A new beginning
[Samples]
After my month’s retreat in October of 2007, I left the novel alone for a while. Thought I’d reread it after a month, but I wasn’t ready. I was still burnt out. I worked on other things.
Around the beginning of January, when two months had passed since the end of my retreat, I gritted my teeth and reread everything I had.
To my surprise, it wasn’t as bad as I thought, and parts of it actually seemed good. Salvageable, at least.
But I knew by then that I did have the wrong handle on it. What was most interesting to me was what went on inside the community of Synusia, not outside: how it was born, how it grew, and how it went wrong—how it had woven into its fabric a rotten thread that would in the end corrupt and unravel the whole tapestry. I also realized that the struggles that fascinated me and that I kept coming back to were not only the obvious struggles between authoritarianism and self-determination and between freedom and security but the more complex ones between truth and illusion, with story as the agent of both—the very same themes that had captivated me in writing my fourteenth-century tale of Sybille Benet.
The will to hold, maintain, protect, and control the community was expressed in the person of the founder Taylor Frazota and his differently motivated successors, his wife Mary Rose and his grandson August Frazota. Among the members of their tiny society, there were more than enough pockets of resistance, mostly silent but still felt. The one I identified with most strongly was Lydia Frazota, younger daughter of Taylor, who viewed the whole history of the community with a somewhat jaundiced eye and was privy to the inside story behind a number of crucial events over her nearly nine decades. I found that it was her story more than anyone else’s that I really wanted to tell. And that is when I saw that a showdown between her and August had always been inevitable.
What else could I do? I started over. Now many of the major events had been worked out, and I could see the shape of the rest. I had a device in mind for telling the story longitudinally from various angles and latitudinally through various characters. And I had quantities of material in draft that I could fit into the right place in the narrative, with some rewriting for a different voice or point of view.
Yes, I was tired, I’ll admit, and discouragement ran high. And in the meantime, from all I was learning by reading writers’ magazines, attending talks and workshops, and listening to people who had completed their novels, I was realizing that the difficulty of finding an outlet for a novel is many times greater than the difficulty of placing an equivalent poundage of short fiction. And I wasn’t even managing to do that.
But Lydia’s story and Synusia’s story wouldn’t go away, and so that is where I am now: with a new working title, a new beginning, and a new plan, but still the same essential tale to tell. And with this, we come to the present moment.
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