Sorting through my Short Fiction folder I come across a lot of incomplete work. I’m one of those writers possessed by the constant itch to be at it, yet I often the lack the focus to carry on when it inevitably becomes a slog. This is especially true in the longer form. I’ve successfully completed three novels, but the last of these was more than six years ago.
Finding the discipline to see a novel through to the end is a learned skill that requires a vision of the “big picture” as well as a tactical mind of how to get from here to there. The more complex the novel, the more complex the problem.
Many successful writers utilize outlines where they map out the entire story in chapters, highlighting the key moments on which the narrative turns. Others utilize the “Story Genius” method in which the character arcs are first described, then explored in detail (what would make Billy go from a mama’s boy to a gunfighter? etc.) with the various plot points and narrative devices serving this timeline.
And then there’s the hit-and-miss method I seem to often employ, which is to think about something, do a bit of cursory research, and then start writing until I get some traction. I want to bury myself in it, get the characters talking to one another, live in that world and make things happen.
So here’s the thing: I’ve got three incomplete novels that have choked out around 50,000 words because I seemed to forget what story I wanted to tell:
A novel set in the 1600s about three people who share the same vision of a Golden Man who fills their hearts with peace. One is a Wendat boy, one is the son of a butcher-turned-surgeon who wants to be a Jesuit missionary, and the third is a young woman who leaves her son to travel to New France and set up a mission hospital for the native women.
A novel told by the best friend of Frank Luke, the first Air Corps pilot to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor, that describes in vivid detail the air war of 1916-18.
A horror novel about a family who moves to a haunted Iowa farmhouse near a creepy town where a 19th century cult lives on in the shadows
A novel about two boys who attend the Iowa School for the Feeble-Minded and escape to the circus
The fourth novel of my Hawser series in which the protagonist lives in segregated Portland during the 1962 Columbus Day storm and is found out by the CIA, taken to White House to advise JFK during the Cuban missile crisis, and then gets sent away to Laos
Each of these projects started with best of intentions, but I got distracted and lost my way about what kind of story I wanted to tell. In the meantime I have entered a bunch of fiction contests (they always serve to remind me that I tend to perform best under pressure) and whittle away at other stories. If the act of writing is torturous, the feeling of having written is the reward. I am certainly not alone in that. I jump around between them to get this feeling, but it’s a bit like eating Ding Dongs for breakfast.
And when all else fails, I grab a fragment from my archives, dust it off, and post it here. This one is from 2015 and is a pretty clear rip-off of Hemingway’s racing stories, but I still like it fairly well. And for now, the itch is scratched a little.
For now.
Hope you enjoy it.
SHAME
Honor, you say? You want me to tell you about honor?
Shit, you’re just a kid.
I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said “youth is wasted on the young.”
He also said that a life spent making mistakes is more honorable than a life spent doing nothing.
Honorable.
You think it means anything?
You can see that I am a small man, child-size but portly. I dress flashy. People always ask if I am a jockey. What’s a jockey? I ask. Or I might compliment their keen powers of observation.
I am a wiseacre.
You’d think I would get my ass kicked a lot, but many large men have a resistance to smacking a guy my size. It makes them look ridiculous, like bullies. Besides, I might get lucky and clock them a good one.
Then they got their ass kicked by a midget.
The truth? I wanted to be a jockey since the first time I was on a horse, when Uncle Vic set me astride the junkman’s dray in the alley behind our Back of the Yards tenement. They were Sunday drunk, jovial. He hoisted me up with his meatpacker’s mitts that almost encircled my waist and set me in front of the breeching chain atop the miserable animal’s back. As I sat up there I felt something new. I felt like a king. Like a god.
I was six.
Then the horse spattered a gallon of strong-smelling piss off the alley cobbles. The men leapt back, laughing and cursing. I held tight to the tug chain and didn’t topple when the horse shied at the noise. The junkman stepped up and grabbed the hackamore.
He looked up at me, red-rimmed eyes in a wood-black face. “You might make a jockey, son.”
The bug lay dormant for years. All thoughts of being a jockey ended when I shot up to my current height of five feet while still in the fourth grade. For a few months I towered over my classmates, but the early growth spurt was the only one and by the time I was eleven I started to think that maybe my old dream might be possible.
I had an afterschool job delivering meat for Allan & Sons to eating joints near our neighborhood. One Saturday I finished early and, flush with my pay, hopped the North Avenue streetcar all the way out to Maywood.
But you asked me to talk about honor. How about I talk about its opposite?
Shame.
I know shame, all right. I know it better than honor. It’s more real to me, a gritty taste in the back of my throat that shapes every word I say, flavors everything I eat or drink. It clings to me like long underwear I’ve been wearing so long that my hairs have grown through it, a filthy stinking second skin that’s stained with shit and piss and every bad thing I ever did.
You’d think I would have tried to avoid it.
You know how they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions? That’s a load of crap. It isn’t paved at all. It isn’t even a road.
It’s a destination you never set out for, where you don’t even know you arrived until you look around and say to yourself ah, yeah. Hell. This must be the place.
I didn’t feel shame when Boy-John pressed the filthy envelope into my lap beneath the pub table. Boy-John smiled, nodded and got up to go, winked as he left.
I knew it was my due, now that I was finally in a place to make big money. Big for me, anyway. Up to then I hadn’t mattered enough to bribe, so I felt I was getting somewhere.
I had no illusions even then. I never was dewy-eyed about any of it. The world is a fix, and the only way to get the boot off your neck is by prying it off with cold cash.
Like I said, I am a little man, and in this world that’s two strikes and maybe three.
Money was the only ladder I could climb, and there was just one way to get it.
Brisbee thumped my shoulder then.“Popped your cherry. Let’s have another round.” He motioned for the whiskey. And of course I drank, caught up in the moment.
I felt no shame in the blur of my room when I counted the bills, more than I would make if I let Sultan win honest by the hundred or so yards he was capable of. He was the best horse I ever jocked, the only one who had that great winner’s heart. It’s hard to explain, but it knew it the first time I rode him around the paddock. Him and me, we had something.
In the gray haze of morning my head thumped from the drinking and lack of sleep, but I always held off coffee until after the race. Just one cup might add a pound or more, especially when my tissues were swollen with last night’s liquor.
The shame hit me as I approached the stables. Sultan’s eyes brought it, the shame of what I would do, what I was doing. I might explain it to myself, say it was only one race, only money. My only way up.
Sultan would only know what I did. He wouldn’t care why.
Honorable.
That word is stone-hard, unyielding as the dawn. You know it best when you cross the line, profane. Obscene. Once you’re past it you never get it back.
Looking back, I wonder what bothers me more: that I had a price at all, or that it was so goddamned cheap?
All the writing you do counts. All of it. Sometimes, the stories or novels we start but don't finish are just what they are. Don't see them as failures but as practice runs, or stagings, before you get to your magnum opus.