Rainbows and Glitter and Sehnsucht, Oh My!

Well, if my lament back in February about losing inspiration was a sort of inadvertent prayer, then somebody up there must not only like me, but also have quite a sense of humor. For it was literally the very next day that I received the initial spark of inspiration that led to the conception of "Rainbow", and while in the midst of excited pre-production for that novel, I suddenly and unexpectedly received another flash of inspiration, this one for the story erstwhile referred to as "V", which I then poured out in a month's time as the novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth. And to top it all off, since finishing that work on Thursday, my inspiration for "Rainbow", which I hardly thought about during that entire month while busily writing another story, has returned with a vengeance. Like the old saying has it, when it rains, it pours!

One of the most humorous aspects of all this, to me, is that the initial spark that set off "Rainbow" was a line from the movie Hello, Dolly!, of all things (who would have thought?). I'll tell more about that at a later date.

This interruption and dislocation of one inspiration by another, only to have the first inspiration fully return once the interloper has passed, may seem a bit odd, but in hindsight it kind of makes sense. The story that became Angels had been developing since September, and in a way I think it was something that I needed to get out of my system first. I think I had to process a lot of dark stuff via the therapy of writing Angels, and I believe it was truly cathartic because since completing it I have been feeling pretty good about life.

Now that that storm has passed, however, the freshly washed air and rays of sunshine are giving more impetus than ever to the formation of "Rainbow" (apropos, eh?). It's really strange to me how that inspiration has not only so quickly and easily returned as though nothing ever happened, but feels stronger than ever, as if it has been newly energized.

I've already alluded to this before, but I find it interesting to compare and contrast the inspiration of "Rainbow" with that of Bluebird. My current inspiration is similar in that it feels very powerful, like a great storm is gathering and will soon be let loose, and in that it feels like something grand and wondrous and strange is haunting me and insisting that I give it concrete form and shape.

What is different is that the passion that fueled Bluebird was painful and tragic, though beautifully so (and was still every bit a real passion, with all the excitement that word suggests), while the new passion I am feeling is bright and expansive. In 2012, I felt more like Thomas Fairchild, the tragic (anti)hero and suffering poet, so I wrote The Bluebird of Happiness; in 2013, I feel more like Martin Lane, the outwardly plain but inwardly colorful artist who begins to see a clearer picture of his own identity and to express it more fully, so I am planning to write "Rainbow" (again, that is only a working title, as I have not yet decided on the novel's actual title).

In short, whereas Bluebird was a tragedy, "Rainbow" is more of a comedy. I don't mean that it is a humorous tale (though there will undoubtedly be much humor in it, as there was in Bluebird), but in the sense that opposes tragedy, i.e., a story with a happy ending. However, just as my tragedies are tempered by glimmers of hope and affirmation of life, this comedy will be tempered by sadness and longing. I tend to like my stories more gray than black and white.

And I think "Rainbow" will be very gray indeed because I do not intend to explain everything about who and what Martin Lane is. At the beginning, he will appear mysterious and difficult to know, but at the end, even after much has been revealed about him and his life, and mostly from his own first-person point of view, I think he will seem even more mysterious. This is because what is revealed about him will only add to the mystery and ambiguity and multidimensional, seemingly paradoxical complexity of Martin Lane. I hope that the end of the tale will leave readers regarding him with a sense of wonder ("who is this Martin Lane anyway?").

In some sense I feel that I fall in love with my major characters. I tend to use that phrase somewhat differently than most people use it. In common usage, to be "in love" with someone implies sexual attraction and at least the prospect of sexual relationship. I tend to use it in a more purely emotional and spiritual sense, something more along the lines of feeling tremendous passion and excitement inspired by a particular person, combined with a deep fascination with that person and a strong desire to know them. Some psychologists have theorized that such feelings have no necessary connection to sexuality or sexual orientation, a theory with which I tend to agree. This kind of passion is very much at the heart of both Bluebird and "Rainbow", both being stories that deal in large part with exploring the various ways in which people can feel emotionally passionate or even platonically romantic love toward each other apart from sexual expression, and how that passion can inspire artistic creativity.

