In search of a main character

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I wrote and wrote, working every day, mostly on the novel. Intermittently I made forays into shorter works of fiction that it was actually possible to finish in this lifetime (though not, perhaps, to place). But always I returned to The Mozeny, and always I found myself thrashing like an octopus in a fishnet. What in the world was my problem?

Maybe I had the wrong main character. Maybe it wasn’t the story of Sybil Loveworth, the storykeeper-in-training, that I wanted to tell but that of her mother. Clio Abernathy, the current master of stories, the mozeny, was in fact the character of the title. It seemed that my unconscious choice had already settled on her before I knew it. I liked that idea. With Clio as the focal character, I started over.

But I immediately ran into the mother-daughter problems again–a theme I just didn’t feel like beating up in a book-length ms. A few cathartic short stories, okay, but that was enough.

And now I was having trouble with my precipitating incident. If Clio and not Sybil was the protagonist, Sybil couldn’t carry the main action. And if the main action therefore was no longer about the boy from the outside and the young woman who risks everything to save his life by helping him escape the clutches of the cult, what was it about?

Aha–the villain has the answer. The showdown, when it comes, no matter how it comes, must be with the main bad guy, of course. My antagonist, one August Frazota, is the grandson and heir of the founder, and he is a very interesting and complicated bad guy. I have thousands of words about him, his parentage, the legacies of his grandfather and grandmother (the charismatic Taylor and the redoubtable Mary Rose), his early influences, his weaknesses, and his passions. At that point in things he was the character I knew best and found most intriguing. But it couldn’t be his story! He’s the bad guy.

I realized then, thinking about August, that a young girl would be no match for him. In the showdown, she would lose. But Clio is, or could be, if I could get a handle on Clio. In fact, Clio is an especially good match for him because there’s some history between August and Clio that, though secret, changed the course of events in the community. I worked on that angle for some months.

About a year ago I began to get really impatient with myself and with lurching endlessly from scene to scene without a strong direction. I still had important work around the boy and his fatally injured mother, and without that I didn’t seem to have much of anything cohesive. Doing this all in bits and pieces at the end of a working day, with most of my brainpower used up, and never having a single day of down time, not one, was wearing me down pretty badly. And yet I knew that if I let it slide for just one day, a day would become two, and two would become more, and then it would all run away from me. My only hope was sticking to it no matter what.

That’s when I conceived the idea of a writing retreat. How else could I focus enough to surmount the obstacles in my way and develop a continuous narrative? No matter how excellent the bits and pieces might be, they were nothing but meaningless scraps unless I could join them in a sustained storyline.

My boundlessly hopeful application to the Virginia Center for Creative Arts for a fellowship was turned down. Recovering from my disappointment, I suddenly had the thought: I can do this for myself. Why not?

I began to make plans to take a leave of absence from work and go away to a place where I could be a full-time writer, even if only for a short while. Last fall I pulled it off. The story of that experience is here.

Sure enough, by hook or by crook, by fair means or foul, by the skin of my teeth and the red of my claw, I came out of that month with 75,000 words of continuous narrative.

But it was the wrong story. Or rather, it was the wrong character’s story.

The evolution of a tale

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In the beginning, Sybil Loveworth was a girl of fifteen, the same age as Sybille Benet. Her mother, Clio, is the designated storyteller (the mozeny), one of the principal roles in the community because ownership of the stories means responsibility for the community’s interwoven myths and history and hence for its identity. Sybil is in training to inherit that role from Clio. The four governors of the community under the philosopher-king are the masters of agriculture, building, medicine, and stories. Together with the four guardians, they form the council that rules the community.

Reared in complete isolation from the outside world, the members of the community are thrown into crisis when an accident one night in the fall of 2007 breaches their security and brings them two strangers: a dying woman and her ten-year-old son. They are twenty-first-century Californians, dressed in a fashion and using a style of speech that are utterly alien to the community. The son is the counterpart of Sybille’s brother Arnaud. Sybil’s own brother Achilles died at the age of four from physical ailments resulting from inbreeding, and her parents have never ceased to mourn. Sybil takes the young stranger under her wing and becomes attached to him, soon realizing to her horror that the leaders see him as a threat. When they allow his injured mother to die and Sybil understands that his life is in danger, she vows to escape with him. Their perilous adventures in the outside world (in Felton, California) become the main focus of the story, with her eventual capture precipitating the climactic showdown.

