Let’s Not Publish That Novel Just Yet
There is unquestioned value to actually publishing a novel but don’t overlook the advantages of perpetually writing it.
What it is, this novel, what it is about, is only by the bye, and in fact seems to come and go.
Sometimes it’s a brawling sprawling tale of the Old West. Sometimes it’s a bit of a Norse saga there in the Middle Ages with Vikings either attacking or befriending – this is yet to be finalized – these noble villagers I have in mind. At other times it’s an epic story of either the pre-war, war, or post-war South. Or North.
These are details to be filled in later.
It’s character that writers are really interested in, and in particular, those characters that, since time immemorial, authors have drawn from real life, drawn, that is, from those people around them – red-blooded and breathing – who make up the players of our daily reality.
Authors slap a new name on them and perhaps shift their characteristics around enough to keep them out of libel court, but it soon becomes known far and wide who is who and what is what, and whose virtues and faults are being highlighted in this manner.
In its most direct form this style of novel is called a roman a clef, which is French for ‘better watch your step there, bub.’
This step-watching business comes into play when you consider the reaction among the people so targeted once they realize that Ira McStrangler in the book, so odious and persnickety a character and one who comes to such an unpleasant end – food poisoning and lightning both, same day, same picnic – is just too close in height, hair color, eye color, religious affiliation, grade school, profession, and fashion sense to be anything other than the town librarian who one time far in the past offended the author, apparently for all time, when she didn’t let him off the hook for the overdue fines he had accumulated.
A dangerous game, as no one likes to see themselves portrayed that way, much less get knocked off fictionally via lightning and food poisoning both, and hurt feeling abound, long-standing friendships draw to a close, doors are slammed, and heels are turned on with a ferocious decisiveness.
It’s a practice much to be discouraged, and as practical matter the wise author never includes one of these portraits in anything ever actually published. Better to steer clear entirely of it in the published, or final stage, of the novel writing game.
But I say nothing definite on this matter in the note-taking stage of composition.
As a matter of fact, it can be downright handy if you are known to be of the novel-writing type and are constantly in a character-building mode.
Let us take an instance.
Say I am at lunch with a friend, a friend rich in all those characteristics that we relish in a friend…except for one.
This one flaw: he is mighty slow off the mark to pick up the check at the end of the meal, so slow off the mark that the race around the track is essentially complete by the time he leaps out of the starting blocks.
Once he is confident that the transaction is fully complete, that is about the time he looks over and says with genuine dismay, “oh, you should have let me get that.” He shrugs. “Too late now, I suppose.”
Prior to this he has looked at the bill sitting plainly between us, or rather not looked at it, in the way you might manage your reaction to the appearance of a newly dead flounder that has somehow found its way to the middle of the table. This is not the kind of thing you want to draw attention to, his manner says, as it will only be disturbing to the people around you trying to enjoy their meal and not entirely fair to the flounder.
A small habit and nothing more, and a splendid fellow otherwise.
Still.
As the waiter steps away with my credit card, this is about the time I pull out my notebook and flip it to a blank page, with that look on my face of someone who just has to get something down while it is fresh in his mind.
I scribble away.
My friend looks over, amused. “Still plugging on the novel, I see. Got a hot idea there?”
“Just a little piece of character revelation,” I say, writing at a white heat.
“What kind of character?” he asks, honestly curious.
I look up, “well, it’s a brawling, sprawling epic of the Old West, and there’s this character in town who is a wonderful fellow, a true friend to the hero. He’s got one fault though.”
My friend, here in real life, seems a little uneasy.
“What kind of fault?” he asks.
“Oh, just a fault,” I say.
My friend squirms a bit. “Well what made you think of faults at a time like this?”
About now the waiter brings back the bill for my signature. “Oh, who knows where these ideas come from.”
“Listen,” says my friend,” let me at least pick up the tip for the meal,” which is a step in the right direction for this good man, who, prior to this, I couldn’t claim with confidence exactly knew what a tip was.
He manfully pulls a few bills from his pocket and leaves them on the table. He tries to make it seem as if it is a familiar motion and he is doing it with a careless nonchalance, but I see the pain in his eyes. But he goes through with it, which is the point.
Brave fellow!