So, in light of that, my current passion I can describe at least in part as feeling that I am "in love" with an imaginary young man named Martin Lane. Perhaps fiction authors are crazy in some sense because we imagine these vast and complex imaginary worlds and the wonderfully complex imaginary people that inhabit them and their often bizarrely complex imaginary lives, and we come to feel real feelings toward these imaginary people (it's sort of a truism that fiction writers often feel like their characters are their children). But we hope that our readers, too, are just crazy enough to believe these wild and vivid fantasies that we tell them, at least for a time, and to fall in love with our characters just as we have.

But more to the point, by falling in love with a person, imaginary or otherwise, we fall in love with life, and with the world. When my daughter was born I felt that I was in love. The world seemed rose-colored. There is much symbolism in my stories, some more obvious and some more subtle, and it is no coincidence that Martin Lane wears rose-colored glasses. As he says of himself in Bluebird, "I'm like crazily in love, with everyone and everything."

I have caught something of Martin's all-encompassing passion, and I hope that my readers will find it equally contagious. Because ultimately it's not really about Martin so much as he is about, and points us toward, the beauty and grandeur of life and of the world we live in; and even more it is about Martin pointing us, as many fictional characters do, toward the mirror, and seeing the beauty and nobility of ourselves.

Angels Are Lonely on the Earth

I have completed my 39,000-word novella Angels Are Lonely on the Earth. It was composed in another burst of inspiration from April 8 to May 9. Although certain elements of the story had been in my head for years, it began to emerge in more definite form last September, at which time I thought of it as a radical reimagining of an existing story concept whose title began with V. In hindsight, of course, it was really an entirely new story concept, though I did not separate it out from "V-----" until this year.

Inspiration often happens at the oddest moments. What may now be seen as the main idea of the story occurred to me in a flash the morning of November 2 as I was walking from my car to my workplace. And it was on the morning of April 4, while I was still lying in bed, that the title came to me, together with a related question uttered by the protagonist near the end of the story, both of which provided the final spark of inspiration.

The story is set in St. Louis, where I currently live, about a hundred years hence. The reasons for the futuristic setting are not science fictional; i.e., they do not relate to advances in science or technology, or even to changes in society. The reason for the choice of time period has mainly to do with the fact that the protagonist, Andrew Gordon, is a fan of the poetry of Thomas Fairchild, the protagonist of The Bluebird of Happiness. Thomas and his work are referenced throughout the story, and have a significant influence on Andrew's life and thought. In this way, I have written a related story that is not actually a sequel.

Angels also references a short story I completed in 2009 called "The Strange Case of Richard Arthurs", borrowing a mysterious outer space phenomenon from that tale as a plot element. This phenomenon, together with the strange effects it produces in human beings, might lead some readers to regard Angels as a science fiction story; personally, I do not consider this story to be SF. The difference has to do with emphasis, or what the story is mainly about. I would hate for non-SF fans to miss out on the story, which I think is simply a human drama, because of a misconception. (Having been a lifelong science fiction fan, it is certainly not antipathy to the genre that causes me to assert this story's non-SF status. At the very least, I would say that if it is SF, it is not merely SF; and I would also say that if it is SF, it is SF of a more literary type as opposed to standard genre fiction.)

As was the case in Bluebird, there is much reference to philosophy, poetry, and classical music, and there are a number of passages that relate, or show, the protagonist's dreams and visions. I am certain that many readers will think the story, having something of an epic feel to it, easily could have been expanded into a full-blown novel; but I am satisfied with the concise and often poetic nature of my storytelling, and prefer to leave much to the reader's imagination. I consider myself to be primarily a poet who sometimes writes prose fiction, which at its best may be thought of as a form of poetry. I also think of myself as a mythmaker, and a good myth is always suggestive, evocative, and ultimately mysterious. As Andrew Gordon learns, poetry and myths and dreams point us toward the ineffable, rather than attempting to spell out that which may not be uttered.

The story is a tragedy, but I think it is ultimately a hopeful one. That is not as oxymoronic as it might sound, for, as one character suggests, tragedy as an art is actually about hope. It is a celebration, not of death, but of life, and affirms not life's defeat but its victory.

