Some of you wanted to know the status of Redemption, my first novel. I'm currently looking for a literary agent to represent it. A number of agents have expressed interest in it based on a one-page pitch letter I sent them. So far I've had no takers. Just last Friday a very fine agent requested that I send the first 75 pages of Redemption to her. She will give me an answer in four to six weeks. Keep your fingers crossed. (By the way, I've already decided my third novel will not be entitled Renovation.)
As I told you last month, my novel Revolution is about a Peace Corps volunteer who, while serving in Colombia, S.A. in 1967, becomes friendly with a FARC revolutionary soldier and gradually becomes radicalized. (That's as much as I'm saying about it. I don't want to give the story away.) There is an autobiographical angle to my novel: The story was prompted by events I experienced while serving in the Peace Corps on the northern coast of Colombia directly after I graduated from college in 1967.
As I wrote last month, I'm using revolution as a metaphor for human transformation. At its heart, my novel will be a love story.
I've now written about 40 double-spaced pages of the first draft. I'm on chapter four. Before beginning to write I spent months outlining the story, breaking it down into chapters, developing the characters and the themes, writing biographical sketches, visualizing the turning points and the unforgettable scenes—understanding the story as deeply as possible before beginning to write it. I expect the first draft will run about 300 or more pages.
It's interesting to me to notice how my novel is taking shape and particularly how the style of writing is developing.
What is writing style?
According to Jerome Stern in Making Shapely Fiction, "Style is how you tell your story. People often talk about the style and subject of a work of art as if they were separable. But if you think about it, the real subject of Van Gogh's landscapes is how he painted the landscapes and the subject of Cézanne's still lifes is how he painted the peaches.
So, too, in literature—the subject of Hemingway's stories is not fishing, but how he wrote about fishing, and the subject of Faulkner's novels is not the South, but how he wrote about the South."
Writing style is the most important element in artistic writing; it is one of the more important elements in business or academic writing. Why? Because style is about so many elements: word choice, length of sentences and one's choice of images and metaphors and the way one writes descriptions; it's also about subtext lurking below the surface and the ineffable feeling one gets from reading a single sentence or a paragraph. Once you decide how you want to tell your story, you can write it more effectively if the style you write it in elucidates the themes you are writing and the story you are telling.
I've known for some time that I want the language in Revolution to be as lush as the Colombian jungle and the narrative to be as open, magical and fable-like as possible, creating a syntax, a place in the novel, if you will, in which anything can happen, perhaps even events outside the physical laws of the universe.
I want to call upon the exotic animals of Colombia and the birds of breathtaking beauty in that land, and I want to contrast them with the characters in my story trying to make sense of their world-views under horrible conditions. In the midst of all that beauty, I wanted to describe revolutionary events pushing people beyond the breaking point.
And you might be thinking, "Oh, magical realism. Isn't that what Gabrielle Garcia Marquez is known for?"
His novel, One Hundred Years of Solitude, has its roots in Marquez's childhood memories when he lived with his grandparents in the village of Aracataca, which is located about 150 miles away from the village of Manaure, my Peace Corps site. I visited Aracataca once while I was in the Peace Corps, before One Hundred Years of Solitude became a bestseller and Garcia Marquez was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Let me talk about influence: I think one writer chooses to let another writer's style influence him or her.
I read a number of novels in order to help me decide how to write Revolution:
The Island Under the Sea by Isabella Allende
The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Brief Encounters with Che Guevera by Ben Fountain
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabrielle Garcia Marquez
I'm not trying to write like any of these extremely gifted writers, but I am open to letting their styles, their visions of the possibilities of their language, influence me. As a writer-friend said to me, "Read Marquez. Use what you can use. You'll be surprised: No one will think you're copying."
Let me give you a two-sentence excerpt from my novel that is written in a style infused with the lushness of the Colombian jungle:
"On a map of Colombia the Magdalena River appears to be like an immense slithering boa constrictor. With the eye of the snake at the city of Barrenquilla on the coast, where the boa constrictor's mouth is splayed open wide, as though about to swallow a field rat, the river snakes southward for hundreds of miles through jungle and eventually grows numerous tails which transform into lakes and rapids, some areas marked by picturesque waterfalls."
Having lived in the Coastal Region of Colombia, I can say it is both strange and beautiful and unexplainable how living there puts one's mind in a magical mood. And that is why I want the characters and the events described in my novel Revolution to be informed by a magical and lush style of writing.
Next month: Keys to character development
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