As to what brought about this change of heart, he may have read a newspaper article, he may had some sort of internal conversation with himself, he may have had a religious moment, he may have seen someone do this very thing on some teevee show.
To my eyes though I think I am looking at a fellow who has no intention of anyone of his height, hair color, and general clothing scheme showing up in any brawling, sprawling epic of the Old West pegged as the character who never pays for his own meal.
I tuck my notebook away, saying “Dang it, the thought got away from me. It works that way sometimes.”
Does my friend show relief?
Maybe. Maybe.
Does he even know what brought about this change of heart?
This remains uncertain, and if you asked him tonight about lunch, he will have forgotten entirely that the notebook had come out at all.
Funny business.
In the neighborhood reading club there are three sisters who tend, to a one, toward warm hearts and fiery natures in equal measure.
You may have seen an animated special as a child whose subject was the surface of the sun. If you recall, solar flares and towering uprearing tornadoes of fire are not rare on that surface, but are rather more or less the local conditions in even the best neighborhoods.
These three sisters are somewhat like that.
Conversations and opinions range freely whenever they are around, well outside the ordinary limits of a book club. Wildly outside those limits.
And at each occasion of these free and frank discussions of God know what and perhaps He knows what brought it on, a high Fahrenheit reading can be discerned in the local conditions.
Lovely people! Hearts of gold! But I seek not to cross them or get on their bad side.
My admiration for their excellence of character knows no bounds…but I’ve been known to pull out my notebook right before one of these high Fahrenheit heat storm events looks ready to land.
It might start with one or the other of them looking sharply my way.
“What’s that you’re doing there? What kind of time is this to be pulling out your notebook? I was just about to tell you a thing or two.” Her arms are what I believe is called akimbo, that is to say her hands are on her hips.
I always watch for this, the akimbo business, viewing it as a leading indicator of storm events, and have my notebook at the ready. I scribble away, apparently too taken with my thought to look up. “Oh, just let me get this down.”
“This another one of your characters?” She peers at me.
“Just filling her out a bit.”
“So it’s a woman?” This is the second sister. She is reluctant to show an over-keen interest, but she can’t leave it untouched either.
“Yes, yes,” I say a little shortly, the very picture of the artist at work putting the brain into high gear, and with little time for explanations. “If you must known, Amelia Featherington-Huffleigh, grande dame around town, is known for her golden heart and her tempestuous nature. They are of equal strength. Revered but feared, that type of thing. Widow of a Greek shipping magnate, she is a woman of strong will and strong words. Men tremble when they wonder if they have crossed her, and their blood runs cold.” More scribbling. “You see a lot of these types these days. Would you say your arms were akimbo just a few moments ago?” I ask the first sister.
The third sister has something to say on this. “That’s putting it a little strongly, isn’t it? Saying men tremble? Laying it on a bit thick?”
“Oh, you wouldn’t say that if you knew this character as I have come to know her.” I scribble some more.
“What height would you call this Featheringstone woman, or whatever she is called?” asks the first of the three. She and her sisters trend towards the tall willowy side, red haired, Irish to the core. “And what color hair does she have?”
I shake my head virtuously. “I never reveal anything about my characters before the book is published.”
“Published? Published? You’ve been working on this novel since you were in grade school! Pshaw.”
”Oh, you are no doubt right, it is desperately hard to get published these days. But sometimes the cards fall your way and there your paperback is, in every airport bookstore in the world: Boise, Boston, Beijing, Baton Rouge, Buenos Aires. And that’s just the B’s.”
I had put my notebook away but now I whip it back out and say, “ Go back just a moment in our conversation. How would a person spell that, do you think?”
“Spell what?”
“That ‘pshaw’ noise you made.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Oh, I just do,” I say, with my pen poised.
Well, she never quite comes up with the spelling of pshaw, but the three-headed redheaded storm clouds do seem to dissipate a bit, and then the sky clears entirely, and back my notebook goes into my back pocket.
So, there’s more to this writing life than mere publication, it’s an entire lifestyle choice, and when you have people around you who are already full blown characters, I’d rather have a notebook in hand than the most handsomely printed novel with my name in big letters on the front of it any day.
It’s just safer that way.
