Looking back, I am surprised to realize how much of my fiction remains, at heart, reporting. Yes, despite elements of surrealism, fantasy, even absurdity.

Do I regret all the time and effort that have seemingly gone nowhere?

Sometimes, yes, but there’s also a sense of pride and a better sense of identity because I have these in hand. The sense of loss would have been greater otherwise.

Along the way, family and friends were slighted, along with public service or political activism. Even outings to the mountains or beach became less frequent. From what I’ve seen, writers make lousy spouses or partners. Consider yourself warned.

I am surprised by the amount of labor that took place in my odd free hours after my sabbatical. Also, by what a bold and risky move taking that year off had been. It did nothing to enhance my resume, for one thing. And I’ll return to the lack of health insurance but spare you the rant about how the current system, even with Obamacare, inhibits entrepreneurial advances. It’s something I couldn’t have done if I weren’t single, not unless I had a very supportive partner. (And then I would have felt guilty. Go figure.)

Let me confess my obsessive (Pollyannish?) looking for natural beauty, wherever; my need to have a connection to soil and water while overlooking the obvious ugliness. Applicable to the hippie thing, too.

And then there was the emotional pain buried in my psyche, a deep well to tap.

I’ve said nothing of the years of therapy since leaving Baltimore or the ways they’ve enriched the writing. Here I had thought such “healing” would impair my writing, but it’s not so. Both long rounds instead opened emotions to me, not just the intellect.  

I’m still baffled by the lack of novels by others closely reflecting the places and experiences I encountered.

Jeffrey Eugenides has come closest, though he was still off in the future. Not just his Greek-American perspective, but his Midwest roots not that much different from mine.

Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me and Norman Gurney’s Divine Right’s Trip catch other corners. Tom Wolfe’s Electric Acid Kool Aid Test misses altogether, and, besides, it wasn’t even fiction. Or was it?

Well, I can go back to Richard Brautigan, at the outset of the ‘60s, including his Pacific Northwest flavor.

Beyond that, though, I turn to the poets.

Also, what if I had recast my novels more as a genre? Or even taken the big books apart for shorter series?

Well, it’s still one writer’s life. Make of it what you will.

It’s a fair question, though for now, I’d rather be plunging into a reading orgy. My to-be-read stack is huge, both paper and digital books and periodicals. I’m feeling rather famished.

As for fiction, nothing since my mid-30s seems to suggest a hot story. Most novels, by the way, seems focused on life under age 30. Or at least rediscovering it. As for growing older, as in aging? No sex? Well, depends on the hook. For now, everything I’m seeing points toward nonfiction.

If I did another novel, I’d want to limit the number of named characters. Just two? Perhaps four or six or eight max? It’s obviously character-driven, not action. The volume itself would be thinner, too.

~*~

There are some other drafts I could clean up, but would any of them be worth the effort? The endeavors  to build readership can be quite exhausting.

I’d love to hear other novelists and short story writers discuss their reasons for selecting the names they apply to the figures in their stories.

For that matter, I’d love to hear readers’ reactions. Like what’s your favorite connection there?

I’ve avoided using names of people I’ve known well. Surprisingly, it became a problem especially in my ashram novel where the best Sanskrit names had already been given to my fellow residents. Elsewhere, it eliminates a wide swath of common names, starting with John, James, Robert, Thomas, and William for males. Or Jack, Jimmy, Bobby, Tommy, and Billy, more colorfully.

Had I known they wouldn’t be reading my work anyway, maybe I should have used the names and left people guessing. I’ve tried to be gentle, though, and perhaps that’s a weakness.

Though I’m not one to apply nicknames in everyday life, I have found them useful in my fiction. As examples, I’ll offer “Big Pumpkin” and “Elvis” for the swami in Yoga Bootcamp.

~*~

There’s also the matter of which figures get named and which ones can pass through unnamed. We don’t want to tangle a reader, do we?

A major consideration in revising my output was an attempt to reduce the number of named characters. For a big book, like the five-generation span of What’s Left or the four-year college life of Daffodil Uprising or the burgeoning social life of Kenzie in Pit-a-Pat High Jinks, this was a challenge.

I did find myself shading Greek tradition in What’s Left: repetition of a name within a family is common but would have been utterly confusing here.

As an alternative, I tried to limit some to a single chapter, treating it like a short story; when it was done, so were they.