Storytellersunplugged

by Brian Hodge

[Podcast edition also available here. Now with 200% more Monty Python clips.]

Since last we spoke, the miracle has happened once again. Yay.

Each time, I welcome it with the kind of gratitude and awe that I imagine my distant ancestors must have lavished on the returning sun each winter solstice as those first rays of dawn broke over the horizon and between the menhirs. Like them, I’ve experienced the cycle enough times to confidently expect that the latest one won’t be any different from all the ones before…

But there’s always that awful chance, isn’t there? That during the longest night, the sun might lose its way, or a trickster might snatch it from the sky.

That the novel won’t start to create its own illumination.

The new one has been underway for a while and following a pattern so familiar that it seems almost as codified as the Stations of the Cross.

In beginning, I pick my way along as though finding a path across a minefield. Progress can charitably be called torturous. Any momentum is less a reward for my efforts than a spastic lunge after tripping over my own feet. The English language turns strange and clunky, and I wonder if vital centers of my brain haven’t sustained some irrevocable damage. Characters feel as if they have all the originality of tobacco shop Indians, and about as wooden.

A confession: I’ve always envied those writers who can hit the ground running, and usually been gracious enough not to wish they’d slip and twist an ankle.

In spite of it all, one by one, the pages mount up…

…eventually ushering in the day that changes everything, a day that is to the novel as the Solstice is to the sun: Huh … that wasn’t so bad today, now was it?

Finally, the novel and I have arrived at what I call the Headspace.

Name something and you’re closer to owning it, but even so, there are no easy definitions here. Like subatomic bits that can be both particles and waves, the Headspace is a polymorphous concept. Sometimes it’s a state of mind. Sometimes it’s a place. At other times it’s even akin to a state of grace. Very early, before the novel boasts a page 1, the Headspace has no more substance than mist and vapor and shadows thrown by sparks. It exists only in the future tense, a dream of something I need to grope my way toward, without much to sustain the effort other than the faith that it really is out there, a slippery hybrid of something that is found and built and grown.

And for all the cosmic blather, you’d think that attaining the Headspace would announce itself in a spectacle to rival the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In a pig’s ass it does.

Because it’s a quiet affair, with a dismaying absence of trumpets blaring from the sky. Too bad. Trumpets really would help — if nothing else, as a monster ego booster. Instead, it’s more like the scene in every movie ever made that features an old-school safecracker. With ears as sensitive as his fingertips, he leans against the door next to the combination lock, and after some excruciatingly precise finessing about and a few beads of sweat, there’s that first satisfying click of the tumblers.

I’m in.

And it’s about damned time.

This summer, when I proofread the galleys for an upcoming edition of an earlier novel, Prototype, it crossed my mind that, even though it first came out in 1996, if forced to add more to it, this wouldn’t have been a problem. Prototype’s Headspace has long been complete and intact. As with a house I once may have lived in, I would always know my way around if I ever went back.

When a novel is complete, I can hold it in its entirety. Not just in my hands … in my head and heart and soul.

But before I can hold the novel, the novel must first hold me.

I must live inside it as it’s spun around me like a cocoon. Its fibers are made up of story and character, incidents and consequences. But these are just the inert materials you can find in an outline. They lie on the slab waiting to be animated. They need more. Emotion and nuance and style and atmosphere and a jillion other things that comprise the lifeblood that flows between the words, and the DNA that marks this novel as unique among all others.

This is the Headspace, and it’s where the magic happens.

Characters open up and surprise me with depths and histories they’d been coy about sharing before. Snatches of dialog are overheard from the future and demand to be transcribed now, stored for whenever their day comes. Connections and possibilities bloom in fields that once looked barren. Lines that may be used on the next page, or not for another 200, drift in like feathers from passing birds … along with droppings, too, but that’s okay. Today’s manure is tomorrow’s fertilizer.

This is the Headspace, and I carry it with me for the duration, like an ever-thickening cloud.

There’s a danger here, too. Because we’re talking about a long commitment filled with demands. The Headspace must be fed and tended; it needs maintenance and upkeep. Frequently. Otherwise, it can drift away before you realize you’ve lost your hold on each other, like a balloon from your fingertips, leaking air and deflating into a sad, sagging lump that no longer looks familiar.

This is the Headspace, and it endures only when it’s complete.

Sometimes I wonder about the possibility of the things we create having attained an objective reality of their own … not just on the page, but having congealed into living, breathing form somewhere. Somebody steeped in the theories of quantum reality could riff on that for hours, probably, although they may not convince me that I haven’t gotten it backwards the whole time: that what we write is an imperfect reflection of the Platonic Ideal of a novel that already exists in the ether, which we try to recreate the best that we can.

Either way, whatever it is, to me it’s the Headspace, and I’m sure there must be better places to live right now.

But I sure can’t think of any.