It is said that the pen is mightier than the sword, and just as brave knights battle dragons, so too do writers often battle their own dragons. With this story more than any other, I feel that I have done battle with the dragon of nihilism and despair. I do not mean this in a grandiose sense of battling them for all humanity, but only for myself, and perhaps also for at least some of my readers. The story is more personal for me than I would like people to understand, and it is a story I feel I needed to write in order that I might not be overcome by a particular kind of darkness. It appears at times that those dragons were sent to slay me; but I think that really I have been sent to slay them. In the ongoing war of light against darkness, I like to think that this little tale constitutes a small but significant victory.

Notes From Somewhere Over the Rainbow

 

First of all, I really need to come up with a real title for "Rainbow". I'm not going to force it though; I have faith that the right title will present itself when it's ready. My ideas about the novel continue to develop rather fruitfully but, despite my excitement, I don't want to say too much about it at this point. It's still in the pre-production phase of development, but is coming together nicely.

One thing I can say about it without giving away too much is that its themes are becoming clearer in my mind. One of the dominant themes, I am coming to realize, has to do with vision, perception, and imagination, particularly with respect to knowing other people and knowing oneself, but also with respect to knowing reality in general.

Martin Lane, like his author, wears glasses and has suffered poor vision since childhood. But this physical defect stands in sharp contrast to the powerful vision of his poetic and artistic imagination (I am speaking of my character, not myself), which enables him to see things that others cannot. In a way, this is a variation of the old motif of Homer, the blind poet.

A big question in the story, as it was in Bluebird, is whether imagination distorts and deforms our vision of reality, or whether it actually enhances and expands that vision. In the former novel, this question was explored mainly in the context of Thomas Fairchild's idealized, unrequited love for Alexandra Grey, a woman he hardly knows, but in "Rainbow", it will be illustrated more broadly, both in terms of Martin's perception of other people, and in terms of others' perceptions of Martin... and even in Martin's perception of himself. As with the first novel, I will again alternate between the protagonist's first-person point of view and the accounts of other characters.

When I first invented Martin, almost by accident, back in 1997 (he was actually, originally, a co-creation with my friend and fellow writer Bill Rogers), he started out as what I now think of as a "mythic persona", based on hearsay about a real person, but more a product of the creative imagination than anything else. So it is very fitting, and perhaps only natural, that the novel centering on Martin should largely deal with the theme of how we know others by way of imagination.

***

So what is going on, meanwhile, with the novel referred to as "V"? Well, something interesting (to me, at least). As I described before, the original story concept dated from 2006, and it was originally only supposed to be a short story. When I recently whittled the story down to its essence, what remained was essentially the original short story concept (which could possibly assume the length of a novella). However, since then I have realized that the newer ideas could form a story unto themselves, entirely separate from the original 2006 concept.

I have been quoting passages from the work-in-production on my Facebook page with the tag "V is for V". This was of course not the actual title ("V" itself being an abbreviation of the title), but ever since I came up with that tag, I thought that this phrase "V is for V" had kind of an interesting ring to it, as well as a certain significance--about signification itself. So I am entertaining the notion that the new story concept (the one that occurred to me last September) might actually be titled "V is for V", and that the older story idea will retain the original title.

Although it had evolved into a story of epic proportions, I am thinking now that it will actually be much shorter, either an extended short story or a novella (it seems many of my story concepts fall into that middle ground)--but one that, through conciseness, density, and suggestion (these, of course, being qualities of poetry), will still have something of an epic feel to it. I have long been fascinated by the idea of relatively small-scale art works that contain whole worlds within them, like worlds in miniature.

One reason for the separation is that the two stories are rather different from each other in feel, tone, and theme. I had incorporated the old story as one component of the new story, but it seemed a bit of an odd fit. The old story is more sensual, meditative, and delicately dreamlike, whereas the new story (i.e., "V is for V") is more visionary, tragic, and coldly austere (which makes it similar in tone, I think, to Bluebird... not surprisingly, since it was born on the heels of that novel's completion).

