Crop Signs

The water rose to my chin, and splashes got into my mouth. I was quivering in the frozen water. The sound was deafening. “Let’s get out of here,” I gurgled… Swimming against the sub-zero current that was trying to bring me back into the bus was complicated.

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This is an excerpt from my first novel, The Captives. I wrote it in Junior High. The storyline is so convoluted that it’s hard to give a synopsis, but here goes:

On his birthday, a Christian teen named David is on his way to school when his bus crashes into a river. All his friends drown, but David escapes only to be taken CAPTIVE by a ruthless gang which is touring the country kidnapping Christian teens and martyring them. He falls in love with a fellow Christian prisoner, Megan, and together they lead a revolt against the terrorist gang.

Obviously, The Captives is a literary masterpiece. I can’t resist offering a few more of my favorite quotes:

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What I saw made a shower of fear grip me and shred me to pieces.

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I didn’t want to stand there anymore—and I had gained a little bit of strength—so I walked towards the road slowly, mourning the loss of my friends… Some birthday this was turning out to be!

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“Were there any survivors?” My mom asked it, hoping for a glimmer of hope.

“No.” Mom’s tears flowed like the unstoppable river that had drowned so many people earlier that day.

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The whole hallway echoed with cheers after Joe left. “Man, you were good!” “Yeah, you told him!” “I can’t believe you said that about his breathe!” “Too bad you have to die on a cross.” “I hope that you escape again and rescue us all!”

I yelled over the roar, “Thank you! But it wasn’t just me. It was God who gave me the courage.”

The applause thickened. “You’re too modest, Mike!” “I hope that your God saves you!”

                “I hope so too!”

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I stopped working on The Captives around page 100. I can’t remember why, but I think it had something to do with how excited I was for my new project, The Warrior’s Heart. Here’s a brief synopsis:

A Christian teen named David is on his way to Argentina for a missions trip when his plane crashes, and he alone escapes by parachute to a mysterious island, only to be taken hostage by a ruthless band of natives. He falls in love with a girl named Megan, and together they hike through the mountains, escape an avalanche and keep warm in a frozen canyon by hugging through the night. Then they kill a dragon and save everyone.

I wrote The Warrior’s Heart for several years in high school, rushing to the theaters every December among a host of other teenage novelists who found inspiration in The Lord of the Rings.

However, I never completed The Warrior’s Heart. I stopped around page 100. I’m not exactly sure what happened. I remember reading through the chapters I had written and noticing their enormous shortcomings. I remember despairing of ever being a real author, and consoling myself by starting a new novel: The Five Fates.

I worked on The Five Fates for a couple years, wrote about 100 pages, and stopped.

Exactly a year ago, I started The Red Road. This week, I passed page 100. I can feel the chapters dragging behind me, slowing my momentum. The past few weeks of writing have been hard. Reading backwards, I am not proud of everything I’ve written. Looking forward, I’m not confident I can write anything better. Maybe it would be best just to start from scratch with a new story, a better story.

In some ways, writing has only gotten harder as I’ve grown older. I’m not the Junior High student writing about dragons anymore. Each year that passes adds greater stakes to dreams like these.

I’ve talked to military kids who grew up moving every two years. When they finally decide to stay in one place for good, a restlessness assaults them at the two-year mark. They experience an impulse for flight as strong as that of migratory birds, an impulse which seems wrong to resist. For them, breaking the two-year cycle requires a feat of perseverance, a breaking of wrong instinct.

I think this is common to all of us. Who knows what wrong instincts we are all harboring in our bellies, unbeknownst to others and perhaps even to ourselves? Only you can know what secret, often nonsensical, urges you must work against.

For my part, I must break the 100-page barrier (among many other, more sinister, impulses in my life). Communicating how I feel is half the battle. As any verbal processor knows, there’s great significance in winding your way toward the perfect words. Some conversations I’ll spend hours processing through the same vague impressions, turning over the same words again and again until I’ve come by that perfect, distilled image or phrase. When I find it, I may repeat the phrase for days or even weeks, trying to remember which friends I’ve shared it with so the revelation doesn’t seem rehearsed when I process it for the tenth time.

Finding a good phrase is like discovering a diagnosis for your sickness. These muscle pains, fevers, and wheezing cough aren’t just random symptoms anymore: they have a proper name.

There are many truisms we writers use to encourage ourselves. One of the most famous (and one that’s helped me from time to time) goes roughly like this:

Writing is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole journey that way.

I recently stumbled across a new metaphor that makes sense of how I feel today as I sit down to write:

Writing is like making crop circles without a ladder.

I start the day where I left off, tracing the previous day’s curve until I arrive at a dead end of corn. Then I start clipping away, projecting from the previous day’s trajectory to guess today’s. Some days I take a machete with me and cut stalks in wide swaths. Other days I bend them with tiny scissors, troubling over each stalk.

In the beginning I had a clear picture in my mind of what I wanted this crop sign to look like. But it’s been a year, and the picture is getting blurry. I don’t have a helicopter or plane, and even when I drag my stepping stool into the middle of the field, it doesn’t afford much perspective. The stalks rise over my head. I try to measure out the distance between lines and circles, but there’s no way of knowing whether it’ll look right from the sky. I’m lost in my own corn maze with a pair of scissors.

So there’s my picture, my phrase. It doesn’t solve my problems, because novels can’t be solved, only made. But at least I have a few words for why this is so hard. Like David from The Captives and The Warrior's Heart, I am committed to surviving, slaying my dragons, and—most importantly—romancing a girl named Megan.*

*The name Megan, like the dragons I'm slaying, is metaphorical. Just in case you were wondering.

