In 2007, I became very discouraged. I was constantly altering my novel, and I was having a hard time creating scenes that worked. My characters didn't seem to want anything. Well, they had things that they wanted, but no particular "want" that could sustain a novel. I was having trouble creating a believable and compelling three act scenario. I had a pretty good plot going when Julian was a fratricidal maniac. I still had my work cut out for me when it came to making the story work, but at least there was a plot there. When I took out the fratricide, it became much harder to say what my story was about.
In short, I got cocky. I thought I could write a compelling novel in which nobody was murdered, but apparently, it's a lot harder than it sounds.
I decided that Julian's fratricidal days were over. He wasn't going to murder anyone. But maybe, instead of a murder, someone could just die. Maybe they were murdered by someone else. Maybe Julian was murdered and the whole book is about how he's a ghost but he doesn't realize it. Or maybe it's not murder but a terrible accident. And maybe this terrible accident gets Julian thinking about his life.
Anyway, this is how the character of Ryan was born.
I gave Ryan the last name Morales because Morales and the word "morals" have much in common. For some reason, that was significant to me.
I wrote multiple word documents, trying to find the perfect way to start my story. The word documents had titles like "Ryan Morales", "Ryan Morales 2," "Ryan Morales 3," and then, when I was getting particularly desperate, I even named one "Exciting Ryan Morales." This was because my story had to be exciting.
I really don't want to get into the specifics of what I wrote during that winter and spring of 2008. It's kind of embarassing. Suffice it to say that it was around this time that I decided that I was going to give up on the novel and just write a collection of interconnected short stories instead. I had a whole cast of possible characters to inhabit this fake setting of Red Harbor, Maine. I had Ryan Morales and Julian. They had their own individual stories. I had Julian's sister Leila. I had Ryan's sister Roseann/Rosanna. And I knew that, with Ryan's death at the center of my story, I could link a few more other people together.
In the summer 2008, I started off my final semester at Pine Manor College. This was the semester during which I would have to complete my creative thesis. I had been in the MFA program and Pine Manor for two years now, and I was more than ready to put this blasted creative thesis behind me. The mentor I ended up going with liked the idea of the interconnected short story collection, and this pleased me.
I ended up including six stories in my creative thesis (about fifty to seventy pages of which I wrote in one month). The stories were told from the points of view of Julian, his sister Leila, his girlfriend Roseann and his best friend Michelle. There's no real central plot that connects the stories. Ryan dies, but that's not really the point of the stories. They just all involve these interconnected characters. I don't know if it's any good or not. My mentor used these comments to describe it:
"You have good characters, well drawn."
"I really feel confident that this is going to be a strong and satisfying book. You are developing a number of multidimensional characters..."
"Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, you have a strong collection of interrelated stories here that are character driven rather than plot driven---even within the separate stories themselves. And I think you have just about arrived with it."
There are a few more stories that I'm working on right now to finish the collection. I hope to get some work done this weekend and say more in Monday's blog.
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