This development is interesting to me too in that it shows me how my general mood has changed since last fall, when what I am now calling "V is for V" essentially replaced the older story. The new idea better fit my mood at the time, but now I have returned to a place where I can also find interest in the old story idea.

For that matter, the tone of "Rainbow" is quite distinct from that of The Bluebird of Happiness. It is not nearly as dark and full of suffering, but it fills me with a different sort of inspiration. It is basically the telling of Martin Lane's life story, though it will not be told in strict chronological order, and will combine his own account with the accounts of other characters. His story will likely not appear as tragic as that of his friend Thomas Fairchild, but I think it will still seem mysterious, strange, and, in its own way, fearful (more wonder than terror).

At least it does to me, Martin's creator (or perhaps, the receiver of the muse's vision of Martin). I can only imagine it would appear that way to those to whom I tell his tale.

It's All About Me

The subject of a future autobiographical novel?

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once said, “I have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself.”

As more of life goes by, the more I realize that one of the questions which fascinates me the most is that of how much we can know another human being, and indeed how much we can know ourselves. I think of it as the ultimate mystery of the human soul. We can never fully know the vast, dark reaches of our own interior being, the murky, mysterious inner space of our memories, dreams, imaginations, and subconscious and unconscious longings, fears, and desires—let alone that of another human being.

Nevertheless, knowing ourselves and knowing others are two of the most fundamental projects of human existence. But these are not projects that can ever be completely fulfilled. When we think that we fully know who someone else is, or even that we fully know who we ourselves are, we are hopelessly deluded.

This mystery of the human soul, I am realizing, has become one of the major themes of my writing. It was more than suggested in The Bluebird of Happiness, and will be even more fully brought out and explored in “Rainbow”. In the latter novel, I am also attempting to explore the ways in which our conception of others and of ourselves is based on our own perception and imagination. But the question might also be asked: is there in fact anything more to our identities than this?

As with Bluebird, I will not attempt to provide any definitive answers to the philosophical questions raised by the story. And, as with the former novel, I do hope to provide some intriguing suggestions and possibilities that readers might wish to further explore on their own.

One thing that is an ever-present challenge to the fiction writer is getting inside the head of another human being (or, in some cases, another sentient being, even if not human). In reality, we only have access to our own inner experience, and to write about a fictional character (no matter how autobiographical the character might appear to be) requires a tremendous act of the imagination.

To some degree, however, writers can only write about themselves. That is to say, even when writing about purely imaginary characters who bear little resemblance to themselves, the character’s thoughts, feelings, and experience must be imagined by the author, and this imagining must necessarily occur through the filter of, and must necessarily be informed by, the author’s own thoughts, feelings, and experience. After all, our own experience is the only experience to which we have any access.

So, even though some of my characters may appear to be more autobiographical than others, in some sense they are all autobiographical—and, at the same time, they are all perfectly imaginary. Whether I am writing about young passionate poetic men, or old dour disillusioned men; about beautiful baroque women, or wide-eyed little girls; about misunderstood man-apes or vampiristic voluptuaries; about bizarre business executives or perfectly ordinary Martians—in each case, no matter how fanciful the creature, he, she, or it is always, inevitably, a reflection and expression of its creator, even if only of its creator's wildest dreams or darkest fears.

Everything Old Is New Again

I have decided that the "Rainbow" novel is definitely about Martin Lane, who played the main supporting actor role in Bluebird. The idea of writing a novel with Martin as the protagonist is actually far from a new concept.

My original conceptions of Martin go back to 1997, although it wasn't until 2003 that he emerged as a definite character that I intended to write about. At the time, I imagined him as the main character in what was then called The Terrible Blue (eventually The Bluebird of Happiness). This was part of a radical re-imagining of the novel that up until then had been the story of Thomas Fairchild. Martin actually remained the main character as late as November 2011--only six months before my final grand vision of Bluebird--at which time I decided to revert to the original idea of having the novel revolve around Thomas.

