Well begun is half done

Who knew this quote was from Aristotle? I always thought it was from Mary Poppins. With a three-year-old in the house, I certainly watch the latter more frequently than I delve into ancient philosophy. But as with many things, it's the thought that counts. And for someone like me who is getting into the business (well, the practice anyway; "business" implies that money is changing hands) of writing books, it's an important thought indeed.

I recently learned about a competition being held by a literary agent named Nathan Bransford. Writers were to send him the opening paragraph of their work in progress, and the best one would receive a free critique of the writer's work or query letter. It seemed like a low-risk venture, so I entered. But I didn't send the opening paragraph of my completed manuscript, The Grave and the Gay. The reason is that I had already sent a query letter and sample chapters of the work to Bransford and he had rejected it. And even though I had since adjusted the opening (and did so again as recently as 48 hours ago), I felt that a fresh start was required.

I looked at the opening paragraph of my other work in progress, which is a single sentence: "I am the King of Bad Dreams." Nah, that won't work. Not much of a paragraph, is it? I could bring up the next two sentences and pretend I intended the three to form an opening paragraph, but it still wasn't compelling enough to stand up to competition. The fact is, the opening is the hardest part of writing a novel. I'm not sure I'd be happy with my current openings if I spent the next 30 years revising them.

Ultimately, I sent the opening paragraph of the essay I wrote about spreading my friend's ashes, which I shared in an earlier post. Even though it's not a work in progress, it's my favorite opening paragraph:

The last time I saw my friend Marc, he was tumbling down from a bridge onto the ground approximately sixty feet below. I had a good view because I was the one who caused his descent. I didn’t necessarily want to do it, but he insisted. And he wasn’t hurt by the fall, because he was already dead. You see, I was spreading his ashes.

Suffice to say, I didn't win. Well, so what? As my hero Abraham Lincoln once said, "I have been too familiar with disappointments to be very much chagrined." Besides, I'm plenty busy shopping around The Grave and the Gay and working on my other work in progress (which is still untitled; the file name is NEW NOVEL.doc). So I dropped it from my mind. Until today.

I was looking through my "Writings" folder on my computer, where a number of files of varying vintages are stored. Many of these are fragments: beginnings of stories, snatches of dialogue, plays on words, observations, etc. I've saved them because I'd once read that Stephen Stills saves all of his musical and lyrical scraps until he finds a place to fit them in. Maybe it could work for me, as well.

One of the files had the cryptic title, "Fifteen.doc." I didn't recall its contents so I opened it. There was just a single short paragraph:

Fifteen. When I was 15 it seemed like I’d be 15 forever. The summer that I was 15 was a memorable one. I had my first beer, my first joint, and my first kiss. Days lasted years. Nights lasted decades. And then one morning, I woke up and I was 45.

I liked it! I must have written it some time last year, when I was 45. It felt real to me, and yet it was also something I felt I could build on. The first question, of course, was "What's next?" And it came to me very quickly. I appended the following to the paragraph:

And I had a 15-year-old of my own. And I had to tell him that I was leaving his mother.

So now I had a brand new opening paragraph that I wish I had found in time for the competition:

Fifteen. When I was 15 it seemed like I’d be 15 forever. The summer that I was 15 was a memorable one. I had my first beer, my first joint, and my first kiss. Days lasted years. Nights lasted decades. And then one morning, I woke up and I was 45. And I had a 15-year-old of my own. And I had to tell him that I was leaving his mother.

No matter. It was an exciting new beginning and I went with it. Within half an hour, I had five paragraphs and something more: yet another work in progress. In need of a title and, one day I hope, an agent and publisher.

Short story sampler

Before I actually started writing a novel in earnest a couple of years ago, I made a number of half-hearted attempts. It's not that I didn't have a story to tell, but I couldn't imagine an ambitious enough narrative arc to serve as scaffolding for a rich, complex story with lots of characters and subplots and action. After a few pages, the story would kind of peter out and I'd lose interest. It struck me that maybe creative writing wasn't my thing after all.

Then one birthday I was given a volume of Raymond Carver short stories as a gift. I'd never actually been much of a short story fan. Just when you're getting interested, the story ends and if you're reading a collection of them, every few pages you have to get acclimated to new stories and situations. I've always been a big fan of James Thurber, however, but I always viewed his work as humorous essays rather than short stories, and the fact that you knew they'd be funny virtually guaranteed a reward for the effort.

But I found the Carver volume extremely compelling. He gave each story a sense that what happened before and after the scope of the narrator's reportage was at least as important as what was in the story itself. In fact, it's not what was happening in the story that was so interesting, it was how the characters thought and behaved in what were generally quiet though emotionally tumultuous settings that made them so rewarding.

Thus inspired, I decided to see if any of my scraps could be turned into a short story, and if any short story-length plots came to mind. I managed to complete one before getting involved in my novel, but have at least three or four more that are in various stages of completion, all of which I hope to continue working on when I have the time. Here are brief descriptions of them, from most complete to least:

Elevation - At 4,500 words, this one is complete. It's an idea that I've had for a long time, inspired by a friend of mine who, despite his success with women, has expressed to me that he wished it were permissible to approach a woman and come right out with, "I'd really like to sleep with you." In my story, a guy wants to do something similar, although he claims to want to do it for purely altruistic reasons. He believes women tend to devalue their own looks, so he wants to give out cards to deserving individuals that simply say, "You're very attractive." That's it, just give out the card and walk away. When he finally gets up the courage to do it, he finds it more intimidating than he thought. There are plenty of candidates, but he finds it hard to seize an opportunity. Eventually, on the subway, he finds himself seated across from four women whom he would not have initially thought to give a card. As he looks more carefully at how they look, how they're dressed, what they're doing, what they're reading, he begins to see more than he did at first. One in particular grabs his fancy. When she gets off the train, he follows her and fumblingly gives her a card. She challenges his intentions and he comes clean that he doesn't really know what his motives are, only that he's captivated by her. They decide to have a drink and get to the heart of the matter. The title comes from the main character's conclusion that there is indeed beauty to be found in those who are "unbeautiful" and his parting advice to the reader that "an unbeautiful woman will elevate you."

