Getting It Down

Quite some time ago I began mapping out the plot of Lunatics, breaking up the work into six major sections, and trying identity key plot developments that I hoped would unfold in these chapters.

Mostly my chapters are quite short which is probably the one and only way in which my work resembles that of Jane Austen’s.

After each day of writing, I look over my ‘master plot outline’ to see where there are holes, where there are parts of the story I still need to tell or, more often than not, where there are sections to write that I have been purposely avoiding——the parts that seem just too difficult.

Gradually, the outline begins to fill. Slowly it comes into better focus. Sometimes I discover there’s something which needs telling that, till this moment, I had not even considered. I begin to get a sense of characters who have been under-represented, who need more of a voice. And sometimes, I even come to understand that some of my best ideas are no longer be relevant to the direction the story has taken. (I strongly suspect any future editor will have much to say about this phenomenon!)

After doing my stint of literary navel-gazing each evening, I usually commit to a particular little chapter I will try to tackle the next morning. (I do most of my initial writing in the morning, some editing later in the evening. Almost nothing useful gets done in the afternoon.)

Then I begin to let ideas swim around in my head. Often it’s no more than an opening line, or a picture of where the scene might begin. Sometimes I have a notion of how the chapter might start and end but the middle is generally quite nebulous and unknown.

As I get into bed in the evening, I let those initial ideas slosh back and forth in my head, trying hard not to over-plan, rather to let them simply ferment overnight.

Then, before you know it, the next morning has arrived. I sit at my keyboard. Generally I will re-read the chapter that precedes the one I’m about to write, sometimes also the one I think will follow it.

Finally it is time to type the first sentence…

 

It was a dark and stormy night…

Usually it’s not long before something comes. Very often, the first paragraph will be drastically edited, sometimes deleted all together, but until I get something down, nothing can follow. Often a character begins speaking, and here is where I’m most comfortable——with dialogue. Once the talking starts, to some extent, I can just sit and take dictation and see how things will turn out.

Here I generally say a quick prayer of gratitude for word processors, knowing how hopeless it would all be if I had to depend on pen and paper and my nearly illegible handwriting.

I bow to you, Jane Austen.

Flashbacks

A lot of flashbacks are used in Lunatics. This is a common enough feature in both modern literature and film. Nonetheless I’m not sure they should be used in a novel without a good deal of forethought about their function and necessity.

Some people have an almost guttural aversion to flashbacks——my wife, for instance. Perhaps because she feels a reliance on them implies a certain laziness by the author who just can’t be bothered to craft a careful straight-forward chronology. (After all, Jane Austen didn’t make much use of them). This reminds me a little of my elderly father’s feeling about abstract paintings which he would insist bear little resemblance to ‘real objects’ because the artists in question lacked the skill to paint ‘real’ objects.

The main action of Lunatics takes place within the four days my astronauts are on the surface of the Moon.

Every chapter of the book is anchored to this Mission Timeline and the four EVAs (extra-vehicular-activities, or “moon-walks”) the astronauts perform.  Throughout each of these days, there are numerous flashbacks, numerous times when a stray thought, a sight, a sound——something draws one or another of the astronauts back to an earlier time.

This process is how my memory works, at any rate. My brain is hopelessly wrapped up in a writhing mass of word associations. All it takes is a particular word in a particular context and I can be hurled back years into the past, re-living a particularly poignant moment or——truth be told——sometimes a very trivial one too.

Of the three astronauts, Deke Slayton, would have had the greatest opportunity to have his thoughts wander, working 60 miles above the moon completely alone and, half the time——as he circled the Far Side——out of radio contact with all of humanity.  Flashbacks seem appropriate in Deke’s circumstance.

For von Braun and Bean they present more of a problem. Lunar EVAs were very strictly choreographed so that not a moment of time should be squandered. Largely the astronauts would be very focused on a sequence of demanding physical tasks. However, there would be exceptions, moments when their thoughts would be free to wander a little. For example

1)during traverses on the Rover when von Braun, particularly, would have little to do except describe the passing scenery.

2)when local topography would temporarily put the astronauts out of radio contact, and

3) within the LEM, just before, during, or after sleep periods. Few of the moon-walkers reported sleeping well on the moon, so their lunar insomnia would surely have invited regular flashbacks.

