Inevitable Unexpected

According to Aristotle, cited by Hallie and Whit Burnett in Fiction Writer's Handbook, "We keep reading in hopes of coming to a conclusion both 'inevitable and unexpected'".

I think this is right - but that more than just applying to our motivation for reading could it be a description of any authentic truth: inevitable and unexpected? Like when Solomon concluded that the resolution to the dispute about which mother's baby was the live son was to slice the child in two or when resurrection forced the grave open to deny Satan the crucifixion's booty and any legitimate power over us earthlings...

The issue for me now is how to craft Stuck in the Mud so that it leads readers to such an inevitable unexpected resolution .... I think Pastor's Ex-Wife does that - you'll have to read it and let me know if you agree.

Curiosity does not kill my cats

I first heard people praise layering as an aesthetic concept when my daughter was learning to paint in high school. That would have been about 10 years ago - at least that is when the concept of layers penetrated my imagination. And my analysis. But I have discovered that it is a semantic description of something I already understood - that it is efficient and powerful to accomplish multiple objectives at once. And that sometimes I still benefit from the many Marxist professors who made up my undergraduate experience as a sociology major....because layering is synergy applied to art.

But layering does not happen without a foundational canvas or concept. And Voila! I believe I have identified a key obstacle that has been hindering my momentum in writing Stuck in the Mud. I have invented many layers but I had not chosen a base upon which to apply them.

The aha moment came when I was mapping the characters' relationships between each other. I discovered that the person I thought should be at the center of the map did not fit there. I have been attempting to fit the story around the wrong character. The central character is not Aileen. It is her father, Dan, whose floating corpse floated washed up at the Ste. Genevieve marina.

But that makes the story philosophically an exercise in the passive voice. And that makes me curious. And curiosity, for me, is an essential ingredient - a core commitment. Curiosity does not kill my cats. It makes them interesting.

So now I know that Stuck in the Mud will use the format of a murder mystery to profile a spiritually abusive contemporary Christian leader in the same was that Pastor's Ex-Wife narrates the road to recovery of a woman who had been married to a spiritually abusive Protestant pastor. Both are built around the victim's story.

If I write Stuck in the Mud well, the reader may end up with an unresolved question as to who the victim really is.....

Meta-cognition and Story Structure

When I write a poem I usually impose a stringent structure on myself - it may be a rhyme scheme, a recurring pattern of syllables, or some other combinations of devices that make it necessary to craft and recraft the piece before it is finished. This has assisted me in some mysterious, serendipitous fashion, to discover my true intent, pushed as I am to make the piece work - as with solving a Sudoku, there is one right set of answers even though the building blocks rearrange themselves forever.

I had a similar set of rules, a template, if you will, for each chapter when I wrote Pastor's Ex-Wife. Each chapter had to advance the plot and also contain:

• A church service - using a fictitious construct which was a composite of a different church building, congregation, pastor, and service
• An anecdote from when I taught music in an inner city elementary school district
• A metaphor or symbol that carried the psychological/emotional impact of the chapter
• Dialogue

I have a similar set of rules for a historical novel - the working title is Isabel -that is based on a series of letters written in 1894 between Benjamin Edwards and Isabel Woods. Most of the research for that book is done but I am not ready to write it yet. However, I can watch it unfold in my mind as though the book were a dance choreographed for the stage - each chapter is one day in the week before Isabel dies. When I do write it, I think it will flow fairly freely - at least for the first draft.

My current struggle is with Stuck in the Mud. It is a murder mystery - think "cozy", not "thriller." But I want to incorporate big issues into the story - the pain that spiritually abusive marriages cause the children, how gender issues play out in today's American Protestant churches, and how the issues of class, philanthropy, and status intertwine in the context of a nonprofit organization. The setting is contemporary Ste. Genevieve, Missouri - the Bolduc House Museum, in fact, so at some level I hope that the novel will be a marketing device for both the museum and the town. There are three corpses: one in St. Louis, one washing up at the Mississippi River marina in Ste. Genevieve, and one accidentally plowed up behind one of the houses at the museum. The requisite but uncertain romantic sub-theme is there.

I'm thinking that the plot itself has to be the driver of Stuck in the Mud....unlike the shifting settings and symbols of Pastor's Ex-Wife, or the character-driven Strindberg-like expose of Isabel. So for me, the task of planning Stuck in the Mud is unexpectedly the most difficult writing task I have undertaken to date.

So much for a writer's meta-cognitive process, right?