The Untangler - I've always been fascinated by knots, both the intentional kind and the frustrating tangles that seem impenetrable. I think that people tend to make their lives tangled as well, and wise people can help you untangle them. So the main character in this story is someone who has difficulty committing to women and he gets himself in sticky situations. His most recent ex-girlfriend had given him a set of wind chimes that became hopelessly knotted in a storm. The woman he's living with (to whom he hasn't been faithful) suggests he take them to her uncle, a retired handyman who is known to friends as The Untangler because he's very adept at untying knots and fixing thorny problems. As the old man works on the knots, he casually imparts to the main character a great deal of wisdom and insight into knots and life. By the end of the story, the wind chimes are in good shape, and his relationship will be, too. I have a few pages written here, but coming up with the wisdom will be challenging. I'm also researching nautical knots to inform the uncle's testimony.

The Triumphant Return of Chip Chumley & the Champions - Here's an example of a story that was intended to be a novel but it ran out of gas. Maybe it will be a novel someday, but it could also be a short story. When I come back to it, I'll see where I think it could go. It tells the story of a group of estranged friends who had been in a high school band together and have agreed to reunite to play at their 25th high school reunion. There's some funny stuff about music in here; I started writing it shortly after reading Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, so it's heavily influenced by that book's style.

The Second Chance - I have just an outline and one torrid sex scene written for this piece, which talks about a man who meets up with a woman he nearly had sex with 20 years earlier when they were in college. The woman is 15 years older than the man and had left school initially when she was 19 because she had become pregnant. Though the two were attracted to each other while in school together, she was in a very different place than he and wouldn't let their making out advance. Now in the present, he's in his mid-40s and she's 60, but the flame still burns. There is praise of older women here.

There are other scraps that may turn into something as well, but this is plenty to keep me busy given I'm still working on my two novels: one in 5th revision, the other still in progress.

Current Projects II: Novel

For years, I'd been taken with the song "Matty Groves" as performed by Fairport Convention, featuring the stunning vocals of Sandy Denny and the magic fretwork of Richard Thompson. This 17th-century English folk song (cataloged as Child 81) is a classic tale of adultery and murder in a mixed-class setting. It seemed to cry out for dramatization, and for a long time I thought I would turn it into a short story. Then, some time after completing the one-act play described below, I realized that perhaps a full-length play would be a better medium for telling the song's story. Such project was still simmering on the back burner when in late October 2006 I was told by a colleague about National Novel-Writing Month. The point of "NaNoWriMo" is to churn out a 50,000-word novel from November 1-30. You register at the website and can upload progress drafts; the whole point is just to create an incentive for writers with books just dangling like stubborn dingleberries from the sphincter of their minds to finally make a novel movement.

Well, my colleague said she was going to write one so I thought I'd do it, too. Matty Groves seemed the logical theme and I set myself to writing. I made decent progress for the first couple of weeks; however, my wife and I had a baby the previous August and in her third month of life decided that sleep was overrated. By the end of NaNoWriMo, I only had 25,000 words down. By January '07, I had 27,000. Things looked bleak until last fall when in a burst of inspiration I finished the novel. Or thought I had. I'm now on my fourth draft and have no idea when it will be done enough to begin sending to agents and small publishers. But the idea has become real. It's on paper, and I have to say I like the overall story arc.

Now, the song itself is eight minutes long, and the latter half of it is a raging instrumental, so essentially I've been treating a four-minute folk song like Silly Putty, stretching it to fit the contours and boundaries of a short novel. To do this has required filling in each character's back story, a process I was astounded to find was fueled by the characters themselves. Honestly, sometimes I would be typing and wondering just who was doing the dictating. I also invented a character named Alexandra McLean (Sandy Denny's real name) and promptly fell in love with her.

The challenge of dramatizing a song is that people familiar with the source material will know how the book ends. To solve that, I changed the ending a bit. I should say I added to it, because the song's ending is beautiful though tragic and I didn't want to lose that. But by extending the action a little longer, I was able to bring an important subplot to resolution and give the reader (dear G-d, please let there someday be a reader) a glimpse at the possible future the survivors may experience beyond the scope of the song's narration.

As the book is set in Olde England, I tried to have the omniscient narrator speak in a tone that suggests it is a contemporary telling. For this challenging style, I was greatly inspired by Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer. Ellen is an old friend from my time at WGBH, and after I left I contributed three scripts to her extraordinary Public Radio International series, Sound & Spirit ("Mourning," "Prayer," and "The End of the World"). Ellen was kind enough to read my first chapter and honest enough to tell me it ain't ready yet. But it's getting there, and I think it picks up steam after the first chapter so I'm focusing my attention on my opening. I was going for something cinematic, but Ellen advises getting the characters involved right away.

Forgot to mention the title (working title, anyway). It's called The Grave and the Gay, which refers to a number of things. First, the phrase is from a speech by Abraham Lincoln, whom you know by now is my primary hero. It also plays on characters' names, the characteristics of the protagonist and antagonist, and hints at one character's unacknowledged sexual identity.

Anyway, the experience of writing a novel was extraordinary, and the challenge is giving it the continued attention it needs when the impulse is to launch into the second one. As I will write about soon, I have both fiction and non-fiction books in my queue. Until then, here is the song that inspired my novel.