Finally, I think there is something about people placed in extreme and isolated conditions which unfailingly invites them to reflect deeply, given the least chance. To simply be able to look up over your shoulder and see your home-planet hanging in the sky. To realize just how far away you are from everything familiar, predictable and comforting. To know, in a very concrete way, that any minute could be your last——these, I’m convinced are circumstances which make self-reflection and vivid flashbacks highly likely.

Anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Lunatic Writer,

signing out.

Believable Characters or

“Less is NOT More”

As the reader moves into the second part of Lunatics, in 1974, I begin to introduce several new characters, a few of them not historical at all. There is definitely the potential for problems here.

The first major new and unhistorical characters the readers meet are Marcus Parent and his girlfriend Celine Tremblay.

When my writing group first looked over these characters they found Celine, in particular, not believable. I think they had their problems with Marcus too.

The gist of the problem seemed to be that I had portrayed a relationship between the two of them——Marcus, 23, Celine 17——that seemed too innocent in their eyes. That the two of them weren’t having a serious sexual relationship seemed really unlikely to them. Moreover, I had portrayed a Celine who, rather than being interested in contemporary music, was much fonder of Broadway Musicals and classic films like Gone with the Wind and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

They didn’t buy that either.

I have a very strong vision of the Celine character. She seems very real to me. At the moment, it seems impossible to think of writing her out of the novel.

So my job, I guess, is to find a way to make her and Marcus more believable.  So I rewrote some early paragraphs to read:

Now, in the dark of May’s last evening, in one of Toronto’s nondescript but pleasant suburbs, Marcus, born-again Catholic——if there could be such a thing——sat on the seat of a playground swing.  Beside him was Celine, his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, not yet old enough to be “born again.” She sat in the swing beside him busily scuffing her shoes in the sand.

Celine was thinking of Judy Garland. She was thinking of the Wizard of Oz, and the scene with the witch’s shoes sticking out from under the house.

Her friends thought she was crazy. What is it with Celine and Broadway musicals? She went so far as admitting the Beatles were okay and yes, she did know they had broken up.  And she sort of liked Abba  but, honestly, what did people see the Rolling Stones?

Apparently the re-write seemed to help. The relationship between Celine and Marcus was starting to become a little more plausible. I guess no final decision can be made till readers encounter these characters again in later chapters.

For me the lesson here is that even though a character can seem very vivid and real to me, it won’t necessarily be that way to my reader unless I provide sufficient context.

I did grow up as a young ‘born-again’ Catholic in 1974 so Marcus’s situation seems perfectly understandable to me and so obvious that it doesn’t need stating. In this case, however, it does seem to need stating.

As a writer of fiction I am ever-ready for the criticism that I’ve written too much, that I need to cut this and that and make the whole thing tighter, so the rare admonition to write “more” comes as a shock. Sometimes, however, for the sake of clarity, even believability, “less is not more.”

The Moon as a Character

The first part of Lunatics is all-back story. It starts in 1967 and ends with LBJ’s death in early 1973. (There is one exception——after von Braun first learns he has been offered a seat on Apollo XX, he flashes back to a memory of almost being killed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943).

The rest of the novel all takes place in 1974 during the astronauts’ stay on the lunar surface.

So there is quite a jump involved——from my frantic race through political history in the first part——to the concentrated activity of a few days in June of 1974.

Again the question of how to start…

For some time, it has seemed to me that I must start with the Moon itself. I must, in some respect, anthropomorphize the moon, give it its own voice. Dangerous business, and a huge change of pace from what the reader has encountered so far.

One of the poetic sections.

I remember talking to Anne de Grace about her recent novel Sounding Line. I told her that I very much liked the little evocative poetic sections that introduced several of her chapters. She told me that her editor hadn’t been so keen on those sections and that it was a battle to keep them in the book.

Hmm. Wonder if I might anticipate such a battle…

Provided the project ever gets that far…

Anyway, here’s my little poetic section. Poetic Lunar Geology100.  Here’s how the chapter opens.