Blog Hop: What I’m Writing and Other Reflections on Claiming Artisthood

A few weeks ago, my friend Meredith posted a blog entry answering four questions about her writing. When I read to the end, I was surprised to see that she had asked me and some other writers to answer the same four questions. So here I am, coming back to my blog after a long absence for this pleasantly self-indulgent exercise. Hope you enjoy it!

What am I writing and working on?

Last fall I quit my full-time job to begin writing in a more concentrated way. It’s been nearly a year, and even though I am once again working about 40 hours a week, I am still writing.

The main project is a novel, but I also dabble in short stories, songs, and essays when the mammoth weight of the novel gets too much.

Fiction:

The Red Road. This is the biggie. I started this novel in college for a novella class and placed the first fifty pages into my professor’s hands, if only to remove them from my sight. My A- earned, the novel sat mostly dormant for three years. Last fall, with much encouragement from friends, I sat down with a basic memory of the story and began to type, starting at the very beginning as Maria Von Trap recommends.

The novel follows two boys as they walk along a forbidden road to save their village. It’s a journey narrative, fraught with danger, brotherhood, and mythology. I spend nearly 10 hrs a week plugging away on this story. I hope that, many years from now, you’ll pick up a copy at your local bookstore if those are still a thing.

“Churchgoing.” This is a short story about a seminary student visiting his mom’s church during Christmas break. His high-minded sensibilities clash with the church’s charismatic exuberance, pushing him uncomfortably toward an O’Connor-esque encounter with grace. This story is a ton of fun to write, and I sometimes embarrass myself by laughing out loud at my own writing. I haven’t shared fiction publicly since college, but I hope to post “Churchgoing” on the blog when it’s complete.

Non-Fiction:

You may have noticed that my blog has been dormant for awhile. This is due in part to the amount of focus The Red Road demands, but also in part to the difficulty I’ve had making sense of my life. Every now and then I’ll record a partial thought on my computer, dipping a ladle into a boiling pot to see if anything has congealed. The thoughts that emerge generally land in one of two categories, which will eventually form the basis of two blog series:

“Recovering Narrative.” Recently I’ve struggled to form a meaningful narrative from the disjointed pieces of my life. “Recovering Narrative” discusses various crises of faith, confusion over where my life is heading, and the way God has led me painstakingly back toward a meaningful narrative.

“In Defense of Beauty.” I’ve been gathering material and writing notes for this piece for many years now. I’m fascinated by the ways we avoid beauty, insisting on mediators which inoculate us to its influence. “In Defense of Beauty” is my love-letter to the world, the kind that’s written both to praise and provoke.

Music:

Does anyone remember that one time I promised to have a homemade CD out by April 2014? Does anyone remember how that never happened?

Well I’m SORRY! I’m still working on that, although not very consistently. I’ve been pretty disappointed by the sound quality of what I’m able to do at home. I really should take a month off from writing the novel to make some headway on this project. I should also lower my standards—a lot. But let’s be honest, neither of these is likely to happen anytime soon. I guess the world will have to wait.

I am, however, writing some songs. My current favorite:

“Eyes Facing Out.” This is a simple ditty I’ve been turning over in my mind for several months, concerning the strange way God made us. I think it’s really interesting that we can’t see our own faces or really even hear what our voices sound like, that we need others to see and hear us.

If you’re interested in any of these projects, give a shout out! Your encouragement keeps a tired writer going!

How does my work differ from others in the genre?

My work differs from others’ in one key way—it is unfinished. I know that’s a big copout, but I’ve always been a restless policeman. (That’s an attempted pun on “cop-out.” It doesn’t really work. Pretend it does and laugh!)

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that my work is unfinished. That in itself sets it apart from nearly every work that has inspired me, encouraged or chastened me, and ultimately inspired me to write. When I compare myself to Marilynne Robinson or C.S. Lewis, I am comparing my beginning endeavors to their finished work. I have no access to their scribblings, their embarrassing false starts, the dirty layers hidden beneath years of revision.

I’ve sometimes compared writing a novel to building a plane. It can’t fly at all till the work is mostly done. A constant labor of faith and imagination is required to believe that such a heavy thing will ever get off the ground.

Why do I write what I do?

In a broader sense, I write novels because that is the form that best facilitates the way my mind works, allowing space for interconnectedness and slow-brew revelations. I enjoy the marathon pace.

In a specific sense, I’m writing The Red Road because I promised I would. I have been a novelist since I was young, but I have never finished a novel. There are many days when I don’t feel any affection for this story (and many days I do). And there’s no guarantee I’ll be published. For me, writing The Red Road is mostly about becoming a person who can persevere beyond aborted projects and half-formed ideas, becoming a person who finishes things that matter.

How does my writing process work?

People often ask me if I’m done with that novel I’m working on. For the next several years, assume the answer is no. A better question would be, “How’s the novel coming along?” An even better question would be, “Would you like a generous coffee patron?”

Flannery O’Connor describes novel-writing as “a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.”

I like that quote because it makes what I do sound EPIC. In reality I’m just sitting at a coffee shop, typing, my hair and teeth fully intact. I quietly add paragraphs and pages to a work that seems not to grow longer.

I keep a tally of my writing hours in an excel spreadsheet like a budget. The danger is to think I’ve been writing when I haven’t. The numbers keep me honest (mostly).

When I sit down to write, I try not to rehash my identity as a writer. I try not to question whether my work has any worth. A year ago, I made a decision through prayer and a lot of consideration, and I have to trust it. The right time for self-doubt was approximately 75 pages ago. Which must mean that now is the time for faith.

I’m not going to tag more friends, because I don’t know enough bloggers. But do yourself a favor and check out Meredith’s blog, Very Revealing. My favorite entries so far are “My Mustache Brings all the Boysto the Yard,” “Walking off the Career Path,” and--what has to be the most encouraging thing I've read in a long time--“Learning How to Run (well, walk).”