[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
V: A Future without Utopia
VI: Nos Deiciamus In Nihilum
VII: Lost in the Flood

I submitted the first draft of Gods of the Hills: An Act of Creative Nonphilosophy in the middle of August 2008. I had been working on it for a year and a half straight, and I felt good about the draft. The writing had a sense of liveliness that I thought was reminiscent of the early works of Tom Robbins and the structure was so loose it was almost as non-existent as I’d hoped it would be. The plan was for the liveliness of the writing to swirl the reader through the loose structure of the book with such vitality as to make the book as joyful a reading experience as there could possibly be. While I had included enough philosophy and color in the book to entertain the eyes and mind, what I really wanted to entertain was the reader’s body. I wanted the book to feel as wet and as wild as a river.

And now I had to wait two weeks to hear if I had succeeded.

The first response came from my advisor, Rebecca Brown. She seemed much taken with the book, writing that “Reading this [manuscript] has been one of my more satisfying experiences of Goddard.” That she praised the experience of reading the book thrilled me. It was exactly what I wanted.

But her letter wasn’t all praise. She had many concerns with the book, but almost all of them had to do with its lack of structure, and the way, despite being a more engaged reader than any scrivener has the right to hope for, she “finished the book still frustrated by how confused [she] was.” But Rebecca seemed so excited about the book that I read all of her criticisms as suggestions from a fellow traveler. Because she offered them with such enthusiasm, I couldn’t help but get excited at the prospect of taking them.

Then the response from my second reader kicked me in the teeth. He was very gracious. His letter was professional, and he wrote that my book was “highly ambitious,” and since it took “fundamental risks at its premise,” he was “inclined to praise it heartily.” But he also said he “wouldn’t be giving [me my] money’s worth” if he took time extolling what was good, so for the rest of the letter, he picked my book apart and offered me suggestions that seemed to change my book more than they seemed to improve it.

To be sure, everything that my second reader wrote about the book was right. In an attempt to keep the reader turning from one page to the next, I’d set up dozens of narrative questions that I had no intention of answering, but this only made my reader “want to know about other eventualities” than what was on the page, “so [his] tendency [was] to speed up…skim ahead and hope to return to what [he'd] been trained by [me] to think of as ‘the story,’ which, as much as [I] may fight it, [was] the secession of Vermont from the union.”

I had intended the book to act as a kind of toy for the delight of others, but reading the book made my second reader feel “toyed with:”

Think of Lucy holding out the football for Charlie Brown to kick and then pulling it away at the last minute, then doing it again, and again, until finally even Charlie Brown gets fed up and tells her he won’t try to kick it anymore.

Reading his letter made me think I had made not a technical mistake, but an ethical one. While I’d wanted to create a wild ride of nouns and verbs, all I had actually done was flood the page with words and hope that someone else would come along to clean up the mess.

[Continue to Part VIII: Now I Know]