I don’t know if I could have made this story work or not. I did get lost in research, although not as badly as I did in 1308. Founded in 1918, the community has its roots in the teachings of a charismatic college professor of philosophy and classical languages who thought he could use Plato’s Republic as the model for an ideal society. The events of World War I and the threat of plague drove him and his followers into seclusion, and there they remained for 89 years while twentieth-century America advanced around them, unseen and unknown. I had to learn a lot about what life was like at home soon after the U.S entered the war in Europe in order to depict the customs and values my people’s forebears had taken with them into their retreat and upon which they had overlaid the Platonic structures as interpreted by their leader.

But at the East of Eden Writer’s Conference in 2006, an editor who had examined a sample of my content advised me not to have a heroine so young unless I wanted my novel to be classed as a juvenile. I didn’t. So, with painstaking adjustments to my six-generation genealogy, I made Sybil nineteen.

Now all of a sudden the big-hearted, impetuous, and resourceful fifteen-year-old whom I had known so well, transported from medieval France, had romantic problems and conflicts with her mother that I hadn’t known about before. And she was no longer so close in age to the ten-year-old boy that she was like a sister to him. Relationships and motivations were getting blurry.

While I was struggling with my main characters, I wrote a series of sketches of events from the point of view of various minor characters, including Sybil’s grandfather Prometheus, a young woman named Rebecca Herman who (as recorded in her journals) was witness to decisive events at the community’s founding, and an old lady named Lydia Frazota who had lived through most of the 89 years behind the walls. And I discovered that the heirs to the founding leader were corrupt in ways that the breaching of the community threatened to expose.

Now those secondary characters started to get interesting.

From medieval France to contemporary California

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The new idea involved a lot of morphing. I needed a twenty-first-century analog to Church-dominated medieval society and its persecution of heretics, a heroine who somehow had the drive and courage to defy that all-powerful institution, and a physical setting familiar enough to me that I could represent it without exhaustive research.

The solution that came to me was this: a restrictive society with passionately held beliefs that set it apart, a society that had a stake in keeping its members ignorant of other ways of thinking. This concept required devising a compelling and sustaining idea or vision for the society, a divergent enough notion of community that it would be obvious why it could not coexist with that of mainstream America, and a means, method, and motivation for achieving complete physical isolation. A cult.

So I bought three books on destructive cults and learned about the psychosocial aspects of cult life. I began creating my settlement in an invented location in the nearby Santa Cruz mountains, an area where there have been and are numerous religious retreats and spiritual communities. And I started sketching counterparts for the main characters in my abandoned narrative: the young girl Sybille Benet, her brother Arnaud, the elderly sisters of Béthune, and the forces of the Inquisition.

I began writing right away, again drafting scenes and scattered segments, and again I found great difficulty in threading a continuous narrative. Again I started doing Internet research, following the trail of every question that occurred to me, always obsessed with authenticity. I amassed information on winegrowing, Platonic philosophy, the construction of drawbridges, a 14th-century saint named St. John of Nepomuk, phases of the moon, inbreeding, wood stoves, Celtic harps, recessive genes, Greek mythology, farm animals, the influenza epidemic of 1918, and the history of women’s underwear.

And I got very caught up in the backstory. My OCD had a field day. I drew maps so detailed that I could pinpoint the location of every tree and shrub in my settlement and know what was in the line of sight for any door and window of any structure. I can picture that imagined setting as clearly as I can visualize my childhood neighborhood or my college campus. And I created a genealogy of six generations, not only of my principal characters but ultimately of every member of the community, with full names and birthdates.

