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A Breakthrough 1/6/2017 7:14:36 AM
In the mid-1980's, when I was a second-career student at a Lutheran theological seminary in Indiana, an idea for a novel came to me. The main elements would be stories I wrote derived from my hitch as an enlisted man in the American army from 1964 - 1968 and a series of novellas about a war in the 17th century between American colonists and natives that resembles King Philip's War, which took place in Massachusetts, where I come from.
I needed a frame for these narratives, so I created a story about an imaginary veteran, teacher, story-teller who wrote the works that would be at the center of my novel. I conceived him to be the illegitimate son of a Moldavian aristocrat, himself illegitimate, an ideologue who started the revival of a destructive cult called the Scythians. Paul Kingsley, the name I gave my imaginary writer, never knew his father and was adopted into a quintessential American family when he was a baby.
As an adult, Kingsley marries an Asian woman he meets while serving in the military. Back home, along with writing stories, he works part-time as a teacher and a journalist. Since he can't escape his biological origins and has grown to be a quintessential American himself, he becomes an enemy of the cult his late father brought back to life.
The story expanded again, because I wanted a strong female presence, when I imagined Stephanie Markham, an editor who's interested in Kingsley's work and who's also an enemy of the Scythians, who gain some influence around the world and in the United States.
I began to write the novel in longhand after I moved to Sudbury, Ontario, where I served as a pastor for 19 years. I filled several notebooks with a draft of this work, read it a few times, and wrote a second draft in longhand. (I have never been able to think well in front of a keyboard). I spent some weeks examining my new draft and wondered how I would go ahead.
Along came a computer and the internet, in 1999 for me. After I typed the novel, I discovered I'd written 1700 pages. Yikes! Even if I polished the text so that it shone like a jewel, no one would publish a novel that long by an unknown writer.
I broke the story down into four novels, added new material, and divided the fourth book in two. I worked on each part independently until I got it to a state where I thought someone could read it, which meant re-working anything that caused me to cringe and there has been plenty of that along the way. (The first person I showed any of it to thought it was terrible. I read the same pages to a group in Toronto, where the reception was warmer.)
Then another technological innovation arrived: Amazon's kindle direct publishing. I kept on revising and have been able to post the first four books in this series, to which I've given the name "Witnesses". I'm working on the fifth now. It's about 90% finished, thanks to God.
This morning -- and now I come to the reason for writing a blogpost about my work -- a breakthrough arrived seemingly out of the blue. It's sometimes said that a writer should be able to summarise his or her work in 25 words. I can almost achieve that. Here goes --
The "Witnesses" series of novels features the experience of a middle-class veteran, journalist, story-teller, teacher as he absorbs history, warfare, faith, love, American identity, a destructive cult, and threats to his family.
32 words. Amazing. Praise God. The whole work hangs together.