However, while there is nothing new about the basic idea of writing a novel with Martin Lane as the protagonist, "Rainbow" is for all practical purposes an entirely new conception, and bears little resemblance to my earlier ideas of Martin's story. As I mentioned before, when "Rainbow" began forming in my imagination not even two weeks ago, I at first wasn't even sure if it was going to be about Martin. However, as time has gone on it has become more and more clear to me that it is about Martin, and that it can only be about him. That realization makes so much sense, has made everything fall into place, and is also just a very exciting idea to me. I feel that I am seeing a fuller and richer vision of who Martin Lane is, and there is so much there to explore.

I mentioned earlier that "Rainbow" bore a close resemblance to Bluebird, which initially made me concerned that I risked falling into the predicament of writing essentially the same story again and again. I am no longer worried about that. True, "Rainbow" and Bluebird do share many similar features and qualities, not the least of which being that they share some of the same characters. However, even though it involves the same fictional world, "Rainbow" has its own very distinct feeling. I think this is because each story reflects the "soul" of its main character. In Bluebird, one gets inside the head of Thomas Fairchild; in "Rainbow", one will get inside the head of Martin Lane. Because of this, each novel has its own unique vibe--emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic. In short, each novel has its own "personality", reflective of the personality of its main character.

(This makes me wonder about the exact relationship between my characters and myself, which is beginning to seem all the more fascinating, perplexing, and mysterious to me now. But that is a topic best saved for its own separate post.)

In the same way that Bluebird possessed, in my imagination, a strange power and mystery (which I was hopefully able to convey in the work itself), "Rainbow" has its own strange power and mystery, different from that of Bluebird. Like its predecessor, "Rainbow" is, in my own mind, a work that is musical, visionary, and ecstatic. It is a different music, a different vision, and a different ecstasy, and will express a different myth than the one told by Bluebird.

Oz, the quintessential American fairyland, was a prominent motif in Bluebird, but "Rainbow" will further develop that motif. Long before I actually wrote Bluebird, I had begun developing my own private mythology and symbolism of Oz in relation to the story. However, this was brought out only partially in the first novel. One thing "Rainbow" will allow me to do is more fully to explore and express my personal Oz mythos.

I am beginning to realize, too, that one thing I am very interested in doing as a writer is to show the endless mystery of human beings. Although much more will be revealed about Martin Lane than in the first book, he will not really be explained. In fact, if I am successful, he will seem even more mysterious at the end than he does at the beginning. I hope and believe that Thomas Fairchild and his experience were left more mysterious at the end of Bluebird, and I hope and believe that the same will be true of Martin Lane at the end of "Rainbow". As with all knowledge, the more you know, the more you realize how much you don't know. This is truer of nothing more than it is of human beings.

"Rainbow" is largely about Martin Lane coming to know himself. Like the reader, he will know much more about himself at the end, but, also like the reader, one thing he will have learned about himself is what a wondrous and mysterious, and never fully knowable, creature he really is.

A Tale of Two Tales

Okay, I feel like I'm going somewhere again. First of all, "V" is not lost. It was like a star that got too big, too massive, and finally collapsed in upon itself. But the core remains, and it now seems purified. What I realized is that many parts of that grand construction were not essential to that particular story, and began to feel like so much dead weight, making the task of writing it feel unnecessarily burdensome. And that's the opposite of inspiration. I realized that many of those individual parts might work better elsewhere, and some were perhaps not necessary at all, mere filler. I made a list of what I felt to be the essential elements of "V", and after looking at it, I felt much better. It now seems much more clear, a simpler, smaller-scale, but more aesthetically unified idea.

I had always thought of that story as being one of my mid-length fictional works, perhaps a novella or a short novel at most (it was originally, in fact, only a short story), not the overblown epic it was somehow evolving into. I already have two ideas for truly epic novels, stories which can only exist in epic form because of their very nature, and I don't need to give myself more work than is necessary in this short and distracted life. After all, Homer wrote two epics, and that is more than most authors have done. I'll feel incredibly grateful and fulfilled if I am able to complete my two epic novels before I leave this earth.

(I should note that I have described Bluebird as an epic, and I suppose it is in some sense, but it is of fairly standard novel length and would be dwarfed by these other two works.)

Now for the new novel idea... its working title, as I have said, is "Rainbow". This is a reference to The Wizard of Oz. I'm not sure yet if the actual title will contain the word "rainbow" or not; we'll see.