Why did I go through all this in order to write my story? Why didn’t I just write it? That’s what many people would have done, and if that worked for them then they would be right to do it. But just as many writers would feel that they had to “know” all about their characters and their world before they could describe what happened to them and do it with conviction. For me, the process was productive.

Over a period of months of making lists and charts and researching names, stories began to emerge. As I built families out of lists of names and dates, I began to see personal traits, incidents, dramas: rivalries, tragic losses, childhood sweethearts, jealousies, hidden relationships, and more. A community character took shape. Public and private events, long-standing antagonisms, and strong and weak personalities changed the course of shared history. Things I would not have been able to think of by the deliberate act of trying to think of them came to me almost naturally just out of working with the background materials I was developing.

As a result of accumulating deep knowledge of my characters and their interwoven family histories, the writing felt less like inventing and more like remembering. My problem began to be what to put in and what to leave out. I wanted to tell all of it.

And in the meantime I began to lose sight of my main character, the counterpart of Sybille of the Vardysts: a young woman named Sybil Loveworth, whose role in the community was that of apprentice keeper of the stories.

I was on my way to being mired again.

How it began

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The novel I am working on, about a hidden community sequestered in the mountains of California since 1918, began as an idea in November of 2004. Or rather, it began as a dream, which led to a hoax and then a screenplay, in the most natural sort of progression, and only then to a novel. Oh, and the novel was set in fourteenth-century France.

The night before Hallowe’en 2004, I attended a pagan ritual with a friend who is into that sort of thing. The ritual celebrated Samhain, the witches’ New Year. Although it was not my first ritual (I have an adventuresome friend), it was my first Samhain, with chanting, symbolic foods, candles, music, and, at the end, some very vigorous dancing, all in a high spirit of celebration. It apparently made an impression on me because that night I had a vivid dream about witches. I described the dream to my son the following day, complete with details about their strange practices, magical vestments, and special powers. He said, “Why don’t you write it?”

The idea seized me in a way that was almost as compelling and unarguable as falling in love.

I’d written a number of short pieces of fiction and a great many articles and essays, most of them published in small newsletters, but I had not tackled a long work since a couple of abortive attempts a quarter of a century earlier. So I did not think first of a novel. Instead I thought it would be interesting to write about my witches as if they were real.

Within a week, I had mounted a page on my personal website detailing the history, beliefs, and practices of my imaginary cult, the Vardysts, using my best arid academic style and including painstakingly faked illustrations and scholarly footnotes.

Filling out the details on that web page took me weeks of feverish research, looking for everything from personal and family names in use in fourteenth-century France and Belgium to properties of minerals to phrases in medieval Flemish. Authenticity was my watchword. No matter how much searching it took, I had to have utterly realistic details to support my outright invention.

What I was hoping was that a writer questing after source material would stumble upon my fictitious narrative, take it for a legitimate history, and develop a screenplay or novel based on it. Second-best would be that a researcher in pagan lore and history would think my account was genuine. I would have loved to see it cited somewhere or even just receive an inquiry from someone who was trying to locate one of my made-up references.

I don’t remember why I thought it would be fun to con a screenwriter or novelist, except that success in the attempt would prove I’d done a good job with my fabrication.

Two months later it occurred to me that I could write the screenplay myself.

I had no idea how to do that. But my first response to a challenge is to read up on it. I bought three books on screenplay writing and formatting and some screenplay software (proper format is crucial in a screenplay) and learned how to use it. And I subscribed to a screenwriters’ magazine. I learned a great deal about constructing scenes, action, and dialogue that I think would be useful to a fiction writer in any genre.

Meanwhile I started investigating the history of medieval France and the Lowlands, a period and place about which I was abjectly ignorant. True to form, I bought three books for starters, beginning with Ladurie’s Montaillou and Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, and proceeded to educate myself, all the while gathering material that would help me shape a concept into a story. The concept was that of a young woman of the Cathar (heretic) persuasion fleeing the forces of the Inquisition and ending up as an apprentice witch in Belgium, from whence she became the matriarch of a dynasty of practitioners whose traditions have been carried down, in secret, to the present day.

