The Compromise: An American Novel
Author's log of writing The Compromise
Willing yet not so surefooted, I write through rocks and brambles towards what is concealed. It is a descent into what is often hidden in American history, theft and degradation. This is the reality of history, but fiction can thread human experience with alternative truths.
Otis is enslaved, a shadow to those who enslave him. What constrains him and what finally lets him step out of that shadow? What identity does he step into? What if his enslavers are also his family living across the deepest divides? Here I explore the shape of his character as revealed in the opening of the novel.
Revision requires a sharp delete key. Like sculpting, the act of removing is the creative act. However, I’m not ready to put my main characters on death-row for my own capital crimes. Cutting Otis’s narrative has meant cutting 20,000 words of my best writing and a Black male protagonist’s voice. Here I explore my processes of decision making involving craft, history, and my place in current discourses on race. Then I explicate a scene in which Otis is also at a crossroads.
We light candles and give gifts that this year may remind of former abundance, when time seemed endless and the planet was a horizonless platform for our whims. Gradually, the plan shifted from expanding unquestionable goodness to giving and taking less and questioning more. In the United States, some of us may have traded illusions of strength for clarifying doubt. As a writer, I’ve questioned my faith in the goodness of my creative imagination. I produced without interrogating the privledge whence it sprang. I question and begin again.
In my little world, The Compromise looms large and requires greater responsibility. Through the month of June 2020, I revised “Moral Freedom.” It describes a protest in front of the courthouse, Columbia, Missouri, 1845. The potential for collaboration interests me more than violence, so I listened to various sources and found my path.
“Sometimes things that have only the barest of associative connections will pay off in the end.” Robert Boswell, The Half-Known World This approach recently payed off. Tentatively, I began The Compromise with an assessment of Otis’s injuries. He was attacked the day he started working as an overseer, a role he was too immature to…
The neighbor’s apples are turning red. The oak trees are dense with leaves. I’m not compelled to prove that I descended from Druids, but I do have a photo of me taken in the 1970s dancing sprite-like around the apple tree in the backyard. The 1980s could have found me cooking apples to freeze and…
Black History Month has slipped by and I have not posted on this topic even though The Compromise is fundamentally influenced by this history. Most of what I’ve learned through research has strengthened the novel’s concept and approach, and this posting will express gratitude to many sources. Our capacities for warmth and creativity surpass any…
Revising, I need to go back to some fundamentals, like a theory of time and story. Thousands of small decisions about the placement of information may produce coherency and emotional involvement or lose them. I may have to rework with a blowtorch the deeper structure of the plot. I may even add a narrator. How…
Technology and chararacter now get a dedicated page on this blog. This could be the most important aspect of writing historical fiction. It helps us understand more than “what happened.” It asks “so what?” As I make decisions about plot elements to follow, I hold this notion of relevance. As such, the answers are not…