![]() Characters appeared and demanded their moments. It was like peering through a knothole in a fence and trying to tell the people on my side what was happening on the other side. It no longer felt like I was writing a novel I was reporting on a world that only I could see. For years at a time.īut something changed in 2011 when I picked it up again with a commitment to take it to the end. Or, I would become irritated with the issues within myself that the book was raising. I would periodically pick up the book and start to write again but would often find that I was just spewing words to say I was working on it. The original outline involved twenty-three days of story. I outlined a grand storyline that would take my character on a voyage like Odysseus, trying to find his way home. Realistically, it took about three years, but those three were spread out over more than twenty-five years. I had never lost my memory.Īt the time I started the book, no one from my family lived in the North Carolina Piedmont, and my father was alive and kicking in the desert of California. It felt true, even though none of the events of that first scene were real in the historical sense. I let my host read it and it had more of an effect than I had expected. I wrote the first scene, from the diner to the dream at the reservation gas station, in one pass. To the painting I added a piece of doggerel to express something about what I was experiencing. While there, I created a strange little picture in the chunky graphic style of Mac Paint®. So I was allowed to return to the place that had been my home for so long and to stay in the back room at a friend’s house. It was not the fault of the city I had chosen. I began writing this book in the Spring of 1989 after a disastrous attempt at re-location from the city that had been my home for more than twenty-five years. The whole book is fiction, but what it talks about is not. ![]() Those who have passed or are long out of my life have been fictionalized with love and respect. Those who are still living have had those threads confirmed and permitted me to use them. Some are a blend of many people I have known. Some of them, including Wade Hudson, are spun from threads of words I had heard someone speak in the process of my own journey. But it does not mean that everything written is true in the life of the author.Īn author creates a fabric with threads drawn from personal experience, paying attention to the people around him, his dreams, and the simple process of trying to create the color or texture needed for the dramatic construct. They are wondering what is true in the sense that it actually happened to someone, and what is true in the sense that the emotions of what occurs in the fiction are true for both the character and the reader. When you write what is true, people get confused. TO WRITE EFFECTIVELY means that you must write what is true. ![]()
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