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| A boy and his copybooks...seems so simple |
This
is a story about how haste made waste of a literary dream and how a mysterious
shadow slipped into my life, rescued me, stirred my mind, and then disappeared.
As
you might expect, the story involves a woman. Or so I believe. I’m still not a
hundred-percent sure, but I do know I don’t care. Read on, if you like
mysteries, but don’t expect this one to be solved. I’ve promised never to
divulge certain clues and that should be easy in this case: I don’t know what
they are. And maybe after we get to the end of this story you’ll understand why
I probably don’t want to know. Probably. Even a columnist is human, after all.
Let’s talk about the literary dream: it
began twelve years ago, on my birthday, in my used bookshop, two hours before
opening time. I’d gone in early to sit behind the window curtain and begin
writing my first novel. Some novelists won’t start a book until they have
hundreds, if not thousands, of note cards outlining every inch of the plot.
Others just turn their dog loose on the trail and hurry along behind it. I’m
that type.
With
a fine-point felt-tip pen I wrote my opening scene into a marbleized copybook:
A man got on a train. As I wrote, I knew what my closing scene would be: the
man would die that same night. I trusted that all the in-between would come to
me as I wrote. The man I’d chosen was an actual historical figure, a self-made
“scientist/explorer” named Richard L. Garner. Like myself, he’d studied primates
in Africa. He was born in Abingdon, Virginia, in 1848 and he died in Tennessee
in 1920 while promoting his research by giving public lectures.
I
composed ten hand-written pages each day, hurrying home later to read them
aloud to my wife, Janet. Those were enjoyable days, marked by suspense and
curiosity, since neither of us knew what tomorrow’s pages would tell. A day’s
episode might end with a hand on a doorknob. What waited on the other side? An
empty room? A dead body? A beaded purse? Such is the power of the writer. The
answer, of course, is: whatever he or she says. How arbitrary. How awful. How
absorbing. How awful. The choices are infinite. The choices are limited. There
is no right or wrong answer. Is there?
Oh
my goodness, if you work out every detail of the plot ahead of time, then
writing a novel is work. Sheer, dreadful, miserable work, as dreary as writing
a term paper. But if you don’t, and you make it up as you go along, you keep
running down alleys, turning corners, and finding yourself in strange
neighborhoods you don’t know how to get out of. Characters you invented simply
to walk through a scene suddenly stop and start talking to the camera, start
singing and dancing and telling their life stories.
Cursed
to be tongue-tied through childhood, in middle age I found myself victimized by
verbosity. Out came an abundance of words whenever I sat down to write – false leads, useless quarrelsome
characters, endless dialogue and description. I never suffered “writer’s
block.” Quite the opposite.
And
so, with that first book, as the train carrying Richard L. Garner rushed along
toward Nashville, one doorknob after another turned to reveal another
character, who had to be explained, carrying another prop, which needed to be
explained, as he or she came sauntering, rushing, stumbling, or tottering into
the next carriage. These explanations are referred to as “backstory” in
fiction. In the hands of a novice writer any story of 300 pages that begins and
ends in one day is going to be riddled with them. No matter how well they’re
written, if these digressions are not kept to a minimum they will interrupt and
confuse the flow of the story.
I
filled six copy books in this meandering “and then” style. That was great fun,
but then the hard work I’d tried to avoid by ad-libbing had to begin.
Suffice
it to say that I worked hard and long. Rewriting involves more than correcting
mistakes. I paid dearly for the fun of my run-wild, run-free months of creative
fun by spending the next two years, daily, reshaping the story. But shortly
after that, I won First Place in the novel category for a sample of my novel at
the annual Philadelphia Writers Conference. Everyone told me that was a
“message from the universe.” You got it, kid! Go get ‘em.
In
those days I believed in the system: Write your book, polish it, and then go
get an agent to sell it for you. I spent two years trying to interest an agent,
failed to do so, got bored, started another novel. And another. And some short
stories. And started writing this column for the Local (now in its seventh
year). And a memoir. I found I liked writing stories more than I liked trying
to sell them to an agent, editor, or publisher. My story about Mister Garner
sat in the desk drawer, affectionately remembered like a summer romance that
ended only because your partner moved to the moon. Every once in a while I’d
change the title. “Garner” became “Fit in a Spoon,” then “Family of Man,” which
was replaced by “If Pigs had Wings, soon to be “Last Night on the Gorilla
Tour.”
So,
how did “Gorilla Tour,” come finally to be released in February of this year,
(twelve years later) with a big, happy book-launch party, only not to be heard
of since? And what does this silence have to do with the subtle and strange
appearance in my life of a mystery woman? I’m still trying to figure it out.
She’d entered my life, turned my head around, and left again – supposedly
finally – in the same enigmatic way she’d entered: anonymously.
See you next week.
