The Compromise: An American Novel
Author's log of writing The Compromise
Image: “Paddle-steamer in a Storm” c. 1840 J.M.W. Turner. [PD] via Wikimedia commons The first phase of writing a novel is like preparing to set sail on a voyage around the world and asking what to bring, what to discard, and what can be found along the way. Will it be dangerous, exciting and life-changing,…
Something comes first in a coming-of-age novel. Like a living thing, it is only small and simple for a moment. It expands and grows more complex with each word. Writing has been an exquisite task, such that I might wish drafting to never end. Revising the opening yet again, has reinforced the mind’s nonlinear capacities….
Reading, we leap away from monotonous daily events to explore the exceptional, those events that we know will come but don’t know when or how. There is much social and psychological responsibility associated with that. Ten to fifteen hours of a reader’s attention is precious.
In a neighborhood free library, I found a crisp hardcover copy of Cold Mountain (1997) by Charles Frazier, but I gave it away to a man for his hospital stay. I borrowed a grimy copy from the library. I dipped in. There in the epigraph is Han-shan.
Bodies have rhythms and arcs already encoded– pulse and breath, birth, growth, reproduction, and decay. Poetry performs its nonlinear subatomic behavior. We may expect the novel to work differently, to be more socially engaged, measurable in time and space, more pedistrian, in a good way. But a novel creates a larger discursive body in which the human body can speak, its pleasures and pain included.
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.
If we write and teach well, echoes return.