The idea of this novel being a companion piece to Bluebird is becoming stronger. I am thinking that the protagonist may very well be Martin Lane, the best male friend of Thomas Fairchild, Bluebird's main character. I can't help but think of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and how the best friend of the first novel's protagonist became the main character of the latter novel.

It would not be a sequel, nor a prequel. It may overlap in time. But I am actually not overly concerned with continuity. In fact, I'm not particularly concerned to go out of my way to avoid apparent contradictions or irresolvable, differing accounts. I am thinking of these stories as myths, and my characters as mythic figures. As in ancient myths, many varying tales were told about gods and heroes, and it would have been difficult if not impossible to put them all together into a coherent whole. That's okay because myth is poetry, not history. It tells truth in a symbolical way, and by circumventing the literal accounts of science and history, it can access aspects of reality and truth otherwise invisible or incommunicable.

Like Bluebird (indeed, perhaps like every novel I shall write), "Rainbow" is philosophical. If The Bluebird of Happiness was primarily about, as its title would suggest, happiness and the possibility thereof, then "Rainbow" is primarily about beauty, and its significance in human life. If Bluebird was a tragedy, then "Rainbow" is more of a fairy tale. But, as in all fairy tales, there will be much darkness to overcome.

Weather Changes

So here's the deal. The story affectionately known as "V" has reached a standstill, and at this point its future is uncertain. Again, for me and my writing process, this is nothing unusual. In fact, there have been many occasions in the past when I have had to "retire" a particular story idea that I had been working on, in some cases for years. Such a retirement is always provisional, however. After all, I once retired the story concept that eventually became my first novel, The Bluebird of Happiness. It was at a point when the story idea (then known as The Terrible Blue) was already seven years old and didn't seem to be going anywhere... but in another six years it would finally emerge, almost overnight, in a supernova of inspiration. So you never know how these things will evolve. Sometimes things just have to develop in their own good time, and you can't force it if it's not the right time.

My story "retirements" are often conceived not as throwing out the story idea altogether so much as "deconstructing" it. In other words, I wish to preserve the best ideas from it for possible re-use later, either in a revived version of the same story (as happened with Bluebird) or in another story entirely (or perhaps various ideas from the original concept will pop up here and there in a number of different stories).

In any case, there is a more positive side to what is happening right now. It is not merely that "V" has lost some of its inspiration. Rather, a new inspiration has been slowly but surely displacing it. It is as though a nebulous mass of low pressure weather has begun pushing out the bright, high pressure air of "V". I sense some dark fugue arising in my imagination, still in the earliest stages of formation, taking on only dimly perceptible shapes, but with an undeniable mounting energy and the promise of great power, like the low rumbling of distant thunder. Like Bluebird in its final inspiration, it has the feeling of music and of hieratic, dreamlike vision. When I feel the story as music and as visionary image at least as much as narrative, I know it is mine.

One thing I can already say about this new story concept--it does not yet have a title, but I'm temporarily referring to it as "Rainbow"--is that it bears strong resemblances to Bluebird (to the point where I am wondering if it may in fact be a related story involving some of the characters from the earlier novel). At the very least, there are definite similarities in terms of character types, settings, themes, and feelings. This makes me worry, of course, that writing what comes most naturally to me, what most inspires me, will mean writing the same story over and over, albeit in different variations.

However, when you think about it, many great authors have carved out a niche for themselves by writing multiple stories and novels that largely involve the same general type of setting, characters, themes, etc.--one only need think of Jane Austen, for instance, or Henry James, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, and any number of other novelists whose works, despite their individual variations and unique qualities, display an overall aesthetic and thematic unity that stamps them with the distinctive mark of their creators.

So perhaps being true to my muse will mean creating a canon of works that bear the strong, distinctive mark of their author and of his peculiar obsessions, tastes, and notions, so that someday people might say, "that's like something out of a Steven Holland story". At least, that is how I like to flatter myself.

Right now, all I know is that I feel like Dorothy, having just left Professor Marvel's house, as the first storm winds begin to blow, with the promise of some wondrous and magical Oz waiting to be discovered on the other side of the cyclone.