Bravest Thing

One of the bravest things I have ever done may turn out to be one of the stupidest things I’ve ever attempted. Last Tuesday evening I completed the rough draft of a novel I’ve been working at for over five years, writing what was going to be a collection of related stories. That’s how it began.

I’ve never before written a novel although I have written quite a few short stories. I got into them through writing up events in my own experience. Some folk thought they could easily become short stories. Up to that point I’d never even considered writing stories, but I set out to find if I could actually write short stories and discovered that my main character could certainly become more interesting than I am! Then I thought I could take some of my good ideas that I’d be too embarrassed to actually carry out and write them as stories. Then I wrote stories about a dog I knew. Since she was a great character as a dog I realized she’d be an even better character as a figure in a story. One night when out with her owner, I said we should bring Miss Shinti to the bar. She’d be a great hit. Soon my imagination dressed her in a red tutu and had her dancing on the bar. People applauded. That became my first Miss Shinti story. Before long there were eight more in which she danced with wonderful technique amazing other characters.

I got an idea to write stories about massage and decided I could set them in the mountains just west of Denver. I wrote up the first one thinking it might be the first of a group of connected stories. Soon the characters started talking to one another, and I seemed to lose control of the project. I got the strange idea the stories might actually be the beginning of a novel, a long story not a short story, not even a collection of connected stories. That’s when I got frightened. That’s when I knew I was going crazy. That’s when I knew I should immediately put away my word processor and find some way to go back into my old profession. No, it didn’t actually go that far. I did consider that I might be playing with delusions of grandeur, for while I had written all my adult life, I had always struggled to write anything more than twenty pages.

My fascination with novels started in eighth grade when I discovered James Fenimore Cooper’s stories included Native American characters. So I read Mr. Cooper’s Leather Stocking Tales and then discovered historical novels by more contemporary writers. I was hooked and began a lifelong practice of reading novel after novel. Although my tastes changed over the years, I still read the stories as quickly as possible in my attempt to see what happened to the characters. I kept reading that way until I got the idea I might be writing a novel and realized I needed to know more about what I was intending to do. My novel reading became increasingly analytical. I paid attention to language, tense, usage, character development, plot, description, flashbacks, and other devices. I read about novels. I read more novels. I hoped to be able to do this strange and seemingly impossible task.

In an attempt to preserve the sanity of my overtaxed mind, I told myself I’d simply write more stories, short stories that could stand on their own. If they insisted on being more than that, I’d deal with the needed changes later. Then one day I finished what I’d intended as a story and realized it was a chapter. I just knew it. I read it to my writers group; they agreed it seemed more chapter-like than short-story-like. “Help!” I yelled deep within my writing soul. “I’m not sure I can write a novel.”

This week I printed out what seems to be a complete novel of over fifty-thousand words. It’s focused on a protagonist who meets with challenges and challenging folk, who works hard to fulfill a dream, who realizes how his whole life has made this possible, and who comes to realize how much he’d missed in his up-to-that-time wonderful life. It was as if fate or some other nasty thing was challenging him to be more, something different, and something he’d always wanted to be. So he did the work, suffered the consequences, learned heaps about himself and others, and of course, in the process fell in love. You must consider this is a novel written by a gay man about a gay man doing what the gay writer would want to have happen to him. But what the writer forgot was that writing itself is consequential! I feel like the High Priest Aaron who helped the wandering Israelites make the golden calf. (Surely you remember the movie if not the book of Exodus.) The Israelites were freaked out by their attempt to leave Egypt. Their leader Moses had been up on the mountain with the fearsome Yahweh so long they figured he’d been consumed by the Holy Presence. They needed the protection of the good old Egyptian gods they’d left behind. They collected gold. They made a calf.

Moses appeared. He was angry, yelling, roaring, threatening. “What have you done?” he screamed at his brother-priest. Weak-kneed Aaron yelled back, “The people gave me gold. I threw it in the fire and this is what came out!” Maybe Aaron just wasn’t brave enough for the job. It’s kind of like a preacher said of two kids who claimed they were just messing around in the back seat of the car and out came this baby. They were shocked. Well, I’ve had my baby. The problem with writing a novel is this: once you have a rough draft, you have to get it not so rough, you have to let other folk read it and express their sometimes not-so-nice opinions, you have to respond to what they say, you have to rewrite, you have to find an agent who wants or needs your manuscript, you have to rewrite it for the agent, and if you ever get to a publisher, you have to rewrite it again for their editor. Like poor old Aaron, you try to please and only seem to get into more trouble. Now I’m not belly-aching or excusing myself. I’m not even blaming my characters who may get me into a heap of trouble. I told a minister friend what my book was going to be about. He said that ought to make just about everyone mad. I said I hope so, cheeky me. And now I’m having some people read my rough draft. I’m thinking I’m brave in doing so. I know that these friends are not as scary as what is to follow. This may turn out to be my bravest whatever.

So I ask: what do you think of that: bravery caused by absolute stupidity?

Denver, 2012

I consider my being a novelist about as likely as my becoming
a hunter of bucks. Perhaps one never knows just what life may
make possible.
Mixed media painting of a Ute petroglyph. Phillip Hoyle