Thursday, May 30

Copernicus Crater

For 800 million years the dust and boulders of Copernicus Crater had waited as the solar wind blew across its regolith.  The crater had endured the daily, yearly, eon-long bombardment of micrometeorites which ever so gradually had smoothed its slopes and darkened its ejecta, obscuring, one atom at a time, all evidence of former, unimaginable catastrophe. Yet even amid the galactic silence, the rocks had retained memory. The shattered, melted and fused remnants still carried within their mineral bones echoes. Of a time before time. When two great spheres collided. And the heat was immense and the rocks separated, congealed and flowed till, finally, newborn twin planets swirled together almost within touch of one another. Then, gradually, in a slow tearing, like siblings asunder, they drifted.  Inch by inch, year by year, as the rocks cooled and the iron sank.  And the lunar crust thickened into a light frothy feldspar.

A momentary calm. 

Lunatic President III

Finally, the question of von Braun becoming an astronaut. There are really only two issues here: von Braun’s age, and von Braun’s war record.

At sixty-two, von Braun would be, by far, the oldest astronaut to fly at this date. But there was no doubt he kept physically fit. He was an avid outdoorsman, boater and scuba diver. We mustn’t forget that Deke Slayton actually did fly a mission at the age of fifty-one, and many years later, John Glenn flew on the space shuttle at the age of seventy-seven! By 1972, NASA was certainly becoming a little more flexible about astronaut age-restrictions.

For most of von Braun’s career as an American space engineer, his war record was well-covered up. News that von Braun was actually a member of the Nazi party (perhaps reluctantly) did begin to leak to the public in the late sixties but never quite reached the level of scandal. The suggestion that he might even have been involved in the securing of slave-labour to help build his V2s came to light not long after. This accusation——disputed by von Braun——naturally tarnished von Braun’s reputation further, but again the damage was not major. To many von Braun remained an American hero. He was the figure in the Walt Disney special who explained to American children how they would soon land men on the moon.

There is no doubt there were people in NASA who held a personal grudge against von Braun. Who never forgot that his missiles killed innocent civilians in London and Amsterdam only twenty years before.  There were many who felt the work force at NASA was scandalously over-represented by Germans, namely von Braun’s colleagues from Peenemunde. And finally, von Braun’s popular image among both the public and the American Senate (where von Braun regularly spoke before committees) seemed to irk many a NASA administrator who felt von Braun was going over their heads.

All this being said, it was not beyond an American president to over-ride NASA decisions. Even decisions about crew selection. It was largely this process that won Jack Schmitt—the first and only geologist to fly to the moon—a seat on Apollo XVII.

For the most part, LBJ didn’t give a damn what his critics thought, if he felt he was right. He didn’t mind putting noses out of joint. Appointing von Braun as Lunar Module Pilot of the last lunar mission, would have been one last great gesture of LBJ’s, showing everyone just who was ‘in charge’.

So, that, my friends, is how Wernher von Braun might have ended up flying to the moon. And the back story to my back story.

Cue in Frank Sinatra please…

FLY ME TO THE MOON

WHERE I CAN BE AMONG THE STARS…

Lunatic President II

A few words about the feasibility of LBJ running for a second term and showing such strong support for the moon missions: LBJ was a strong supporter of American Space Policy even before Kennedy. Indeed Kennedy relied strongly on LBJ’s advice in charting his man-to-the-moon adventure. Even before Kennedy’s election, Johnson was strongly identified with the emerging American space program. He took delight in embarrassing the Eisenhower administration on being caught with its pants-down by the Russian sputnik launch.

Talk of downsizing at NASA began only in 1968, and it was not till Nixon took office that it became a reality and missions began to be cancelled. In my eyes, it’s easy to see how this trend could have been halted in its tracks with Johnson running for a second term.

Johnson had many pet projects and tended to be tenacious about pushing them through.

Of course the escalating war in Vietnam was draining both financially and politically for the nation. The situation in South-east Asia surely had much to do with Johnson’s poor showing in the New Hampshire primary of 1968. However, if Johnson had gone just a little further, and unilaterally halted ALL bombing in North Vietnam, as a prelude the start of peace-talks, I believe this would have done much to win back some of his eroding support. In such a case, I believe he might easily have been encouraged to run for a second term. Especially if he could have convinced Bobby Kennedy to run as vice president. Kennedy would surely look upon this as a grooming for his own run at the presidency in 1972, and LBJ would likely have appreciated having Kennedy under tight reign for the next four years. Kennedy and Johnson on the same ticket? Well, it had worked before!