OK, other people, I think you exist out there in the toxic-fog-soup of the wildfire superplume, laying over us here in Bellingham. Hello. My throat and my lungs have hurt for the past two days. It’s an I-can-only-guess landscape. If I look to the east I know our striking and snow-capped Mt. Baker is out there somewhere. Up in the gray wash is a spot of weak glow I can guess is the sun. But I couldn’t swear to these by the evidence of my eyes.
It’s a fictional kind of landscape. Fiction’s out there and in here--I could call this post Notebook to Novel. I just published my first full-length work of fiction (I’ve published stories and a novella), the novel Entangled Objects: A Novel in Quantum Parts. I know, it’s listed on my website as forthcoming. But it came. It’s just that problem of finding time to keep the website in order. Anyway!
The genesis of my novel has given me some thoughts for fiction writers trying to get started, as my writing at first didn’t feel like a novel. It began on a plane and my process was very natural and also very borrowable. (Maybe From Aviation to Novel? Not very catchy.)
Entangled began as I was flying home from Korea and several things had, er, entangled themselves in my head, in that weird twilight consciousness you get into in a plane. One was the memory of a cloning scandal—faked data claiming success in cloning human cells, a scandal that had happened in Korea.
I knew at least one U.S. scientist was involved and it made me wonder about the story of this person’s significant other—traveling to another country to give their S.O time to do this work, realizing the spouse was trying to create the cells of actual people. Which is existentially weird, especially if you follow the thought of scientists like Giulio Tononi, who’d argue each cell has a little bit of consciousness. So it’s weirdness for her (I imagined a her, someone in a marriage fairly traditional in some ways) that her guy could, and did clone the cells of actual humans, then shame that he didn’t. She became Fan, my first point-of-view character.
My second character came from similar musing. I had seen a man, goofing around, fall out of an elevator, barely missing a bad encounter with a woman’s toe. I began wondering what it would be like if he’d smashed it. Somehow that became imagining her becoming obsessed with televangelists while coming to terms with her own sexuality. Go figure.
As I kept writing I started on to Obsession 3, a pre-existing obsession of mine. This was what a reality star like Kim Kardashian must think about at the end of the day, with all of the glamming, cosmetic procedures, re-shaping of face and body. That this is all unreal? More real than real? Is creating yourself in this way very shallow or is it possibly very smart, at least, authentic to the person you wish you were?
My point is, because I was stuck on a twelve-hour flight and can’t sleep on planes, I didn’t just wonder idly about things. I started writing about those imaginings. It was cool.
So my suggestion for this post is to keep a notebook but go beyond describing what’s around you, and noting thoughts, though these are great. Go for the questions that the world around you is handing you. Don’t drop a single question that occurs to you, even if it’s one of those what-kind-of-parent-would-put-their-kid-in-that-awful-shirt kinds of things. Some parent did. Who?
What if the person you saw with the rowdy huge dog had the dog slip the leash and run away? Slip the leash and jump all over one of the president’s Secret Service men? (Actually happened to me with my dog Burley and George H.W. Bush’s security detail. Who had very little sense of humor about it.) What if this person got put on a domestic terrorist watchlist? (Did not happen to me, though I do get patted down in airports to a remarkable degree. Hmmm.)
Create a scenario for all those quirky situations that you see and put someone in those situations. Watch what happens around you and generate what-ifs. Make those people more and more real: what if the person who lost their dog then slept outside for days in an old sleeping bag in case the dog returned. What if it were the sleeping bag of a lost lover? You get the idea.
Generate a dozen or so scenarios/people in them each week and then write from the two who most capture your fancy. If you have trouble getting your characters all the way into their skins, think of someone you know and change everything about them. It is strangely easier to do this than create someone out of the air. You will not end up with the person you started with, trust me.
Calls for submission: Global Poemic is curating poems dealing with the pandemic. https://globalpoemic.wordpress.com/2020/09/09/i-like-your-mask/?fbclid=IwAR2Fm2J1UETyYyTFrcNotm4Fj6AXznIxAEQIH_lo8vB4JfGj9Ww5wzoZWKA
And my own Bellingham Review! We accept fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid work. Check us out at bhreview.org, where you’ll find the call for submissions.