.

A few weeks later, after having written several scenes to introduce Tradeoff Vicar and the question of secession, I looked back on the opening words I’d written in that garden and decided that, as happy as I was with them, they were not the first words of my book. They were the first words of my “story” perhaps, but they weren’t the first of the book. It wasn’t a question of editing; I just needed a whole new beginning.

But I wondered how my book should begin.

I spent the next twenty minutes or so scanning the opening lines of my favorite books. I looked through the oeuvre of Tom Robbins, the fiction of Robert Anton Wilson, various works of John Barth, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the short-stories of Jorge Louis Borges, trying to find a pattern, and coming up with nothing. But then I picked up that favorite of favorites, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and something clicked. If I was to stay true to themes of my book, I had to combine my love of homage with my desire to transcend — secede from — my influences.

So, using Joyce’s “Stately plump…” as my model, I created a nonsense word that would announce a new beginning in literature, a word whose meaning would fluctuate with its context, but whose final form would be as true as the sun in the sky. Then, with a flutter in my heart, a tin-veiled flutter like a tin-flap flutter in the hot blood ventricles of my heart, I typed my nonsense word onto the screen: “Skrinkle lee.”

Then I waited to see what happened next.

Five minutes passed.

Then I changed the period to a comma, and typed it again: “Skrinkle lee, skrinkle lee.”

And suddenly, ex nihilo: an image, a natural amphitheatre in the northern night. Excited, I pressed the ENTER button on my keyboard, and swooped in on the image like God’s own scout, describing it faster than my fingers could type. I didn’t know what any of it meant, or how it connected with Tradeoff Vicar and his Adirondack chair, but I liked what I saw. A few hours later, the original draft of my prologue was complete.

Skrinkle lee was just the beginning.

Over the next few weeks, I read, revised, and reread my prologue and first chapter, but before my first packet was due, I found myself ready to move on. So without waiting for feedback from Kyle, I plunged ahead.

Chapter Two started easily. I took some of the ideas about Eliza Best from the beginning of the previous semester (her age, her location, and the general structure of her first scene), and started again. For the first couple thousand words, everything remained the same as the earlier draft. She was alone in the woods and approaching a giant marble igloo (like the prologue, the igloo was an inspired choice more than a conscious one); but then, as she was standing in front of the door of the igloo, something happened: with nary a smile on my face, I gave the child, Eliza Best, a third eye.

I had no idea why.

I sat and I stared at that third eye for a long time. I didn’t get it. I didn’t know where it came from or why it was there, but all of sudden, there it was. And I had to deal with it.

I spent close to a half hour exploring all the reasons to keep it and all the reasons to delete it, and while I don’t remember those reasons now, I do remember the giant surge of happiness and joy and glee that carried me out of that decision-making process and into a future where there existed a precocious young girl with a third-eye in the middle of her forehead, a persimmon-irised, ebony-eyeballed third eye smack dab in the middle of her forehead. I didn’t know where it came from or why it was there, but I knew it was absolutely right.

So I pressed ENTER on my keyboard and typed the words again: “Skrinkle lee.”

Because skrinkle lee is just the beginning.

[Continue to Part V: A Future without Utopia]