Any writer tackling a large work such as a novel or screenplay will need to consider the matter of structure. The easiest way out, of course, is to follow a conventional model.
In fiction that might mean 60,000 words, more or less, spread out over 20 to 24 chapters, typically in a straight chronological order, past tense. For the film, something that would come in a little under two hours. To that you’d add pacing, points of conflict, resolution, number of main characters, and so on.
Sometimes, though, you find that’s not the best way to organize your material.
For example, in its revisions, Promise emerged with three sections, each set in a different locale – Prairie Depot, the Ozarks, and finally the Katonkah Valley. Each one, as it turns out, can be viewed as a novella held together by the central couple, Erik and Jaya.
I didn’t intend it this way. The original version had five sections, for one thing, which I came to feel were simply too unwieldy. The cuts provided what I feel gives a better balance.
Let me also admit to a fondness for shorter novels. Novels, mind you, not simply novellas, no matter how much I enjoy them, as well. Maybe it’s a reflection of my typically crowded schedule.
Still, both short stories and novellas stand as kinds of orphans in today’s literary scene. They should be more popular than they are. An occasional solution, one I’ve enjoyed reading, runs a central character through a set of short stories to culminate in a volume of novel length. It’s a tricky strategy, though, and hard to pull off.
Maybe that’s one more reason I feel a special satisfaction with Promise.
No matter how wigged-out the narrative, my novella With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses is sounding more sensible than some of the political candidates.
No matter how gonzo the narrative, my novella With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses is sounding more truthful than some of the political candidates.
In the buildup of national elections, once again a major influence remains the elephant in the room. I’m referring to the legacy – make that plural, legacies – of the hippie outburst, especially in contrast to those on the Vietnam war side of the divide.
The wounds and tensions haven’t gone away. Just look at the continuing proliferation of POW-MIA black flags across the landscape, on one side.
For the other, the lines are much more hazy yet festering. As I’ve been arguing, hippies came – and still come – in all varieties and degrees, and likely nobody ever fit what’s become the media stereotype. With the end of the military draft, the movement lost a crucial motivating force and focusing definition.
Complicating the situation was the distancing many youths on the antiwar side felt when it came to politics. With its support of the military at the time, liberal politics were tainted with outdated Cold War ideologies like those of the conservative side. For hippies, radical was the label of honor. And the Democratic Party base of the left was splintered as its youthful potential allies had nowhere to turn or direct their forces in the political arena.
The horror meant going from a hawkish LBJ administration to one of Richard Nixon.
Fast-forward now to the present American landscape. Gone are the grandparents and parents of many of the now senior baby boomers – the core of the hippie movement versus the older generations. Yet political candidates still tiptoe around many of the reality issues, beginning with marijuana and other illicit substances, as if they’re too hot to touch. Let’s get real. Want to talk about litmus tests?
As we look at candidates, ask where each stands on a scale of continuing issues from the hippie stream. I find it enlightening.
Peace and social justice activism.
Sexual equality … including abortion rights.
Racial equality.
Environmental and ecological issues, including the outdoors.
Educational alternatives and opportunities.
Sustainable economics and fair trade.
Spirituality and radical religion.
Fitness along the lines of yoga, bicycling, kayaking, hiking.
Organic and natural foods.
Marijuana reform.
Arts and crafts.
Community as common wealth, including health care.
Labor as a matter of respect and a livable income.
Well, we have Bernie running straight true to the cause. Hillary, more cautiously so. But on the right? Let me suggest being wary of anyone in the pro-war camp who hasn’t served. Period. As for other life experiences?
~*~
All of this returns me to my Hippie Trails series of novels. I’d love for you to come along. Just click here.
No matter how trippy the narrative, With a passing freight train of 119 cars and twin cabooses is sounding more realistic than some of the political candidates.
Decades ago, after hearing mention that my family had Quaker roots in North Carolina, I began the genealogical detective work that now fills my Orphan George Chronicles. Although I’d independently come to the Society of Friends and become a formal member, I was surprised to hear that my family had been Quaker and that there were Quakers in North Carolina – my, have my eyes been opened!
In the genealogical work, I chose to begin with my great-grandparents – people I’d never met in the flesh.
But when my father died, the focus shifted. I realized only one person remained who might be able to fill me in on questions of his childhood and parents, and that was his “baby sister.” That would mean getting to know her – and her parents – without all of the filters that had always been applied by my mother, who had issues of her own. (Oh, for these family dynamics!)
It became a rich and fascinating project, given all the more incentive when we met my aunt and her husband, a retired university dean, at the airport. It was a first-time encounter for them and my brood, yet he swept up my younger one in his arms and proclaimed, “It’s so good to have another Democrat in the Hodson family!” The party activist suddenly had a favorite uncle. Make it great-uncle-by-marriage if you will, he got the crown.
At that point, my aunt remarked that Grandpa’s slogan, painted on all of his trucks and on the calendars he mailed out each year, was “Dayton’s Leading Republican Plumber.” She promised to send a photo of the vans all lined up on the street. “You didn’t know that? It was even on his stationery and bills.” This was something I’d never known, although he did sign one of his last notes to me as “formerly Dayton’s leading Republican plumber,” a comment that long puzzled me. Through much of the spring and summer I wound up following up on her reactions and insights to her childhood and adolescence, which to my surprise (the word of the day) paralleled my own, especially in regards to their now-Methodist church, the denomination I grew up in. At last, I could finally look directly at my grandparents through all the memories and scattered bits of data I could assemble, as well as all the material I already had, doing genealogy. It was like being given a key, at last.
Grandma and Grandpa at family reunion
My aunt suggested I correspond with a surviving first-cousin Dad’s age, who wound up also contributing memories, and the result was a remarkable project, not quite memoir but more a realization of finally knowing my grandparents, pro and con, for the first time – years after their deaths – as well as questioning many of our ingrained expectations: just what are grandparents supposed to be, do, or look like, for instance. Unexpectedly, I reconnected to more feelings/memories from their house on McOwen Street than to the house I grew up in on Oakdale Avenue. Some of the stories that turned up, like my dad’s desire to be a sports writer or a big chicken dinner Grandpa arranged to help pay medical bills for one of Mom’s best friends, are priceless. From an intellectual perspective, the project also illuminates the difficulty of knowing – it often meant triangulating something in the middle of three often contradictory sets of perceptions. More importantly, to some extent, I’ve finally been able to reconnect with more than a few fragments of my childhood.
From my end, there’s little I’d say was happy in all of that childhood. But there are things I can finally claim and appreciate, and even rework or rewire. Much of my adult life, as I’ve found in Dad’s genealogy (Mom’s is entirely different, and far more gothic than she ever would have admitted) has been a matter of reclaiming many of the values and practices Grandma and Grandpa rejected in their move to the up-and-coming industrial city. I never knew that my Hodson ancestors were Quaker or that Grandma’s were Dunker (Church of the Brethren), very close to Amish and oh-so Pennsylvania Dutch. But they rejected all that, with some values somehow surviving, however invisibly.
Some discoveries still amaze me. The fact that Grandpa accomplished all he did with nothing more than a grade-school education, for one thing.
Or that his two best friends in adulthood were both a decade older than himself, and both died within a year – one of ALS, the other in a car collision. Since he was the youngest of three sons, I wonder about the dynamics.
There’s much, much more I’ve uncovered along the way. As you can guess, it’s a long story. Today would have been his birthday.
~*~
Jnana's Red Barn 