I worked on that project for a year and a half. I wrote about 76,000 words, in isolated chapters and scenes spanning about a 75-year period, picturing it all as intensely as if I had been an eyewitness, and yet unable to string it together with a single continuous narrative thread. Every turn I took, I ran into the need for more research. Every detail took research, quantities of it. There was no such thing as a halfway measure. I don’t have OCD for nothing, after all. To describe something or even mention it, I had to know.

Here is an example. This was a memorable stumbling block from an early scene. I had the children on the second floor of a manor house when their father raised the alarm—soldiers were about to attack under the banner of the Church to clear out the family of heretics. Summoned by their father, the children ran down the stairs. Only they didn’t run, in my draft. They clattered. That’s because I was imagining them wearing hard-soled shoes.

On rereading, I thought: what did they have on their feet? Did they really clatter? And I stopped right there. Off I went on another bout of research. What would children of their class and station, in that period, in that part of the country, at that season of the year, have worn on their feet? Wooden clogs, sandals, boots, soft leather slippers? And would they have worn such footwear inside the house, in their bedroom at night? And—would there have been an upper story with stairs anyway? and did they have bedrooms?

Answering those questions took an entire evening after a long workday as an editor in a high-tech corporation.

A sampling of the content is here on the fiction page.

Eventually I became so overwhelmed by the inexhaustible demands of authenticity and so disheartened by my inability to weave my story into a plot that I gave up. I took all the materials I had, put everything into a large box, tied it with string, and stuck it on a high shelf in a closet, where it still remains. There was no way that this story set in medieval times could be transformed into a tale that could be told in a time and place I knew. It could not have happened where there were telephones and televisions, public education and child protection services, buses and penicillin. And as long as I had a day job, I could not possibly devote the time necessary to support the story I had in mind.

For two weeks I mourned the loss of my story, which even now remains as fully alive in my consciousness as my own memories of childhood and young adulthood.

And then, one day in August of 2006, I woke up with a clear thought: I know how to do it! I know how to take the characters, conflicts, and themes of my story, even if not the setting and the environmental conditions, and transform them into something that will work in twenty-first-century California.

And that is the novel I am working on now.

Why am I doing this?

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

If you want to write a novel, it’s no longer a simple matter of devising setting, character, plot, and theme, building scene upon scene, with exposition, rising action, climax, and dénouement, never mind deep insight, knowledge of the human heart, passages of lyrical beauty and scenes of breathtaking suspense, all delivered in crisp, clear prose, with sentences of varying length, good grammar, and neat typing, let alone style, style, style. Now you must also do market research, construct a marketing plan, and build a platform.

A platform.

That’s supposed to mean people who are going to be interested in your book when it comes out, and even before it comes out, and whom you can list by category in your marketing plan, by group size, largest to smallest, so your agent and prospective publisher will consider taking a risk on you.

Can you imagine [fill in the name of any author you heard of more than ten years ago] doing this? Consider:

PUBLISHER: Who do you see as your audience?

CHARLES D.: Well, it’s about a penniless orphan who gets caught up with a gang of petty street thieves in London. There are a lot of those, and I think they’ll all buy a copy.

Or how about this:

PUBLISHER: Do you have a local angle?

MARK T.: There’s stuff about some towns on the Mississippi. Probably everybody along the river will want to read it in case I happen to mention somebody they recognize.

PUBLISHER: Can you stick in a few more names?

Of course, you can still write a novel without thinking about publication. But most of us who write things are dying to have somebody read them (and admire them). So if we ever want to get there, or at least get there prehumously: platform.

Hence blog.

The idea of a blog for someone like me, unknown, unpublished, more than likely destined to leave my precious manuscript in a computer folder that my heirs will never open, strikes me as pretentious at best and revolting at worst. But I am looking upon this as an experiment. If I wind up feeling ridiculous, I can take it all down. Certainly Dickens and Twain, Brontë and Austen and Alcott, Hardy and Hawthorne and Dostoevsky and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never had to do this. But what if they could have?